Welcome Home

The new web is here, and it looks like the old one. We're cutting through the bloatware of 2.0, bucking the transparent scam of 3.0, and moving forward with time-tested tools and human hands, free of corporate colonization and datamining and "user experience design."

Capitalism has conglomerated the spaces we depend on for community and connection into a few fragile baskets, each of which is getting worse to use every day. The solution is to decentralize[1]— rebuild the resilient maze of the early net rather than feed free content to the monoliths threatening to sell out or shut down at any moment. We must own both the content and the context of our creative work. We must seize the means of posting.

A Living Web

Map of the Internet, circa 1974

The Internet began its life in the 1960s as a network of interconnected research computers and university labs, which gradually fell under the influence of the military as "ARPANet." The purpose of ARPANet was to provide realtime communication in the event of a nuclear strike (or other disaster) against the United States[2]. Whether the computer scientists contracting with the government to build this newtwork really believed it would be nuke-proof or not, the critical feature of the Net was "distributed resilience": The system should be able to survive the failure of any one part.

Today, after decades of the Internet falling from a government research project to a public commons to a private utility, that resilience is gone. Bigtime websites and apps backed by big money have metastatized across digital space, and now form a series of walled gardens eating up previously-free information and stuffing it under the purview of rich freaks with no morals or motives besides selling ads. Would the Internet still be useful if a site like Reddit—which has gobbled up knowledge and knowledge-havers who used to reside on thousands of independent forums—started costing money to look at, or just pulled the plug entirely after a weak quarter?[4] What about a different load-bearing site like Instagram or Tumblr?

Social media is not a reliable substrate. Nothing's wrong with goofing around on there, but when your thougths and words exist on a platform that isn't yours—that belongs to some rich wad who might be a soulless profit-seeker, a straight-up Nazi, or both[5]—then your posts don't belong to you either. The corporation you've lent them to owns the context, and they will delete everything you've ever uploaded the minute it hurts their bottom line to keep it around. I think that's pretty thin ice to set anything on you actually care about—and it's only gonna get thinner as interest rates go up and investors demand a harder squeeze.

Back to Basics

The only way to own the things you put online is to put them in your own space built with your own tools. The solution is to go DIY.

Imagine an Internet populated mostly by sites like this one, instead of sites like Twitter. If one of them goes out, that's just a tiny piece of the puzzle missing, rather than a critical chunk. And, if you're working in plain HTML, you can say what you want anywhere you want. Rent a domain or add a page to your friend's site or host it yourself off a Raspberry Pi in your closet. It'll look the same and work the same. HTML has been standard since 1993[5] and forms the bedrock of the modern web, which means it works on every device everywhere. If HTML gets bought out or shut down, we've got much bigger problems than where to post.

Handcrafted websites are lighter, faster, and better for the planet,[6] but maybe the most important thing is that somebody made them who cared. I, a real human, made this website from scratch. And you, a real human[7], chose to look at it on your own, without an algorithm feeding it to you or suggesting anything. Feel that connection—human to human, across space, made possible by but not mediated by machine. Rebuild that attention span years of infinite scrolling and short-form video have eroded.

The Small Web

The movement I'm describing is known as "the small web," and it's already in practice by people with a lot more to say about it than me. For starters, you can visit the Reading page for some links about making websites smaller and more human-focused.

If you missed it when I was working on it, I made you a free website you can download, edit in a text editor, and upload to the host of your choice. Or feel free to start from scratch! Making an HTML page is nowhere near as complicated as other kinds of programming, but I find that it's still just enough work to be kinda fun. Put in a little effort instead of tossing all your ideas into the sea of "content" to be churned up for free.

The Web can be ours again, can be good again, if we just take it.