Turn off WiFi to read, and other clever media designs

The Disconnect is a literary magazine published on the web with a fun wrinkle: You can only read it if your wifi is off.

It’s a clever idea, if only for the other things it makes you consider.

Imagine building a “cool take”, an article template that puts up a paywall if it starts going too viral. (If your response is that no publisher would do that, because they want the eyeballs, remember some subscription publishers worry about putting too much of their best stuff “in front of the wall”.)

My idea is a stunt, just like The Disconnect. But it’s neat to think about how you might address problems in our current media environment purely through design, and at the publisher level rather than through changes to platforms.