Reject Modernity, Embrace the Web
New year, new website! 🥂 In fact this is my first personal website, if you don't count the Doom 3 fan site I had around the turn of the century (surprisingly and embarrassingly, it's still up). But why start now?
(The screen turns wobbly as we enter a flashback. Upbeat late 90's music starts playing.)
Being an elder millennial, I got to experience the golden age of the old World Wide Web at a formative time in my life. Many of my adolescent evenings were spent expanding my young mind in places like the Rotten Library, Brainsturbator or Ran Prieur; laughing myself silly reading Something Awful or Seanbaby; learning the basics of 3D game programming from sites like NeHe and Flipcode. Social interaction happened on forums and video wasn't feasible yet.
Eventually came broadband, Web 2.0, YouTube and Google Earth and podcasts and Twitter — a series of new things that pushed the old web forward in exciting ways. And then smartphones came and ate the world.
(The music stops abruptly. Cut to black.)
Like the rest of you I spent my 2010's and early 2020's spinning in Big Tech's grip, dutifully adopting new apps and platforms. It was fun for a while longer, until it wasn't. The Internet started leaking out of our phones into the real world, especially the ugly parts. The companies that had brought those cool new things to the web in the mid-late 2000's started shutting them down or making them worse. Then they invested hundreds of billions in a string of potential Big New Things in hopes of finding another big growth driver — chat bots, AR, Web3, the Metaverse, AI.
Meanwhile I spent every idle moment of the day on my phone doomscrolling Twitter, and when I sat down at my computer at night with the intent to make or learn something, I would give up at the first hurdle and watch YouTube slop instead. I had a wealth of amazing technological resources available to me but I wasn't doing anything with it, apart from passively consuming Content™. Worst of all, I had become cynical about something amazing — computers! — that I used to love.
(Fade in to a sunrise on a cold but lovely January morning. "Brand New Colony" by The Postal Service plays softly somewhere.)
For the past year or so I've been pulling on the threads of my online life, leaving platforms and deleting apps and being more deliberate about my tech use. A big part of this (ongoing) process has been rediscovering the Web — the classic Web made of websites, written by humans for humans, using HTML and CSS and a splash of JavaScript for fun. That Web has been there all along underneath the surface, and there is still a global community of people on it writing and creating and making connections. That's the web I want to contribute to.
So yeah buddy, welcome to my web zone. It has an RSS feed and an e-mail address and will probably reach almost nobody. But it only costs me a coffee or two each month to keep online, and that's a small price to pay for ownership of my online identity and a place where I can share the things that make me tick — learning, writing, drawing, making software — on my own terms.
Feels pretty good. ❤️ 🌐