What a year!

2017 was a year of the good, the bad, the contested and the questioned. A lot of real stuff happened in this year of the fake.

It was a year that started with Not in my Name and ended with Me Too. The Trump news was too large, ongoing, never-ending — ten years of misdeeds packed into one. The film industry was rocked, newspapers were rocked, the art world was rocked, Vice just got rocked. Companies that began the year as darlings were lurching by year’s end. Driverless cars were here to stay but for the folks at Uber the more pertinent question was: who is driving this company?

Amidst the turmoil, we kept our heads down, got to work, made our way to California and hoped for clean air and great success. The garage doors opened on 2116 Zeno Place in January. In some ways, we looked like a startup all over again. We had four people at two desks. A small team couldn’t get much smaller. There was too little time and too much to do.

I’ll cut to the end of the year and to the conclusion, just in case anyone out there hates suspense. We nailed it. We grew like never before. We introduced collaborations that were more groundbreaking than anything we’d previously attempted.

We’ve always been a company that welcomes artists, but we finally got to work with one of the greatest artists of our time when Bjork reached out from her Icelandic wonderland. The resulting video was a gift to all those who believe there is still ground to be broken and musicians willing to smash it apart.

We went interstellar with an experiment that looked back to the optimistic time of the seventies, when space travel was what we were talking about, instead of Russian collusion, a time when we were pushing the boundaries with the Voyager space probe, which contained within it a vital piece of communication: the golden record, a testament to our culture, a list of our achievements, a friendly handshake extended towards extraterrestrial life.

Why wasn’t there more of a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of this great symbol of cooperation? For us, it seemed like a chance. So as the great gift continued its journey into the far reaches of space, we asked forty cultural luminaries to create works inspired by the record that would form a collage.

In a time of pessimism, we wanted to pay tribute to an act of space optimism.

Over the course of twelve months we grew the team to ten. For the first time ever we started presenting our own advertising campaigns. If that wasn’t enough, we went all-American and made a film about a bunt machine.

This was a journey into a new realm. I’ve never sat through a baseball game, let alone come to understand the term ‘bunt’. (I have a little more information now. Not enough to play for the Dodgers, but enough to understand the strategic importance of the bunt. It’s kind of the opposite of a home run.)

With the help of the New York Times and the New Yorker, we rolled out our student campaign across the US and were lucky enough to host an intimate session with Zadie Smith at UCLA.

Creative people use WeTransfer, from A to Z, alt J to Zadie. In the music world, Foxygen, Julian Casablancas, Chance the Rapper and Moby all chose to share their latest (and, in our opinion, greatest) music via WeTransfer.

Of all the work we presented, Bjork was massive but Ryan McGinley killed it. We were able to release an online gallery featuring unreleased McGinley — some of his most daring and meaningful work. The photos were split into five sections: Family, the Road, Nudity, Rebellion, and the Divine. McGinley was able to present his images and, alongside them, discuss their meaning.

We want people to stick around and enjoy our reading experiences, our visuals, our video, and last year we saw that viewers weren’t flitting past what we offered. Interested viewers who came for Ryan’s photographs stuck around for an average time on site of 5.5 minutes.

Viewers stuck with Bjork for a whopping 15 mins.

For me personally, the Moby film was the most memorable project. It resonated the most. As always, Moby went full-out with his views. He didn’t hold back.

There were other bright spots. The radio station we helped launch with Gilles Peterson, Worldwide FM, got more listeners than NTC. Our post-secondary education facility (expect meaningful, unstuffy and anarchic) launched. The University of the Underground caused a little of the chaos we had hoped for.

And what does 2018 have in store? I’m hoping it’s going to be a lot more positive. I’m hoping the transfer of ideas and creative impulses continues. The sad news is that the recent FCC ruling on net neutrality has already dampened the excitement and optimism of the new year.

Unless by some miracle Congress uses all of its power to overturn the ruling, we will go back to 2005 when the internet service providers were blocking VOIP, barring Bit Torrent from ComCast, when Google and Verizon were trying to do side deals, offering preferential treatment to the big dogs.

AT&T’s planned acquisition of Time Warner is very likely to go ahead, meaning that AT&T will most definitely offer preferential service to their networks over and above Netflix.

What does this mean for you and me at home? The opposite of the free and exciting and useful transfer of ideas. Instead we’ll get an internet that looks and feels different: a potentially slower internet, a throttled, filtered internet.

This is not the internet that gives rise to great projects big and small. It’s not the internet we’re used to. It’s certainly not the internet we were finally beginning to feel we had a stake in.

I’ve been saying this for a while, but it’s down to you and me. Lets make 2018 the year that we made a difference.

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