Colophon
A site arguing against hidden allegiances owes its readers a full accounting of its own. Here it is.
What this is
Live Free, Don’t Join is an argument in ten articles, with its evidence, its objections, and its practice — published at dontjoin.me, at dontjoin.party, a name chosen because it reads both ways, and at unjoin.me, the same request in a single word. It is unsigned, in the same spirit that the argument is unjoined: the words are asked to stand without a letterhead, which is the test this site keeps recommending.
The cost of that should be stated plainly, since it cuts against the site’s own principle. An anonymous author cannot be audited — not his expertise, not his conflicts, not his record, not whether his own verdicts scatter the way this site says they should. Anonymity is not the absence of a letterhead. It is a letterhead reading view from nowhere, and it is the least checkable one there is. What is offered in its place is a Sources page built so that the argument can be taken apart without reference to whoever assembled it, including a section for the works that contradict it.
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, built rather than stated. A page that said never surrender your judgment to a group — now join ours would have refuted itself in one screen.
What the architecture does not do is prove anything. If a coin toss is enough to make a team, an absent mailing list is not what stands between this page and one; the content is, and the objection is put properly here.
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.
Other editions
The complete text — every page of this site, unabridged — is also published in free, open formats for offline and mobile reading. Each is a plain file: no app required, no account, nothing to install and nothing to join. They are regenerated from the same Markdown source as the site itself, so the words never drift out of sync.
- EPUB — the open ebook standard; opens in any phone reading app, e-reader, Kobo, KOReader, or Calibre
- PDF — print-faithful US Letter, page-numbered, fonts embedded
- Markdown — the site’s own source form, in one file
- Plain text — readable by anything with a screen, now or in fifty years
The charts appear in these editions as their underlying data tables. Like everything else here, the files are public domain — copy them forward.
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, access dates, the failed replications, and the literature arguing the other way. That is not a vulnerability. That is the design.