★ HOT ★
this site is best experienced over gopher://
★ NEW ★
You typed gopher.followthemoney.wtf into your web browser.
Your web browser doesn't speak Gopher, so it found us at port 80 instead of
port 70 and you got this — a little welcome mat hand-coded in the
style of the era when Gopher still mattered.
The actual content lives on the other side. If you want to read it the way it was meant to be read, scroll down to How to connect.
Gopher is a hypertext protocol from 1991, predating the World Wide Web
by about a year. It is menu-driven, text-first, line-oriented, and standardised
in RFC 1436. You
open a connection to TCP port 70, send a selector terminated by
\r\n, and the server sends back either a menu or a document. No
headers. No cookies. No tracking. No JavaScript. No images, unless you ask
for one specifically.
HTTP won the popularity contest in the mid-1990s and Gopher faded into a kind of dignified obscurity. But the protocol still works, the clients still exist, and there is a small and stubborn community of operators (us, now) running "gopherholes" on the open internet.
You have three options, in increasing order of nerdiness:
| Native client |
Install a real Gopher client and point it at
gopher://gopher.followthemoney.wtf. Recommended:
|
|---|---|
| Web gateway |
Don't want to install anything? Floodgap runs a public Gopher-to-HTTP
proxy. It is not us, but it is reputable: gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.followthemoney.wtf (third-party gateway — we don't see your traffic, but they do.) |
| Raw TCP |
For the curious, the brave, and the people who already have nc
installed:
printf "\r\n" | nc gopher.followthemoney.wtf 70 printf "/recent\r\n" | nc gopher.followthemoney.wtf 70 printf "/search\ttariffs\r\n" | nc gopher.followthemoney.wtf 70First line returns the root menu. Second returns the most recent analyses. Third runs a full-text search for "tariffs". |
Everything Velocity Economics publishes that has been approved for public consumption. The gopher menu is laid out roughly like this:
Only items approved for public release appear over Gopher. Drafts and rejected pieces stay behind the curtain.
Velocity Economics is a framework for analysing news through the lens of who is moving money, who is blocking it from moving, and who is getting squeezed in between. It is plain-language, opinionated, and skeptical of official explanations. The full archive lives at followthemoney.wtf if you would prefer the modern web experience — with images, RSS, podcast audio, and a frankly excessive amount of CSS.