So now I have this space I built for me. A place I can feel proud of because I made it. A place that represents me and the way I want to present myself to the world. A place for my voice to shine through. A real home.
Even if you don’t plan to build a full website and start blogging, at least buy a domain, build a page that links to your other online presence. That way you can get started with little work and when you start to get ideas that don’t quite fit into any social platforms you’re in, you have a place to put it – and people you’ve shared your address before already know where to find you.
Here I get to share my thoughts in a place I control. I get to piss around and add/remove new features & eye candy as I see fit. And on top of all that, I get to have a place on the web that's 100% mine that (hopefully) expresses a bit of my personality too. All of that is extremely difficult on a cookie cutter social media profile.
What I learned from this experiment is that flooding the internet with an infinite amount of what could pass for journalism is cheap and even easier than I imagined, as long as I didn’t respect the craft, my audience, or myself. I also learned that while AI has made all of this much easier, faster, and better, the advent of generative AI did not invent this practice—it’s simply adding to a vast infrastructure of tools and services built by companies like WordPress, Fiverr, and Google designed to convert clicks to dollars at the expense of quality journalism and information, polluting the internet we all use and live in every day.
There’s people who are really angry about a lot of tech stuff who disagree with each other about everything, including whether or not they really even have a problem. But all of their problems start with the fact that there’s a lot of commercial surveillance. So these people might disagree about everything else, but they will agree that their problem could be solved if we could do something about commercial surveillance.
So if you think Mark Zuckerberg made grampy into a QAnon, or if you think Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that TikTok is convincing millennials to quote Osama bin Laden, right? Or if you think that it’s ugly that red state attorneys general are following teenagers into out-of-state abortion clinics, or that Google reverse warrants reveal the identity of everyone in a black lives matter demonstration or for that matter, the January 6th riots, or if you are worried about deep fake porn, or if you’re worried that people of color are having the surveillance data captured about them mobilized to discriminate against them in employment and financial products, right? All of these different things all start with cutting off the supply of surveillance data.– Cory Doctorow
The future core of a internet humane internet, if we are going to be able to use it to do the essential work of surviving this century, is a series of linked routes that stick us all together and supports our communities. This is what the internet needs to accomplish. How to we make that happen? How do we improve not just our telecommunication platform but leverage it towards a better world for all participants?
But instead we’re all-in on deskilling the industry. Not content with removing CSS and HTML almost entirely from the job market, we’re now shifting towards the model where devs are instead “AI” wranglers. The web dev of the future will be an underpaid generalist who pokes at chatbot output until it runs without error, pokes at a copilot until it generates tests that pass with some coverage, and ships code that nobody understand and can’t be fixed if something goes wrong. If you think companies are going to pay “AI” wranglers senior-level pay in the long term, or that they’re going to pay for the time it takes to rewrite or properly comprehend the code being generated, then you’re missing the point of why employers are adopting the technology. The point is to pay fewer of us less: replace senior coders with junior, specialists with generalists, and the trained with untrained. We’re left in a world where we still suffer from the same anxiety, pressure, and burnout as before. Except this time we get paid less, if we have a job at all. This is an obviously worse way of making software. It makes for software that’s less reliable, less effective, and less productive for the end user.
just realized i've had the mollywhite.net domain for over 10 years(!!)
related sneak peek into an upcoming piece: i firmly believe that if you're going to spend money on one thing online it should be a domain, particularly as online identity gets more fragmented. as platforms come and go, you can always find me there.
My wish is for the IndieWeb to enable and encourage connection between indie website publishers and readers, allowing conversations and other types of interaction. My vision is strengthening and broadening the IndieWeb community. I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable.
I had such a great chat with Mike McCue on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.
The full episode is available here and on PeerTube/YouTube/the usual podcast feeds!