Stop everything! I've re-discovered the old web!!

21 August 2024, 3:40pm

A Rant about Social Media

I've pretty much always been suspicscious and disappointed by web 2.0. I held off joining Facebook for quite a long time and have actively avoided other social media sites like the plague. The irony is not lost on me that one of the major events of my life (meeting my now partner) would not have happened without Facebook, and I definitely admit that there are some positives that I have gained from these services. That is why I have been so reluctant to outright delete everything and completely move off social media once and for all. But I do find the list of reasons I stay has dwindled significantly. Right now, I can think of two reasons I stay on Facebook:

• The handful of memes that bring me pleasure, supplied by the three-or-so meme groups I interact with
• I can keep in touch with my family there

Other than that I find myself spending less and less time on social media. The ads annoy me. I have to do an annoying series of secret clicks to get a feed that shows the most recent posts first instead of what the repetitive -A-L-G-O-R-I-T-H-M- deems is acceptable for me to see. And election season is in full swing which inevitably means avoiding most news sites if I want to keep my mental health in check. I've also found the shift towards extremely short videos that came with TikTok incredibly annoying, realizing that I have two ways of engaging with media... either in a single static meme image or a 90 minute video essay. There is no in-between. This has meant I've basically given up on Instagram. And I have less than zero desire to create a TikTok account.

I don't want to be a brand

Another thing I've been thinking about a lot over the last couple of years is how there has been a shift in the way we think about our presence online. We're not just putting our ideas out there for people to reflect on. Or using it to share things in our life that matter to us anymore. Instead we have to think about our brand image in the way we post. Our "online" life has become so carefully curated to project an image of what we think we should be. I had moments where what I was choosing to do my "offline" life was based on how it would appear "online". This is fucked up. So I decided to just stop posting. You might have noticed this... or maybe you haven't. Lord knows the algorithm doesn't favour individual people over advertisers or influencers. I made a conscious decision to not blast every thought I had on social media. I avoided posting photographs of what I was doing and instead just live my life. It definitely helps that doing a PhD means I doing really do that much these days besides read articles, analyse data, and grade undergrad papers but I still stand behind my decision to post less.

I used to love the internet

And through all this turmoil with what I was seeing on the new internet--the one that is dominated by gigantic corporations--I was craving what I missed about web 1.0. I used to love the internet. I spent so much time bouncing around webrings reading ghost stories and looking at pixel art and talking to people on text-based-role-play forums. When I was studying contemporary art, I would seek out artists making web-based art projects in flash. I remember being blown away by an artist who took a photo of himself everyday and uploaded it to his website (fyi - he's still doing it today). Mind you, I found this guy in about 2002 after he'd been working on the project for two years already. Instagram wouldn't be founded for another 8 years. Today, this seems like such a prosaic thing - uploading a photo of yourself and I think about this project a lot. I think about many of the art projects that were exploring the boundary between the online and the offline during the early 2000's. I wonder if there's even a boundary anymore. And I wonder in which directly the bleed occurred... is our offline self more like our online one, or the other way around?

These existential questions still tickle at the back of my head and it's been exciting to see the wave of Y2K nostalgia that has crept over the internet. The rise of analogue horror has me reliving the nights spent sitting too close to the computer screen reading through the journal of Heather Donohue as she describes her time in the Burkitsville woods hunting for the infamous Blair Witch. Of course, nothing will ever be able to truly recapture the experience of not knowing exactly whether that movie was true or not. We can't go back to those innocent days when we believed whatever we read on the internet... which is probably for the best. But when I really drill down, it's not about the doubt that was raised by The Blair Witch Project that made it so compelling, it was that it had never been done before. It was a completely new and creative way of using the internet to tell a story that made it so captivating. And while the analogue horror I've watched recently certainly coudln't claim to be completely new, they are definitely doing something more creative.

It was really my delving in to analogue horror that sparked by desire to go back to the early internet. I started to look for some of those old art projects which not a lot of luck. I had long since lost their urls so I couldn't even look them up on the Wayback Machine and Google is completely broken to the point that unless you are searching for something to buy on Amazon you have no hopes of stumbling across something interesting and undiscovered. I've been frustrated by the sameness of "Content" that I get given across all platforms I engage with, desperately trying different strings of keywords in the hopes of being given something unusual, something unlikely, something... anything... I hadn't seen before.

Then I found Marginalia. I can't remember the arcane symbols or what combination of keys plus the konami code I put into Google that led to me finding this utter delight on the internet. I'm pretty sure it was a link someone had posted on Reddit (which, by the way, had been the closest I'd come to the old web because it is less about the algorithm and more about people. At least, it is for now. But I'm sure the enshitification is not far off now they have gone public). Marginalia is part of a movement to escape the capitalist hellscape of the current internet. It's an independent search engine that is designed to find things that you would never find using the big search engines. I tinkered a bit looking for weird search terms, but where Marginalia came into its own (at least for me) is with the Random button. Clicking on this little rainbow wonder will bring up nineteen completely random websites. These websites will likely have low views, be weird personal websites, and feel very very much like the internet did 20 plus years ago. One of the random pages that I was served up was yesterweb.org which led me to the rabbit hole that is the Small Web. I'm not even going to attempt to provide links here because one of the main points of the Small Web is discovery and curiosity. Here you are on your own journey of discovering what you are interested in and I'm completely in love with it.

Why this ugly wonderful website now exists

And that is why I decided to crack out my html coding skills and hard code this baby to look just how I would have made it look when I was building similarly ugly websites in notepad back in the 90's. Yes, I am going to use animated gifs. Yes, I am going to use cluttered tiled jpeg backgrounds. Yes, I will likely use at least one scrolling marquee text effect. And maybe I'll start adopting pixel animals again. But I'm definitely pulling up my chair on this little piece of turf on the Small Web and I'll use it post what's going on in my life here. If you want to stay up to date with me, this will be the best place to bookmark. I'm not ready to completely delete my social media presence yet (see those two remaining reasons above), but it might be coming.