The Internet has become a place of stupid ritual.
Dominated by giant media platforms, financed by surveillance, the current incarnation of the Internet demands constant consumerist worship. Greedy institutions act as gatekeepers, controlling our access to each other. We gain status by flooding their conduits with countless fleeting updates that convey nothing to one another.
Of course, it shouldn't be this way. The Internet should boost the messages of individuals, not drown out or manipulate them. It should be a landscape made of interconnected personal spaces. That was our reason for being here in the first place.
To that end, every Internet user deserves their own server, hosting their own website, broadcasting their own message. This ought to be a fundamental component of our day-to-day Internet use. It is as reasonable as everyone having their own mailbox.
Rather than toss our thoughts into the maw of an algorithmic recommendation engine, we should maintain personal pages that index them, for visitors to explore. This should not require anybody to create an account.
Most importantly, every one of us has a set of beliefs which are completely ours, and which deserve to be stated clearly and openly. We should not be weakly implying these beliefs via our token public reactions to the news cycle; our web presence should be free to evolve only at the pace that we do. My website only updates when I change it myself. Here I can tell the world where I stand; this is my station.
We owe this to ourselves and to each other:
- to share what we know, and learn what we don't;
- to take full control of our online representation and correspondence;
- to discover online content ourselves, rather than rely on recommendation systems to satiate us;
- to foster and nurture communities beyond the walled gardens of online platforms;
- to affirm that we alone bestow value on the things we share.
In time, this page will evolve into an index of my beliefs. They aren't meant to be interesting, just publicly accessible. It won't be a blog, because it won't journal an ongoing process. It will be static, simple and hopefully consistent.