The Colours

It all starts with a single red sock sneaking into a batch of whites — the quiet bleed that began changing media long before social platforms arrived.

The thing about laundry is this: the trouble never starts with the big, dramatic disasters.
It starts with the bleed. One small, innocent-looking red sock that slips into a batch of pristine whites and quietly ruins the whole military parade.

Media didn’t collapse overnight, either.
It didn’t jump from the crisp white-shirt certainty of newspapers straight into TikTok meltdowns and algorithmic roulette.

No — chaos begins modestly.
It tiptoes in.
It stains slowly.
It starts with colour.

And in the world of communication, the first hint of colour – the first crack, the first leak – arrived long before social media.
It arrived with newsletters.

The First Loosened Stitch

Long before Twitter/X taught us to shout at strangers, and before Facebook taught your aunt to share conspiracy theories, there was something far more innocent — but far more radical.

The early newsletter.

By today’s standards, these things were primitive. They looked like ransom notes made in Microsoft Word:
• odd spacing
• strange fonts
• clip-art that should’ve been euthanised
• and always, always too many exclamation marks

But here’s the key:
for the first time in modern media history, ordinary people could publish something without asking a newspaper baron for permission.

It was the moment someone left the washing machine lid open just a crack.
Colour started to bleed.

You remember this era because you lived it where it mattered: B2B intelligence, pre-web sales operations, real newsletters that people paid for because they were the only place to get the information.
They were imperfect, improvised, handmade — but they were yours.
Not Hearst’s.
Not Murdoch’s.
Not the state’s.

They were democratic in the smallest, wildest way.

The Modem as Midwife

Then came that sound.
The dial-up scream.
The mating call of the early internet.

For the first time, the world wasn’t built on ink and industrial presses. It ran on:
• copper wires
• patience
• late-night creaking floorboards
• and the hope nobody picked up the telephone mid-download

The early web looked like chaos, but it wasn’t.
It was messy, but slow.
Chaotic, but constrained.
Unregulated, but small.

Forums appeared.
Blogs appeared.
Personal websites emerged — digital sheds filled with half-finished thoughts and blinking GIFs.

But unlike today, effort was still required.
If you wanted to publish, you needed:
• time
• intent
• a modem
• and the kind of stubbornness normally reserved for monks and tax inspectors

Scarcity kept the chaos in check.
Colour leaked into the whites, but it hadn’t flooded the machine.
Not yet.

The First Democratic Pipes (Sort Of)

We sometimes talk about this era as the “first democratisation of voice.”
It sounds noble until you remember what was actually involved:

Someone would write a blog post that three people and an accidental Russian bot would read.
Someone else would hand-code a website that only loaded if the weather was good.
And every company newsletter felt like a dispatch from a man barricaded in a shed with a fax machine and too much coffee.

But for all its comic imperfections, something profound was happening.

The moguls were being bypassed.

A little colour had slipped into the system, and the whites — those “immaculate” media institutions — suddenly weren’t the only game in town.
The monopoly on narrative was starting to fray.

Not collapse.
But loosen.

Democracy doesn’t arrive with trumpets.
It arrives as a mild inconvenience for the people who thought they owned the washing machine.

The Semi-Chaos Years

We tend to romanticise the early internet, as if it was some kind of golden café of civilised debate and genteel discovery.

It wasn’t.
It was a rabble with HTML.

But it had something modern media lacks:
a friction that limited the mess.

You couldn’t publish by accident.
You couldn’t go viral without divine intervention.
You couldn’t spread a rumour to a million people by sneezing on a “Share” button.

Communication still required intention.
Clumsiness acted as a natural filter.
And the result was a kind of semi-chaos — messy, but human; imperfect, but genuine; chaotic, but navigable.

Colour, yes.
But not the whole paint factory.

Reflection

The early newsletters and the first stirrings of the web didn’t overthrow the old media world. But they weakened it. They loosened its grip. They let oxygen in.

They revealed that voices could come from outside the newsroom — unpolished, unsponsored, unlicensed, uninvited.

The bleed began here.
Not with Zuckerberg.
Not with TikTok.
Not with the current algorithmic circus.

Once the colours entered the wash, the old certainties were never coming back.
The immaculate whites of Part 1 were destined to dull, fade, or tie-dye themselves into something nobody could fold neatly again.

And inevitably, inevitably…
the machine kept spinning.

Part 2 of the Laundry Series