Toward a Better Internet

This document is the manifesto for what I am calling “A Better Internet”. Because it is out there. It definitely exists in fits and starts. The Internet, in the first decade-and-a-half of the web, was this. But somewhere along the way, things got corrupted by what we can call “Capitalism” as a short-hand.

Still here? Too bad. In those earlier days, the web brought blogs and forums showing you you weren’t alone out there. There were people that looked like you, felt like you, loved like you, even if there wasn’t anyone physically close and the where you happened to live in was full of people who thought your real wishes were weird or even “sick”. There were places to talk for that, places to cope with long-term crippling diseases, places to find care and offer care.

And the Internet saw that and it was good. But the terminally-diseased among us, infected with the idea the world is a zero-sum game where some motherfucker is already out there plotting to take everything from you and yours saw a perfectly healthy garden sprouting and growing and being tended and cut back as time went by and decided it needed fixing. “No one is making a living from giving away this caring! How can it possibly be sustainable?” They begged questions that never needed asking or answering. It didn’t need money and it didn’t need sustaining. It would either persist on its merits or die back and be replaced by another evolutionary attempt and caring.

Let’s not oversimplify this part: it wasn’t all (or maybe even not mostly) bad intentions. Blessed are the toolmakers, generally anyway. If blogs and forums were working well for people who had Internet access and were willing to learn a little HTML or BBCode or whatever, simpler things that didn’t require technical knowledge or self-hosting would open the field to even more people. It might narrow the diversity of thought and possibility and open us up to a bit more chance of crippling infection, but the risk felt worth it. And it was and it did open things up to a much wider audience plus phones started to be part of the mix and the whole world was suddenly online with Something to Say. And everything froze right about there.

So now here we are about 20 years later and every discussion is an iteration of:

• iPhone vs Android
• Playstation vs X-Box

You cannot have a good faith discussion with anyone. Fuck that, the global tools available to us are actively working against you spouting your damned nuanced take and asking if anyone has thoughts or links or books they could suggest so you could be better informed on the topic. This is Thunderdome bro. Come hard or don’t come at all. Pick a successful social media-adjacent site and it’s optimized for people to post hot takes for arguing. Some of them for a living: maybe the lowest part of COVID for me was having all day to look into the origin of the meme my Vietnam Veteran dad had posted about people forgetting veterans and tracking the thing back to some kids in Moldova.

We doom-scroll by stories of people who had to quit trying to do content moderation for social media sites because of the number of horrible accidents, abused children, dead animals and just general out-gassing of the worst of existence they had to rate on a scale of 1-5 without ever stopping to ask how we built multiple tools to allow people to do that. They have always existed, they just weren’t “platformed” before. I was a freshman in college when we got (text-only, thanks Lynx!) access to the web in 1993. Usenet was still more interesting. You could learn all sorts of things and it was a precursor to the good Internet from a few paragraphs ago. But here we came, the original Eternal September and we brought our own infections to the party. Any time I brought a friend by, my roommate would insist on, while apologizing and saying he wouldn’t do it again, showing someone run over by a steamroller or whatever Usenet had puked up that day. If he hadn’t been the child of very wealthy parents, the cost-benefit calculator in my head would have let me beat the living shit out of him, Private Pyle-style, early in the year. Stop platforming … well, anyone. Ideas should rise on their own merits.

So here we are, me not beating the shit out of gestures broadly. So what do we do? I propose this: A Better Internet. Doesn’t need to solve everything, doesn’t need to boil the ocean and it does not need to fix anything that exists. Let’s just turn our back on what exists. Want to post weird, unverifiable shit about HAARP radio waves molesting pangolins? Great, I won’t see it. I’ll be over here and your ass is not invited.

Embrace the Linux philosophy of “Do one thing well”. You ever gone camping and had to actually use the multi-tool you got as a stocking stuffer on your 12th Christmas together? I’d rather go hungry than try to open a can with something that’s going to bust my knuckles (at least in front of others). Whatever you build, I should be coming there for one specific thing and it should be made clear what that thing is.

Ok, Good Work Big Mouth, So Now What?

Well, I do have the odd idea. Some of them are in-flight. Here’s the current list as an idea of what I mean

Anti-Social Site

Not quite like that. A message board for the city I live in with a few things of note

• No accounts
• You can only post once a day
• Your post disappears after a day
• You have to be physically within the city borders (as best I can enforce it) to post
• There are only 10 posts appearing at any given time (currently)

“Looks Like You’re Not Using an Ad Blocker”

This is just a bit of JavaScript built for the anti-social site right now. If it doesn’t find the presence of an ad blocker, it recommends the user add one and provides links to platform-specific options.

Inventory System

This is the least likely to see the light of day due to my personal flaw (there are lots, this is just the one likely to mess this up) of coming up with a reasonably ok idea, getting it off the ground and then blanching for fear of either screwing it up or not having anyone show up, stopping work and just day-dreaming how cool it would be if it were a huge success. I have vibe-coded the app and it is the thing I wanted for so long. I walk around the house with my phone, take pictures of stuff that matters (well, like the snowblower or a set of crescent wrenches, not my kid), note what room it is currently stored in and add notes. Expanded to anyone who wants to sign up, The Better Internet idea would be: buy less stuff. Need a rototiller, but just for this weekend? There’s a user within 30 miles of you who has one and they’re willing to lend it out if you’re not going to break it. Heck, they might even drop it off, show you how to use it and wind up helping and you all get to know each other.

You do not need to do anything fancy here. Keep doing what you’re doing, but drop the traffic monitoring. You don’t need to know who your typical user is or the paths they take. That stuff is great for optimizing to the common denominator, but let’s not. Let’s make stuff you like. Make it accessible out of the box so everyone can use it. Stop caring if everyone does. The last thing you want is everyone showing up. Find your people, treasure them and don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. As Tom T. Hall said, “Lord, if I judge ‘em, let me give ‘em lots of room.”