I miss the hopeful internet. (a manifesto)

I've been thinking about this exact topic a lot lately. I miss it as well. 

this short article touches on that feeling i have, where the old internet isn't gone. it's been walled off. but walls can be broken down, or walked away from. the one niggle i have, the piece that feels absent in this is that you do have to actually go and do it - the walking away - which i have found is held in the imagination as an insurmountable step for many people that i talk to casually about this type of thing irl... food for thought. https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

an article about how spooky scary contemporary internet has become https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-spam-isnt-the-dead-internet-its-the-zombie-... (404 media is great in general)

hello again! if you enjoyed this manifesto - or this long thread of related recommendations - i cannot more highly recommend everest pipkin's Anonymous Animal: https://everestpipkin.itch.io/anonymous-animal

i deeply enjoy reading blog posts like this, and this one provides a nice opinion breakdown of why 'browsing' for shows on apple (or in my opinion most online media companies right now) is unsatisfying and frustrating https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/12/on-browsing

you are not alone in your longing for the internet that once was: https://joanwestenberg.medium.com/i-miss-the-internet-c7e41544a8b9
"...we may find that we’ve become the very people we’ve been longing for..."

another piece, a stream of consciousness, a blog post from a blog i follow via rss and recommend: https://mycorrhiza.space/Blog/2023-10-08

choosing where you reside online, and finding things out for yourself.

As with many NYT articles, I find its "thesis" a little trite, but the intent is something that resonates: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/magazine/browser-tabs-forever.html?unlocked_a...

Kagi Small Web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

(also has links to more work in this vein!)

recent blog post about the internet and ai and feudalism and suburbification of the net: https://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/you-scream-into-the-void-but-the-rate-l...

(not as much of a downer as that summary sounds)

ruminations on the shortcomings of discord: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509

i am particularly struck by this comment:

"Ehh, I don’t want my stuff saved. Anything that truly matters to me is not on Discord, including stuff that originated on Discord. It’s easy enough to make backups as you go and I’d rather not leave a paper trail I have no control of that persists until the end of time. You might want to live forever, but I don’t. Just let me enjoy myself in the moment and then evaporate my data when I’m gone."

(apologies for archiving your comment, stranger, but i left you anonymous)

this short manifesto zine offers paths forward from the place where my own manifesto was speaking from not quite a year ago: https://ivanpapiol.itch.io/reclaiming-online-spaces-manifesto

another's reflections on the tech industry of now vs the past: https://twitter.com/ShannonVallor/status/1559659655097376768?s=20&t=3lV7sZBEFMx4...

a podcast about the cloud and it's physical costs: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-the-cloud-reshaped-the-internet-w-dway...

I've been a fan of Everest Pipkin's work for a long while now (I cannot recall when I started to like their work, but I know it's been a few years at least) and this article did not disappoint: https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/i-know-a-place-pipkin

okay this one just cracked me up: https://perfectsite.neocities.org/

I reread this today. I still like it.

I've been digging through neocities - I made up a new username for it, how exciting!! - and enjoying my foray into strange blogs. I am also reading the book Glitch Feminism right now: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3668-glitch-feminism I highly recommend it.

more reading/vibes, all by Cameron Askin: https://www.cameronsworld.net/

https://artofgeocities.tumblr.com/

https://twitter.com/cameronaskin

very cursory, but relevant: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbanny/we-should-replace-facebook-with-personal-...

further reading: http://jakec.net/decline.html