Designing a personal Internet (an intro)
Zach WhitworthSimulating how the Internet could appear: .hack//
Among media idealizations of the Internet's graphic user interface, .hack// showed what some thought it could look like in their near future, although it is far from the design style we see today.
The Internet is portrayed as a mysterious, uncanny, and even pseudo-factual place, intimately connected to the waking world for better or worse.
An alternative to the World Wide Web before the World Wide Web: Project Xanadu
Ted Nelson argues computer interfaces today merely replicate paper documents as they are, i.e. Adobe Acrobat, the Web, but it did not have to be that way. The Web uses one-way hypermedia—Nelson believed two-way hypermedia was possible and preferable.
(Read more in Wired, “The Curse of Xanadu” https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)
The design of personal computers: Apple
Apple's founders held antithetical views on how the computer should be designed, leading to conflicts in development.
Steve Wozniak: What we develop should be “open source,” schematics should be made available to others, and our products should be easy for others to work on.
Steve Jobs: What we develop should be hermetically sealed, with barriers put in place to prevent others from working on our products themselves.
Steve Wozniak: A hobbyist or hacker perspective empowers users and fosters knowledge of how computers work, but users are more limited.
Steve Jobs: A business perspective holds that users should need little to no knowledge of how computers work, dramatically expanding the number of computer users, but few have much computer knowledge.
Wozniak would step away from Apple leadership in the late 1980s.
The design approach of Steve Jobs explains the longstanding difficulties of repairing Apple computers. For example, in recent MacBook models, users can no longer replace their RAM on their own, if at all.
We've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology.
By design, the vast majority of the population is left to be passive users—merely consumers. Many people don't even consider the Internet to be a massive network of physical servers and cables.
Low-tech Magazine, which now runs its website on solar power, visually displays the energy capacity of the hardware (a server) hosting the site.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
The Internet as a vessel for "content": Bill Gates
Bill Gates believed that "content" was where money could be made on the Internet. His 1996 article, "Content is King," set the tone for the monetization and flattening of virtually everything published online.
https://medium.com/@HeathEvans/content-is-king-essay-by-bill-gates-1996-df74552f80d9
This technology will liberate publishers to charge small amounts of money, in the hope of attracting wide audiences.
Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content.
Two decades later, we would see the emergence of the all-encompassing category of "content creator."
Homogeneous vs personal
The third most-used website in 2023 is Facebook.
The third most-used website in 1998 was GeoCities. (Only 25 years ago)
When GeoCities was shut down by Yahoo! in 2009, Internet archivists went to great lengths to save as many websites as possible. https://geocities.restorativland.org/
An example website: https://geocities.restorativland.org/TelevisionCity/Network/1842/
As a kind of what we would now call "social media," GeoCities hosted hand-coded websites and listed them in directories categorized in "neighborhoods" based on theme.
Back then, the index was how a user could start "surfing" the Web. (This is why it is still common practice for homepages to be written in code as the index.) Netscape was one such service that featured directories.
http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html
The handmade website was the arena for experiments with new forms of writing and media. Genres such as the hypertext novel emerged.
https://bobbyrabyd.github.io/Sunshine69/noflash.html
Even corporate websites experimented with their presentation on the Web.
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
The personal website was a craft, and even professional websites often retained the warmth of personality. My dad's old website, for example, featured both formal and personal elements.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170313172001/http://whitworth-design.com/index.html
The depersonalized Web
"Surfing" the Web is not as widely practiced anymore. Most users only visit a handful of websites, and the exceptions tend to also be owned by the same corporations. (Google, Facebook, etc.)
Personalization persisted here and there, such as on MySpace or Tumblr—which can host handwritten code similarly to GeoCities—but their traffic has dramatically declined over the years. (Yahoo! seems to like destroying websites.)
For the most part, users now access the Web via smartphone applications, which are streamlined according to the Jobsian design philosophy. In general, the "social media" dominating the Web today provides little to no possibility for personalization—only "content."
Over the years, since even before the advent of the Internet, psychoanalysts have come to face existential questions from patients, i.e. "Who am I?" This is to say that processes of simplification have made us into "increasingly empty vessel[s]," which we are expected to fill with "content." (As Murray Bookchin puts it.)
We get steered toward a desire for "authenticity." Self-help gurus say we need to be "authentic." This language lies at the heart of the development of what is now being called "Web3" by techno-accelerationists and neo-reactionaries. "Web3" pushes the idea that the Web should adopt blockchain-based systems, which cryptocurrencies already use, effectively creating a Web based on principles of authentication. Not only does this further the monetization of the Web, but it defeats the very merit of the Internet, namely its utility for freely copying and sharing information—its lack of respect for the notion of the original.
Everest Pipkin:
What digital files and digital artists do have is duplicatability. There is no original file. When I make a copy of a text document, 3d model, or game and give it to you we both have the original. We’re both having a first-hand experience. We both are engaging with the work wholly as itself, not second-hand documentation.
https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3
The personal Internet
The great merit of the Internet is its function in simulating closeness to others, a closeness which might even simulate (and develop) what could be called empathy, which began with the written word and has evolved into hypermedia and near-instant communications. Perhaps this is why the Internet has been so affiliated with eroticism. (Pornography, Snapchat, dating sites, chat rooms, etc.)
If there is anything good to say about the Internet, it is that it is a treasure trove—the largest library ever known. It is also a means to commune with others at great distance, to build global human kinship.
What one does on the Internet informs how one lives when off the Internet. One does not live in the library or in letters—you have to take what you learn into the rest of the world.
If the Internet is thought of like the sea, we might be sympathetic to Ariel's desire to be "out of the sea." At sea, we may find messages in bottles, artifacts left from passing ships, and other curiosities of the human world, and we long for their source.
I want to be where the people are.
Our time spent on the Internet affects how we live in meat-space. The Internet is a dystopia, replicating and advancing some of the worst attributes of the present order of things, but it's here to stay. So long as one does continue to use it, one must strive to use it with volition, not mere passiveness. Corporate social media reduces users to a mass. Human dignity must be reasserted.
Some people still make their own websites (and you should too!)
The personal website is ultimately not the remedy for the dystopia, but within the bounds of the Internet it may aid in the redevelopment of personality.
Instead of accepting ready-made dogmas, we should each of us be the makers of our own creed. … We believe that in the future man will be increasingly unwilling to live in cages and that, if he needs a nest he will construct it himself twig by twig in the open air, and abandon it when he is weary of it, and remake it, if necessary, every springtime, at each new stage of his thought. (Jean-Marie Guyau, Irréligion de l'avenir, 1886)
It may be that the decline of Web directories has made personal websites more of an individualistic project, whereas massive websites like Facebook (or TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) cater more to our social instinct, albeit at the cost of individuality. Our understanding of the "self" is socially-informed. "Personalization" has come to mean the display of one's tastes in mass culture—your favorite band, your favorite movies, or generally something that has been sold to you.
A healthy society should support a flourishing of human personality. If the personal website is to have any life, it will need to be connected with others, as opposed to the many you'll find today that are practically animated business cards. (For example, most of what you'd find on https://brutalistwebsites.com/ are portfolios for professional design studios.) The average website today may seem isolated from the busy realm of "social media," but one can establish connections with other users with hypermedia—this is what the Internet is built for.
"Do-it-yourself" –> "do-it-together"
NeoCities is one avenue for this. Like GeoCities, it hosts web-code for free and provides a platform to link with others.
If you have yet to dive into coding, another easy avenue to create a free website is HotGlue. It works like a collage in your browser, and you can also implement code if you want to.
The webring is an old-Internet method of connecting with others that some have revisited in recent years. Here are a few examples:
https://webring.bucketfish.me/
https://emreed.net/LowTech_Directory
If you like the idea of "social media" but can't stand platforms like Twitter (or whatever the hell they're calling it), Mastodon is one alternative.
If you just want to write out your ideas somewhere to share with others, blogging is still a thing. Here are a couple quick ways to start:
https://www.blogger.com/about/?r=1-null_user
The question of design
To design is to invent with intention. If we want to create a society that makes sense for everyone, that promotes general well-being, such thinking must be present in what and how we design. Why we design informs what and how we design. We design our capacity to design.
The Internet is a fundamentally urban system, like a city. It imposes itself upon and extracts from the rural, or smaller communities.
Despite its major problems, particularly as a hazard for human health, the city also fosters the potential for new forms of kinship—it brings people together. The Internet is not so different. It raises a question we all have to answer: How do we come together without destroying ourselves and each other?
Don't merely reject the Internet. Instead, we need to learn to use it differently. The personal website is one such challenge to use the Internet with a degree of intention.
I think more people should learn to code, but not for career opportunity—one should learn how things work. Tinkering is a useful practice. At the very least, learn the basics of HTML, and play around with it. Familiarity with the fundamentals of our environment helps us to better understand that environment and actively participate in its shaping. (The realms of computers and the Internet were themselves built by hackers!)
There is no going back to "Web 1.0," or a time before the Internet, for that matter. We should not see the early Web as idyllic, but we can learn from its history. We should not be fooled to think of the dominant, contemporary appearance of the Internet as the way it has to be.
Required readings
Motherfucking Website http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Better Motherfucking Website http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
The Web is Fucked https://thewebisfucked.com/
Start a Fucking Blog https://startafuckingblog.com/
Keep the Web Free, Say No to Web3 https://yesterweb.org/no-to-web3/