Colophon

A site arguing against hidden allegiances owes its readers a full accounting of its own. Here it is.

What this is

Life Free, Don’t Join is an argument in ten articles, with its evidence, its objections, and its practice — published at dontjoin.me, and also at dontjoin.party, a name chosen because it reads both ways. It is unsigned, in the same spirit that the argument is unjoined: the words are asked to stand without a letterhead, which is the only test this site endorses.

What it asks of you

Nothing. There is no membership, no mailing list, no account, no donation button, no comment section, no forum, no badge, and no store. This is not asceticism; it is the argument, load-bearing. A page that said never surrender your judgment to a group — now join ours would have refuted itself in one screen.

What it collects

Nothing. No cookies, no analytics, no trackers, no fingerprinting, no third-party requests of any kind — every byte, including the typefaces, is served from this site’s own server. There is nothing to accept and nothing to opt out of. The site cannot tell anyone what you read here, because it does not know.

How it is built

The entire site is plain text: essays written in Markdown, compiled by a static site generator (Hugo) into flat HTML files, and served read-only as static files. There is no database, no admin panel, no login page, and no code executing in your browser — not one line of JavaScript. What your browser receives is, in the strictest sense, just writing. The typeface is Newsreader, an open-source text face designed for on-screen reading; the palette is grey, for reasons the essay explains.

Who owns it

No one, on purpose. Everything original here — the articles, essays, definitions, and design — is released under CC0 1.0: public domain, worldwide, no rights reserved. Copy it, translate it, print it, improve it, disagree with it in the margins and publish the margins. No attribution is required, and none is requested; an argument for the unjoined life should itself belong to nobody. Quotations and data remain the property of their cited sources.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, the Sources page contains everything needed to prove it wrong — originals, links, and access dates. That is not a vulnerability. That is the design.