What is this horrible future? Where did the promise go? For the past year I've been trying to put my finger on when it went pear shaped. Was it 9/11? Was it the Challenger? All I know is somewhere around 6-8 years ago I lost interest in engaging with the internet. I hesitated going to facebook one day, and then I stopped, and then I just never went back. I tried instagram and it was a little better for a while, but there's so much talk of optimizing and hashtags and shadowbanning that it killed all the joy. I stopped posting reviews for products or sellers when I had previously enjoyed doing that to help others make an informed decision. I'd get a fleeting urge to put my 2 cents in on a reddit post, but by the time I typed a reply up the impulse was cold. Why bother. It's bots-bots-bots and people misrepresenting themselves for attention with stolen picture or made up situations, or bots/people looking to snipe at whoever is foolish enough to stick their head out. I gave twitter a try this summer - a real, genuine try, because I thought important things were happening that I should help to amplify - and someone tweeted back, "No one cares." And I guess to me that sums up the godawful rot that has settled into the internet, and society at large to an extent.

I remember when people started recommending google as a search engine over askjeeves. I remember when I used to be able to find odd interesting corners of the internet through google. About a yearish ago I noticed how frustrated I was getting with the search results. Even though the depth of content available on the internet has surely increased, it seems like the portal through which I view it has closed more and more until I'm only allowed a narrow crack. I've switched to duckduckgo but it doesn't help much.

I built my first website on Tripod back in like, '99. I taught myself HTML and had some fun. I bought my own domain and had a proper hosted website in 2000. I used to really enjoy being on the internet. I had a gallery on Elfwood (before epilogue, before deviantart). I posted art. I connected with people. I made friends. I didn't give two shits about "followers". I've noticed how people don't comment on content anymore like they used to, and how I, too, feel discouraged from interacting. Because I think we all know we are meat on the internet. We are cows being herded through a slaughterhouse, and any sort of curiosity or originality is just a cue for some robot arm to slice a chunk of flesh from a belly or flank, and another robot arm to offer a portion of feed as a reward for our trouble.

About a year ago I wanted to set up a simple link webpage for business related stuff, so I could direct people from instagram to my other corners of the web. I didn't want to make a full website, because these days it's more efficient to use various use-specific services than try to write your own. I looked at freebie options for a link page and wasn't impressed. I decided maybe I could make my own using google sites. Google sites has to be today's version of geocities or tripod, right? It's a link page, I mean we're not talking rocket surgery here! A bit of HTML refresher and I should be able to bang it out. What a goddamn disaster that turned out to be. What a misbegotten wreck of intellectual promise. I tried to use their stupid webpage builder and I got so pissed. Google "help" has become a labyrinth of links of half answers that make no sense. And then I realized ... they don't want to make it easy. There is no commercial benefit to making it easy for people build their own simple stuff. Buy this service, pay for this - make it as difficult to understand as possible.

The internet isn't for fun anymore. The internet is for profit. And just like that "mouse paradise" Universe 25 experiment I believe we are witnessing the slow choking decline.

(I ended up on carrd.co for the webpage.)

Since then I've been wondering where the old internet went, and I've been looking for it various places. I've wandered through ghost town forums and checked out the cutting edge new services. I even downloaded the tor browser because I thought maybe people had fled to some secret place on the dark web, ha ha. There has to be a place. I thought if I kept my ear to the ground I would eventually hear about it. And yesterday I was reading an interesting essay about independent thinkers, which roundabout led me to investigate the substack service, which led me to a newsletter called Tales From the Dork Web and an article called "Gopher, Gemini and The Smol Internet".

OMG! The Smol Internet! Yes, please!

So here I am. And I've misspelled my username, so we're off to a fantastic start.

The Four Quadrants of Conformism