Put your hands in the air and step away from the online.
About this "Internet" thing everyone's talking about.
I’m not doing the damn image this week.
The image is part of the problem. Every SEO best practices, write-for-the-web, go viral checklist template says you must include an image to lure the reader into your article. No images sends a signal that you don’t have any fun here in Squaresville.
You think an approved stock photo is going to fix my giant boring walls of text? Like, do you even know where you are?
The image isn’t even for the reader.
It’s about serving that gluttonous, shapeless, amorphous monstrosity known as The Algorithm.
My grouchy rant about the monoculture plantation of ideas once known as the “Information Superhighway” leads me into a further rant by way of my response to this lovely piece by
at the
Allow me a moment of autobiography to set the scene.
I was a teenager in the 1990s when all this e-junk began colonizing our lives. Back then, it really was exciting and new. You mean I could talk to somebody in Australia on this thing? I can read all these niche manifestos about topics I didn’t even know existed 40 minutes ago? I can send and receive electronic mail?
It wasn’t a golden age. That term is badly overused and more often expresses nostalgia than accurate judgment. Online was slow, hard to find anything, and you couldn’t get phone calls during the hour-long download of a 5 megabyte gif image.
This was back when people made phone calls.
Looking back 25, closer to 30 years, those flaws would turn into wistful memories. Yeah, it kinda sucked, but it was ours to suck with.
The suck was mostly to do with the form of access and presentation. Usenet was revolutionary in its time. Now it’s “what’s that?” Far too much text, not an image or 30-second video in sight.
The content could be superb. I’m not stretching the analogy too far by comparing it to last century’s Age of Adventure. Even up to the 1920s a good portion of Earth’s surface hadn’t yet known the sight of man. Without convenient airplanes and satellite images, you could believe in hidden lands.
Then technology came along and ruined all that by bringing the globe under the withering gaze of Knowledge. Not much later, robotic exploration of the solar system put an end to sandy Barsoom and jungle-world Venus.
Possibility was replaced by a tame, orderly regime of facts.
The internet’s the latest victim of civilization’s taming process. Tom doesn’t exaggerate the least when he says that everything is boring now. I believe the taming of the wilds is no small part of why.
But, look, the question of whether the internet is interesting or entertaining falls short of the real problem.
Ever since I was introduced to Natasha Dow Schüll’s work on addiction architecture — with a hat tip to
in his wonderful book The World Beyond Your Head — I’ve been wary of all parts of internet design, from the UX of the platforms to the material hardware used to access them.I give many thanks that I was old enough to mistrust the smart [sic] phone revolution with two feet standing firm in analog reality. The “Web 2.0” intrusion into every part of life never felt right to me. Now that it’s dying, maybe, it feels like fate is coming aright.
I use the internet because it remains the most powerful and wide-reaching tool for connecting, communicating, and sharing ideas that our species ever created.
Web 2.0, aka social networking, aka social media, is an invisible algorithmic cage built on top of the internet for the purpose of corralling attention and extracting value from it.
Handheld screens, portals into that libidinous hell, grant it free access to your soul.
In a post this very week, Cal Newport, the one online person who may be more of a refusenik than this author, wrote:
Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic. We didn’t additionally need all of these conversations to be consolidated into the same interfaces and curated by the same algorithms.
I don’t have to rehearse all of the social dysfunctions caused by these changes of behavior.
It irks me when I see members of my own family doing the scrolling-in-public thing. If you’re out with people, I expect you to be with people. I’ve walked out of planned activities over this. Few things are more irritating or disrespectful than trying to watch a movie or have a pint while the other party stares into the electronic void.
My kids, almost nine, know that phones exist because the law forces me to allow them out of the house, where many other parents seem blissfully unconcerned about “tech”. Mine are not allowed phones. That is a hill I would die on. If we don’t count the occasional supervised school assignment, done by laptop, they have zero (0) access to the internet in our house.
You know what kids do when they aren’t rendered into sessile blobs by dancing lights on a screen?
They get creative. They use their imaginations. They play with physical objects. They read books. They draw and write and play games.
I lead by example, as a good leader must. About the only reason I use my phone is for listening to audiobooks, a handful of podcasts, and music. I’m not a “scroller”. I don’t even have those apps installed.
We’re an analog household.
Enough of all that. Let’s talk shop. What can a body do about the situation?
Old habits from the Web 1.0 days are a good place to start.
For example, I still read blogs. I use RSS feeds and browser bookmarks to keep up with them. Blogging may be “dead” but there’s sure a lot to read in that graveyard.
(TIP: You can read Substacks this way. If you have a lot of subscriptions, it can be way easier to load them into an RSS reader rather than waking up to an exploded inbox.)
I don’t watch videos. Okay, I only rarely watch videos, and that’s nearly always an interview or talk from someone I want to hear from. Random Youtube URLs with “you gotta watch this bro!” energy receive none of my precious click power.
Tick Tock, not even once.
This way of processing has the superb advantage of not requiring me to be plugged in all day long. There are no likes or notifications.
When I am online, I’m circulating more and more through the Small Web renaissance happening on the fringes of the big platforms. There is still much interesting and obscure writing happening online. You simply do not see it with your damn apps and platform addictions.
Not only have you forgotten they exist, you’ve forgotten how to find things without the services of five companies.
Where do you find things? Here’s a small, by no means exclusive list of places to start:
Once you find a doorway in, it’s easy to hyperlink your way down many and various rabbit-holes.
I warn you that many of the small sites you’ll find suffer from the “meta” problem — they respond to the problem of internet dysfunction by writing about internet dysfunction, which ironically amplifies the problem since it’s internet dysfunction all the way down.
That’s a small detail. There’s much interesting out there to suit your fancies, and better yet, there are opportunities to build your own things.
These folks are even bringing back web rings.
Not enough for you? There’s more out there. Much more. From the revival of the Gopher protocol (which predates the HTTP spec behind the World Wide Web) and its newer cousin Gemini, to Tildeverse pubnix systems and newer projects like Urbit, you can get as nerdy and obscure as you want with your reading and publishing. Even Usenet still exists, though most of it is a wasteland of spam.
A good portion of such isn’t even on the “internet” as most people know it. Odds are that your web browser won’t cut it, and you can forget about an easy iPhone app. You need nerd tools to use them.
There’s a lively fringe out there on the margins only hidden from you by its lack of commercial viability. There’s stuff even I don’t know about—I’m more of a nerd whisperer than a full-blown nerd—and that’s pretty exciting.
Many of these options are tech-heavy, and therefore not always user-friendly. That will drive off a respectable portion of even a sympathetic audience.
Bearing in mind that it’s the absence of “everybody” that makes it so appealing.
Since I’m one of those Linux people, I’m happy using a terminal for many tasks that bog down you GUI normies. This includes the Lynx browser, a text-only (yes) web browser. This sucker is a dream for reading anything, from that bloated ad-funded monster to simple blog posts. Fire up a terminal, type in the URL, and I’m in an image-less, ad-free heaven.
Imagine a screenshot here. It looks like this because it’s plain text.
The good news is, it ain’t gots to be like that if you want to publish own your own info-property. Plain HTML and CSS are simple as eating sugar. Running a blog on Hugo is no harder than blogging on Wordpress (I find it easier). No crazy nerd-tech from 1992 required.
Publishing your writing, from one-line 𝕏eets to multi-part long-form text-walls, doesn’t have to happen on rented land where you toil in the fields of content to the local baron’s profit.
***
A bit of housekeeping. With some of the above thoughts on my mind, I’m taking a break on the weekly articles through the end of the year. In 2024 I’ll be approaching this newsletter differently. I started this Substack as a discovery tool for me, and it has been, but not quite the way I intended.
With a year of posting, and little (none) in the way of active promotion, my subscriber count is a hair away from three digits. Not inspiring, but given what I write about, it’s sort of expected.
I’m grateful for each of my readers, make no mistake, but this project isn’t landing how I’d hoped, in large part because I haven’t stuck to my original plans.
When I return in January, I’m changing to a more newsletterly format, with my longer meatier writing published in a different venue. There will be a paid option attached. It will likely not involve another Substack subscription for you.
However fun it is to write these articles, they take up time and energy that could be spent where my heart and intentions are, creating things of greater value than free blog posts.
In the mean time, you might be interested in my daily email list. It’s different, shorter, and less formal tone than the articles here, but maybe that’s what you like. If you’re interested in that, click forth and be joined:
Click here for Matt’s personal email list.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
Best of luck with that new venue!
Even though I make my ilving online, I long for the day some big boot kicks the plug out of the wall. Just so people can spend some time seeing what realisty is like. The internet is a thin slice of unreality inserted into life.