Farewell to the internet

This website, at this domain, has been online since 2007. It predates Facebook, Twitter and widespread use of smartphones, or even WiFi. The earliest incarnation was hosted from my home, on an old desktop computer that lived under my desk. I tended to the site lovingly, changed the styling up from time to time, kept a blog, which was of course powered by a dinky little static rendering CMS that I wrote myself, to prove that I could, to show that I cared.

I did all this because I thought having a well-maintained website was the calling card of belonging to the hacker culture which I had admired and identified with since I started using Linux and learning Python around 2000. I was specifically following the advice from Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker" essay, which I read circa 2002.

The tech scene then was an idealistic and optimistic place. The internet was new and exciting and it was going to change the world for the better. The Inevitable Future was going to be decentralised, decommericalised, post-geographic, pro-privacy, anti-censorship, destructive to entrenched monopolies and weary giants, and empowering to the individual. Not everybody at the time could see this, of course, but we had faith that future generations of "digital natives" would grok it all instinctively and complete the revolution. The internet didn't just enable these changes, it naturally transmitted the underlying ideology, right?

Alas, it didn't. In the long run everything became more centralised and more commercialised. Online privacy turned out to be an illusion and it also turned out that almost nobody cared. New, more powerful monopolies replaced the old ones. Personal computing devices become ever more "appliancified", so that average computer literacy went down, not up. No "global village" ever emerged to increase understanding and fellowship between diverse peoples, but rather consensus reality was fractured into myriad bizarre and incompatible worldviews fostered in bubbles of search results and content recommendations, actively driving people apart. A weird cult of celebrity worship took over the internet, and people stopped reading and writing and started watching and making videos instead. Anything even slightly resembling authentic human expression became increasingly hard to find. Personal websites like this one basically went extinct, even amongst tech geeks. Computers and similar devices became consumption-centric and stopped even pretending to serve their users and owners, and society has just kind of quietly accepted that the legitimate purpose of devices and networks is to allow the people who make them to shove things under our noses in exchange for cash. Despite all these blatant failures, admiration for and blind faith in "tech", and uncritical acceptance of marketing spin, has somehow only increased. Words like "algorithm", "crypto" and "artificial intelligence" are part of daily life now, but they don't mean what they meant back before they were, making it genuinely difficult to meaningfully talk about any of this. It's almost unbearable.

I'm as fascinated by computers as ever, and obviously continue to use them professionally, but I can no longer relate to or identify with either the general public's or the tech industry's visions of what they are or could be or should be. The idealism is gone, the optimism feels entirely unfounded, there's no spirit of adventure or discovery or play. Nothing is fun anymore! Everything has been needlessly complicated to suit a globally scalable "production" mentality that I have no need for. Nothing is personal anymore! Everything is performative, for the sake of the big unified global fishbowl we frog-boiled ourselves into and for some reason won't leave. We've lost that computer feeling.

Yes, yes, I've become old and bitter and jaded ahead of my time, it's true. I realise full well that somebody 20 years older than me probably could have written a similar rant in the year 2000, and I would have confidently dismissed it as the senile ramblings of somebody who didn't understand what was happening anymore. The irony is not lost on me.

I'm not quite as sad about all the above as I must sound. It turns out there are plenty of interesting and rewarding hands-on technical hobbies that can scratch the hacker's itch just fine. I'm not living a banal and mundane existence in "meatspace". I'm having fun and learning stuff and making friends in a world without software updates or subscription fees or planned obsolescence or e-waste, or at least with an awful lot less of it.

As a symbolic gesture in recognition of this change in who I am, I've taken down the vast majority of my website. It had already been de facto abandoned for years anyway, and much of what was up was either technical content so out of date as to be useless, or consisted of ideas and opinions I felt strongly about over a decade ago but these days could very possibly feel otherwise about, making it a liability to leave up. Some of what I consider the best stuff might stay online, perhaps without any links to it, just to avoid breaking old links or bookmarks.

See you in the real world, perhaps.