EDC stands for “every day carry,” the stuff you carry around when you leave the house.
There’s a subculture of people interested in displaying, discussing, and looking at EDC of other folks. I don’t know how big the EDC subculture is, but it’s big enough to have sites online dedicated to EDC.
I wrote about EDC years ago. It was a guilty pleasure for a while. But eventually, most of the EDC submissions begin looking similar: keys, a knife( usually a Spyderco), an expensive penlight, a multitool (usually a Leatherman), and a few other bits and bobs. So I stopped visiting.
Then I checked in on the EDC scene last week.
The stuff being carried every day isn’t much different except for newer iPhones and such. The site though is more sophisticated. Maybe monetized would be a better way to say it. Now, when you let your cursor hover over an EDC photo, each item is overlaid with a number corresponding to numbered hot links just below the photo. If you click on the item description you’ll be sent to Amazon, or some other vendor. There are even notes in the description to let you know if an item is on sale.
The newer format also has lots of little features, ads really, about new gear for EDC.
One thing that’s the same as before is how new and unused the items seem in almost every submission. The submissions with items that appear to be actually carried every day really stand out. Maybe the new, slicker format feeds into the EDC crowd who’re more about style than actually carrying the stuff they fetishize about.