Well... I guess this is the start of this new site! To be honest, this entire thing has been an interesting process. It all came about because one day, for one reason or another, I decided to start looking through old Geocities archives (courtesy of The Geocitites Gallery by restoritavland). It felt quite like walking through a digital ghost town. I was particularly drawn to the old 90's era Anime fan pages for shows like Sailor Moon, Evangelion, Dragon Ball, Akira, etc. The minimalist yet maximalist aesthetic that many of these pages have are incredibly appealing to me. Some of the sites even still have working MIDI files!
However, I was also overcome with a sense of melancholy. I was someone who grew up during the tail end of the Golden Era of the internet (I went online around 2012 at age 9.) I experienced some of it, but never what it was like at the peak. That's why I can't really say everything I'm saying is coming solely from a place of rose-tinted nostalgia. I reflected a lot on this yesterday, things like how we use the internet in the modern day is so much different to how it used to be. With each passing day you hear about something new, like how AI is becoming scarily advanced the more we progress in the computer sciences. The days of having a little Dragon Ball Z webring are so far away.
Perhaps it's the simplicity I crave. Or the community. At the moment it's hard for me to say precisely what it is, but I've certainly felt that the internet, despite being in the age of so called "social" media, is somehow more isolated than it ever has been. You're less of a person and more apart of a mass, centralized group. Just try standing out on a website like Reddit, what with its terrible 'upvote/downvote' system that encourages group think, or Twitter, where despite being in this Information Age, information goes to die when stripped of all nuance and reduced to easily reactionable headlines. A game of twisting information to fit your own narritve.
These days it's hard not to feel like everything you consume is being prepared by some Algorithmic masterchef. These sites feed you exactly what you want to consume, thus trapping you in a bubble or echochamber of your own thoughts. Confirmation bias abounds. There's no need to interact with people who might think even the slightest difference to you! With that in mind it's easy to see why the internet feels so divided yet centralized. Instead of a network it's more like a web of small bubbles under the thumb of huge corporations. You're free to be yourself in the same way you're able to be freely yourself in a cyberpunk megapolis. To me, it's quite telling that people heard Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter and bring about "free speech" or whatever and jumped right on that train. Yes, because that's what we need right now, another billionaire making empty promises of nothing about a subject that's already stupid to begin with. The Wild West is over and we're entering the Industrial Revolution, turned into machinations by the rich elite for their own profit. Journalists and news agencies have a sole interest in cooking up the next outrage headlines for engagement, grifters are looking to spread division even further so they can profit from it. Is there truly no escape?
The answer is: no, because it's only going to get pushed to the limits. There's no getting off this trainwreck but there are ways to minimalize it. A good way is to decrease your engagement with social media sites as best as you possibly can. Recently, I deleted Twitter off my phone, and I recommend doing the same (if it isn't like, part of your job of course). There's really no benefit to be had by staying on sites like that. In my 4+ years of consistently using Twitter I haven't once felt an actual use for it, other than to be fed the latest happenings for when I'm bored. Doesn't that feel strange, though? Using world changing news for essentially no other reason than that you're bored? Back when 9/11 happened, my father didn't find out until the following day. These days you would be immediately notified, along with every single other minute detail of this tragedy. Not to minimize important world events or tragedies but there is only so much the human mind can take. You sit there, doomscrolling through all of it, knowing in the back of your mind that there isn't a single thing you can do about it. You think, "Maybe I'm doing my part by staying informed!". But we both know that isn't true. The best you and I can do is live our lives.
Neocities has given me endless creative control over what I do and put on my site and for that, I'm grateful. I was initially put off by the fact I had to learn basic HTML to even figure it out. "What was this?" I thought to myself. "Why can't it be a premade website builder like Wix or something?". But, as it turns out, I'm enjoying this way more than if it was a dragndrop format. The Internet may be going through the worst phase we've ever seen, but at least there are pockets of people out there like me who wish to preserve this user creation orientation, to protect true freedom of expression. Not by being able to say slurs on Twitter or something. Actual human connection.
Isn't that the dream?
-Avakira, Febuary 20th, 2023. Monday. 10:52 AM.
