The Guide To Everything is not a single book or a single website. It is an ecosystem of independent guide publishers who agree on one thing. The universe is too interesting to be explained by one corporation, and too important to be left to platforms that will slowly enshittify it.
Instead, the Guide To Everything is a mutually owned, continuously Regovernanced commons that uses the playful gravity of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To Everything brand to hold a swarm of small actors together.
# A Network Of Little Guides In this ecosystem nobody is “the publisher” of the Guide. There are only publishers of Guides. Each Guide is small and opinionated. - A pocket survival guide to urban birdwatching. - A micro atlas of queer cafés in Barcelona. - A field guide to independent bookshops that still smell of paper and dust. - A handbook for running Bookshop Coop Store infrastructure in a small town. Independent publishers create these Guides in their own voice and style, but they agree to plug into a shared commons. The brand on the cover says “Hitchhiker’s Guide To Everything” in small type and the local title in big type. The relationship is reversed. The shared brand is a signal of membership in the commons, not a corporate logo that owns the content.
# The Hitchhiker’s Brand As A Commons The Hitchhiker’s brand is treated as a commons property. - It is collectively stewarded by a cooperative, not monetised by a single rights holder. - Publishing rights are granted through membership and adherence to shared rules, not by private licensing deals. - The brand can be withdrawn from projects that violate those rules, but cannot be sold off or privatised. This turns what is usually a mechanism of enclosure into a mechanism of federation. Independent publishers get. - A recognisable frame for their work. - A shared audience that knows roughly what kind of playful seriousness to expect. - Access to shared infrastructure like layout templates, metadata schemas and distribution tools. The brand gets. - A continuous flow of new Guides from many places. - A wider ecosystem than any one organisation could maintain. - A built in resistance to capture, because no single publisher is indispensable.
# Regoverned Guide Commons The heart of the ecosystem is a regoverned content commons. Guides live in a shared repository of pages, specs and layouts. - Each Guide has a canonical digital version, written in a friendly, forkable format like a wiki with Yam or similar back matter. - Pocket editions, regional bundles and special runs are compiled from these canonical sources. - The commons defines the minimal constraints. Licence, attribution, interoperability, safety and the rules of the Hitchhiker’s tone. Regovernance shows up as a continuous loop. - Members decide how much energy goes into new features versus keeping costs low. - Specs for new Guide types, new metadata fields or new distribution channels are written and ratified in the open. - If the ecosystem starts to bloat or drift, members can deliberately simplify it, prune failed experiments and reset priorities. No one assumes that the first governance model is the final one. The rules of the commons are part of the living text of the Guide.
# Independent Guide Publishers Independent guide publishers are the main characters in this story. They can be tiny collectives, small presses, bookshops, activist groups or solo weirdos with a laser focused obsession. They agree to. - Publish at least some of their Guides into the commons under the shared licence and brand. - Participate in at least minimal governance. Voting, commenting, writing specs or hosting local meetups. - Keep their own economics transparent enough that the community understands why they price and package Guides the way they do. In return they get. - Shared discovery. Readers who enjoyed one Hitchhiker’s Guide are likely to explore others. - Shared tooling. Layout pipelines, translation workflows and accessibility improvements land once in the commons and can be reused by everyone. - Shared distribution. Through independent bookshops, Bookshop Coop Store infrastructure and local events. Nothing stops a publisher from also running their own imprint, their own website or their own side projects. The commons is an “also, and” not an “instead of”.
# Bookshops As Local Nodes Independent bookshops act as physical nodes in the Guide To Everything network. They stock pocket editions, local bundles and single Guides. - A shop in Barcelona might carry a bundle called “Local Orbits” containing Guides on neighbourhood history, migrant mutual aid and independent cinemas. - A shop in Glasgow might feature a rotating “Shelf of Everything” where new and experimental Guides are sold at cost to see what resonates. Through Book Stock Export Aggregation and coop-store style infrastructure, shops also show live availability of Guides online. - Readers can search once and see which local shops have a given Guide. - Special local editions can be pre-ordered, printed and picked up in the same place. Bookshops are not just retail endpoints. They are co-owners of the commons infrastructure and hosts for the conversations that regovern it.
# Agentic Development Under The Hood Underneath the narrative and the brand there is a quietly humming set of agents and scripts. Agents help with. - Converting wiki pages into print-ready layouts for the pocket editions. - Checking citations, dates and ISBNs, especially when Guides reference other books in the ecosystem. - Generating stock and metadata exports for bookshops and regional catalogues. Humans steer. - What counts as a Guide in the first place. - Which specs are accepted and which ones are gently laughed out of the room. - How the Hitchhiker’s voice is used, bent or refused in different communities. Agentic development makes it realistic for small publishers and bookshops to share a surprisingly capable infrastructure without hiring a full time platform team. The cost can be pooled, monitored and deliberately reduced over time.
# Deshitification By Design The Guide To Everything exists in a world full of platforms that would love to capture it. It defends itself by design, not by wishful thinking. - The content is a commons. - The brand is a commons. - The core infrastructure is as thin and boring as possible. - The governance is explicit, incremental and adjustable. When a polished new platform appears and offers “exposure” in exchange for surrendering rights, there is a well maintained alternative. Independent guide publishers can say no and point to the Guide To Everything as proof that another way is viable. Deshitification here means that the ecosystem does not need to grow into a central giant to survive. It can remain a patchwork of small publishers and shops, held together by shared stories and shared infrastructure rather than by contracts of adhesion.
# Why It Matters The Guide To Everything is not just about books and pamphlets. It is a pattern. - Many independent actors. - A shared, playful brand. - A regoverned commons of content and tools. - A network of physical and digital nodes that keep the thing grounded in real communities. In a world where “guides” increasingly mean algorithmic feeds and SEO sludge, a mutually owned constellation of Guides that actually care about their readers and their neighbours is a quiet but powerful counter move.