*Before it Became a Capitalist Hellscape* 🫠 [[The Internet#🍄 Tags|🍄]] --- Research for a post I’m currently ideating… --- ![[Screenshot-Neil-Gaiman-Internet.jpeg]] [Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet](https://calnewport.com/neil-gaimans-radical-vision-for-the-future-of-the-internet/), November 27, 2023 via [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/the-nervous-system?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2) --- “There are plenty of times that this YouTube channel feels like a really nice town that I live in. And I appreciate you for living here too. Thank you so much.” Adam Savage, [The Search for Adam’s Favorite Mechanical Pencil](https://youtu.be/2DJQffwLgkM?si=iqjx9I9Yz2mtUEp5) “As we say in our hometown… don’t forget to be awesome.” John & Hank Green, [Crash Course](https://thecrashcourse.com/) --- [The Computer as a Communication Device](https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf) J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor Reprinted from Science and Technology, April 1968. Hat tip [David Schmudde] --- [On the Internet, We Are Either Artists or Bureaucrats](https://schmud.de/posts/2020-06-23-internet-community.html "On the Internet, We Are Either Artists or Bureaucrats") (2020, 2024) David Schmudde > I still believe that the best internet is the internet that engenders community and conversation. A network of thought is like a community of artists. Each person who shares their small creative act invites a response. > **The performative aspects of social media** - likes, retweets, and chasing engagement - **are different than the conversational tools of message boards and newsgroups**. “Engagement,” as it is called in the analytics dashboard, is cosmetic. It obscures the difference between conflict and conversation. > Consider what networking pioneer J.C.R Licklider published in 1968 on online communities: > > In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest. > Licklider argued that people would be happier and more productive if they participated in communities of shared interest rather than “accidents of proximity.” [The Computer as a Communication Device](https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf) J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor Reprinted from Science and Technology, April 1968. > In the video below, Licklider warns that the internet will place us on “a new technological base for intellectual efforts before our ponderous social processes will let us. I think more people outta get in there and think about the social process.” Another well-formulated forecast.  > Building a healthy community that engenders fruitful conversation is a difficult endeavor. It requires a certain skill and a lot of hard work. Most people who manage book clubs or internet forums do their work unpaid. Their effort is yet another form of labor that no technocratic system can seem to properly compensate or value. **The very linchpin of community building goes unmentioned in Licklider’s musings on online communities** - as if the technology itself was the solution. --- [Small Web](https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/small-web) by Joe Hallenbeck > Shouting into the void is not the basis for a community. > IndieWeb is also a movement with a similar collection of ideas surrounding anti-corporate web influence and encouraging the creation and keeping of personal authored websites. > > One idea that comes from IndieWeb is POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere which advocates that you should publish your work (writing, film, images) to a site that you control. A blog, a digital garden, a home site, a portfolio etc. and then syndicate this publication into various media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, etc. > > In this manner the canonical version of your work is maintained under your control. But it is shared to places where people are and those people can be drawn into visiting your site --- [IndieWeb POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE) **POSSE** is an abbreviation for **Publish (on your) Own Site, [Syndicate](https://indieweb.org/Category:syndication "Category:syndication") Elsewhere**, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like [social media](https://indieweb.org/social_media "social media") silos) with [original post links](https://indieweb.org/original_post_link "original post link") to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content. --- [Tending the Digital Commons](https://ayjay.org/Tending.pdf) A Small Ethics toward the Future Alan Jacobs ![[Screenshot-Quote-Highlight.jpeg]] [wget](https://dev.to/jjokah/how-to-download-an-entire-website-for-offline-usage-using-wget-2lli) - tool to download / backup websites Late in The Lord of the Rings, after the great assault on the city of Minas Tirith has been unexpectedly repulsed, the wizard Gandalf encourages his companions to think about what work remains to them: > It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (Tolkien, Gandalf LOTR) ![[Screenshot-AJ-WWW-Walls.jpeg]] > It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as "walled gardens." But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. >  If you're on Facebook, you are living on Mark Zuckerberg's bounty. This is of course a choice you are free to make. The problem comes when, by living in conditions of such dependence, you forget that there's any other way to live— and therefore cannot teach another way to those who come after you. What Jacobs believes all children should be taught regarding the Internet or “anyone who wants to be a responsible citizen of the open Web.” This is pretty similar to my early internet experience in the 90s except I am more comfortable with HTML than CSS as it came later. ![[Screenshot-Domain-AJ.jpeg]] I have been circling back to his final point in the last 12 months as I have been increasingly uncomfortable having my best work live on Substack and not my blog. > They can engage with that original purpose of the Web-sharing information and collaborating on knowledge-building endeavors-by doing meaningful work online, in the public, with other scholars. (Audrey Watters) > this knowledge has the further effect of reminding us that code-including the algorithmic code that so often determines what we see online—is written by human beings for purposes that may be at odds with our own. ![[Screenshot-AJ-Zuck.jpeg]] --- # [We Need To Rewild The Internet](https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/) The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. By [Maria Farrell](http://mariafarrell.com/about/) & [Robin Berjon](https://berjon.com) APRIL 16, 2024 Opening describes late 18th century transition from wild forests to forestry in Germany. After the first crop the next trees that grew were spindly and weak. > It was a disaster so bad that a new word, _Waldsterben_, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. > The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered. ![[Screenshot-Forest.jpeg]] > The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late. > Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. > What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? > We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. > Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” [according](https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/benefits-and-risks-rewilding) to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. > (Rewilding) creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” > many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole _web_) is normal. > We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. --- [The Web We Lost](https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/) by Anil Dash > In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other competitive services, with no restrictions. Vendors spent years working on interoperability around data exchange purely for the benefit of their users, despite theoretically lowering the barrier to entry for competitors. > they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. > We’ll fix these things; I don’t worry about that. The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web _means_, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know. [Rebuilding the Web We Lost](https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/18/rebuilding_the_web_we_lost/) > We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. > But they’ll look different, both in terms of the people who make them, and the people they serve. And they’ll be more durable, not optimized based on current fashions in financing, but because they’re built on the accurate belief that there are people who care deeply about the web they use, the works they create, the connections they make, and the humans on the other side of those connections. Note these are from 2012. I wish I had been tuned into the shift back then. --- [A Different Internet](https://schmud.de/posts/2022-12-05-different-internet.html) by David Schmudde > Tarnoff claims that the internet is broken because it is treated like a business; a more equitable, privacy-respecting internet will require provisions for substantive governance outside of commercial interests. > “The root is simple: the internet is broken because the internet is a business.” (Tarnoff) > What remains explicitly clear is the fact that folks are not gathering in the digital equivalent of parks and town squares, they are gathering in online centers of commerce. Our digital public spaces, often called “platforms,” are really purpose-built shopping malls. This distinction is where Tarnoff’s book shines. --- Also on my list from this article [Wasting Time on the Internet](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wasting-time-on-the-internet-kenneth-goldsmith?variant=40974250803234) by Kenneth Goldsmith. Quoting Stefano Rodotà in [2004](https://www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/1049293#eng): > We may believe that we are only discussing data protection; in fact we are dealing with the destiny of our social organizations. […] there is little doubt that privacy is a necessary tool to defend the society of freedom and counteract the drive towards establishment of a society based on surveillance, classification, and social selection. > Establishing a public commons won’t eliminate advertising and commerce. But a counter-balance is requisite for a balanced ecosystem that serves a diverse set of needs. --- [SETH WERKHEISER]([https://sethw.xyz/](https://sethw.xyz/blog/2024/04/08/relying-on-grey-boxes/)) on Cal Newport > If our work is on social media, we leave the chance of “being discovered” to a grey box. An algorithm. > > But the “old way” of finding and discovering things on the Internet was through blogs and directories. > > I think it’s time to get back to directories again. DIY style. Curated links to resources to duplicate tapes, make zines, and lists of art galleries by city and state. Love all of Seth’s work. He probably has other quotes & posts I can reference. --- ![[Screenshot-BBS.png]] --- --- ![[Screenshot-Decoder.png]] > Nilay Patel: There’s an idea embedded in two phrases you just said that I find myself wrestling with. I think it is the story of the internet. It is how commercialized the internet has become. You said “content supply chain” and “content life cycle.” The point of the content is to lead to a transaction that is an advertising and marketing-driven view of the internet. Someone, for money, is going to make content, and that content will help someone else down the purchase funnel, and then they’re going to a pair of shoes or a toothbrush or whatever it is. And that I think is in tension with creativity in a real way. That’s in tension with creativity and art and culture. Adobe sits at the center of this. Everybody uses your software. How do you think about that tension? Because it’s the thing that I worry about the most. Why Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is confident we'll all adapt to Al [Transcript](https://www.theverge.com/24153956/adobe-shantanu-narayen-ai-firefly-premiere-photoshop-pdf-creativity-commerce) --- October 17, 2015 #### [The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/) Mike Caulfield > In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by. > Humanity can advance, not through argument by through a true collaboration. (above) on Memex from Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think > So when we look at the web today, we see very little of this original vision. What happened? > > Originally I had a long narrative in this section, and the story moved between the WELL and Howard Rheingold and Dave Winer and mailing lists, and Jorn Barger’s epic goodbye to the Kate Bush news group. >  …I’ll boil it down to this. It came down to who had the power to change things. **It came down to the right to make copies.**    emphasis added > The “conversational web”. A web obsessed with arguing points. A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought. A web where you weld information and data into your arguments so that it can never be repurposed against you. The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations. > And a web that can be beautiful and still is beautiful on so many days. I can’t stress this enough. I’m not here to bury the Stream, I love the Stream. > >But it’s an incomplete experience, and it’s time we fixed that. on Open Educational Resources. > Everybody wants to play in the Stream, but no one wants to build the Garden. on the conference he is speaking at > … what we want to do here is to seriously interrogate the assumptions that are hidden in plain sight. > we can imagine a world, I think, so much better than this one, if only we can get our heads out of the Stream for a bit, and build the Garden we need. So let’s talk about how to do that. He also mentioned Federated Wiki a lot. Federated Wiki is a collaborative knowledge application developed by Ward Cunningham (wikipedia) --- #### Substack > The vibes are shifting on Substack. Have you felt it too? What began as a creative underground sandbox (or at least, what began as something that felt that way) is becoming another greedy, feedy social media platform. (By feedy, I mean it’s a feed.) [The elite capture of Substack](https://discussioncandy.substack.com/p/the-elite-capture-of-substack?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true) (CW: body image) by [CYDNEY HAYES](https://substack.com/@discussioncandy) April 5, 2023 [Substack rolls out Notes](https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true) Sept 20, 2023 [Substack announces a new algorithmic homepage](https://on.substack.com/p/new-front-page?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true) --- [Making the Internet Alive Again](https://gabygoldberg.substack.com/p/making-the-internet-alive-again?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&publication_id=73380&post_id=142149937&triedRedirect=true) by Gaby Goldberg > The Internet used to be the creative medium. Now, it’s just the mode of delivery. > “Surfing the web” very well may be a thing of the past. > The best parts of the Internet — the best parts of it for _you,_ whatever that might mean to you — are usually hard to find. That’s precisely what makes them so special. > I am curating my feed, but moreso, my feed is curating me. --- > The creator economy isn't peer-to-peer. It's peer-to-machine-to-peer.  Tara McMullin, [What Works](https://open.substack.com/pub/taramcmullin/p/the-creator-economy-is-eating-creative?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios) --- # [Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter](https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/marking-the-webs-35th-birthday-an-open-letter-ebb410cc7d42) by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) Mar 12, 2024 > Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine. > Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity — what I term the 3 C’s. > The first decade of the web fulfilled that promise — the web was decentralised with a long-tail of content and options, it created small, more localised communities, provided individual empowerment and fostered huge value. > the web serves as the foundational layer of our online ecosystem > There are two clear, connected issues to address. The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned. This has segmented the web, with a fight to keep users hooked on one platform to optimise profit through the passive observation of content. This exploitative business model is particularly grave in this year of elections that could unravel political turmoil. Compounding this issue is the second, the personal data market that has exploited people’s time and data with the creation of deep profiles that allow for targeted advertising and ultimately control over the information people are fed. > The future hinges on our ability to both reform the current system and create a new one that genuinely serves the best interests of humanity. To achieve this, we must break down data silos to encourage collaboration, create market conditions in which a diversity of options thrive to fuel creativity, and shift away from polarising content to an environment shaped by a diversity of voices and perspectives that nurture empathy and understanding. --- > What if we imagined an alternative future, one in which the internet was a global social fabric that we took care of together and technology was an everyday instrument for people to create, express themselves, and play in? >We have a chance to save the web for ourselves, to reclaim our spaces and welcome our neighbors. >Let us work towards a web that is soft, quiet, and natural. > >Let us make _tiny internets_. [Tiny Internets](https://tiny-inter.net) by Spencer Chang --- ![[Screenshot-Poetic.jpeg]] [A Manifesto for Poetic Computing](https://poetic.computer) > Computers were women who did the computing, and all it means now is a box of components. How do we take the agency back from the machines? > Most traditional cultures embody computational thinking long before the Turing Machine was conceptualized. Knitting, weaving patterns, rangoli, cooking, music, poetry are all computational. [Source](https://poetic.computer/background/) [Are.na](https://www.are.na/koundinya/channels) --- [my website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. what could yours be?](https://laurelschwulst.com/e/my-website-is-a-shifting-house/) by Laurel Schwulst Spring 2018 > my favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. in other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. there are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. what kind of room is a website? or is a website more like a house? a boat? a cloud? a garden? a puddle? whatever it is, there's potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity. > the web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. this web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like facebook/instagram, twitter, and google. > how could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating? how can you make it fun or thought-provoking or (insert desired feeling here) for you? > fred rogers said you can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. --- > make sure you have a website where all your weirdness resides [Seth Werkheiser](https://sethw.xyz/blog/2024/04/14/use-your-voice/) --- Listened to Hank Green & Nilay Patel on [Decoder](https://pca.st/0lclt3xn) over lunch. ([Transcript](https://www.theverge.com/24087834/hank-green-decoder-podcast-google-youtube-web-media-platforms-distribution-future)) HANK: **I should be asking that question of myself. Why am I writing in the text box that pays money to Elon and Mark [Zuckerberg] and not my text box?** NILAY: Why do we all work for free? Look, we want to talk about the platform era and media. Why do we all work for free?  HANK: **Everybody’s insisting—**  NILAY: I don’t know the answer to that question. HANK: **…** **We can’t shut up about how our work has value, but then we can’t stop giving it away for free.** … NILAY: The great magazines, the great print magazines, the great media brands, ==they had aspirations that were bigger than their revenue==, that were bigger than their view counts. It was, “Did we make an impact? Did we move the culture? Is this the thing everybody’s talking about? Is this the magazine cover that, maybe it sold the most on the newsstands, but was it the most striking and evocative?” --- [Indie Web Camp](https://indieweb.org) A community for people building their own webpages. > The [IndieWeb](https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb) is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”. > **It is a community of independent and personal websites** connected by [open standards](https://indieweb.org/building_blocks "building blocks") and based on the [principles](https://indieweb.org/principles "principles") of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content. --- [How the Blog Broke the Web](https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/) by Amy Hoy I have a similar experience of the early internet. Resonating deeply with this. > Back when you could really say you were _surfing the net_. > > Back then, we didn’t have platforms or feeds or social networks or… blogs. > >We had _homepages_. > >The backgrounds were grey. The font, Times New Roman. Links could be any color as long as it was medium blue. The cool kids didn’t have parallax scrolling… but they did have horizontal rule GIFs. on being online in 1993 > We built every new page _by hand_. When we had more than one web _page_, we built the navigation _by hand_. We managed our Table of Contents _by hand_. > Each would-be Netizen had to bushwhack their own path. Then Movable Type happened, > Suddenly, instead of _building_ their own system, they were working _inside_ one. > >A system someone else built. > Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. > But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — _but only in a certain way_ — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost. > Thus began the Chronological Sort Era. > The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. Boo. Let’s bring it back. --- [Google Zero is here — now what?](https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-housefresh-ai-overviews-traffic-data-audience) / Search is an invisible platform that shaped the entire web. And it’s changing. By Nilay Patel > The entire web is Google’s platform, and creators on the web are often building their entire businesses on that platform, just like any other. > It’s honestly been challenging to explain just how Google operates as a platform, because it’s so large, pervasive, and dominant that it’s almost invisible. > the number one question I have for people who build things on any platform is: what are you going to do when that platform changes the rules? > There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites. > But for a lot of small businesses. Google Zero is now. It’s here, it’s happening, and it can feel insurmountable. https://pca.st/episode/c218f6bc-353b-4617-bb7d-0adb635ab8b --- Alan Patrick, [On the increasing uselessness of Google](http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html): > Google is like a monoculture, and thus parasites have a major impact once they have adapted to it – especially if Google has “lost the war”. If search was more heterogenous, spamsites would find it more costly to scam every site. That is a very interesting argument against the level of Google market dominance. via Anil Dash [Three's a Trend: The Decline of Google Search Quality](https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decline_of_google_search_quality/) --- [What is the small web?](https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/) by Aral Balkan > On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes). > On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people. > We’re currently building the tools developers (including us) need to build the everyday tools everyone will use. > The single tenant web is sustainable and scales differently. It does not have economies of scale. It does not scale vertically like the Big Web. It scales horizontally. As the Small Web scales, no single organisation or person scales alongside it. It does not centralise wealth and power. > The Small Web is not a place; it is a public sphere. > each one of those databases is an artefact of a soul’s exploration of itself and the world around them. > When we say the Small Web is decentralised, we are talking about topological decentralisation. --- > Hello! I’m Laura Kalbag, a British designer living in Ireland, and co-founder of [Small Technology Foundation](https://small-tech.org). My book [Accessibility For Everyone](https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone) is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook from A Book Apart. > Small Technology Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. > ## What is small technology? > > [Small Technology](https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology) are everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits. The opposite of big tech. We’re on a mission to build tools that enable everyone of us to own and control our own place on the Internet. [Laura Kalbag](https://laurakalbag.com/a-belated-introduction-to-small-technology-foundation/) --- # Raiders of the Lost Web If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can. By [Adrienne LaFrance](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/adrienne-lafrance/) October 2015 > The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness. > The promise of the web is that Alexandria’s library might be resurrected for the modern world. But today’s great library is being destroyed even as it is being built. > In 1994, there were fewer than 3,000 websites online. By 2014, there were more than 1 billion. > Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library. > Culturally, though, the functionality of the web has changed. The Internet is now considered a great oracle, a place where information lives and knowledge is stitched together. And yet there are no robust mechanisms for libraries and museums to acquire, and thus preserve, digital collections. The world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, is [in the midst of reinventing](https://medium.com/@adriennelaf/what-will-yesterdays-news-look-like-tomorrow-7f82290ab8d0) the way it catalogues resources in the first place—an attempt to bridge existing systems to a more dynamic data environment. But that process is only beginning. > In other formats, entire eras of meaningful work have been destroyed. Most of the films made in the United States between 1912 and 1929 have been lost. “And it’s not because we didn't know how to preserve them, it’s that we didn't think they were valuable,” Rumsey said. “The first 50 or 100 years of print after the printing press, most of what was produced was lost... People looked down on books as having less value in part because they were able to print things so rapidly and distribute them so much more rapidly that they seemed ephemeral.” > Transformative technologies in any era are met with initial skepticism, and that attitude often fuels indifference about initial preservation efforts. Historians and digital preservationists agree on this fact: The early web, today’s web, will be mostly lost to time. > The Internet Archive has its Wayback Machine, an archive filled with imprints of web pages as they appeared in the past, like digital fossils. > The life cycle of most web pages runs its course in a matter of months. In 1997, the average [lifespan of a web page](http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/11/the-average-lifespan-of-a-webpage/) was 44 days; in 2003, it was 100 days. Links go bad even faster. [A 2008 analysis](http://worldcat.org/arcviewer/5/LEGAL/2011/06/15/H1308163631444/viewer/file73.pdf) of links in 2,700 digital resources—the majority of which had no print counterpart—found that about 8 percent of links stopped working after one year. [By 2011](http://worldcat.org/arcviewer/5/LEGAL/2011/06/15/H1308163631444/viewer/file2.php), when three years had passed, 30 percent of links in the collection were dead. > Scholars believe that around 300 B.C., the Library of Alexandria may have housed three-quarters of humanity’s texts. Today, three-quarters of humanity’s books are [abandoned](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0), out of print and housed only in libraries—if at all. The existence of a resource, unfortunately, has little to do with access to it. --- [Manorial Technocracy](https://blog.ayjay.org/manorial-technocracy/) by Alan Jacobs > “while feudalism was based on land-grants to aristocrats who promised armed soldiers in return, manorialism referred to a system in which an elite owned all the property and the rest of the world had to work on that property on terms that the local lord set.” (medievalist Stephen Morillo) also from Alan’s [micro blog](https://blog.ayjay.org/social-media-blogs-newsletters/) > Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace… --- [The Old Web](https://rubedo.work/oldweb.html) by Jack Clayton > I miss when the internet was a wonderland. I don't mean that it was perfect or utopian, because it wasn't. Of course, neither was wonderland, when the Queen of Hearts got ahold of you; she was a master of concern trolling before it really existed. There's always been someone in a hurry, who's running late, but not too late to tell you tl;dr. There's always been the already-in-progress party that only makes sense if you're already part of it. > > What I mean is: I miss rabbit holes. > > I miss starting with one site and getting led to more. > the web we once knew... some of it is still there. Some of it can be [reclaimed](https://web.archive.org/). And some of it we can rebuild, block by block and snippet by snippet. I'd like to think it's worth doing for its' own sake, but at the very least, I think it's worth doing because it's satisfying to put a page together. --- So it’s not just me then: “Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse.” [[Cory Doctorow]] [Source](https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/) This post also inspired me to trying searching Cybersurfari again (which I had been spelling wrong) and found all kinds of breadcrumbs. ![[IMG_8610.jpeg]] Including an Angelfire page that is somehow still working: https://www.angelfire.com/ia/gamecenter15/cyber.html ![[IMG_8613.jpeg]] ![[IMG_8605.jpeg]] And a congratulations page: http://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/stories/hunt/treasure.htm ![[IMG_8607.png]] --- via [Robin Sloan](https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/here-is-your-liberal-art/) > Andy Matuschak’s [reflections on his year as an independent researcher](https://andymatuschak.org/2020/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me) are thoughtful and inspiring. > I think Andy is presently one of the great investigators of digital media’s potential. In my view, he’s part of an important intellectual lineage that, though it’s been attenuated at times — now might be one of those times — remains unbroken, connecting generations of excellent weirdos who insist: ==we can use these magic mirrors for something better.== Love this metaphor. I need to read Andy’s post to see if this is his phrase or Robin’s. --- >_You choose the web you want._ But you have to do the work. > >A lot of people _are_ doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun. > > Again: you choose. [Brent Simmons](https://inessential.com/2019/10/29/you_choose.html) (Creator of Net News Wire) --- > Nilay Patel: There’s an idea embedded in two phrases you just said that I find myself wrestling with. I think it is the story of the internet. It is how commercialized the internet has become. You said “content supply chain” and “content life cycle.” The point of the content is to lead to a transaction that is an advertising and marketing-driven view of the internet. Someone, for money, is going to make content, and that content will help someone else down the purchase funnel, and then they’re going to a pair of shoes or a toothbrush or whatever it is. And that I think is in tension with creativity in a real way. That’s in tension with creativity and art and culture. Adobe sits at the center of this. Everybody uses your software. How do you think about that tension? Because it’s the thing that I worry about the most. Why Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is confident we'll all adapt to Al [Transcript](https://www.theverge.com/24153956/adobe-shantanu-narayen-ai-firefly-premiere-photoshop-pdf-creativity-commerce) --- > Nilay Patel: And the introduction of AI means that search engines like Google, which was really the last great source of traffic for web pages, just don’t seem that reliable anymore as it begins to answer more questions directly. Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas [Transcript](https://www.theverge.com/23795154/squarespace-ai-seo-web-social-algorithms-anthony-casalena) --- > I can’t help but notice the shifting tide of the tone of the internet. When the internet was first developed it was created for the quick and free exchange of information between individuals across the world. Now, I’m hard pressed to do research on a topic without hitting multiple paywalls asking me to sign up, pay more, share more.  > > Yes, I believe writers and artists should be adequately paid for their work - but the consequence of individuals paywalling content is fractured access to information that is killing the democracy of the internet. Instead of pooling together, we are pulling apart - the individual is being chosen over the collective, which is a theme I see time and time again in culture these days. [Paywalls, begone!](https://charlierewilding.substack.com/p/why-im-removing-paywalls-at-rewild) Why I'm democratising REWILD by going open-access Charlie Rewilding --- NY Times April 11, 1999 ## [Searching for the Essence of the World Wide Web](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/041199internet-ecosystem-review.html) By GEORGE JOHNSON > GAZING through a computer screen onto the vast expanse of the World Wide Web, one feels like an explorer perched at the edge of an endless wilderness. It's a bit of a letdown, then, to learn how very finite the whole place really is. Related links to explore: John Seeley Brown on Xerox PARC Creative Ecologies [YouTube Talk](https://youtu.be/amdONcqQvnU?si=6RjluJkHSIhqCF_1) [Slides](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/John_Seely_Brown_creativityusc.pdf) [Interview](http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB11-Ecology-PARC.html) Lada Adamic [Portfolio](http://www.ladamic.com) --- # [Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web](https://neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/) We're quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it. - [Parimal Satyal](https://neustadt.fr/index.html), 2 november 2017. See also: my [Paris Web 2020 talk](https://www.paris-web.fr/2020/conferences/against-an-increasingly-user-hostile-web.php) > I believe we're slowly replacing a web that empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. And why we should, at the very least, stop and think about the consequences of that shift. > It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lea, a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web. > On April 30 1993, CERN made a bold decision. It decided to release WWW into the public domain. It renounced all intellectual property rights and essentially invited anyone at all, anywhere in the world, to play with it. Later, the director of CERN who approved the decision said that he was inspired by Richard Stallman's vision of free, open software. > hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) > You could start reading about logical fallacies and end up on a website about optical illusions. Read about the history of time-keeping and end up learning about Einstein's special theory of relativity. All interests were catered to. Information could truly be free: transverse borders, cultures and politics. > > That is the web at its best. > The modern web is different. > It's naturally different from a technological standpoint: we have faster connections, better browser standards, tighter security and new media formats. But it is also different in the values it espouses. Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter. All the while being tracked and profiled. > Almost every website you go to today reports your activities to third parties that you most likely neither know nor trust. They record where you come from, what pages you visit, how long you stay on each, where you click and where you go next. > The longer you stay, the more information you give, the more valuable your pro�le—and the platform—is to advertisers. > The web is open by design and built to empower people. This is the web we're breaking and replacing with one that subverts, manipulates and creates new needs and addiction. --- [CERN: A Short History of the Web](https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web) ![[Creative-Commons-FirstProposalMarch1989.jpg]] The first page of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web, written in March 1989 (Image: CERN) > The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”. > An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: “WebCore”. The goal of the project was to form an international consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN to join MIT and founded the [International World Wide Web Consortium](http://www.w3c.org/) (W3C). --- Am reading Filterworld and amazed how this socialist operations room (Project Cybersyn) is like Star Trek meets knights of the round table. (It wasn’t put into effect before another regime took over.) ![[Pasted image 20240404194242.jpg]] ![[IMG_8654.jpeg]] ![[IMG_8655.jpeg]] --- **Spencer Chang** > And yet, people still carve out community in the most hostile of places and subvert platforms to create space for human-first desires. > We make magic out of our internet spaces in the same ways we do in the physical world… > …these [tiny internets](https://tiny-inter.net/)sprout and bloom. Like digital moss, they spring up everywhere even when you try to stamp them out. [one year of independence](https://spencer.place/posts/one-year-research/) > An attempt to describe my computing philosophy > > I care about how technology can help people relate to each other, create space together, and express themselves more fully on the internet. > I dream of an age of [communal computing](https://www.are.na/spencer-chang/communal-computing-infrastructure), where they—computers, the internet, our network of online devices—feel like ubiquitous reminders of our capacity for creativity, intimacy, and solidarity. An age where technology became a vehicle of liberation for our dreams of not only existing in a harder world, but also flourishing, together. >I want to make tools that empower people to embed their personality into the fabric of the bits that surround us. I hope to make environments that embrace participation, ones that invite us to mold the internet as a [material](https://www.are.na/editorial/on-elemental-computation)for creation and a medium for connection. > to realize that we enchant technology with meaning with each action we take > I want us to be able to feel the warmth of the human behind every hypermedia, every piece of data that we encounter. [communal computing infrastructure](https://www.are.na/spencer-chang/communal-computing-infrastructure) on Are.na and [touching computers](https://spencerchang.substack.com/p/touching-computers?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true) Discussion of tangible computing and a very cool idea about NFC chips / ceramics / business cards. --- Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirkey “People who care passionately about something that seems unimportant to the rest if us are easy to mock.” p. 88 “If people are using their surplus time and talents in generous and public ways, then we can assume the cause is new tools: the web, mobile phones, new software…” p. 99 “Assumptions that people are selfish can become self-fulfilling prophecies, creating systems that provide lots of individual freedom to act, but not a lot of public value or management of collective resources for the greater public good. Systems designed around assumptions of selfishness can also crowd out solutions that could arise when people communicate with one another and enter into agreements that they jointly monitor and enforce. Conversely, systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.” p. 112 Social production is the creation of value by a group for its members, using neither price signals nor managerial oversight to coordinate participants' efforts. (This is the world of friends and family; it is how most picnics happen.)” p. 118 Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do. Human nature changes slowly but includes an incredible range of mechanisms for adapting to our surround-ings. p. 121 Getting an Invisible University means mastering the art of creating groups that commit themselves to working together outside existing market and managerial structures, in order to create opportunities for planet-scale sharing. p. 180  (Joshua Porter), explains to his clients, "The behavior you're seeing is the behavior you've designed for." Users will only take advantage of opportunities they understand and that seem interesting or valuable. Porter is in effect telling his clients: It doesn't matter how much you want users to behave a certain way. What matters is how they react to the opportunities you give them. If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities. p. 196 Further Reading: The Economics of Knowledge by Foray - Small Pieces Loosely Joined (a unified theory of the web) by David Weinberger the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true "small pieces" of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we're still inventing. p. x “Hyperlinks are the geography of the web.” p. 49 “Links are all that holds the Web together; without links, there is no Web.” p. 54 "Everything is in flux," said the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And he said: "You can't step in the same river twice." While pointing out that everything around us is always changing, he also implicitly acknowledges the continuity that we observe amidst all the change: we may not be able to step into the same river twice, but both times there's a river there. But there is another reason we tolerate imperfections on the Web. Because it's our Web, made by and for humans, it shares the characteristic that distinguishes us from the gods: fallibility. Of course, as Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor, is reported to have said, the "Web will always be a little bit broken." We are, too. p. 78 The imperfection of the Web isn't a temporary lapse, it's a design decision. It flows directly from the fact that the Web is unmanaged and uncontrolled so that it can grow rapidly and host innovations of every sort. The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose. p. 79 The Web isn't just informal. Its informality is in-your-face. In it we hear ourselves being released from impossible ideals of behavior. We get to kick in the teeth the idealized and constricted set of behaviors known as professionalism. And we get to shed the limits imposed by whatever level of "political cor-rectness" we think has gone too far. p. 91 The Web celebrates our imperfection, ludicrous creatures that we are. Its juice comes from there being as many points of view as people and as many ways of talking as there are Web pages. The Web is where we can air our viewpoints, experi-ment, play, and fail, and then get right back on our feet and try again. It is not headed towards agreement. Ever. There isn't one way of thinking or talking or behaving on the Web, and if there were, who'd want to go? The Web would be just a large "infor-mation resource," a place where we find answers. But the Web is far more interesting. It will never be perfect-complete, final, total, true without exception, good without hesitation. It is, therefore, a genuine reflection of our imperfect human nature, and a welcome relief from the anal-perfectionism imposed on so much of our real-world lives. p. 94 Web groups are different than groups in the real world, and not just because, free of geography, they are often more purely interest-based. Just as important, Web groups are different in time. Consider the difference between the Emily Dickinson Society, which meets once a month in the real world, and Dickinson readers who have found one another on the Web-imaginary examples in both cases. The real-world society sets aside the first Tuesday night of every month to get together. Although individual members may, of course, chat about the Belle of Amherst whenever they run into one another, the group's talk about Dickinson is confined to that two-hour ses-sion. Miss it and you've missed it for the month. The Web-based Dickinson group, on the other hand, is held together by a mailing list that lets each member send a message to all the other members. p. 109 The Web is a written world. The 300 million people on the Web are its authors. We get our authority not from degrees and qualifications (all of which could be invented anyway) but from what of us appears in our writing: our authenticity. What is the greatest betrayer of a lack of authenticity? A voice without affect, without passion: a computer program. The knowledge worth listening to-that is worth developing together-comes from bodies, for only bodies (as far as we can tell) are capable of passionate attention, and only embodied creatures, their brains and sinews swaddled in fat and covered with skin, can write the truth in a way worth reading. The bodiless Web is fat with embodied knowledge that could only come from the particular people smart, wise, opinionated, funny, provocative, outrageous, interestingly wrong—to whom we're listening. Indeed, that's why we're listening. Hyperlinks make the Web into a traversable place. Rather than being constructed out of hard-edged atoms and things, the new world of the Web is built thoroughly and completely out of the interrelationship of things. p. 170 ![[Screenshot-David-Weinberger.jpeg]] --- ![[Screenshot-Karlsson-Internet.jpeg]] [Source](https://substack.com/@henrikkarlsson/note/c-56041821?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=836c5) --- Screentime by: Becca Caddy “Today, certain algorithms pull towards you things that you already know, believe or like. And they push away everything else. Push back! It shouldn’t be this way.” Tim Cook CEO of Apple 2019 Keynote Speech Becca’s tips 1. Notice what you’re shown. 2. Choose what you want to engage with. 3. Avoid bottomless experiences. 4. Change recommendation settings. 5. Game the system. (Use available tools to indicate what you’d like to see more or less of.) 6. Look beyond social media for news. “The news that's shared on social media could favour the more extreme, clickbaity headlines and news stories. Remember algorithms are likely to favour the things that get people riled up and sharing furi-ously. Visit sites directly instead or use a news aggregator, like Feedly. This allows you to add multiple sites, which means that the most recent stories are then presented back to you in one stream.” “The past is written but the future is left for us to write.” Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Picard “We need to decide the direction we’re going in so that the future is a destination we want for ourselves, not just a place we find ourselves in.” Defensive pessimists - “perform better when they lower expectations and imagine how everything could go wrong” Techquilibriun 1. I choose how my time is spent. 2. I make the improvements that work for me. 3. I value having the choice to switch on or off. 4. I watch for my feelings being pushed. 5. I don’t need extreme changes, I need balance. “We can advocate for technology that is built with good intentions, and for all of us.” --- > There is a _much_ simpler explanation for why users stay on platforms even as they decline in quality: they are enmeshed in a social service that encompasses their friends, loved ones, customers, and communities. Even if everyone in this sprawling set of interlocking communities agrees that the platform is terrible, they will struggle to agree on what to do about it: where to go next and when to leave. [Cory Dotorow](https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/) --- [I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/07/opinion/media-message-twitter-instagram.html?unlocked_article_code=1.s00.v1j6.ZsJklknnRmoS&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) Ezra Klein, NY Times ![[Screenshot-Medium-Message-Ezra-Klein.jpeg]] Composite image of people on their phones by artist [Pelle Cass](https://pellecass.com) Quotes & thoughts at [[Medium]] --- [Indie Microblogging](https://book.micro.blog/) by [Manton Reece](https://micro.blog/manton) > Massive social networks steamroll over the natural, steady evolution of the web, because a single large site gains an outsized influence over progress. > Today we face a web that is fundamentally broken. The web is increasingly centralized, corporate, and developer-hostile. Most writing happens on a small number of web sites that we do not control. > [In a conference talk at Web Directions in 2014](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNr0JNwsLy8), IndieWeb co-founder Tantek Çelik outlined what we could learn from old blogs and how to rebuild for the future, starting with the early days of blogging before silos took over: > > "In 2003 we kind of hit this moment of peak independent web. We kind of assumed that that was how it was always going to be. Everything was working; everyone had their own site. Why would we assume anything different? Well, what happened? Silos happened." > Massive centralized platforms create problems for society. By posting to your own site, you control your content, distributing it more evenly across the web and minimizing the power of big tech companies. > _Progress depends on our changing the world to fit us. Not the other way around.” — Halt and Catch Fire_ > _“Most important things in life are a hassle. If life’s hassles disappeared, you’d want them back.” — Hayao Miyazaki_ > It’s not about leaving Twitter and moving to the next platform. It’s about redistributing microblog posts across the web, with a diverse set of platforms. > While the open web still exists, we dropped the ball protecting and strengthening it. Fewer people’s first choice for publishing is to start a web site hosted at their own domain. > It was gone before we noticed what had been lost... > What happened? Social networks were simply easier to post to, and the feeling of engagement in getting likes or replies was more compelling than publishing into the void of the blogosphere, wondering if anyone was listening. > There used to be RSS feeds from Twitter for reading a user’s timeline. I didn't know that! > Robin Sloan [captured this beautifully](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/lost-thread/): > > The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded. > _“As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.” — [Matt Mullenweg](https://memeburn.com/2013/05/matt-mullenweg-on-how-open-source-is-democratising-the-web/)_ > _“Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.” — [Brent Simmons](https://inessential.com/2018/02/01/why_micro_blog_is_not_another_app_net)_ > The more we can use open standards, the more we can avoid being locked in to any specific platform. > Laura introduced it this way [in a blog post](https://laurakalbag.com/a-belated-introduction-to-small-technology-foundation/): > > Small Technology are everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits. The opposite of big tech. We’re on a mission to build tools that enable everyone of us to own and control our own place on the Internet. > **Webmention:** A protocol for notifying another web site that you’ve written about one of their posts. > Patrick Rhone in his Micro Camp 2021 talk compared paper copies to backing up digitally. If you want something to last 1000s of years, paper is better: > > If you really want to back up your blog — and make it durable, make it something that will last, make it something that maybe your grandchildren or great grandchildren might read — the best way to do that is to print it out. > _Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” — André Gide_ > Distributing writing across more web sites protects us if one massive site shuts down. It gives us flexibility to move to the next popular network if one emerges. > We are over a decade after Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous “move fast and break things”. It is time for developers to slow down. > A commitment to posting to a place you control, to a place you can look back to years from now as an archive of your best photos at your own domain name, regardless of what social networks come and go over the years. > _ “There are never purely technological solutions to societal problems.” — Molly White, [Blockchain Solutionism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0k_GjxuJDM)_ > [Mike Monteiro emphasized this frustration in a post](https://medium.com/@monteiro/merry-last-christmas-jack-dorsey-59f82c06f02b) about the daunting, insurmountable problems facing Twitter’s leadership team. He talked about meeting in person with Jack Dorsey: > > We discussed Twitter’s role in the world stage. And I admired his vision, but feared his approach. Jack, and to an extent Twitter’s pet porg Biz Stone, have always believed that absolute free speech is the answer. They’re blind to the voices silenced by hate and intimidation. The voices that need to be protected. But anyone who’s ever tended a garden knows that for the good stuff to grow, you have to deal with the bad stuff. You can’t let the weeds choke the vegetables. > Would a curated timeline scale to the number of tweets that Twitter processes every minute? No, but we never want to be that big, because big platforms are inherently part of the problem, no matter the best intentions of their founders. > > Small companies like Micro.blog can do take a different approach that wouldn’t work for others. It’s something that Paul Graham captured in his famous essay [Do Things That Don’t Scale](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html), reminding early startups that they don’t need to build something that can reach scale right away, because chances are they’ll never get very big: > > Tim Cook doesn’t send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can’t. But you can. That’s one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can. > "The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed." [Cal Newport](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/can-indie-social-media-save-us) > It’s often said that the IndieWeb isn’t about protocols and tools. It’s about people. It’s about personal web sites and the interaction between people writing on their own blogs. > Micro.blog [leaves certain features out on purpose](https://micro.welltempered.net/2018/04/10/a-guide-to.html)because adding those features risks changing our mission from what it is to what _someone else’s_mission is. See also: [[Microblogging]] --- [Small Technology Foundation](https://small-tech.org/about/#the-foundation) We’re [Laura Kalbag](https://laurakalbag.com) and [Aral Balkan](https://ar.al) (and Oskar the huskamute). We live and work in Kilkenny, Ireland. Since 2014, we’ve been advocating for regulation of surveillance capitalism, investment in ethical alternatives, and carrying out [research and development](https://small-tech.org/research-and-development) on ethical alternatives. --- [Searching For My City: On local connection in the age of the internet](https://joinreboot.org/p/searching-for-my-city?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true) by HUMPHREY OBUOBI A perspective on the internet as a tool for strengthening local communities. --- [ICANN](https://www.icann.org/en/beginners) > ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. > ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world. See also: [IANA](https://www.iana.org) --- [W3C](https://www.w3.org) > The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops [standards and guidelines](https://www.w3.org/standards/) to help everyone build a web based on the principles of [accessibility](https://www.w3.org/mission/accessibility/), [internationalization](https://www.w3.org/mission/internationalization/), [privacy](https://www.w3.org/mission/privacy/)and [security](https://www.w3.org/mission/security/). [W3C’s History](https://www.w3.org/about/) > Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. --- ![[Screenshot-Anti-SEO.jpeg]] Is this punk rock? [Source](https://www.threads.net/@crumbler/post/C5gZzhrOFex/?xmt=AQGz8USN1hFanN7bWdJbZ8yoPDqRXgvUCEAmihKj9x56bw) --- [We Can Have a Different Web](https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/) > More of a neighborhood feeling where everyone was a possible friend, and less fear that people might interpret your social media post as uncharitably as possible. > The thing is: **none of this is gone**. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. _We can return._ Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses. Hat tip to [Seth Wekheiser](https://sethw.xyz/blog/2024/05/02/return-to-the-web/) See also: Hamster Dance (1997) https://youtu.be/6WpMlwVwydo?feature=shared --- # [The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small](https://defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small) Kelsey McKinney > The goal of social media became entrapment instead of facilitating and servicing the curiosity that brought people online in the first place. > It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. > The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. --- Cory Doctorow on [Linkrot](https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/) > The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web: https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/ > The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%. --- # Rediscovering the Small Web By [Parimal Satyal](https://neustadt.fr/index.html), 25 May 2020 > My aim is not to convince you that everything was better in the past; it wasn't. You had trojans, malware, endless pop-ups, terrible security practices, browser incompatibility, slow Java applets. No, technically, the modern web is more secure and more usable. > > This essay is my attempt to show you what the small and independent web can look like, why it’s different from the the sites that dominate web traffic today, why it's worth exploring and how easy it is for anyone to be a part of it. > Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting. > we are replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditises people. > It reminded me that the creative, personal, fun web I grew up with is not a thing of the past. It’s still here in 2020. You just have to know where to look. > Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click. > > No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a _place_ that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination. > You welcomed visitors (sometimes with a splash screen), guided them around by explaining what the site was about and the different spaces available to them (usually on the home page) and reminded them to leave a word on the guestbook on their way out. > > But the semantics of the web of yore made sense in the context of how you _practically_ interacted with it. You very rarely just came in for one specific thing and then immediately left like you might today; you usually _entered_ a website and looked around. You browsed. > [Webrings](http://brisray.com/web/webrings.htm) were "circular" collections of websites, often around a topic or a theme. The idea was that you could go from one website to another by clicking on the "next" or "previous" buttons usually placed on the bottom of each member's homepage. These have also largely disappeared. > There is so much "content" that is constantly pushed at you as a user that very few of us actually venture out to browse and explore anymore. > For them, the web was just another marketing channel. > **What this means is that web users end up interacting and spending most of their time on the visible, predatory commercial web, while the very long tail of smaller, amateur websites remains hidden in the noise.** > Modern web design principles are very rarely directed at regular people looking to make a website on something they are interested in. Instead, the focus is on creating websites that perform well: > > _Don't use too many colours. Write short, catchy headlines. Don't let content be too long. Optimise for SEO. Produce video content, attention span is decreasing. Have a an obvious call to action. Push your newsletter. Keep important information above the fold. Don't make users think. Follow conventions._ # "It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art." > **The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing**. > **A painter wouldn’t add more red to her painting or change the composition because market data showed that people liked it better. It’s her creative vision; some people might like it, others might not. But it is her creation, with her own rules. The question of "performance" is simply irrelevant. It's the same thing with the small web.** > If the commercial web is "industrial", you could say that the small web is "artisanal". One is not better than the other. They serve different needs and both can co-exist in an open web. It would nevertheless be a shame if we only spent time on the commercial web and never got the opportunity to experience the creativity, passion and quirkiness of the small web. > [Restorativland](https://restorativland.org/), a "restored visual gallery of the archived Geocities sites, sorted by neighborhood". - [Wiby.me](https://wiby.me) is a search engine for old-school, interesting and informative webpages, with a useful "[surprise me](https://wiby.me/surprise/)" button that takes you to a random result. - [Neocities.org](https://neocities.org) is a modern web host that lets anyone create a basic website for free and be a part of a community where you can follow other webmasters. - [Curlie](https://curlie.org/) is "_the largest human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors_". - [Internet Archive's GIFcities](https://gifcities.org) --- Sad Grl [Surf the Web](https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/surf-the-web) ![[Screenshot-Surf-the-Web.jpeg]] Sad Grl [Internet Manifesto](https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/cyberspace/internet-manifesto) ![[Screenshot-Internet2.jpeg]] ![[Screenshot-Internet-Web.jpeg]]--- [A Handmade Web](http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html) by J R Carpenter > **I evoke the term 'handmade web' to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.** > > Handmade web pages flourished in the mid-to-late-1990s, in the brief period after the academic web and before the corporate web. ‘Handmade’ is by no means the only or best term to define the web of this period. > **I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to make a correlation between handmade web pages and handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists books.** > The handmade web emerged at a time when print and digital enjoyed a more symbiotic relationship. This is evident in the early output of the [trAce Online Writing Centre](http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/index.asp) founded at Nottingham Trent University in 1995. Over the next decade trAce evolved into one of the most influential online writing communities in the world. trAce’s first output was a [word-processed photocopied booklet](http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/writersforthefuture/1995/) which contained links to websites distributing journals and zines. Fittingly, trAce’s last output was also a print booklet, > In "Media Archaeology: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media" (2011) Wolfgang Ernst observes: "If a radio from a museum collection is reactivated to play broadcast channels of the present, it changes its status: it is not a historical object anymore but actively generates sensual and informational presence." Similarly, when viewing old web pages in modern browsers we are confronted with a temporal paradox. Layer upon layer of [dated web-design aesthetics](http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/cyberfest/index.htm) overlap and peel like wallpaper, revealing earlier versions beneath. Pages optimised for lower resolutions now take [less than a third of the screen](http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame5/). Ghosts of browsers past mingle with occasional page errors, dead links, and missing images. Sound files play automatically. Warnings abound, issued from earlier eras, addressed to readers who are not us. > **I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to advocate for an ongoing active engagement with the making of web pages and of web policies.** > **I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a 'manual', a 'handbook', a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.** > **I evoke the term 'handmade web' to suggest slowness and smallness as a forms of resistance.** > In today's highly commercialised web ... it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects > The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways. J. R. Carpenter, March 2015. --- [The Vernacular Web](http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/) > What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end? > > To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts. > The amateur web didn't die and it has not disappeared but it is hidden. > Also new amateur pages don't appear at such amounts as ten years ago because the WWW of today is a developed and highly regulated space. You wouldn't get on the web just to tell the world, "Welcome to my home page." The web has diversified, the conditions have changed and there's no need for this sort of old fashioned behavior. Your CV is posted on the company website or on a job search portal. Your diary will be organized on a blog and your vacation photos are published on iphoto. There's a community for every hobby and question. > > This is why I refer to the amateur web as a thing of the past; aesthetically a very powerful past. ![[GIF-90s-Internet-Under-Construction.png]] > The "Under Construction Sign" is a very strong symbol of the early web. It reminds us of the great times shortly after the scientists and engineers finished their work on the Information Highway. Ordinary people came with their tools and used the chance to build their own roads and junctions. Work was everywhere and everywhere there was something that wasn't ready, links were leading to nowhere or to pages that didn't quite exist and there were signs on the pages that warned of broken connections and the lack of navigation. > It was a historical feature of the amateur web to prefer expression over structure. > Free collections are the soul of the vernacular web. Lots of people were building their pages with free graphics and lots of people were making collections. The many-to-many principle really worked. Making your own site and building collections was a parallel process for a lot of people. The early web was more about spirit than skills. To distribute was no less important than to create. > The World Wide Web was constantly developing and when we say it looked different 2, 5 or 10 years ago we should also say it was conceptually different. ... The way it looked was derived from the underlying architecture. > Let's forget about the visual appearance of the vernacular web and think about how it worked. What were the principles of its growth? The obvious answer is links. A lot of links. Links on every page. > people felt it was their personal responsibility to configure the environment and build the infrastructure. > The way you looked for information was time consuming but rewarding. > Since the late 90's linking wasn't that hip any more. Search engines, portals and catalogues took over the linking responsibilities making searches faster and less surprising. In the quest for order and hierarchy the web changed completely. Sites with no external links at all became the norm and now constitute the facade of the mainstream web. Users jump back and forth between search engines. > > Links -- the once typical means of conveyance -- have lost their infrastructural importance. > > In todays web blogs compensate for over precise search engines by delivering a constant stream of surprise links. It's an interesting evolutionary paradox when you remember that old-school link collections were created to compensate, through human intervention, for the rough search engine results. In the end both cures delivered the same: a link to an address new to the user; an unknown topic, a surprise, an action, a deep web. --- # [As We May Think](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/) “Consider a future device …  in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” By [Vannevar Bush](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/vannevar-bush/) July 1945 Editor’s Note: As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. > The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships. > A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. > Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. > Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. > > The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. > Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. > All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. > It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails. > Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. > The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome. [Vannevar Bush](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/vannevar-bush/) was an engineer and administrator who led the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. --- # [Always Already Programming](https://gist.github.com/melaniehoff/95ca90df7ca47761dc3d3d58fead22d4) > Everyone who interacts with computers has in important ways always already been programming them. > > Every time you make a folder or rename a file on your computer, the actions you take through moving your mouse and clicking on buttons, translate into text-based commands or scripts which eventually translate into binary. > > Why are the common conceptions of programmer and user so divorced from each other? The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of _less_ agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into _more_ agency. > When we all build up and cultivate one another’s agency to shape technology and online spaces, we are contributing to creating a world that is more supportive, affirming, and healing. [Melanie Hoff](https://www.melaniehoff.com/) is an artist, organizer, technologist, and educator committed to cultivating spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to express the absurdities of these systems while revealing the encoded ways in which they influence how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. --- # 404 Page Not Found By Kate Wagner 2019 > The internet is perhaps the most potent and active delivery system in history for the thesis “capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love”—online it happens in real time. Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. > apps, though they may be connected to the web, are not websites. > As tech writer Christopher Mims noted in 2014, apps and app stores are all about throttling the competition; unlike the web they aren’t built on a universal open platform. They are thus completely misaligned with the earlier ethos of the internet as a place for the open-ended exchange of ideas. Mims adds, “The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people could exchange information and goods. It forced companies to build technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology.” > they think, because this stuff isn’t profitable, it must mean nobody wants to see it; and so nobody does. --- _"The villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live."_ - Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing --- # [Designer-Researchers Mindy Seu and Yasaman Sheri Imagine a New Internet](https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2024/03/07/researcher-yasaman-sheri-mindy-seu) Seu—the author of _Cyberfeminism Index_ sits down with the head of Serpentine Gallery's Synthetic Ecologies Lab to discuss community, gathering, and the shifting material reality of the digital world. > The Internet is a web of interconnected ideas created by a collective of humans and their thoughts. > **Sheri:** Nature is simultaneously systematic and messy. It’s also holistic, encompassing scales that we humans are not able to sense or perceive but are very much part of. It brings back the idea that we’re not all that separate; there is intertwined connectivity between one another. > **Seu:** Messiness also points to this idea of gathering. Instead of moving fast and breaking things, scholars like Anna Tsing encouraged looking around rather than looking ahead. Noticing what would bloom naturally through emergence. This gathering also then points back to curatorial practice because it’s about finding resources that are specifically intended for your kin, your community. Then, designers like you and me question what container might hold this material gathering; a tool, a website, a book, an installation. This might then be activated through a social gathering. It offers a different way to consider how we might engage with vast information overload. > **Sheri:** This concept of gathering: There’s a historical undertone of the hunter-gatherer. We can consider the ancestral nature of foraging juxtaposed against agricultural farming. Can you touch upon what gathering means today?  > > **Seu:** I write about this briefly in the introduction of the _Cyberfeminism Index_. It also served as an inspiration for my Yale MFA course called “[On Gathering](https://issue1.shiftspace.pub/on-gathering-mindy-seu).” It points to Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which she posits that the first tool is not the spear, a tool of domination, but actually the basket, a tool of gathering. > **Sheri:** In a time of increased siloing, how can we think about collective creation and the commons?   > > **Seu:** You and I have adopted this role of facilitator. We create platforms that have clear parameters that are porous enough to allow for some modification or surprise. Then invitees or passersby can contribute resources. So not only is it open access, but it’s also crowdsourced. For the [_Cyberfeminism Index_ website](https://cyberfeminismindex.com/), my collaborator Angeline Meitzler and I also felt it was important to make the database open source. It’s an easy way for people to clone the online version as a basis for their own platforms. For me, this trifecta—open source, crowdsourced, open access—really hits the sweet spot for how to make an online resource meaningful to a community, but also adapted by other communities, thereby creating these pathways between them. --- > Social media sold us on the idea that we can just post and lots of people would see it.  > > This was true for a moment, but it was a house of cards. As more and more people post more often 24/7, there are only so many people who can see everything that is posted. > > The “reach” was a lie. It helped lots of people, yes, until it didn’t. [No Quick Fix](https://sethw.xyz/blog/2024/06/13/no-quick-fix/) Seth Werkheiser --- # [Save the Web by Being Nice](https://sheep.horse/2024/4/save_the_web_by_being_nice.html) Andrew Stephens, Tuesday the 30th of April, 2024 ![[Screenshot-Save-Web.jpeg]] > The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this. > > The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort. There are different levels of Niceness but roughly from least to most effort: - Liking or upvoting a URL on a forum or social media that someone else posted. - Commenting on a URL somebody else posted saying how much you enjoyed the content. - Posting a URL on social media/discord server yourself, suggesting that others might also like to read it. - Dropping a quick note of appreciation to the author via email or DM. - Actually paying money for the content via Patreon, etc. > Posting URLs to Facebook or Twitter or Discord exposes your friends to pages they might find interesting while cracking the shell to the outside world just a little. --- [Anil Dash on On Being](https://onbeing.org/programs/anil-dash-techs-moral-reckoning-jan2017/) > We bake our values into the choices we make when we design these tools. > there were hints all along that the choices we made, like on a whiteboard in our meeting room, had implications. So for example, there’s a box you type in, just like when you write an email, the box you type in when you write a message. > The thing that I’ve seen in particular in online media was — the world into which we started creating the social media tools around the turn of the century — it makes me sound like I’m ancient — I am ancient. The thing that jumped out to me was it was not centralized. There were — everybody had an individual site. > > And what happened in short order, in about half a decade, was Google became the front door to all the content. You would go through one search engine and one news site, and that would be your entry point more or less. And one or two advertising platforms sort of took over, Facebook, Google. > So like, “We’re a neutral platform anybody can publish on.” And then when you get to the current state of affairs, which is when you sell advertising, you are brokering attention. And so something that draws more attention and has more emotional appeal will be more successful and more lucrative. Then you say, well, some of the things that are most attention-getting aren’t true. > And then if you look at every other professional discipline, you look at somebody who goes to law school, somebody who goes to business school, journalism school, medical school, every single one of those disciplines has a professional society that sets standards. And if you don’t meet them, you can be disbarred. You can lose your medical license. There’s an expectation about what you’re supposed to do. > > And in the educational process, there’s an extensive ethical curriculum. The bridge has to stay up; it can’t fall down. You have a historical tradition where, in medicine, they’re going back to Hippocrates. In law, you’re like talking about English common law that happened centuries ago. And then in computer science, they’re sort of radically anti-historical. Not even ahistorical, just like, there is nothing before now. > > We refuse to see — there is no before time. And there is zero ethical curriculum. You can get a top-of-the-line, the highest credential computer science degree from the most august institutions with essentially having had zero ethics training. And that is, in fact, the most likely path to getting funded as a successful startup in Silicon Valley. > Krista Tippett quoting danah boyd: “I believe in data, but data itself has become spectacle. I cannot believe that it has become acceptable for media entities to throw around polling data without any critique of the limits of that data, to produce fancy visualizations which suggest that numbers are magical information.” As you said, “In the tech sector, we imagined that decentralized networks would bring people together for a healthier democracy.” And there’s that idealism that I think really was there and is there in journalism too. And then she says, “We hung onto this belief even as we saw that this wasn’t playing out. We built the structures for hate to flow along the same pathways as knowledge, but we kept hoping that this wasn’t really happening. We aided and abetted the media’s suicide.” I think I’ve tracked down the source of the quote, [Reality check: I blame the media](https://medium.com/datasociety-points/reality-check-de447f2131a3) > Like, I liked computers, but for half my life, the computer wasn’t plugged into anything. It was sort of this island. And then it sort of woke up once it got connected to other people. > I would say far less than 10 percent of the people creating these tools today think that they should distinguish between the uses of these social tools as to whether they’re being used for constructive purposes or destructive purposes. And what they’re afraid of is a lot of things. I think one is that, “Well, who are we to judge? We don’t want to presume.” I’m like, “You’re not humble.” Like, the tech industry… > > The false modesty of the tech industry is the most ridiculous argument that they start with because at the same time they’re like, “We’re here to change the world. We’re going to put rockets on Mars and make self-driving cars, but we don’t want to presume too much.” > > And so that’s sort of the starting point. And then they get into, “It’s really hard, and it takes people.” As it turns out, yes. Yeah, it does. It takes human judgement. And you have to say where you sit, and you have to make a call, and you have to make some people angry because they didn’t get to be jerks on your platform. > **MS. TIPPETT:**I mean, and that’s even stopping short of saying, “We are going to encourage generative relationships,” right? > > **MR. DASH:**Yes, yes. > > **MS. TIPPETT:**Robust civics. Not just everybody being nice and banning bad voices, but something that’s robust where difference is being engaged. > > **MR. DASH:**Or explicitly designing for good behavior. > I think for remaking the tech industry, for reforming it around being more ethical and humane. I think this is one of the most important missions around. I just think — because we have subsumed decision-making from media, from policy, from culture, from art, into the tech world, and we are influencing it. When we make the box bigger, the text gets bigger. Because we have that responsibility, then the urgency with which we have to address our moral failings is that much higher. > there’s a shocking ephemerality to what’s happened on the internet. Most of the things that have ever been published on the internet are now gone. And that’s a weird realization ‘cause it’s a young medium. > And I thought I want to fight for, one, preserving my words and those of others. And two, I want to be worthy of preserving them. And we don’t build the tools that way. > We don’t have a very intelligent cultural conversation about how kids engage with technology at all. > I also think of the concept of “screen time.” When you’re with young kids, you’ve heard this, right? “Do you limit your child’s screen time?” And it’s like, no. I engage with what he’s specifically doing. I don’t limit his page time. I just choose whether he’s reading a book or a magazine or whether it’s something that’s like a bunch of — he’s 5 years old, so he likes poop jokes. But — how much of that and how much of, like, smart stuff? And so the idea that they’re both on pages and are therefore equivalent is absurd, and yet we talk about screen time that way. I’m like, is he playing chess on the iPad? Or is he watching funny YouTube videos of animals falling over? Which is also awesome, but different. > Krista Tippett: Are you saying — so, this is a radical idea. You apply the same wisdom you apply to other things to technology? > > Anil Dash: Yeah > they say this — like, “This is real life, and then there’s computer world.” And I’m like, “That’s not the thing. That’s not how their lives are gonna be.” And I think I had an unusual perspective, in that I did start using computers before I was in kindergarten, just as my son has. ![[Screenshot-Anil-Dash-On-Being.png]] > It’s not over there. It’s not an artifice. It’s not the virtual world. It’s just life. And I think about that with so many experiences where, when we were fighting for validating social media and social networking, saying these would be important, these would be part of our lives and there’s a reason to include it, it was about this idea that sharing makes something better. > > I fully reject the argument — people say this all the time. You know, “I saw this young person in a restaurant on their own, on their phone, not interacting with anyone.” What do you think they were doing? They were talking to people. > > They were interacting with lots of humans all at once. And it makes me furious because I’m saying they’re being deeply social. > I think — it always does come down to, what are our values? And what do we care about? And what are the things that we think are meaningful? And then using that as a filter to understand and control and make decisions around these new technologies. > But those of us in the tech world have not done ordinary folks any favors around making those decisions because we’ve adopted this stance that values don’t apply. And that’s part of the reckoning I’d ask everybody who’s not in technology to have, is to raise that flag. > **MS. TIPPETT:**So over the years, I’ve had conversations with people like Sherry Turkle and danah boyd, and Tiffany Shlain. This idea that is very hard for us to internalize, because we feel like this technology hasn’t landed on us and taken over our lives, permeated — and it has. > > **MR. DASH:**But we have a choice, and our choices matter. > > **MS. TIPPETT:**Right. And to internalize that this technology is in its infancy, and we are the grown ups in the room. > I’m not worried about the failures; I’m worried about the companies that succeed. > **MS. TIPPETT:**OK. But I love your — you just say in your profile — I love reading Twitter profiles. I think that is such a beautiful slice of humanity, at least the ones I read. “Trying to make tech a little bit more humane and ethical.” I once interviewed a French geophysicist, one of the people who discovered tectonic plates, and he pointed out that the word “human” in French is the same as the word “humane.” I don’t know why I thought of that when I was reading this. > I describe myself as being in the technology industry, but technology always means “things invented after you were born,” basically. And so there was a time when the technology industry was the wheel. And there was the time when the technology industry was fire. And its every iteration along the way has been — the first people to do agriculture were the technologists of their time. > > So I’m just saying that context of “this is only temporarily new” has been really, really helpful for me. > And so that weighs on me a lot. To be bookended by these two incredible people, like, my parents on one end and my son on the other, it feels like a grave responsibility. To get to be the conduit between the greatness of what my parents have done and the greatness of what my son will do, I think is the thing I think about every day. So it’s — well, I have these tools, and they’re novel now, and they will be boring very soon. **And so, en route to them being boring, how can I be sure that they are just?** # Missing from transcript - my notes from unedited version > When you connect a billion people together that is actually new. (38:44)… There are 10,000 years of how to build a community, but we throw that part away. Re: YouTube comments > We refuse to learn the parts that are applicable and we’re not good at identifying the parts that are brand new. > No one can anticipate the way network effects play out at that scale because no one’s ever done that before. > The communities of affinity that form on the internet are the greatest thing about it. …and it’s just the entry point through which they connect. But all the richness of their human lives follows behind because they’ve made that connection. (50:50) > I mean, it’s hard to explain to the young people I mentor in the tech industry now that we had computers that didn’t have the internet. And they’re like, “What would you do with it?” > Oh, they pay you because they change what you wrote. You gotta compensate me for that. > It made really clear why I liked writing for this other medium. Why I liked writing for the web. That’s what my voice was suited to. On writing for Wired magazine vs blogging (noticing not all of this “unedited” version is in the transcript.) An interesting connect to what Robin Sloan said [[Renaissance Souls]]. --- [“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.](https://www.anildash.com/2024/02/06/wherever-you-get-podcasts/) Anil Dash > …podcasting as a technology grew out of the early era of the social web, when the norms of technology creators were that they were expected to create open systems, which interoperated with tools by other creators and even other companies. This was based on the successes of earlier generations of the internet, like email and even the web itself. > What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow. --- ![[Screenshot-Save-Web.jpeg]] [Source](https://sheep.horse/2024/4/save_the_web_by_being_nice.html) --- [Seth Godin: On Being with Krista Tippett](https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/) ## Seth Godin: Life, the Internet, and Everything > **Mr. Godin:**But we now need to add a big shift here — which is that if you’re looking at our conversation through the industrialist’s point of view, your next question is, but where is the mass? How do I reach everybody with a product that isn’t average? That shows that we’re keeping score of the wrong thing. > > And what this age we’re living in is doing, is it’s dividing the mass market, which is basically dead now, into hundreds or thousands of micro-markets — little markets of interest. So you can’t make a substantial impact on everyone anymore. It’s almost impossible. > > But what you can do is go to the edges, and go to the few people who care deeply, and make a big impact there. > We’re not one monolithic culture anymore because there isn’t one giant form of media anymore. Instead we’ve permitted people to go into their own bubble to find people like themselves to listen to what they want to listen to and talk about what they want to talk about. > Industrialists hate this… It’s cheaper to make average stuff for average people. > I think the people who want to make a difference often have a choice. The one method of doing it is, “I want everyone to agree with me. I will demonize the outliers. It’s me against them.” And history has a lot of folks that have done that and political discourse is filled with it. But the other form of leadership is to find people who are inclined to agree with you and to lead them. To amplify their best desires and figure out how to take them further. > What industrialists have done since the beginning is stripped their dignity away. > Recognize that the person you are dealing with is a person. > Krista: We choose who and what we belong to. It’s not just about survival; it’s about connection and flourishing. > But what the internet has done is meant that we don’t have to get on a plane anymore to meet strangers who are like us. > So the challenge of our future is to say, are we going to connect and amplify positive tribes that want to make things better for all of us? Or are we going to degrade to warring tribes that are willing to bring other groups down just so they can get ahead? > what I’ve been working my whole working life to do is help people redefine marketing as the work an organization or person does when they tell a story that resonates with us. And that marketing isn’t advertising — marketing is the product we make, the service we offer, the life we live. And that no one ever knows the truth about anyone else. But what we notice about other people and what we notice about what organizations do — that’s marketing. If it’s noticed, it’s marketing. > Because now everyone has their own TV network. Everyone has their own radio station. Everyone has their own printing press. So what are you going to put on it? What are you going to put out to the world? Because if we’re moving beyond you work for me and you do what I say — to a world where I say, here, here’s a microphone — speak up. Here, here’s a connection to the internet — touch who you want. We’re going to notice what you do. Whether or not you choose to be a marketer, you are one. > --- # [The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/internet-future-about-to-get-weird-1234938403/) The new year offers many of the promises of an online moment we haven’t seen in a quarter-century BY [ANIL DASH](https://www.rollingstone.com/author/anil-dash/) Rolling Stone Magazine DECEMBER 30, 2023 > the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. > For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. > Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations. > Take the web browser itself — it was originally created by Tim Berners-Lee at a publicly-funded research laboratory, > While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today. > this hearkens back to that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned the internet of a generation ago — sometimes the entire platform you were using to talk to others was just being run by one, passionate person. > We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we’ve witnessed since the turn of the millennium, > There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird. --- ## [Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet](https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/tim/articles/freeware_0398.html) by [Tim O'Reilly](http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/27) 03/01/1998 > **In this rough and tumble community, you gain status by what you give away.** > First, you have to realize that while "free software" has generally been available without cost to its users, what "free" really means is that a program's source code is available, so that its users can customize or extend it. As Richard Stallman, the creator of GNU emacs and one of free software's most ardent spokesmen, put it says on his website (www.fsf.org), "Think free speech, not free beer." For this reason, free software advocates have recently started championing a new term: open source software. --- # Twenty-five ways in which MIT has transformed computing February 25, 2019 ![[Screenshot-Computer-Wires.png]] Adam Conner-Simons | Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL **1983: The growth of freeware** Early AI Lab programmer Richard Stallman was a major pioneer in hacker culture and the free-software movement through his [GNU Project](http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html), which set out to develop a free alternative to the Unix OS, and laid the groundwork for Linux and other important computing innovations. **1985: Spanning tree algorithm** Radia Perlman '73, SM '76, PhD '88 hates when people call her “the mother of the Internet,” but her work developing the Spanning Tree Protocol [was vital](https://hackaday.com/2018/05/29/spanning-the-tree-dr-radia-perlman-untangling-networks/) for being able to route data across global computer networks. (She also created LOGO, the first programming language geared toward children.) --- # For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution [Christopher Tozzi](https://play.google.com/store/info/name/Christopher_Tozzi?id=11f66_4_6p) Aug 2017 · MIT Press Foreword Jonathan Zittrain > The ideals of the free software movement are fundamental to our relationship to technology. Their goals are for us to be able to learn from and alter the increasingly baroque and pervasive code that shapes our lives. By learning about and refining that code, we can better understand and affect the world around us, inspiring the kinds of self-reliance and self-realization that are some of the most important aspects1 of human flourishing. > Although the ideals of the free software movement are timeless, realizing them has become increasingly difficult to achieve. The environment for free software in the 1980s and 1990s benefited from the work that had been done by academia—and according to its values—in the computing space. Chapter One > What Is FOSS? For several reasons, it is not easy to define what the term free and open source software (FOSS) means for the purposes of this book. First of all, the term free software is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to software that may be legally copied without cost. It also can describe software whose source code is governed by particular licenses designed to ensure that anyone can view it. Some programs described as free software have both of these qualities. > Moreover, the phrase open source software did not exist before 1998, which makes it anachronistic to use the term to describe code that was developed before that date, even though many people frequently do when discussing historical events. > The term closed source software refers to programs whose source code is not publicly shared. > In these pages, the term free software refers to software whose programmers or users call it such because its source code can be studied and modified freely by people who use the software, whether or not the source code costs money. > Software that is simply given away for free is best labeled freeware. > In contrast, free software makes it possible for people other than the original creators of the code to share, study, and modify the software. For these purposes, access to source code is a prerequisite, because source code is necessary for understanding how a program works and for making changes to it. --- # [Recapturing early-internet whimsy with HTML](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/21/1084525/internet-whimsy-html-energy/) Modern forms of coding make most websites feel like commercial transactions. The HTML Energy movement aims to bring back the joys of the early days. By Tiffany Ng December 21, 2023 > Websites weren’t always slick digital experiences.  > There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of Times New Roman text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built entirely from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code and a desire to be on the internet. > Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. Anchored in the concept of “HTML Energy,” a term coined by artists [Laurel Schwulst and Elliott Cost](https://read.cv/elliottcost), the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics. It focuses on the tactile process of coding in HTML, exploring how the language invites self-expression and empowers individuals to claim their share of the web. > However, despite the monopolistic landscape of Big Tech, one fundamental reality continues to justify the internet’s democratic reputation: anyone can publish a website for free with HTML. With an abundance of real estate, the web technically has space for everyone. It’s just a matter of traffic. >  As an amalgamation of minuscule and intricate creative decisions, a site constructed using only HTML is a form of self-­expression -- --- ## [The GNU Project](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html) by [Richard Stallman](https://www.stallman.org/) ### The first software-sharing community > When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking. But we did it more than most. > This meant that the first step in using a computer was to promise not to help your neighbor. A cooperating community was forbidden. The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, “If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them.” > The idea that the proprietary software social system—the system that says you are not allowed to share or change software—is antisocial, that it is unethical, that it is simply wrong, may come as a surprise to some readers. But what else could we say about a system based on dividing the public and keeping users helpless? Readers who find the idea surprising may have taken the proprietary software social system as a given, or judged it on the terms suggested by proprietary software businesses. Software publishers have worked long and hard to convince people that there is only one way to look at the issue. > Computer users should be free to modify programs to fit their needs, and free to share software, because helping other people is the basis of society. > I faced a stark moral choice. > > The easy choice was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker. Most likely I would also be developing software that was released under nondisclosure agreements, thus adding to the pressure on other people to betray their fellows too. > > I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place. > > I had already experienced being on the receiving end of a nondisclosure agreement, when someone refused to give me and the MIT AI Lab the source code for the control program for our printer. (The lack of certain features in this program made use of the printer extremely frustrating.) So I could not tell myself that nondisclosure agreements were innocent. I was very angry when he refused to share with us; I could not turn around and do the same thing to everyone else. > ### Free as in freedom > > The term “free software” is sometimes misunderstood—it has nothing to do with price. It is about freedom. Here, therefore, is the definition of free software. > > A program is free software, for you, a particular user, if: > > - You have the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. > - You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.) > - You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. > - You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. > Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. > But at that time, many of the interested people were not on the Internet and could not get a copy by ftp. So the question was, what would I say to them? > > I could have said, “Find a friend who is on the net and who will make a copy for you.” Or I could have done what I did with the original PDP-10 Emacs: tell them, “Mail me a tape and a SASE, and I will mail it back with Emacs on it.” But I had no job, and I was looking for ways to make money from free software. So I announced that I would mail a tape to whoever wanted one, for a fee of $150. In this way, I started a free software distribution business, the precursor of the companies that today distribute entire GNU/Linux system distribution. > If a program is free software when it leaves the hands of its author, this does not necessarily mean it will be free software for everyone who has a copy of it. For example, [public domain software](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#PublicDomainSoftware) (software that is not copyrighted) is free software; but anyone can make a proprietary modified version of it. Likewise, many free programs are copyrighted but distributed under simple permissive licenses which allow proprietary modified versions. > Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means for restricting a program, it becomes a means for keeping the program free. > The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions—but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define “free software” are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights. > > For an effective copyleft, modified versions must also be free. This ensures that work based on ours becomes available to our community if it is published. > But interest in the software is growing faster than awareness of the philosophy it is based on, and this leads to trouble. Our ability to meet the challenges and threats described above depends on the will to stand firm for freedom. To make sure our community has this will, we need to spread the idea to the new users as they come into the community. > > But we are failing to do so: the efforts to attract new users into our community are far outstripping the efforts to teach them the civics of our community. We need to do both, and we need to keep the two efforts in balance. > Teaching new users about freedom became more difficult in 1998, when a part of the community decided to stop using the term “free software” and say “open source software” instead. > > Some who favored this term aimed to avoid the confusion of “free” with “gratis”—a valid goal. Others, however, aimed to set aside the spirit of principle that had motivated the free software movement and the GNU Project, and to appeal instead to executives and business users, many of whom hold an ideology that places profit above freedom, above community, above principle. Thus, the rhetoric of “open source” focuses on the potential to make high-quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community, and principle. > Free software” and “open source” describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values. The GNU Project continues to use the term “free software,” to express the idea that freedom, not just technology, is important. > The use of “hacker” to mean “security breaker” is a confusion on the part of the mass media. We hackers refuse to recognize that meaning, and continue using the word to mean someone who loves to program, someone who enjoys playful cleverness, or the combination of the two. See my article, “[On Hacking](https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html).” Originally published in the book [Open Sources](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/open-sources/1565925823/). Richard Stallman was [never a supporter of “open source”](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html), but contributed this article so that the ideas of the free software movement would not be entirely absent from that book. --- # [Cookies, gift-giving, and the Internet (1999)](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/700/610) - Hillary Bays - Miranda Mowbray > ## The Internet Gift Economy > As Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and Richard Barbrook described in papers in earlier issues of _First Monday_ [[3](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/700/610?inline=1#note3)], the Internet operates as a gift economy. Individual Internet users donate content for other Internet users to use free of charge. In return, each individual receives access to all the content made available by others. The amount an individual receives is much more than they could ever produce, so the gift economy works in the interest of Internet users. It also facilitates the cooperative production of free high-quality software and other digital content. --- Rishab Aiye Ghosh [Cooking Pot Markets: An Economic Model for the Trade in Free Goods and Services on the Internet”](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/580/501) _First Monday_, vol. 3, no. 2 Mar. 1998 > _This is the "cooking-pot" market: an implicit barter economy with assymetric transactions._ > Much of the economic activity on the Net involves value but no money. > It is quite hard to put a price on the value of the Internet's free resources, at least in part because they exist because they don't have prices attached. They exist in a market of implicit transactions. [[2](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/580/501?inline=1#ref2)] > On the Internet, through much of its past, the bulk of its present and the best of its foreseeable future, prices often don't matter at all. People don't seem to want to pay - or charge - for the most popular goods and services that breed on the Internet. Not only is information usually free on the Net, it even wants to be free, so they say [[9](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/580/501?inline=1#ref9)]. > Simply by reading what you write, they add value to it - an endorsement, of sorts. > Paul Samuelson's textbook definition of economics as the "study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people" [[12](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/580/501?inline=1#ref12)] > In an environment where it costs next to nothing to duplicate a product, exactly what is scarce? > decisions on when and where to post a message or participate in on-line discussions are taken all the time, so often that they're barely noticed as actual decisions. > Both are a question of resources allocation - your time and effort in one case, your money (which actually represents your time and effort) in another. > Life on the Internet is like a perpetual auction with ideas instead of money. > on the Net every trade of ideas and reputations is a direct, equal exchange, in forms derivative of barter. > In a barter exchange the value of nothing is absolute. Both parties to a barter have to provide something of value to the other; this something is not a universally or even widely accepted intermediary such as money... in a barter transaction you normally yourself use, and obviously value, what you receive. > When the contribution of each side to a barter is used directly by the other, it further blurs the distinction between buyer and seller. In the "real world" barter did not, of course, take place between buyer and seller but between two producer-consumers in one transaction. > I never believed that people could do so much work just for "fun". Yet it's the most common reason I have always seen for anything of value produced on the Net. > "The original motivation," says Needham later, "and [the] sustained motivation right through to today was just to put something back into the Internet community in one small way ... [it's just that] over the years it turned into a bigger way!" Now that's more like it. Putting something back into the Net seemed not much clearer than "fun" at first, but it is at least a sign that there is something Needham, like all of us, took out of the Net in the first place. Needham is IMDB creator > So the economy of the Net begins to look like a vast (cooking-pot), surging with production to match consumption, simply because everyone understands - instinctively, perhaps - that trade need not occur in single transactions of barter, and that one product can be exchanged for millions at a time. The cooking-pot keeps boiling because people keep putting in things as they themselves, and others, take things out. > Torvalds points out, "I get the other informational products for free regardless of whether I do Linux or not." True. But although nobody knows all the time whether your contribution is exceeded by your consumption, everyone knows that if all the contributions stopped together there'd be nothing for anyone: the fire would go out. And that wouldn't be fun at all. > However, the fact that Needham and Hartill have formed a company to work on the database full-time means that IMDb has to be their source of real income. It is not enough for IMDb to earn intangibles such as reputation to meet their needs for intangible information products on the Net; Needham and Hartill now need their work to make some real money, tradable in the economy outside the Net. As Needham adds parenthetically, "of course I now have [the] added motivation that if we fail then my wife and kids starve too." Reputation capital can help earn tangible monetary returns: IMDb now takes paid advertising. > It is the cooking-pot market of a seemingly altruistic value-in-giving norm that drives the economy of interacting people. > The cooking-pot model provides a rational explanation for people's motivations to produce and trade in goods and services, where a monetary incentive is lacking. It suggests that people do not only - or even largely - produce in order to improve their reputation, but as a more-than-fair payment for other goods - "ideas" - that they receive from the cooking-pot. The cooking-pot market is not barter, as it does not require individual transactions. It is based on the assumption that on the Net, you don't lose when you duplicate, so every contributor gets much more than a fair return in the form of combined contributions of others. 2 Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, 1994. "The rise of an information barter economy", _Electric Dreams_, #37 (21 November), at [http://dxm.org/dreams/dreams37.html](http://dxm.org/dreams/dreams37.html) --- # The attention economy and the Net Michael H. Goldhaber 1997 > Information, however, would be an impossible basis for an economy, for one simple reason: economies are governed by what is scarce, and information, especially on the Net, is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in the stuff, and yet more and more comes at us daily. > There is something else that moves through the Net, flowing in the opposite direction from information, namely attention. So seeking attention could be the very incentive we are looking for. > Attention, at least the kind we care about, is an intrinsically scarce resource [ [4] > In a full-fledged attention economy the goal is simply to get either enough attention or as much as possible. > We still do understand material things as objects that generally are to be bought and sold in exchange for money, but we also understand that more people are likely to pay attention to a book if they find out about it than if they don't. So in the case of a book, the Internet should now be viewed as a useful and free publicity mechanism. Let passages be freely copied and circulated on the Net, because most of the time, the more of copying that takes place, the more customers there will be for the physical printed version. If you have a Web site, don't charge for it, because that will only reduce the attention it gets. If you can't figure out how to afford it without charging, you may be doing something wrong. 1. On attention's scarcity and its economic importance, see also Michael H. Goldhaber, 1989. "Equality and Education in America Now," In: Education and the American Dream, H. Holtz, I. Marcus, J. Dougherty, J. Michaels, and R. Peduzzi (eds.), Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, Chapter 6, pp. 70-76; Michael H. Goldhaber, 1992. "The Attention Society," Release 1.0, ( 26 March), No. 3, E. Dyson (ed.), New York, EDventure Holdings, pp. 1-20; Michael H. Goldhaber, 1992. "Attention: The System of Post Industrialism?" Z papers, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April-June); and, Michael H. Goldhaber, 1996-97, Web site: [http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/](http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/) --- # [The Original In-App Purchase](https://tedium.co/2016/10/27/shareware-history-legacy) ## It wasn't just about games. In the '80s and '90s, shareware democratized the way computer software was sold. Ernie Smith, 2016 > ### "You're probably used to buying an expensive, commercially marketed program, taking it home and hoping it does the job. All too often, though, you find it falls short of your expectations. The shareware way lets you choose from a wide variety of high quality programs and try them all until you find the one you like best. Then and only then do you pay a low registration fee to the program author." > **— An explanation of value of shareware**in the introductory catalog for The Software Labs, a shareware-by-mail distributor. The fairly slick 1992 catalog, [which can be viewed](https://ia800507.us.archive.org/24/items/TSL1992/TSL-1992.pdf) in all its wonderful glory on the Internet Archive > ### "I have never been as socially involved, as interconnected with as many different kinds of people, as when I started getting involved with computers." > **— A quote from a recorded interview with Andrew Fluegelman,** as cited by _Infoworld_ contributor Kevin Strehlo [in a memorial piece about the developer and magazine editor](https://books.google.com/books?id=-S4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8) upon his 1985 disappearance. Fluegelman's legacy, [as highlighted in this clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUkDNjKM270), looms large on early computing: Beyond being an inventor of shareware, he was the founding editor of _PC World_ and _MacWorld_. But his health proved troublesome. He had developed cancer and was suffering from colitis at the time of his disappearance. > ### How adware bastardized shareware's good name > > **Shareware wasn't perfect as a business model**—clearly, more people used software for free than paid the piper—but…it was fairly altruistic. It kept small developers in the game and let computer users try out different kinds of software without spending thousands of bucks [at Best Buy](https://tedium.co/2016/10/11/big-box-retail-computers-problems/). > The problem is, all the altruism that went into the model at its launch didn't follow through to a second generation of developers.  > > During the early Windows XP years, the model broke down. A few factors were behind this, including the tendency for shareware-distributing websites to be the exact kinds of sites that would distribute downloads with adware > Sometimes, this adware would take the form of programs like Gator, which claimed to have legitimate uses (it would save passwords for you), but also came with a pop-up ad network. (The company behind Gator [denied being adware](https://www.wired.com/2005/12/spyware/) and changed its name multiple times before its inevitable shutdown.) ![[Screenshot-Windows-90s.png]] > In much economic theory, natural monopolies should either be publicly owned or, at the very least, heavily regulated to prevent abuses, especially as they often tend to monopolize crucial public functions. The free market option does not compute. > The one saving grace of the Internet, its genius if you will, was that at the end of the day, no matter what, any person could start a Web site and acquire uncensored access to a global audience. This was democracy’s trump card against tyranny. Regrettably, we can now see that, as wonderful as it is to visit Web sites featuring material that would never see the light of day in mainstream media or the corporate Web sites, it is not sufficient. As Internet scholar Matthew Hindman has put it, we should not confuse the right to speak with the ability to be heard. > The evidence is now in: though there are an infinite number of Web sites, human beings are only capable of meaningfully visiting a small number of them on a regular basis. The Google search mechanism strongly encourages implicit censorship, in that sites that do not end up on the first or second page of a search effectively do not exist. > As Michael Wolff puts it in _Wired_: “[T]he top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010.” > As long as the Internet is assumed to be primarily a profit-generating medium, and all policy and regulation is premised on that presupposition, it is difficult to imagine a different course than the one described herein. > Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange, and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth, which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant. > But commodities produced for sale on the market under capitalism also embodied something else: exchange value (value). Every commodity was thus viewed as having “a twofold aspect,” consisting of use value and exchange value.[47](https://monthlyreview.org/2011/03/01/the-internets-unholy-marriage-to-capitalism/#en47) > The Lauderdale Paradox was an expression of this twofold aspect of wealth/value, which generated the contradiction between total public wealth (the sum of use values) and the aggregation of private riches (the sum of exchange values). > The effective “closure” (or displacement) of much of the free public space on the Internet, which now seems to be occurring, means that what was once clearly a form of public wealth in new communicative possibilities, as measured by use values—that is, in the new, universal human capacities it seemed to promise—is giving way to a very different type of system. > Communication is more than an ordinary market. Indeed, it is properly not a market at all. It is more like air or water—a form of public wealth, a commons. When Aristotle said that human beings were “_social animals_,” he might just as well have said that we are _communicative animals. > The moral of the story is clear. People in the United States and worldwide must redouble their efforts to address the paradox of the Internet at all levels of the analysis presented herein. The outcome is far from certain, and the issues are still very much in play. A global network of resistance is both necessary and feasible. Indeed, in view of the nature of the Internet and the stakes involved, it seems fair to say that these issues will only become more encompassing in coming years. How this battle plays out will go a long way toward determining our future as social animals. # [The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism](https://monthlyreview.org/2011/03/01/the-internets-unholy-marriage-to-capitalism/) _by_ [John Bellamy Foster](https://monthlyreview.org/author/johnbellamyfoster/ "Posts by John Bellamy Foster") and [Robert W. McChesney](https://monthlyreview.org/author/robertwmcchesney/ "Posts by Robert W. McChesney") 2011 --- [The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet](https://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff-webrip/) 2011 > Two decades after its inception, the World Wide Web has been eclipsed by Skype, Netflix, peer-to-peer, and a quarter-million other apps. > Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services—think apps—are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures. > Who’s to Blame: Us As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work. > > By Chris Anderson > This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. > The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution. > Who’s to Blame: Them Chaos isn’t a business model. A new breed of media moguls is bringing order—and profits—to the digital world. > By Michael Wolff > According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Milner says. “In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.” > Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea—one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back. > Many of the newer Net applications are closed, often proprietary, networks. > This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time. > Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control. > Today the Internet hosts countless closed gardens; in a sense, the Web is an exception, not the rule. > Google, by managing both traffic and sales (advertising), created a condition in which it was impossible for anyone else doing business in the traditional Web to be bigger than or even competitive with Google. It was the imperial master over the world’s most distributed systems. A kind of Rome. > Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time previously spent idly drifting from site to site... It was, all of a sudden, not just a radical displacement but also an extraordinary concentration of power. > Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows. > Artificial scarcity is the natural goal of the profit-seeking. > Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are voting with your finger. > More important, the great virtue of today’s Web is that so much of it is noncommercial. The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. ![[Screenshot-Graph-Internet-90s.png]]Sources: Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW ODLYZKO --- [Internet for the People](https://www.versobooks.com/products/2674-internet-for-the-people) by Ben Tarnoff Marea - Fiber Optic Internet Cable  > MAREA is a reminder that the internet has a body. A body of glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other things—things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy. > Connectivity is never neutral. The growth of networks was guided by a desire for power and profit. They were not just conduits for conveying information, but mechanisms for forging relationships of control. > The internet reformers have some good ideas, but they never quite reach the root of the problem. The root is simple: **the internet is broken because the internet is a business.** Emphasis mine. > The internet started out in the 1970s as an experimental technology created by US military researchers. In the 1980s, it grew into a government-owned computer network used primarily by academics. Then, in the 1990s, privatization began. > A system built by scientists was renovated for the purpose of profit maximization. > To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. > Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule... so long as the internet is controlled by firms that are compelled to prioritize profit-making … this sort of democratic decision-making can’t take place. > A democratic internet must be bound by a different set of demands: those that arise from people’s desire for self- determination. The satisfaction of such demands requires, among other things, taking collective control of the online spaces where our common life increasingly takes place. > The internet wasn’t invented by a lone genius tinkering in a garage. Rather, it involved thousands of individuals engaged in a decades-long act of co-creation. > The internet was such an unlikely idea that only decades of public funding and planning could bring it into existence. > This enthusiasm was driven in part by the rise of the World Wide Web, which made being online much easier. The early internet was not particularly user-friendly. Text-heavy applications like email predominated, and using them generally required a degree of technical skill. The web offered a new, more intuitive approach: a collection of hyperlinked “pages.” What we take for granted now—clicking our way through a chain of content—was revelatory at the time. The web did not replace the internet; it lived within the internet. But over the course of the 1990s, many newcomers would come to know the internet primarily through the web, to the point where people had trouble distinguishing between the two. This seems true now of people who primarily experience the internet through social media apps. > The first website went up in 1990; the browser that would popularize the web, Mosaic, appeared three years later. As usual, public money played a leading role. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, worked as a scientist at CERN, the European research organization backed by nearly two dozen member states, while Mosaic was developed at the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which had been created by the NSF in the 1980s. > In 1991, they decided to cash in, creating a for-profit subsidiary that started selling commercial access to the NSFNET backbone, > One of their chief executives, William Schrader, testified that NSF’s actions were akin to “giving a federal park to Kmart.” > Strikingly, this transfer came with no conditions. There would be no federal oversight of the new internet backbones, and no rules governing how the commercial providers ran their infrastructure. > Senator Daniel Inouye, who introduced a bill in 1994 that would have made telecom companies reserve up to 20 percent of their capacity for “public uses.” This capacity would be considered “public property”—the telecoms would have no control over it. > “There should be a national debate about what kind of media system we should have,” Jeffrey Chester, the organization’s co-founder, told the New York Times in 1993. “The debate has been framed so far by a handful of communications giants who have been working overtime to convince the American people that the data highway will be little more than a virtual electronic shopping mall.” > It has become not just a mass medium but an essential infrastructure, analogous to electricity in the depth of its integration into billions of people’s lives. Google, Netflix, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon—account for nearly half of all traffic on the internet. > The site didn’t just facilitate interactions; it shaped them. > It wrote the rules for how people could interact and designed the spaces where they did so. It was not only an intermediary but a legislator and an architect. > Back in 1993, the activist Jeffrey Chester had warned that the information superhighway would become “a virtual electronic shopping mall” if corporate interests had their way. > The shopping malls of the internet are nothing if not privately owned public spaces. They are corporate enclosures with a wide range of interactions transpiring inside of them. Just like in a real mall, some of these interactions are commercial, such as buying clothes from a merchant, while others are social, such as hanging out with friends. But what distinguishes the online mall from the real mall is that within the former, everything one does makes data. Every move, however small, leaves a digital trace. And these traces present an opportunity to create a completely new set of arrangements. > In theory, more information should have made the web more useful. In practice, more information made the web more bewildering. The existing tools for making sense of it all simply weren’t up to the job. > If Google began as an attempt to interpret the abundant information of the web, its commercial viability would rest on interpreting the abundant information of its users. > Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers, (In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by, Shoshana Zuboff) > It is essential to the success of the social media mall that users behave as if their behavior is entirely their own, while being induced to behave in ways that are maximally legible to the automated systems that track and analyze them, ultimately for the purpose of selling ads. > the leviathans of the modern internet. > Computing may someday be organized as a public utility,” declared MIT computer scientist John McCarthy in 1961 > In the 1980s, the internet went from being a protocol to a place… In the 2010s, it became a different kind of place altogether. It cut its tether, losing its anchorage in a fixed point. It became fluid, ubiquitous, diffuse. The internet was no longer something people logged onto but something that was always on: fastened to your hand or wrist or pocket, woven through homes and workplaces and cities. > erode the power of the online malls… create a constellation of alternatives > The logic of the online mall is to enclose everything and get as big as possible. …More users mean more rents, more data, more profits. > (Librarians) retrieve, classify, curate, and contextualize information, and they do so not for profit, but as a public service. This is a service that is sorely needed in online spaces. > > As Safiya Umoja Noble notes, it is significant that funding for public libraries has fallen as Google and Facebook have grown. We have outsourced "our knowledge needs" to the online malls, which satisfy those needs according to commercial imperatives that inevitably compromise the quality of the knowledge provided. > scholar Lindsay Bartkowski argues that content moderation is best understood as a form of care work and, like other forms of care work, is systematically under-valued. > producing to satisfy human need—what organizers at the time called “socially useful production”—rather than to maximize profit. > to remake the internet, we will have to remake everything else. > It had a “culture of serendipitous tinkering,” says internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain. --- ## This Page is Designed to Last ### By [Jeff Huang](https://jeffhuang.com), published 2019-12-19, updated 2021-08-24 > A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web > The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks... But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair. > > Bookmark after bookmark led to dead link after dead link. > This is more than just link rot, it's the increasing complexity of keeping alive indie content on the web, leading to a reliance on platforms and time-sorted publication formats (blogs, feeds, tweets). --- [Searching For My City: On local connection in the age of the internet](https://joinreboot.org/p/searching-for-my-city?r=836c5&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true) by HUMPHREY OBUOBI A perspective on the internet as a tool for strengthening local communities. --- [ICANN](https://www.icann.org/en/beginners) > ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. > ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world. See also: [IANA](https://www.iana.org) --- [W3C](https://www.w3.org) > The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops [standards and guidelines](https://www.w3.org/standards/) to help everyone build a web based on the principles of [accessibility](https://www.w3.org/mission/accessibility/), [internationalization](https://www.w3.org/mission/internationalization/), [privacy](https://www.w3.org/mission/privacy/)and [security](https://www.w3.org/mission/security/). [W3C’s History](https://www.w3.org/about/) > Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. --- ![[Screenshot-Anti-SEO.jpeg]] Is this punk rock? [Source](https://www.threads.net/@crumbler/post/C5gZzhrOFex/?xmt=AQGz8USN1hFanN7bWdJbZ8yoPDqRXgvUCEAmihKj9x56bw) --- [We Can Have a Different Web](https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/) > More of a neighborhood feeling where everyone was a possible friend, and less fear that people might interpret your social media post as uncharitably as possible. > The thing is: ****none of this is gone****. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. __We can return.__ Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses. Hat tip to [Seth Wekheiser](https://sethw.xyz/blog/2024/05/02/return-to-the-web/) See also: Hamster Dance (1997) https://youtu.be/6WpMlwVwydo?feature=shared --- # [The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small](https://defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small)  Kelsey McKinney > The goal of social media became entrapment instead of facilitating and servicing the curiosity that brought people online in the first place. > It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. > The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. --- # What Happened to the New Internet? 2023-11-08 Bryan Lehrer [Source](https://www.bryanlehrer.com/entries/new-internet/) > The ongoing project of reforming the internet continues to be vitally important, even if its problems are beginning to converge on accepted truths. Powerful companies, perverse incentives, all-consuming digital environments. We all know the tune. Together these conditions have brought us to a place of casual dystopia. We use the internet constantly everyday, but rarely without distress, be it conscious or subconscious. This is not to say it's not still capable of wonder, beauty, and bliss. It's just that these moments have become the exception before the norm. The internet _works_ but not for us. This much is painstakingly obvious and has been for years. And yet, where are the better alternatives? > In a blog post reflecting on Are.na’s 10 year anniversary, founder Charles Browkoski said: > > Our ideal outcome as a company is not becoming the next Facebook (god forbid), it’s becoming the next Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot spring hotel in Japan, and one of the world’s oldest businesses (founded in 705 AD).  What a fitting way to capture the punk steadiness of pushing back and creating anew. --- --- --- # [Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does](https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/) Anil Dash > When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that _the machine is never broken_. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed. > > The most effective and broadly-understand articulation of this idea is the phrase, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, often abbreviated as POSIWID. The term comes to us from the field of cybernetics, and the work of Stafford Beer... > The next step, then, is to reflect on the systems around us now that we are cursed with the horrible truth that all of them are working correctly. Ask yourself, how do you get the power to change the system so that it wants something else, so that it can only inevitably do the right thing? Is there a reasonable path to that power? Or does that system need to be dismantled, so that it can be replaced by a system whose purpose is to do the right thing? --- # [Always Already Programming](https://gist.github.com/melaniehoff/95ca90df7ca47761dc3d3d58fead22d4) https://gist.github.com/melaniehoff/95ca90df7ca47761dc3d3d58fead22d4#always-already-programming > Everyone who interacts with computers has in important ways always already been programming them. > > Every time you make a folder or rename a file on your computer, the actions you take through moving your mouse and clicking on buttons, translate into text-based commands or scripts which eventually translate into binary. > > Why are the common conceptions of programmer and user so divorced from each other? The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of _less_ agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into _more_ agency. > When we all build up and cultivate one another’s agency to shape technology and online spaces, we are contributing to creating a world that is more supportive, affirming, and healing. [Melanie Hoff](https://www.melaniehoff.com/) is an artist, organizer, technologist, and educator committed to cultivating spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to express the absurdities of these systems while revealing the encoded ways in which they influence how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. --- Thinking a lot about the old web, and world building. Our blogs used to be an extension of who we were, and how we operated. Then we gave everything over to “social media profiles,” where we uploaded the perfect photo for our avatar, wrote a cute / informative / snarky bio, and then fed the machine one or two sentences at a time. [Seth Werkheiser](https://sethw.xyz/blog/2024/06/18/no-accident/) --- ###### Alternative Search Engines [Marginalia](https://search.marginalia.nu) [Kagi](https://kagi.com) ###### Web Building Tools [micro.blog](https://micro.blog/pricing) --- #### Further Reading [Community Memory](https://www.are.na/editorial/community-memory) [Cyberplace: From fantasies of placelessness to connective emplacement](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506980211010693#body-ref-bibr34-17506980211010693-1) [Let’s bring fansites and webrings back!](https://bryanlrobinson.com/blog/bring-fansites-back-to-the-web/) [30 years on, what’s next For The Web?](https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/) [World Wide Web Foundation](https://webfoundation.org) [Contract for the Web](https://contractfortheweb.org) [Solid Pods](https://solidproject.org) [How DNS Works Illustrated Zine](https://wizardzines.com/zines/dns/) [Why RSS NetNewsWire doesn’t take money](https://inessential.com/2023/02/20/on_not_taking_money_for_netnewswire.html) [Pluralistic: The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents" (07 May 2024)](https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/) [Static Site Guide](https://www.staticguide.org) --- ###### 🐝 Cross Pollinate [[Digital Garden]] [[Tech Monopolies]] Old Magic of RSS [on Substack](https://sarahshotts.substack.com/p/the-ancient-technology-of-rss) [[Capitalism]] [[The Medium is the Message]] --- ###### 🌱 Gardening Notes Added: April 9, 2024 Tended: June 23, 2024 *Note: I realized today that Tags and the end of this page were missing. I've restored from an archive, but it definitely seems like some tags are missing now. It probably happened when I was trying to alphabetize them and it didn't sync.* --- ###### 🍄 Tags #internet-culture #early-internet #new-media #curation #seth-werkheiser #humphrey-obuobi #spencer-chang #mike-caulfield #memex #vannevar-bush #poetic-computing #laurel-schwulst #fred-rogers #star-trek #cory-doctorow #cyber-surfari #cybersyn #filterworld #google #angelfire #lycos #tim-berners-lee #creator-economy #tara-mcmullin #hank-green #nilay-patel #andy-matuschak #robin-sloan #websites #john-seeley-brown #creative-ecosystem #lada-adamic #maria-farrell #robin-berjon #ecology #rewilding #alan-jacobs #audrey-watters #websites #stephen-morillo #neil-gaiman #austin-kleon #ezra-klein #pelle-cass #the-medium-is-the-message #adam-savage #adrienne-lafrance #alan-jacobs #andrew-stephens #andy-matuschak #angelfire #aral-balkan #attention #audrey-watters #austin-kleon #blogging #charlie-rewilding #cory-doctorow #creative-ecosystem #creator-economy #curation #cyber-surfari #cybersyn #david-schmuddee #early-internet #ecology #ernie-smith #ezra-klein #filterworld #fred-rogers #gift #google #hank-green #hillary-bays_ #humphrey-obuobi #internet-culture #j-r-carpenter #jack-clayton #john-green #john-seeley-brown #lada-adamic #laura-kalbag #laurel-schwulst #linkrot #lycos #manton-reece #maria-farrell #memex #michael-goldhaber #microblogging #mike-caulfield #miranda-mowbray #neil-gaiman #new-media #nilay-patel #parimal-satyal #pelle-cass #poetic-computing #rewilding #richard-stallman #rishab-aiyer-ghosh #robin-berjon #robin-sloan #sad-grl #seth-werkheiser #spencer-chang #star-trek #stephen-morillo #tara-mcmullin #the-medium-is-the-message #tim-berners-lee #vannevar-bush #websites #bryan-lehrer #melanie-hoff