There have been a few pieces written lately about the desire to rethink the way we use modern technology, which has not only become the dominant factor in literally every aspect of our lives, but also has shaped our world into a more homogeneous, automated, boring entity. The internet, once a strange adventure land of creativity and weirdness (both good and bad) – has morphed into a space where a few large sites dominate everything from socializing and publishing to sales and news dispersal. In the case of Google, we’ve been conditioned over the years to trust them with almost all of our information needs, only to be told now to scratch all that in the name of the “progress” of AI. Now we’re expected to be patient while the company’s infant LLM learns and hallucinates as it tries to parse stolen content – never mind the potential damage that patience may cause.
Gregory Barber writes, in “Everyone is a Luddite Now” -a review of Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine – that the Luddites of old were maligned by the lies of the elite. The idea that they were afraid of technology or just didn’t like it wasn’t true. They were fighting against the exploitative system that developed and used technology like automated looms. Today, a similar view is taking hold and “Like the Luddites who struck against machine-spun fabric and factory life, workers today are rising up against automated warehouses and gig work and AI-generated content. Behind them stand the same old merchants of progress: the likes of Marc Andreessen…(who) published a ‘techno-optimist manifesto’ labeling any and all questioners of progress as ‘liars.'”
It isn’t just the growth of AI or self-driving cars that are giving people pause. After years of mind-spinning change, both in our technology and in our society in general, people are hoping for a kinder, gentler, simpler pocket of the world. In an article for Rolling Stone, Anil Dash declares that “The Internet is About to get Weird Again,” and points to the growth of people expressing more creativity in their own online space. The bland sameness of the last decade stifled much of the type of innovation that was seen in the early days of the web, but Dash notes that “…the rise of new networks and alternative platforms has inspired a resurgence in these kinds of creations that hasn’t been seen since the early 2000s.”
I think that most of us can see that yes, there are valid and helpful applications for AI and that perhaps even self-driving cars could be helpful if the geniuses building the things would at least finish them before putting them out into the world. In the same vein, it’s easy to see the benefit of large, corporate social sites for certain things. The growing popularity of the various Mastodon servers or sites like BlueSky are maybe even more important though, in that they give people alternative destinations and more options than what a single dominant company can provide. Having a nuanced, cautious take on what a few powerful men (always men) isn’t a backwards hatred of technology – it’s a refusal to continue to be their unpaid and completely unvalued product.
I was inspired by all of this discourse and decided to once again try nurturing my own domain. Not only did I have a lot of fun with my old Blogger and Movable Type spaces back in the day, but what I learned from that experimentation helped me career-wise, where I was able to move from tech support to web and software design. The early days were good to me in a lot of ways.
So. This is an attempt to do something fun and creative, and to welcome the flowering weeds of digital weirdness in the cold cracked sidewalk of the corporate web. Is that too cheesy? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s too a more positive, creative, safe corner of the web.