Joshua Long 🍒Back to the field

Phone web app · 2026 · Private, one user

Instead

One real thing to open instead of the feed.

Private for now

Instead: a Look card, Flowers of a Hundred Worlds from the Cleveland Museum of Art

Kind: Phone web app
Status: Private, one user
Stack: Next.js, Vercel Cron, Upstash Redis, Claude
Year: 2026

Instead is the app I open instead of social media, junk podcasts or bad YouTube. Each open shows one real card: an essay, an artwork, a video, a podcast or an album.

It needs zero maintenance from me. Every morning at 5am it reads what my studio's agents know about my interests, gathers candidates from good sources and museum collections, and picks eight. Nothing repeats for a month.

No generated images and no generated music. Everything is a real thing someone made.

The screen is the card. For artworks, the background is sampled from the edge of the piece itself.