A website to destroy all websites.

How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.

Captive Pegasus, Odilon Redon (1889) ~3100 words; about a 15 minute read

table of contents, of course

1. The internet is bad
2. The invention of the automobile
3. Tools for Conviviality & the industrialization of the Web
4. The Web we want
5. So where do we go from here?
6. Denouement

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part one.

The internet is bad.

Christ’s Descent Into Hell, Follower of Hieronymus Bosch (~1625)

Well, the Internet mostly feels bad these days.

We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.

Instead of turning freely in the HTTP meadows we grow for each other, we go to work: we break our backs at the foundry of algorithmic content as this earnest, naïve, human endeavoring to connect our lives with others is corrupted. Our powerful drive to learn about ourselves, each other, and our world, is broken into scant remnants — hollow, clutching phantasms of Content Creation, speed-cut vertical video, listicle thought-leadership, ragebait and the thread emoji.

It used to feel way better to Go Online, and some of us will remember.

We used to be able to learn about our hobbies and interests from hundreds of experts on a wealth of websites whose only shared motivation was their passion. Some of those venerable old educational blogs, forums, and wikis still stand, though most have been bulldozed.

Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.

¶

We used to make lasting friendships with folks all over the world on shared interest and good humor.

But now those social networks, once hand-built and hand-tended, vibrant and organic, are unceremoniously swallowed by social media networks, pens built for trapping us and our little piggy attentions, turning us all into clout-chasers & content-creators, and removing us from what meaningful intimacy & community felt like.

¶

Even coding for the web used to be different: One could Learn To Code™ to express oneself creatively, imbue one’s online presence with passion and meaning, and for some of us, build a real career.

These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value. We don’t think about the art of our craft and the discipline of its application, we think about throughput and scale.

To be very clear: I’m not trying to Good Old Days the internet. None of this is meant to make you feel nostalgic — the Internet used to be slow and less populated and less diverse, and its access was limited to those of a certain class. The Web For All is a marked improvement, widespread global internet access is a marked improvement, and what I’m asking you to consider is what it used to feel like to use these tools, and what we’ve lost in the Big Tech, Web 2.0 and web3 devouring of the ’Net.

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part two.

The onset of the automobile was a revelation for access and personal liberty. With the advent of cars, members of society could travel farther, get more done in their day, and bend their limited time more to their creative will!

But as time wore on and the industrialization & proliferation of the automobile progressed, its marginal utility diminished — the industry started to society fewer & fewer benefits, and take more & more in exchange1.

In American cities, for example: though at first the automobile enabled humans to travel further distances, it now demanded that humans travel those distances, and demanded infrastructure be created & maintained to enable it.2 Many now must use an automobile to get everything done in their town in a day, and must pay & take time for that automobile’s fueling & maintenance.3

Further than that, the automobile asks all of us to chip in tax revenue to protect its infrastructure, but only certain classes can afford an automobile with which to use that infrastructure, and those classes who can’t afford to do so are relegated to underfunded public transit systems.4

No longer a tool to serve our societies, our societies now serve the automobile.

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part three.

Tools for Conviviality, & the industrialization of the Web.

In his book Tools For Conviviality, technology philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich identifies these two critical moments, the optimistic arrival & the deadening industrialization, as watersheds of technological advent. Tools are first created to enhance our capacities to spend our energy more freely and in turn spend our days more freely, but as their industrialization increases, their manipulation & usurpation of society increases in tow5.

Illich also describes the concept of radical monopoly, which is that point where a technological tool is so dominant that people are excluded from society unless they become its users. We saw this with the automobile, we saw it with the internet, and we even see it with social media.

No longer a tool to serve our societies, our societies now serve the automobile. Instead of designing and using tools to build a society, our society changes to adapt to the demands of our tools.

¶

Illich’s thesis allows us to reframe our adoption and use of the technologies in our life. We can map fairly directly most technological developments in the last 100 (or even 200) years to this framework: a net lift, followed by a push to extract value and subsequent insistence upon the technology’s ubiquity:

the textile revolution

The preferred imagery used to mythologize the Industrial Revolution is the woodetchings of textile manufacturers, transformed in the early 19th century by the arrival of automated fabric machinery. Its proponents laud the shift of an agricultural society to a technological one, creating new sectors for labor, and raising up the middle class (we will say nothing of this period’s new punishing conditions for labor in this essay6). But the ultimate ecological and human costs engendered by the increasing availability of cheap fabric production are well-documented: In 2022, the fashion and textile industries employed around 60 million factory workers worldwide7, and less than 2% of those workers earn a living wage. Those workers also endure the full suite of labor exploitation practices, including gender-based harassment, wage theft, and unsafe conditions. On the material side, the induced consumption resulting from ever-cheaper products means the world consumed 400% more textile products globally as 20 years ago8, and bins most of it (the average American generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year).

antibiotic technology

The arrival of antibiotics in 19289 allowed for revolutionary leaps in fighting bacterial infections like strep throat, pneumonia, and meningitis, but an over-dependence and over-prescription of penicillin and its siblings through the 1950s-70s resulted in the proliferation of antibiotic resistance, which subsequently led to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs, and increased mortality.10

space exploration

Since the beginning of the space exploration era in the late 1950s, humanity has made leaps and bounds in learning about our own world and its physical systems, telecommunications, imaging, etc. The increasing frequency of commercialization missions in space for satellite systems (and lately tourism) has resulted in immense amounts of space debris being generated — both from active satellites and from jettisoned/destroyed components of previous missions, the debris threatens future missions and has even been destructive to the field of astronomy, making it impossible to use earth-based sensors and photography devices to learn about space.11 So desperate to extract Shareholder Value from the starry sky, we’re blinding our own ability to look at it.

The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989 as a way to universally link documents and other media content in a flexibly-organized system that could make information easily accessed at CERN, and be easily shared with collaborators beyond.12 But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society, including cyberstalking and bullying, the instantaneous circulation of CSAM, violent images, and misinformation, identity theft, addiction, etcetera.

The rampant industrialization and commercialization of the Web predictably develops flashy, insidious patterns of extracting capital from its users: new surfaces for information means new surfaces for advertisement, and new formats of media beget new mechanisms for divorcing you from their ownership.

convivial life & convivial tooling

Illich poses convivial tools as directly opposed to this industrialized, radically-monopolized set of social systems. Similar to E.F. Schumacher’s concept of “intermediate technology” introduced in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, convivial tools are sustainable, energy-efficient (though often labor intensive), local-first, and designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users.13 Illich cites specifically hand tools, bicycles, and telephones as examples, but with its enormous capacity for interoperability and extensibility, the Internet is the perfect workshed in which to design our own Tools For Conviviality.

part four.

the Web we want

The Plains of Heaven, John Martin (1851-3)

let’s reconsider

the markers of a decaying ’Net I mentioned before, with convivial tooling in mind:

Teaching & learning on the Web

Monolithic platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Medium, and Substack draw a ton of creators and educators because of the promise of monetization and large audiences, but they’ve shown time and time again how the lack of ownership creates a problem. When those platforms fail, when they change their rules, when they demand creators move or create a particular way to maintain their access to those audiences, they pit creators or their audiences against the loss of the other. Without adhering to the algorithm’s requirements, writers may not write an impactful document, and without bypassing a paywall, readers can’t read it.

¶

When those promises of exorbitant wealth and a life of decadence through per-click monetization ultimately dry up (or come with a steep moral or creative cost), creators and learners must look for new solutions for how educational content is shared on the Internet. The most self-evident, convivial answer is an old one: blogs. HTML is free to access by default, RSS has worked for about 130 years[citation needed], and combined with webmentions, it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.14

Connecting with friends on the Web

Social media apps have imprisoned us all in this weird content prison — in order to connect with friends we’re sort of forced to create or be vanished by capricious black box algorithms, and all that we do create is, as we’ve already alluded to, subsequently owned by whatever platform we’ve created it on. If Instagram goes away overnight, or decides to pivot catastrophically, your stories and your network of friends goes with it.

¶

The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.

With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.

Coding for the web

Lastly, consider the discipline of web engineering:

We have been asked to build the same B2B SaaS website with the same featureset n^∞ times, and our answers for the optimal way to do that are increasingly limited. We’ve penned all of our markup into JavaScript templates just in case a product manager needs the wrapper component to post JSON somewhere down the line, and we’ve whittled away at style code until it’s just a mechanism for deploying one of two border-radius-drop-shadow combos to divs. It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft, and that’s understandably uninspiring to many of us.

¶

Yet our young React shepherds have no need to fear: there are countless more colors than blurple out there, and countless more fonts than Inter. HTML and CSS are better and more generative technologies than they’ve ever been: Thanks to the tireless work of the CSS working groups and browser implementers, etc, there is an unbelievable amount of creative expression possible with basic web tools in a text editor. Even JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though). ${new Date.getCurrentYear()} is a veritable renaissance of web code, and it asks of authors only curiosity and a drive to experiment.

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Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will.

The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans:

it’s personal websites.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

And how might one claim this ultimate toolchain of conviviality, and build a place on the web that enhances their autonomy and creativity?

How might one build a personal website?

Start small

Let yourself start small, have fun trying shit that doesn’t work, document your growth, publish failed ideas & successful ones. Some of the best websites in the world are just HTML, and they belong to their authors. Make friends, let yourself be inspired by others, send friendly emails asking to learn new things, and do not demand of yourself masterpieces. 1.

Reduce friction to publishing

Get the resistance to ship out of your way. Don’t get caught up in tooling and frameworks, just write HTML and get something online. If you’re an engineer, delight that you’re not beholden to the same standards of quality and rigorous testing that you are at work — draft some ideas, hit the h1 to p tag combo, and publish. Update and update again; let your ideas grow like gardens, the way they do in your mind. The mutability of the web, often its great weakness, is also one of its great strengths. 1.

Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)

Don’t worry about design unless that’s the part that brings you joy. Make friends with designers and trade your work for theirs, or trade tips, trade advice. Get comfortable with being joyfully bad at something — from that soil of humility grows a million questions for those who have learned and are excited to share. Iterate until you’ve something you’re proud of, or iterate so much you’ve ruined it and have to go back to bald. 1.

Use the IndieWeb

Leverage the IndieWeb and its wonderfully thought-out protocols, tools like brid.gy to syndicate your ideas out to the wider web, and then use Webmentions to bring the ensuing conversations back where the content is. That way, you can publish work where you prefer to, folks on Bluesky can enjoy and discuss it, in the same stroke as folks on Mastodon may, or folks directly on the canonical URL. 1.

Join us in sharing what you’ve made

I encourage you to join us in our auspicious website adventure, and if you do, I hope you’ll further join us on personalsit.es, our happy little home for everyone building something humble or thrilling or joyful or deeply accursed, but personal.

part six.

(denouement)

Sunrise on the Matterhorn, Albert Bierstadt (after 1875)

You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of. Godspeed and good luck.

❦

That’s all for me. If you find any issues with this post, please reach out to me by email. Thanks eternally for your time and patience, and thanks for reading. Find me here online at one of my personal websites like henry.codes or strange.website or stillness.digital or strangersbyspring.com, or sometimes on Bluesky and Mastodon.

As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die.

fin.

go home

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