A Small Room to Be Larger
There’s a tiny, stubborn rhythm to starting things. A felt tip pen pressed into a blank page. The first mug of tea in a kitchen that still smells like cardboard and cleaner. The sound of a train that hasn’t decided whether it’s stopping for you or not.
Nikorow Labz started in that in-between space.
I got tired of shouting in magnolia painted rooms. Places where every word had to arrive pre-approved, laminated, and ready for metrics. The modern internet feels like a noisy library where everything’s in a labelled box: “hot take,” “trauma dump,” “inspo,” “content.” Even your content gets an expiry date: trend for 48 hours, then in the digital compost heap you go.
You’re told to speak through forms. “What’s your niche?” “What’s your angle?” You queue behind hashtags like it’s a chicken shop counter: take a number, wait your turn, don’t be weird. “Be safe,” they say. “Be correct.” Translated, that often means: be predictable enough to sell, harmless enough not to bother anyone in charge, and quick enough to scroll past.
I wanted something else, freedom, maybe...
Not chaos, not cruelty - just somewhere you’re allowed to be a full human: sharp one day, soft the next, occasionally wrong but willing to learn out loud.
Because there is real turmoil right now, and not just the headline kind. There’s the low-level panic of precarious work. The quiet humiliation of choosing between time to cook and time to rest. The weird ache of realising you’re too tired to properly read the manifesto you just reposted. Politics is not somewhere “over there”; it’s the length of your shift, the price of the rent, the fact your brain is too fried to think about anything beyond the next direct debit.
We live in an era that worships neatness. If your entire worldview fits in a 20-word caption and a trending audio, you’ll glide through the feed. If your thinking stutters, spirals, contradicts itself, or insists on nuance, the system gets abit itchy. It doesn’t know where to file you.
That system is built into the platforms.
Once upon a time, they promised connection. Now they specialise in selective disappearance. Shadowbanning is just the updated version of “everyone suddenly stopped returning your calls.” Your post is technically still there, but it lives in a cul-de-sac the algorithm forgot to pave a road to. Permanent bans are louder —like waking up to find the shop you built, bricked up overnight. Both are small exiles: one slow and ghostly, the other with immediate effect.
And beneath all of that is a quiet lesson: your public self is only as real as someone else’s server allows it to be.
I’m not pretending rules don’t matter. People get stalked, smeared, and dogpiled. Harm is real. Moderation isn’t optional. But I got tired of the theatre around it, so tired. The all-or-nothing responses, the opaque decisions, the sense that there’s no room for repair or growth. You’re either pristine or permanently suspect. You either go viral or vanish.
There’s almost no space left for the awkward middle: the apology that isn’t PR-managed, the idea that evolves, the conversation that takes longer than an Instagram story.
So Nikorow Labz begins as a small, deliberate counterweight.
Not a grand utopia yet. A lab. A workshop. A messy table where the tools don’t match and bottled water is permanently in reach. A place to think in public without having to turn everything into “content.” Essays, notes, maybe audio, maybe conversation — all circling the same questions: How does policy touch the peasants? How does art translate to your bank balance? How does ordinary life carry political weight without turning into a lecture?
This space will be imperfect. Posts will wobble. Some ideas will age badly, very badly, trust me. Some lines might cling to you like a chorus; others will fall flat and stay still. That’s fine. Labs don’t exist to prove they’re right; they exist to learn out loud.
I’m not here to vanish into high theory or to flatten experience into brand-safe slogans. I care about the messy bits: panic that wakes you at 3 a.m., anger you don’t know where to send, tenderness you don’t quite trust, and that stubborn curiosity that refuses to die even when you feel completely rinsed.
If you hang around here, you’ll find slow things: poetry that takes time, reflections that don’t resolve neatly, jokes that sit next to grief without apology. You’ll meet a voice that believes:
Truth is often awkward and badly lit.
Kindness isn’t the same thing as silence.
Wit is a survival tool, not a way of sneering from a safe distance.
If I sound cross sometimes, it’s because I give a damn. If I sound soft, it’s because softness is a luxury and a necessity in a world that keeps trying to sand us down.
Bring your skepticism, your mood, your side-eye. Bring the part of you that doesn’t fit the drop-down boxes. Read a paragraph on the bus. Listen to a piece while you wash dishes. Pocket one idea and test it against your own life. Disagree with me. Improve on me. Ignore me for months and then wander back in.
The point here isn’t to polish a perfect stance. The point is to stay present — to keep gathering small, honest acts of attention until they feel like a place. Not a platform. A ground to stand on. For us by us.
With mischief and attention,
Nikorow Labz Collective
