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The Outernet

NB: Andrew Roach's "small things Manifesto" says much of what I'm saying here, better. I flirted with not posting this as a result, but it was mostly complete before the stM dropped, so here it is.

When I first got into Gopher, around 2013, I saw it as little more than a toy. I liked the underground nature of it, and I enjoyed how straightforward it was to use, but it had no particular ideological context to me. It was just cool.

Nine years later, the Internet is at a crossroads. What once seemed to be a tool for bringing people together across gulfs of circumstance and distance has become a factory of nightmares. People are turned against each other en masse for the profit of a small handful of corporations that control nearly the entire consumer Internet. Everything we create is used to extract engagement - and by extension, profit - for those companies. Sometimes work that people did for free, as a labour of love for a community, is put into a blender, painted with the "AI" buzzword collection, and sold back to us by a megacorp for a monthly fee. Amoral billionaires affect the lives of millions by treating online communities as toys.

This is not what the Internet used to be, and it is not the Internet I remember from a decade ago.

What's left? Choosing to be human in a dehumanizing system. Making things, not for money, but for the joy of creation. Seeing our fellow denizens of the Internet as people, not as demographic cohorts to be monetized. Making new spaces for ourselves and those we care about and those we share interests with. Fighting a culture of obsolescence and constant "more / faster / bigger" by choosing to use tools that already work.

What tools do we have at our disposal? The collection of mostly-unrelated systems that I've taken to calling the "Outernet." Fediverse instances, built to provide a place for communication rather than an environment to maximize ad revenue. Internet radio and podcasts. Free-software communities, especially those outside of the control of corporate empires. Gemini and Gopher, the underground noncommercial spaces prioritizing communication and expression over size and reach. Art and writing, and sharing the results with other people. Personal websites, made with care, rather than a million near-identical Twitter profiles. The future of the Internet doesn't have to be left to a clique of companies chasing "more" forever. It's time for folks to decide what they're willing to be a part of.

There's some other things I've been writing on this subject, and I'm going to have more posts in the coming days; the next is on the subject of obsolescence culture. Be afraid.