Container is an online magazine that takes a human look at technology, exploring how people use it for creative projects, community-building and social justice. Set up in November 2020, it focuses on process over product, and collectivity and community over the successful individual, big tech and corporate greed.
The name and ethos of the magazine is inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s essayThe Carrier Bag of Fiction in which she tells the story of the container: the most humble, the most useful and quite possibly the first thing the human race invented. The container is the bag you put things in because they are “useful, edible, or beautiful” and because you want to share them with your community. It signifies what it is to be collectively human – expansive, communal, representational, and more about process than destination.
Find out more about the background of Container in this talk by founding Editor, Alice Quigley in which she talks about trying to channel the commons and resist the lure of “techno-heroic” narratives not just in the work we commission but in every stage of the editorial process.
