Here are some ideas I believe in...
When I sign up for a social media account I surrender my personal identity in favor of the one that the platform allows me to express. I enter my information into a webpage, where it is formatted and collated along with the data of millions of others. Further, I limit my interactions to those allowed by the platform. If I am limited in this way, there is no difference between today's online discourse and Orwell's Newspeak. Even those causes which are driven by real people unite behind a platform mechanic like a hashtag. Unfortunately this simplifies the language, and allows efforts which mean well to be co-opted, misassociated, and abused.
When I first ventured into the woods of writing my opinion down in long-form, I believed that Medium would provide an easy platform to do so. But what I found is that the goal of Medium is to present articles of every kind monolithically. This may benefit readability, but it means that writing lists, technical articles, tutorials or showing text and images in novel ways is difficult. I've never once gone to Medium (over Stack Overflow) and been satisfied with the way the technical truth I seek is manifested. I'd rather go to a page that was hand-built for the purpose it serves. In an age of digital abundance, I belive that's a fair expectation.
Web Design is the Cinderella's slipper of online expression. I have found so many platforms
that don't fit what I want to express, so I've been moving on for years. I think that just
learning how to do it myself has been enlightening for me. Web Development is getting easier and easier,
you can embed or import what you don't want to make, and there are many libraries out there. There are
templates and systems for those who don't want to code. Web Design and hosting is not something
I pretend to know much about and it can definitely be annoying to deal with. I believe that
if something is worth being said I can overcome those annoyances.
I believe a free and open internet relies on the sovereignty of the individual.
I would rather see a curated page of content than the output of a digital profiling mechanism. The SEO race that started in the early 2000's has left us in a position of ever-changing trend words, leading to a massive amount of content formulated specifically to bubble to the top of the algorithmic stack. Instead of media becoming "baptized by time", it is "blessed by an algorithm". The new and inflammatory is favored over the old and good, simply because of the machinations of the core ideas of aggregation algorithms.
I noticed a difference between how I've interacted with Vimeo and how I've interacted with Youtube.
Using Youtube is a practice in maintaining sanity.
Youtube will suggest hundreds and hundreds of videos to me a day, swapping out every video with a
new one to escalate potential "interaction" metrics. Every time I visit Youtube, I only watch
a handful of videos from great channels, however the amount of algorithmically targeted
content I am exposed to is tenfold. In contrast, Vimeo's homepage is a description of
their video hosting service. Almost every time I've visited Vimeo, its been to watch a
specific video in high definition. It's almost always a music video, a short film,
or some creative content that I wanted to see to begin with. Once I'm done, I might check
out that channel to see that person's other videos, but I am definitely not dragged down
a wormhole of content.
Is a system designed to the benefit of the individual or the advertiser?
When an issue, a discussion, or an affiliation is reduced to its core keywords, it also allows the supporters of either side to easily label one another. How we show ourselves on these platforms robs us of our diversity as individuals. These labels affirm our self-security, but effectively allow us to label and polarize any discussion. It's incredibly easy to see someone as red or blue, black or white, in or out, and toss away the idea that there exists an in-between. It's incredibly hard to hear someone out, when they have to climb out of the bucket that they've been put into. This interaction model has left us in a world where it is unsafe to disagree. Disagreements can change people's minds, but it can't happen in one word, and that's what we afford ourselves when we reduce our beliefs to a hashtag.
The internet is a beautiful free-association machine. If I come across something with real value, I'll probably just post it on my website. I don't necessarily need to tweet, pin, or share it in any other way. I can form a social network by just linking directly to my friends or the people I enjoy getting content from. If everyone did that, I feel like it'd be a lot more fun to hop around and find things. I want to experience the web by surfing through it, not by scrolling through a slim vertical slice of life. Of course the search engine is still an important part of how a modern user interacts with the net, but it does not have to be the default.
Any targeted advertising, no matter the pretense or condition, is Behaviourism. Cross-site traffic tracking and other tracking techniques regularly violate the individual's right to privacy. This usually takes the form of a trade off between privacy and convenience. I requested copies of the personal data that various agencies have on me. It was accurate, complete, and immense. I want to hear about a product from someone having a good time with it and leave it at just that, indefinitely. The rest of the micro-attention-unit ads-economy be damned.
I am not sure what the future holds for decentralized networks, social or otherwise, but
I feel like its one of the only solutions thats maintainable at a Space-Age scale. It may be
the only way that we can push back against corporate entities, whose raison d'être is a
bottom line, from controlling culture.
The internet is ours, lets use it the way we see fit.
Lucas Rumney