The rant I wish I’d written.
Category: internet culture
the Open Web and Librarians
This morning I asked one of my much younger colleagues, a librarian, if she knew what RSS is. I was delighted to find out that she does know, and that she uses an RSS thingie to subscribe to feeds via email.
I feel like she is one of the few. I have not talked to a single colleague who knew what Fediverse is. None have known what I mean when I say the “open web” or “small web.” They are all good, smart people, but they don’t know. When I have talked about the electronic spying done via Instagram and the like most have shrugged their shoulders and don’t seem to care. Many now are young enough that they’ve never known a different world. For them there has never been any privacy.
I went to grad school at U.T. Austin, in the School of Library and Information Science, in 1994/1995. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago its name was changed to the “iSchool”. When I look at the staff now, it is full of computer science people. The school is about to become just a department in the newly created School of Computing, where no doubt they are indulging in AI bullshit. This of course makes sense, as universities tend to chase the money, and the money is in computing, AI, and fornicating in the capitalist gangbang with the humanities strapped to the top of the metaphorical pool table.
I just want people – any people – someone – to stand up and say “I am an m-f’n librarian, an ancient and honorable profession, and we will outlast this bullshit!”
We need some indieweb/openweb/HTML-writing freaks in library schools across the country!
Walled Gardens
Crazy idea here. I’m not even close to being the first to think this. I just happened to think of it right now.
It should be illegal for public institutions to post information on walled gardens like X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, etc. If someone must have an “account” to see the government information, on a for-profit site, that should be illegal, even if the account doesn’t cost money (only your privacy).
Something cool
This person is running a website but not on any hosting service.
They have a small computer, in a box, in their garden, running server software and a simple site, powered by solar. Is it on all the time. Well, not necessarily, but it has been doing pretty well.
Update to Social Media Semi-Blackout Update
So, last night. Went home from work. Had a nice conversation and chill with my wife as we discussed some stuff with the sitting next to me.
Then took the dog for a walk.
Then had dinner and helped clean up as we talked.
Then we watched a Rush concert on TV for the rest of the evening. I checked social media on my computer for about 30 minutes, put it away, and spent the rest of the night finishing the book I was reading. That’s it. No more social media.
I am finding, already, that I want to check social media less and less.
Slowing breaking the chains.
Website Details, Blogging, and Ethics
First. Yes, I’m posting a lot today.
A couple of years ago when I “discovered” the notion of the IndieWeb I also spent a lot of time exploring blogs. By blogs, I mean REAL blogs. The kind written by real human people, about their lives and opinions and ideas, on which they are not trying to sell things. I don’t like that the interwebs have become, in the mind of the Great Unwashed Masses, just a marketplace. I don’t like “app culture”. So I looked for other bloggers doing good work and started following them via RSS (in my case, using the Reeder app — yes — I know – a fucking APP!!! — but in this case it’s doing the lord’s work).
If you still don’t know what RSS is and why it can make your life better, read this thing I wrote.
So, getting to the point…
I found the blog Minutes to Midnight, by a person who would become an internet/blogging friend, Simone Silvestroni. Looking over his blogroll I found other good writers. I also discovered the word “colophon”, which I will be adding to this site, but more importantly on his colophon I found some really interesting information that I actually care about. In particular, notions of website accessibility and how green a site is. Lots of good links and info on that page! For example – links. Look people. Links need to be easy to find. The text needs to be a different color, have enough contrast to the rest of the page, and be-fucking-underlined. Likewise, I learned about green websites — sites that use less energy to serve up a page. And page design that uses less energy. I think Minutes to Midnight is where I learned to stop being obsessed with analytics and to not spy on my readers (or help Google spy on them).
I was surprised to find that the host of this site, dreamhost.com, seems to use a green amount of energy. I’ve tested the pages here. I was very surprised to see that my micro.blog sites aren’t as green as my dreamhost sites. I am not stressing about it, because honestly my sites over there get so little traffic. I’m working on getting all my sites nice and accessible. The biggest issue on micro.blog is that I tend to change themes on some of them a lot, and it takes to put the link underlines back in. This site could be greener. It runs on WordPress. Honestly, I’d rather it be static pages, but at this point I’m not going to convert over 1000 posts and pages. In the future, however, who knows?
One thing I’ve become more aware of is the effect of images and video on my pages. I’m trying to be more aware of not using images or video unless they are really the point of a post. If words will get the job done I just type the words.
October 6 will be the 20-year anniversary of this blog.
Noise
I’ve been reading the Minutes to Midnight blog for a year or two now.
Simone recently wrote an article called Noise. Then he wrote More About Noise. As you’ll see in the 2nd article, this topic seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people. I was one of those who emailed him about the first article.
More and more I find myself affected by noise of all sorts. So many things want my attention, and I only have so much I can healthily give. Only so much that I want to give. And yet the world and the internet often feel like a parasite attached to my frontal lobe, drawing out my attention — my focus – faster than it can be replenished.
It’s an addiction. Plain and simple.
I often joke that people are terrified of being alone only their own thoughts. But honestly it’s not a joke. It’s the truth. With the smartphone you can be connected all – the – fucking – time to the Beast. You think you are getting something, but you’re not. You are giving something. Something that is limited in quantity and precious beyond compare. Your time and attention. Maybe your sanity too.
I had hoped by now to have a plan of action for 2026 for really altering my tech ownership and use. Simplification. Intention. Awareness. As I just wrote those three words I realized that maybe that is my plan. My ongoing plan. Evaluating what devices I use, and what is on them. Evaluating what digital services I use. Evaluating the software I use. Evaluating where and how I store my own data. Do I continue using the “cloud”? Is that really needed? How much of it is noise? Probably a lot.
There’s a lot to think about.
A few years ago I read a number of books about Zen. I have never really “practiced”, though I feel like aikido shares some principles with Zen practice. Maybe that’s why Zen really spoke to me. I read about Zazen, the practice of the Zen form of meditation without a goal. No “success”. You just sit there quietly, staring at a blank wall, and let your thoughts pass through your mind without really doing anything with them. My understanding is that you learn that thoughts are “just what your brain makes”, and it can make a lot of them. You observe them. You don’t act on them. You just let them happen. It seems like what you come to find is that most of them are, in fact, noise.
We already have enough noise in our heads already, generated by our own brains. We don’t need to add the noise of everyone else’s brain to that bedlam.
Yet another new web project
A couple of friends and I are working on a web-zine. The idea is to create a website as the homepage of the zine, and each zine is done as separate issues. Not an ongoing blog. A zine, with discrete issues. I’m fiddling around with it here…
As part of this project I am building the site “old-school.: No content management system. No commenting system. Not even an RSS feed. Just hand-coded html pages done in a text editor, server-side includes, and CSS. An email address people can use to comment if they choose to do so. I feel like interactions like “likes” are bullshit. They’re cheap. If someone really wants to comment, then email us. No associate social media sites. We’ll notify a few friends of the project, and that’s it.
It’s been a lot of fun to work on this.
A good article
My wife pointed out this article today…
https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-threat-no-one-wants-to-talk-about
It’s a really good article. Over the last few years I’ve really struggled with my participation in social media. Frankly, I’ve hit delete on many posts here on this blog, often before every publishing them, because I don’t want to be part of the problem.
In this article, Sexton really crystalizes some of the feelings I’ve been having about the internet, tech bros and the influence of so-called “big tech”, and my own role in it (even if mine is an infinitesimally tiny role).
Back to the Old Web
A few posts on various blogs that I enjoyed…
https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/
https://neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
Punk Ethos and Blogging +
Note: I originally drafted this post months ago. I went in this morning, did some edits, and hit publish.
On my micro.blog site I posted this while back.
I’ve been having this conversation with @grubz today, in a comment thread on this post he made a while back, in which he said that having your own blog feels so punk rock.
I agree. Fediverse/Indieweb is indeed the punkest thing happening on the internet now. I realize now that is why I’m so drawn to it.
The quote I was thinking about from Ian MacKaye was from a talk he did a the Library of Congress. From my notes from a library conference presentation proposal I never finished…
On the Definition of Punk – Ian MacKaye, at Library of Congress…
People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?’ Here’s how I define punk: It’s a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It’s just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn’t being dictated by a profit motive.
Ian goes on to discuss this a bit more. Here is the full video. It is worth your time to watch or listen to.
As we move into a possibly (probably) dark time in our country’s history, and as libraries are under attack by the Forces of the Stupid, I feel compelled to explore this line of thought again. The Public Library as an Intellectual Free Space.
Recent events happening in the ongoing enshittification of social media (and nearly everything else) have brought this interview with Ian to the top of my mind. I’ve been doing this blog since 2006. I actually had a blog before that as well. I’ve been creating websites about my personal interests since 1994. But not until now have I really considered just how punk rock the “small web” is. It is part of that free space that Ian describes.
Note: the rest of this post is what I added this morning.
My friend The Czarbar and I have been talking about this stuff almost constantly for the last year, as we attempted to move a 200-person skateboarding group away from Facebook. The effort, as I edit this post now months after I originally drafted it, has largely failed. The core group and a few others have joined us on Discord. Facebook (predictably) fucked us over by reopening the group after The Czarbar shut it down. This complete disregard on the part of Meta for the wishes of the original creators of the FB group is clear evidence 1)that we did the right thing by leaving FB, 2)that when you put shit on a Meta site it becomes THEIRS. Not yours. and 3) Meta and other big social media and “content” companies are scum and along with the purveyors of AI should be eradicated like the digital (and actual) vermin they are (I added this one because I wanted three reasons, and because it felt good).
Not surprisingly, the reopening of the group did not demonstrate to the folks who jumped right back on that FB is shit. They just breathed a sigh of relief and continued posting shit.
Back to the top of this post….
I will, however, amend my statement above about the punkest thing on the internet right now. It isn’t Fediverse. Fediverse is useful, and it’s much better than the social media silos, but
The punkest thing (and for those who don’t care about being punk, the BEST thing) on the Internet has always been and always will be personal websites and blogs, written by individuals, to express themselves for zero payback beyond the experience of blogging.
Personal sites and blogs, connected to you via RSS feeds, with relatively secure commenting features, and without connections to big social media, are the answer.
Own your online presence. Get a domain name. Own your data. Make it portable.
That is all.
You Owe Nothing – by starbreaker
starbreaker is my favorite blogger.
This is his more recent exploration of why personal blog/site/pages are PERSONAL.
It would be thermodynamically impossible (or some shit like that) for me to agree with him more. I don’t lay down the law here quite to the extent he does, but that’s not what I’m about. But the point is, I could if I wanted to.
Honestly, this is why the small web = best web.
Now go build your own site and tell the social medias to fuck off.
Social Media “Content”
As the months roll by it is actually kind of amazing to see the evolution of clearly bot/AI generated “content” on social media platforms. Fake “fan” groups and pages, etc etc. I hope some genius is out there writing a PhD dissertation on this particular disaster.
Bubbles?
I’ve been reading some blogs this morning. A lot of posts about the effects of social media. A couple of ideas keep coming up, which I will list and comment on below.
We are retreating into our own information bubbles that tend to isolate and radicalize us.
Gonna have to disagree with this. At least for me. Curating your intake of information is not retreating. It is the Enterprise raising the shields. There are way too many graduates of YouTube/FaceBook/Twitter University out there, many of them not even actual humans, blabbering 24/7 to propagate lies about vaccines, support Trump, and tell you raw milk is good for you. No one needs that shit, but there it is. Shields – fucking – UP Mr. Sulu!
People are losing critical thinking skills
I’m not sure most people ever had them, but this is more of a comment than anything else. Every single one of the Trumpbots, Q-nuts, and other wackos believe their own ability to think critically is unmatched. So when I hear someone complain about the “critical thinking skills” of others I immediately question that person’s own intellect.
Google – Is – Shit
Today @fromjason shared this article.
I’ve been playing with DuckDuckGo for a few months now.
Today I did a comparison search.
My friend Jeff and I run the world’s only talk podcast about the Traveller RPG. The only one. There are no other talk podcasts in the world dedicated to Traveller. It is called SAFCOcast (SAFCO stands for Super Adventure Friends Co.)
I searched DuckDuckGo for “Traveller RPG talk podcast”.
Our podcast was the first thing to show up. As it should be. It is the single best answer to the fucking query.
Then I searched Google. Our podcast was not even above the fold. The first thing that came up were videos on the Google-owned YouTube and links to threads from Reddit, who Google has a “deal” with.
It’s not really a surprise that Google now sucks. I’m a reference librarian. I have known this for a long time. The thing is, it is getting worse and worse.
My new project for the remainder of the year, which I’ve been meaning to do and not gotten around to, is to gradually remove myself from using any Google-owned products, at least in my personal life. For the time being we still use Chrome at work. I deleted all my videos from YouTube earlier this year.