About Me (and This Place)
Social Media has failed us.
It's a bold opening, but it's the truth. What could've been a sociologically and culturally revolutionary technology - a service that allowed you to talk to anyone at all at any physical location on the planet at any time about anything - has been co-opted into a corporate tool.
Of course, The failures of an immense social platform will inherently reflect the failures of the society that created it. And ours is a society beholden to corporations and profit. (See: https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/88/3/693/5879710?login=false)
I strongly believe that we as a society know little to nothing about the structures that govern our lives. The corporate monopoly on electronic devices and their associated medias does far worse to your health than staring at a screen for seven hours a day. These platforms are actively harmful cesspits built atop a 100% regionally monopilized infrastructure that is much more of a plutocracy than the average netizen realizes.
We live a significant fraction of our lives on these platforms and devices, subject to the whims and fancies of the corporations behind them, and the corporations are starting to realize it. Each and every single one is designed to have a monopoly on your attention, and the way it is all connected makes it an actively hostile environment. We, as the humans on these platforms, have absolutely zero control over them whatsoever. And although it's what we use to communicate and live, although it has a somewhat shared culture and language, even though it should be a society, it is not - it is billions and billions of lab rats running around under a corporate magnifying glass. The only thing stopping our world from being a complete dystopia is that they can't use a microscope yet. Big social media works with big data, trillions of petabytes stored on expensive servers that they don't even know what to do with yet. With the advent and improvement of machine learning, however, we don't even require humans to sift through the data anymore. Corporations see you on these platforms as large groups, and they are looking to lead you towards a predictable outcome. Usually - please extend your subscription, or buy this product. I don't see it being long before we get to the point where they can influence your outcomes on a person to person basis.
And, on a personal level, as someone who was a child when these platforms first arose and is now entering young adulthood - corporations have robbed me of an incredible, vast potential for learning and social interaction, and I'm tired of pretending like they haven't.
Anyways. On this site, I hope to do a bunch of things. First - this is going to be the social media I never had. A place to put things that I hope people who know me will see. A place to explore my passions in a way that other people can enjoy and provide feedback on.
Two, I'm going to write. A lot. Blog posts, stories, novels (fingers crossed!).
Three, I'm going to be covering some unorthodox topics. Namely, "The Internet is dead," "The Corporation as a Religion," "Sociology and The State of Things," and "The World is on Fire."
The insularity of such hobbies as writing on the internet is not lost to me - but I believe that, in a healthy social landscape, this insularity would not exist. I believe Neocities is an active, healthy step towards the democratization of internet communication, but it is still fundamentally a more difficult platform to find other people on. Let me be clear - it's far better than the garbage being shovelled down our throats on other platforms. But if we consider the state of social media if all the active research that has gone into making it generate profit was instead put into research to make it more accessible and social, we would be in a completely different place. I support the Neocities project, and I support the Internet Archive's fight for a Distributed Web. https://blog.archive.org/2015/02/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web/