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blog/2024/03/web-aint-dead.html
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<blockquote>The strategic aim of these hierarchal constructions of history is to displace truth, and the invention of a glorious past includes the erasure of inconvenient realities. While fascist politics fetishizes the past, <strong>it is never the <em>actual</em> past that is fetishized.</strong></blockquote>
<p>Since we have established that the Internet was never decentralized, the manifestos that push such an idea we can now interpret as not being concerned with the <em>actual</em> truth and how to deal with it but instead with invoking a particular emotional response.</p>
<p>But if fascists are preoccupied with the supposed "invasion" of minorities into their countries, then who serves the purpose of the "invaders" in the "smol web" mythic past? Most manifestos pin the blame on, as stated in point two, the corporations that captured the people who came online around the time that personal phones became useful for Internet browsing. (Many an "Eternal September" comparison has been misused.) Unshackled from the previous requirements of being at home and sitting down at one's computer, or even <em>having</em> a computer, many multitudes of people were suddenly granted the ability to surf the information highway whenever they wanted (or could get signal, anyway). But since the small form factor of phones, even the 2012-era BlackBerries with physical keyboards, aren't conducive for writing HTML and don't have the battery life or stable IP address to host a website (even nowadays, and certainly not back then), the new Internet users were drawn to the newfangled social media sites that allowed them to publish words without having to learn a single line of code or pay a single cent.</p>
<p>Some would go on to learn HTML and take pride in making a website they could show off to their friends and family (I should know, as I was very proud in my pre-adolescent days to have done so) but <a href="../../2023/august/interview.html">most had higher priorities, more pressing issues, in their life</a>. And so for their purposes Twitter and Facebook were enough. And regardless if they stayed on Twitter or Facebook or tried a different social media platform, every new user increased the value of said platform, drawing in advertisers and making it harder for others to leave because of the loss of one's social graph that leaving would entail. Every fly caught makes the spider's web stickier.</p>
<p>Some would go on to learn HTML and take pride in making a website they could show off to their friends and family (I should know, as I was very proud in my pre-adolescent days to have done so) but <a href="../../2023/08/interview.html">most had higher priorities, more pressing issues, in their life</a>. And so for their purposes Twitter and Facebook were enough. And regardless if they stayed on Twitter or Facebook or tried a different social media platform, every new user increased the value of said platform, drawing in advertisers and making it harder for others to leave because of the loss of one's social graph that leaving would entail. Every fly caught makes the spider's web stickier.</p>
<p><strong>In the eyes of these people for whom the Internet was new and shiny, if not for social media, they would not have been able to publish on the Internet <em>at all</em>.</strong> And so it still is today. You have only to look at the fanart community for your favorite video game, particularly its more terminally online users, and watch them every time Elon Musk contemplates ruining Twitter further: they <em>know</em> they can make a personal website to showcase their work, but they also know that that means forgoing the algorithms and channels that led to people discovering their work in the first place. And posting to one's site and only using Twitter as a means of notification for new content, to them, just seems like extra work with no reward.</p>
<p>And in the eyes of most of the people who write these manifestos, they would prefer that these social media sites ceased to exist <em>at all</em>. They would prefer that all these millions, soon to be billions, of voices be silenced to sate their concept of technological purity. That is not to say that social media is a <em>good</em> thing, merely that, if the two options <em>in the minds of the non-technologically-minded</em> are to be</p>
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