When I share websites I’ve made, people often respond with comments like “I wish the web were like this.” These reactions confuse me: I just made this website, and the web still is very much like this: personal, poetic, expressive. That is, if you know where to look.
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What if we didn’t think of a website as one thing that answers to a million people? What if instead, there were millions of websites, each one handmade by a single person?
This really gets to the core of an idea I’ve had for a while now. There’s not one global culture in real life, but the data magnates sure wish there to be one global internet culture online. Fortunately, as I’m sure we’ve all noticed, we are humans, not clicks.
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Beyond artistic self-expression, there are also pragmatic reasons why a diversity of views is helpful. For example, I was very disappointed when Yahoo! closed both GeoCities and Yahoo! Groups. Both of those were filled with an incredible amount of useful research, some of it the result of years of collective collaboration, and only a small fraction of it has been archived anywhere (e.g.: the science behind mercury exposure, research into alternative energy, etc.).
Neocities gives me a vibe similar to peak GeoCities. It also has the added benefit of being “open source”. Should Kyle dip out, someone can easily save their content and/or start another instance that other people can transition over to. This mitigates a few significant problems (e.g.: countering lock-in through portability, interoperability).
However, it also highlights another problem: How can we make self-hosting even easier and as close to “free” as possible? Low-Tech Magazine’s website that is hosted on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi serves as a good illustration of the type of thing that I am talking about.
Going one step deeper…Hypothetically speaking, how can one completely side-step ICANN and all the rest while still making their information accessible? Similar to “pirate radio”, is a completely “pirate internet” possible?
Yet another step deeper...larger psychological and sociological issues; CW?
Humanity should have large pools of constructive information that are easily accessible to everyone all over the world. At the same time, control across all boundaries should be limited as much as possible. This is similar to the Data-In, Data-Out (DIDO) concept at the basis of Fab Cities.
To be more specific, I mean that what someone “commands” in one place should not be able to affect the survival of people in other places simply because digital communications allow that message to be sent.
To quote a summary of the documentary, The New Rulers of the World by John Pilger [with some slight editing and an extra link by me]:
The myths of globalisation have been incorporated into much of our everyday language. “Thinking globally” and “the global economy” are part of a jargon that assumes we are all part of one big global village, where national borders and national identities no longer matter. But what is globalisation? And where is this global village? In 2001, John Pilger made ‘The New Rulers of the World’, a film exploring the impact of globalisation. It took Indonesia as the prime example, a country that the World Bank described as a ‘model pupil’ until its ‘globalised’ economy collapsed in 1998. Globalisation has not only made the world smaller. It has also made it interdependent. An investment decision made in London can spell unemployment for thousands in Indonesia, while a business decision taken in Tokyo can create thousands of new jobs for workers in north-east England. This might seem a very natural development if you live in a country like Britain, with its long international history as a trading nation and imperial power. Bringing the world closer together may throw up new opportunities for cultural and economic interaction, but it also exposes us to the negative aspects of life on a shrinking planet, whether it be the threat of global warming, the international trafficking of women for sexual exploitation, or the spread of AIDS throughout Africa and Asia.
I have highlighted a portion of the quote in bold. That sort of power dynamic is completely backwards. Why should any one person or small team be able to direct the activity of a massive group of people? Transforming the authoritarian and mob mentalities that drive those circumstances can seem challenging, but I think humanity is evolving in that direction. Every individual will be empowered to make their own decisions while also being held accountable for their collective impacts.
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