I was there Gandalf. I was there 30 years ago…#

In the days before the original DotCom bubble, the Internet was lawless and free. Like the Wild Wild West. It was a haven for the kind of things that decent people shouldn’t be exposed to. I spent those days honing my nascent Unix skills by defacing white supremacy websites. As investment and profit found its way into the Wild Wild Web, it became civilized.

Decent people shouldn’t live here; they’d be happier someplace else.#

For the most part, making the WWW safe for people like my parents and my kids is a good thing. There was a time in my youth where I deluded myself into thinking that knowing how to use a computer meant that I was smarter than everyone else, and that the Internet was a place reserved only for people like me. Yes, the Internet is a degenerate wasteland; yes it is fit only for pirates like me.

There was a shred of truth in that. If you had technical skills, certain laws didn’t apply to you. The major ones still did, like gravity, physics, thermodynamics, and the 10 commandments. But little ones like system access controls or copyright didn’t restrict me like they did “normal people.” I believed myself to be part of a counterculture. I read things like “The Hacker Manifesto” and “The Bastard Operator from Hell” and thought that I was part of a movement. My anarcho-punk sensibilities found a home on the digital frontier.

We are Samurai… the Keyboard Cowboys… and all those other people out there who have no idea what’s going on are the cattle… Moooo.

Also, as it turns out, the term I was looking for was not “pirate” or “samurai.” It’s “neurodivergent.”

You mentioned something about ‘Gentrification?’#

Oh yeah. The gentrified web has arrived in waves. A technology comes along, then a tech company monopolizes it, and then world just sort of “does it their way”. It’s like the market’s decision on VHS, or BlueRay, but with far more market manipulation. The power of the Wild Wild Web is that there is no central distribution point. It’s not TV or radio, it’s completely different. Attempting to centralize it defeats that purpose.

Internet Search - Internet search made it easier to find things on the web. It’s not like it made weird things on the web illegal. It just limited a lot of people’s experiences to the first page of Google search results. Search Engine Optimization became a cottage industry, and if you wanted to be on that first page, you needed to pay up. This led to vast numbers of people seldom venturing below the Surface Web and mostly seeing what people paid for them to see. They probably have no idea that the Internet is huge and weird on a Lovecraftian scale.
Social Media - Social media is supposed to help people connect to, and keep in touch with, one another. I don’t think it delivers on that anymore. One problem that I had on sites like Facebook was interacting with gamers and hackers in front of normies like my extended family or people I went to school with. It took me a long time to realize that social media was ‘The Gentry’ and being a sarcastic troll made me a commoner. Huge sites like Facebook created these “web estates”. Yes, users were now seeing a small piece of the deep web (not the dark web) but they were corralled there. And how do you keep users coralled? With the “Fake Internet Points” rewards system. People click the like button for hearing what they want to hear. So of course you are going to say things that get likes. You start to think in terms of getting likes. When everyone does that, it’s groupthink. Again, weird stuff isn’t forbidden, it’s just unpopular. In some cases it’s unthinkable.
The smartphone - The smartphone is great for putting the world of information into your pocket. But experiencing the web through a smartphone often means using an app. The brilliant thing about the Wild Wild Web is that you don’t need any app other than a web browser. Yes, I am aware that you can use a web browser on a smartphone, but before the smartphone, using the Internet meant using a computer. Locking an experience to a smartphone app limits that. You don’t hyperlink to things in other places, you repost them. It doesn’t connect things, It centralizes them. Combine that with powerful algorithms to coerce engagement and users now aren’t just corralled, they’re siloed. These engagement silos do the opposite of connecting and engaging people. Keep people in these groupthink silos long enough and they start to have trouble interacting with people that disagree with them. Now, weird stuff goes from unpopular to existing in a completely different reality. I am probably confusing computer literacy with media literacy, and I probably didn’t get much media literacy education in public school. So maybe arguing with strangers on web forums doesn’t make people interrogate their own beliefs like it did for me.
Cloud Platforms - This coincides with social media and the smartphone. It is at this point that we start to see not just social media apps limiting the actions of their users based on terms and conditions, but now service platforms like Youtube, Paypal, and Amazon shutting down services for troublesome groups like Wikileaks. For the most part, curtailing violence, hate speech, bullying, stalking, and fraud is a good thing. But if you are an activist, dissident, or whistleblower, being shut down is not cool. Freedom is complicated. Open societies are dangerous. Democracy is messy and full of compromise. Cloud platforms are privately owned and can be strong armed by governments and in the case of Twitter, they can be bought and converted into one billionaire’s political project. Now, weird stuff doesn’t just exist in a different reality, it can stop existing alltogether.
Generative AI - The promise of generative AI is powerful: making expert tools both useful and usable to non-experts. However, AI is still hampered by the cloud platform problem. I have used AI for a lot of things, like learning about subjects that are emotionally taxing for people, such as racism or homophobia. I have used it for writing promtps and to make logos for projects. However, there is a limit. When it comes to certain political, philosophical, or historical topics, CoPilot and chatGPT have shut me down due to terms and conditions. I can ask all the questions that I want about fascism but not anti-fascism. AI exacerbates more than just the cloud platform problem. Large Language Models are trained on data scraped from the web. So all of the for-profit popularity, centralized groupthink, and media illiteracy gets mashed together and distilled.

What do we do about The Gentrified Web#

The short answer is self-hosting your tools and content. If you don’t own and control your platform, you don’t actually have a platform. I have heard it likened to living in a slum. Sure it’s cheap, but the landlord can shake you down at any time and there isn’t much that you can do about it. If you don’t yet have the knowledge to host for yourself, you can build a lab and start learning. Or at least you should look to hosting with smaller independent providers. Or maybe just partner with a self-hoster? Is anyone out there looking for a partner to pool hosting resources with? Can we start a “cloud separatist group”? It’ll be fun! We can be gay and do crime.

The longer answer is to walk away from Internet gentrification. I don’t fully understand what that idea looks like just yet. It’s probably the Internet equivalent of living off-grid. Only you’re on the grid? Or maybe you’ve made your own grid? Like I said, I’m still forming the idea. The leftist in me is partial to the idea of owning the means of production, but the anarchist in me is partial to mutual aid. I think it starts with self-hosting the infrastructure of your online life, but the philosophy could extend to building your own infrastructure for your offline life as well. Making your own food, water, and energy.