Amicite (pronounced am-ih-cite) is a hobbyist project built around creative media, digital independence, and the quiet belief that people should be able to make informed choices about the platforms and services they use. It is the work of one person, Mike Jay, based in Leeds, West Yorkshire, and it has been growing steadily since 2004.
The focus here spans music production, design, photography, and writing. Articles on technology, data sovereignty, platform ethics, and civil rights sit alongside the creative work, because the two are not as separate as they might appear. The digital spaces we inhabit are shaped by decisions made far away from us, and Amicite exists in part to push back on that. Not loudly, but practically.
What We Do Here
Music is the longest-running thread. Over two decades of electronic production covering a range of genres, from cinematic ambient and chillout through to drum and bass, hard psytrance, and gabba. More than 250 tracks produced to date, all created independently using FL Studio.
Design and photography run alongside the music. Experimental design work built from the ground up using Affinity Designer, and landscape and event photography that finds composition in places others walk past.
The writing covers technology, civil rights, data sovereignty, and the political, when the political warrants it. Amicite does not align permanently with any government or party. When those in power say or do things that warrant a response, that response tends to find its way into the work.
Digital Sovereignty and Conflict Countries
Some of the tools built here exist specifically to give people alternatives. When a country’s government or the corporations operating within it act in ways that cause harm, whether that is data exploitation, political interference, or broader geopolitical aggression, we consider that country a conflict designation. The aim is not to tell anyone what to think. It is to make sure people who already know what they think have somewhere to go to act on it.
The Stratum-powered directories on this site catalogue alternatives to platforms and services connected to conflict-designated countries, covering everything from social media and communication tools to software and consumer apps. No accounts required. No tracking. Just information.
Why No Accounts
Your identity is not a database entry. Amicite is built to be a quiet corner of the web, somewhere to read, listen, and explore without being prompted to log in, verify yourself, or consent to data collection. You are a guest here, not a data point. That is a deliberate choice and it is not going to change.
The Name
The name Amicite comes from the Latin amicitia, meaning friendship or goodwill. That root, Vulgar Latin amicitatem, is also the shared ancestor of the Spanish amistad, meaning friendship in a sense that carries connotations of trust and mutual bond rather than mere acquaintance. The name was chosen to reflect a straightforward idea: that this should be a space of goodwill toward the self and toward others, without the transactional layer that most of the web now takes for granted.
There is a secondary connection worth noting, though it is one of coincidence rather than design. Amicite happens to share its spelling with a real mineral, a rare zeolite first formally described in 1979, found at a quarry in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, and named after the Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Amici. The mineral belongs to a group known for a particular property: zeolites can exchange ions within their structure without their core framework changing. The shape holds even as what passes through it shifts. It is not a bad way to think about identity either.
The verb overlap that sometimes gets cited is worth addressing. Amicite is also the plural imperative of the Latin amicio, meaning “clothe” or “wrap around”, and some have drawn meaning from that. The overlap is a coincidence of spelling only. The two Latin words share no root and no etymological connection. It is a neat idea but it does not hold up, so we are not going to pretend that it does.
Amicite is not a brand. It is not a business. It is a body of work in progress, made independently, with no external funding, no advertising, and no interest in being anything other than what it already is.