The more I look around the web the more I’m convinced we should all treasure our own tiny corners of the web…
It’s about personal expression, it’s about creativity, it’s about sharing openly. It’s about respecting others, it’s about listening, it’s about reflecting on what other people say. And all those things I believe are better done in a space I control, rather than in some soulless social media platform where my content is no different than everybody else’s.
Years of social media have managed to convince us that a scrollable timeline, a comment box with a characters limit and a like button are the tools we need to use to connect with each other. That is a big fucking lie…
Many people are concerned about lowing the barrier to entry onto the indieweb. Even this blog, now published with an esoteric static site generator, deployed with 30-year-old command-line tech, and modified with custom code, started on blogspot, which still exists. It felt revolutionary, infinitely connecting. It is the reason I’m in Dallas, of all places, and why my life is the way it is now, for good and bad. There are new versions of that experience: Pika, Bear, omg.lol. These facilitate the same kind of local internet communities I first experienced through blogger and independent web publications in the early 00s.
I ditched the major social networks in the late 10s…
It should be clear if you follow the thread…we are losing the battle for not the just the web, but our own minds and humanity. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s important to at least consider. We’ve traded the open web of ideas, creativity and collaboration for a walled compound where we are trained by specialists on how to think, how to desire.
…then re-joined for some of the practical reasons people feel stuck in them, then realized how much I hated them, left again, and now realize that missing out on those practical uses is not a real loss. I’m trying to convince others one heart and mind at a time, but it is odd and disconcerting. Most people haven’t been thinking about this for over ten years, and most people don’t care.
I was reminded of my own recent thoughts:
However, the normal people I know are not creating Mastodon accounts…It is not that they don’t care about the facts…they do not have the capacity to care or even understand them…[they] just want to post [their] photos and enjoy the accolades of [their] peers…
But it occurs to me that just like resistance to political authoritarianism must start locally, so must this resistance to technological authoritarianism. And it is hard to do. And it is going to take a long time. And not everyone is going to make it.
One day, your neighbor is going to read and believe one thing on a platform controlled by an authoritarian power, another is going to believe a different thing, and the former will point to the latter when the authorities arrive, and you will be faced with an ethical decision. How well will you be prepared? Will you look into the eyes of all your neighbors and see humans? Or like that first neighbor, will you see an enemy, someone deserving of punishment? Or will you be somewhere in-between–a still, small voice inside will whisper, “Something’s wrong,” but it won’t get through all those loud voices emanating out of that small rectangle of glass in your hand, and you will remain still, wordless, passive…just like you’ve been trained to do.