About Spite Village

A solitary narrow residential tower standing on an island of earth surrounded by deep construction excavations, with modern high-rise buildings behind it Tim Wu, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

You can find spite houses – also known as nail houses and holdouts – wherever and whenever there’s growth. Owned by people who refuse to move sell or move when developers come knocking, they get surrounded and cut off as highways, shopping centres and office buildings appear around them. Or sometimes they’re a building constructed or modified primarily to inconvenience, frustrate or defy a neighbour or authority.

Personal websites feel like spite houses right now, as AI destroys the free web as we know it. AI tools are hoovering up our content without sending anyone to our websites. Platforms are enshittifying. The people who built the web as we know it — the bloggers, the publishers, the indie creators, the organisations with something to say — are being bypassed, extracted from, and told to be grateful for the exposure.

A narrow wooden house with pretty window boxes wedged tightly between two much larger red brick apartments buildings Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Spite Village is a collection of links to the people and projects building anyway. The ones choosing the harder path: publishing on their own websites, owning their infrastructure, making original things, pushing back. Writers, designers, developers, and thinkers who believe the web is worth fighting for — and are doing something about it.

It’s inspired by the essay A Website to Destroy All Websites and follows on from my own Spite House zine project. It’s also built on the conviction that a spite house is only a spite house if it stands alone. A spite village is something else entirely.

Lauren x