Make the Web Great Again
"It's understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can't be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web."
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web
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Introduction
Many of us are blessed with being old enough to remember the Web as it was back in the 90s and 2000s. Back when powering on the computer felt a tad like activating an arcane, whimsical artefact left behind by some enigmatic wizard from a bygone era. A sort of spellbook that could transport anyone who wields it to a seemingly endless number of wonderful lands. Surfing the Web back in those days felt like going on a genuine adventure. Internet Explorer and Netscape were quite fitting names for the browsers that reigned in those days.
Fast forward to today, or really any point after ~2007-2010, and the Web has become utterly unrecogniseable. The endless prairies and jungles of cyberspace have been paved over in favour of online corporate strip malls, the search engines that granted knowledge now censor it, the creative and unique personal websites of old have been replaced by generic templated personal branding sites, and people from peasants to presidents have found their speech being muzzled by the Web's new unelected and unaccountable overlords.
With the sordid state of things, is there any hope of restoring the wonder and the magic of the Web that once was?
There might be, but before we can ponder a solution to the problem, we must first understand its causes. What is fundamentally missing from the modern Web, that is causing these maladies with its absence?
Tenants of the Old Web
In my view, there were five main unspoken principles that served as the foundation of the great old Web: Anonymity, Decentralisation, Technical Literacy, Non-Commercialisation (major caveats on this one), and perhaps most importantly Freedom of Speech.
- Anonymity - In the not-so-distant past of the Internet, it was considered common sense to not reveal any personal information online. While the usual justification for this notion was safety concerns - one can never know what kind of malicious actors may find that information and what they may do with it - an equally (if not more) important justification is that complete anonymity allows for an arena where ideas can stand and fall on their own merits.
Put simply, the more information is available about a speaker, the more people are likely to make snap judgments about the information they are delivering and the more likely some people are to automatically reject them before they utter a single word. Whether or not it's based on a person's way of speaking, their nationality or race, their sex, their physical appearance, or any number of factors.
For better or for worse, people as a whole will regard the exact sentiments differently depending on whether they're coming from (to make two arbitrary examples,) an attractive middle-aged Chinese woman and a male Hispanic teenager in a wheelchair. When the identities of all participants in a debate are obscured, everyone's messages can only be judged by the merits of the ideas themselves.
Of course, even when people's identities are essentially no more than an alias of their choosing, an avatar, and whatever meager personal information they wish to divulge, it's possible for cults of personality to prop up around certain users after they become well known enough. Many of us have been in forums or chatrooms where a certain popular user's contributions may as well be the Word of God.
One of the wonderful aspects of 4chan and most other chans is that the complete and utter anonymity, right down to the non-existence of user accounts. Outside of rare exceptions such as 4chan's /pol/ board, there are no genders, no races, no nationalities. Nothing aside from ideas. There is no way for a would-be huckster to generate a cult of personality or whore for attention (for lack of a better term,) because there is no way to even tell that two posts are or aren't from the same individual.
Of course even outside of chans, there is nothing preventing a user who has developed a reputation, positive or negative, from reinventing themselves elsewhere behind a fresh identity. For people who have been online since they were tots and have understandably made many embarrassing blunders during that part of their lives, this provided an excellent recourse from the Internet's unforgetting nature. Lamentably, the forced self-doxing (adding a phone number for "security", real name requirements, etc) that is so commonplace on the mainstream modern Web can make this impossible in many places.
- Decentralisation - While I constantly sing the praises of Neocities and Gab, I do not want the Web to be dominated by them, or anyone else. "The problem is not who sits on the throne, but that there exists a throne to begin with", as the saying goes. The Internet is the most powerful communication tool that humanity has ever had, and it should not be even remotely dominated by any person or group. This is the only way that freedom of speech for all can be truly guaranteed.
Allowing one party to have a monopoly or near-monopoly invites both corruption and stagnation. The best example of the former would be Google, and the best example of the latter would be either Internet Explorer during the era when it enjoyed a nigh-monopoly in the web browser world, or Google once again.
Ideally, the Web would function much like IRC does. While there are a number of IRC networks and channels that enjoy more activity than most others, there are no real obstacles to a person who is dissatisfied with the state of affairs in one channel from starting their own and growing their own community. Establishing one's own IRC server is moderately more difficult but still very much do-able.
This was of course how the Web once was, but with monopolies and nigh-monopolies in everything from search engines to social media to online commerce, it's woefully easy for even large and thriving websites to have their existence hidden and even their servers taken offline after they incur the wrath of a few large corporations. No one, regardless of their affiliation or their motives, should be able to wield this sort of influence over the world's most powerful method of communication.
- Technical Literacy - The decline of the Web has gone hand-in-hand with the bar for participation on it being lowered to more and more abyssal depths. At the time I had gotten online, a prospecting netizen needed to be able to navigate a Windows 95 PC, get online, find a host or learn to host their website, and learn enough HTML to create said website.
I am going to be blunt and say that this was not a very high bar for entry, yet it was still apparently perceived as too high by the vast majority of the world. As time went on and Windows PCs became easier to use and the Internet became more mainstream, the online population increased. Blogs and LiveJournals became more and more popular, Myspace came around, and suddenly even an utter dimwit could plop themselves behind a computer, register on Myspace or a blogging service, and start polluting the Web with their drivel.
The floodgates did not truly open however, until the dreaded smartphone (iPhone), a device so simple that even a monkey could use it, came along in 2007. This sordid event came on the heels of Facebook opening to the public and Twitter being founded, and together with those events, sealed the mainstream Web's fate of becoming by large an intellectual toilet dominated by the lowest common denominator.
Some would call it "gatekeeping" to exclude technologically illiterate people from discourse, as if this was a negative thing. As I explained in my Babel article about normiefication, we already gatekeep in most things. No one would willingly enter in a relationship with any creep that happens to proposition them, or hire anyone for their business regardless of their mental state and work ethic. Nor would any sane person be OK with a 10 year old getting behind the wheel of a car.
The logistics behind operating a PC, constructing a basic website and getting it online are vastly simpler than learning how to operate a vehicle, and quite frankly, if someone is too intellectually lazy to even do this, they should not have a seat at the table. This is not abstract algebra, this is "Notepad but you have to type in a short tag to start a new line instead of hitting the enter key" at its most basic level.
- Non-Commercialisation - I was quite hesitant to include this one, because it is truly a double-edged sword. To be clear, the fact that the modern Web allows musicians, artists, developers, and others to earn money from their work is a wonderful thing, and I will never oppose that. What I do staunchly oppose are the grifters that have turned the Web into a stripmall with their collective lust for profits.
The decline of the usefulness of mainstream search engines was a byproduct of not only censorship of various kinds by the companies running them, but also of swarms of con artists perfecting the art of manipulating their algorithms to artificially push websites to the top of their results in exchange for profit. It is worth mentioning that the point of the (often worthless) websites that employ these hucksters in question is, of course, to make money off of shoving advertisements for more useless garbage in the faces of anyone with the misfortune of visiting them. It's an astonishing circle of complete bullshit.
The siblings of those tiresome websites are the sea of insipid "personal branding" websites littering the website advertising banal people's work lives.
Say what you want about the old shoddily designed 90s "MY NAME IS SARAH AND MY FAVOURITE BAND IS DEPECHE MODE! HERE'S A PIXELATED PHOTOGRAPH OF MY CAT!" Geocities websites but I'll happily read through 100 of them before I subject myself to a single "Hi! I'm Joe Norp and this is my personal branding website! I work at Insomnia Solutions, synergising diverse paradigms for modern engagement! Here are some generic photographs to show how safe and "normal" I am! Be sure to like me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram!" snoozefest.
Again, I have no quarrel with people wanting to legitimately make money off of their work and have personally supported such endeavours in the past, but there is no doubt that commercialisation has trampled on the creative and wild spirit of the Web. I'm fine with the person making a livelihood off of selling their art on the Web while simultaneously contributing creativity to it, but I do not abide con artists screeching about their "brand" or trying to sell useless junk.
The difference between these two is the difference between someone playing the guitar outside for money or selling their paintings, and an obnoxious salesperson haranguing on to anyone whose ear they can find about their useless crap.
- Freedom of Speech - It's difficult to imagine in this deplorable modern age where people routinely lose their livelihood over silly, innocuous online comments, but there was once a time where the notion of the Internet being "serious business" was naught but a popular meme. True, there were flamewars and other drama, but people recognised the absurdity of caring that some anonymous person, known only by the moniker 1337Hax0r and a cartoon cat avatar, called them a "fag" on a forum.
As the normiefication of the Internet grew however, and real life became more and more intertwined with the Internet, suddenly terms like "cyber-bullying" began being thrown around, and hordes of pearl-clutching dullards started screeching and demanding that people's free speech be restricted to preserve their feelings.
One important problem with regulating free speech online, is that the Internet is a global medium in every way, and there is effectively no end to obscure things that certain groups will find offensive. As a random example, I am assuming most people reading this will not find a cartoon containing a bipedal pink elephant deity to be offensive, yet such a character appearing in Dragon Ball Super unintentionally sparked offence among Hindus because it came off as a derogatory reference to one of their deities.
The Web is not an individual locking you in their basement and screaming slurs in your face until you break. It is a global medium with billions of users and countless websites originating from every inhabited place on Earth. Many of those websites are liable to outrage certain people across the world, intentionally or otherwise, but that is part and parcel of a free medium.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The single most important thing any of us can do to combat the blight of the nu-Web is to boycott big technology companies and platforms (Google, Facebook, Discord, etc) to the fullest extent possible. The power and influence that they wield over the Web comes solely from the amount of people that use their services, and even the mightiest of these companies will vanish like a fart in the Sahara if enough people walk away from them and embrace the old free Web. Please see my
It's Past Time to Completely Boycott All Big Technology Companies and
Alternatives to Big Technology Platforms and Programs articles for more information on this subject.
In spite of the sorry state of the modern Web, there are still numerous beacons of hope outside of the walled gardens of big technology companies even now.
Kolyma and
Neocities, of course, provide homes for hundreds of thousands of netizens to set up homesteads like the ones that dotted the Web in the distant past. Equally worthy of mention is the censorship-free social media platform
Gab, which I also had an account on. Although I loathe social media as a whole, Gab's stalwart fight to preserve freedom of speech on the Internet against all odds, and its exceptionally welcoming and kind community, have made it an exception in my book.
Beyond these two platforms, there is still a vast sea of independent Web 1.0 sites scattered all over the Web. I have catalogued over 100 such sites over at
the Dock and am steadily adding more to the list as I find them. More pertinently,
Wiby is a special hand-curated search engine that serves as the de facto portal to the Web 1.0 side of the Web. While it returns far less results than most other search engines, the results it does return are undeniably of higher quality since by its very nature, Wiby is utterly unaffected by algorithm-manipulating nonsense. Also of interest is
Curlie, the "sequel" to DMOZ and a vast directory of Web 1.0 sites from all over.
Although they harbour little to no activity anymore and are a pain to find websites on, Angelfire and Tripod are still miraculously chugging along even now. I do not know of any way to actually navigate around them aside from using search engines or looking around in Curlie, however.
Aside from walking away from the plantation of big technology in favour of these greener pastures, I urge everyone reading this to spread the word. Not necessarily about this website (although that would be appreciated!), but about the movement for restoring the old Web and abolishing the tyranny of big technology itself. Many people are not only blissfully misinformed about just
how bad these companies are, or even that there is a whole free Web outside of their reach. Maybe even consider starting your own website if you have not already, even if you may not yet think that you have much to say.
Every single person who boycotts the technology oligarchs and embraces the free Web is making a difference, and even utterly miniscule snowflakes can become a devastating avalanche if enough of them gather.
As much as I would like to be able to press a button and magically undo the normiefication of the Web, that is not a box that will ever be closed. The only option then, is to inspire and convert as many of them possible towards embracing the spirit of the old ways.
This website is my avenue of spreading the word about many topics - notably
Bast and
autism acceptance - but it is also my way of demonstrating what is possible with the Web. My way of showing that a person's presence on the Web does not have to be limited to some stale, insipid social media page or blog. It can be anything and everything that you can dream up.
Further Reading (Library of Babel)
