A Welcome Statement

It’s easy to be pessimistic about tech these days. Often me and my close friends might casually pine for a “90’s” lifestyle, but truth be told, I don’t think many of us would enjoy going back to that world.

What I suspect we really want is less bullshit. No predatory data collection, no manipulative app practices, no “uncancellable” fees etc. An internet that benefits all people; Not just multibillionaire assholes looking to profit off of our time and interests.

For 12 years now, I’ve worked in digital strategy, and for 27 years, I’ve been online. The more time passes, the more I believe that we’re misusing an incredible technology. This site is intended as a deliberate statement against centralized “social media”, and a call to revisit the intent and promise of the web itself as a platform.

On Nostalgia

In recent years, there’s been a revival for “web 1.0” and “pre-social media” attitudes. Many folks in their 20’s and 30’s have fond recollections of animated GIFs, web rings and guestbooks. And there are no shortage of excellent sites (like Neocities) that cater to that nostalgia. It’s a very fun and altruistic idea (and of course every generation should have the right to fondly recall their childhood!), but I don’t think it serves me all that seriously.

After years of moving through web trends (geocities, blogger, digg, tumblr, etc.), the idea of jumping onto yet another specific platform and ride yet another wave of growth, stagnation, and decline just doesn’t appeal to me. With Neocities in particular, I believe that it’s anchoring itself to a very specific era, and to a specific group of people who were active on the internet in the late 90’s/early aughts. I think it’d be a mistake for me to once again commit to a specific platform on the web as opposed to committing to the idea of the web itself.

Federation

Broadly, I’m far more interested in the ongoing efforts to (re-)decentralize the web, and in efforts to democratize infrastructure. (Specifically, communication platforms like LoRa where (in theory) we might even be able to cut cable providers out of the equation and create a more robust, free, and democratic means of public communication.)

Fediverse platforms are a great step in this direction, but they’re still only a small facet of what the web COULD be. As they as, they’re more of an adaptation of existing concepts grafted onto new ideas rather than a complete revolution in and of themselves. Mastodon in particular is a very cool platform (that I plan to continue to advocate for!), but it’s clearly coming out of a desire to replicate twitter rather than achieve a loftier goal of broad, self-owned communication. (NOTE: I do have to give props to ActivityPub, the W3C spec that Mastodon is built on).

If we’re going to take inspiration from the past, I’d rather take from web founder Tim Berners-Lee who has often spoken of the web’s unfulfilled potential. Berners-Lee inspires me to imagine a more human-centric internet where anyone can have a website, host their content and materials there and feed it out RSS style to whomever wants it, while maintaining total control of their personal data and content. (His Solid is a perfect example of a truly useful methodology that genuinely empowers users).

The Future

This individual website is under my control. No platform owns it. I can design it however I want, or just grab a simple template and write what I want. I don’t have to worry about being “flagged” or having my account banned (well, at least on my own server), and the majority of issues that plagued the early web (media sharing, post distribution, accessibility) have long since vanished from concern for me.

That said, I don’t believe that individual sites are a panacea. We still require and rely on mirrors and caches to ensure that records exist when sites and data vanish. Source verification is still (and will likely always be) a huge concern for determining truth etc.

Perhaps the biggest issue is discovery. There’s justifiable fear that useful things will never be found, but I’d argue that the system we have now is significantly worse than the net prior to the advent of centralized algorithmic recommendations (and more broadly the “social graph” of facebook, livejournal, blogger etc). Word of mouth might be slow and hard to monetize, but it’s authentic to human experience and a little more resilient against outside influence.

There’s no need for these platforms anymore: they’re middlemen. We can and should close out “social media” as a concept. They were a very effective lure to get more people online, but the platforms themselves have proved deeply untrustworthy and self-aggrandizing. It would be beautiful to point technology towards helping people better themselves and others; rather than putting capital towards providing addictive distractions.

If we as the public aren’t intentional with the systems we build and use, we offer up control to whomever can leverage those systems against us. I want a humanist internet, an intentional one. Not one bloated for its own sake.