A view of cobble stone buildings and windows in New York's Fashion District
I wonder what people are doing in there; by Timo Wielink.

My (Subtle Want to Engage in a) Divestment from the Open/Social/IndieWeb/Small Web

I don't shy from the fact that I have strong feelings that guide my outlook. I make sure to not solely make those feelings my only facet of guidance and look for things that both defend and counter the logics I want to embody. In relation to the open Web[1], I'm fighting something that I didn't expect to be such a concrete emotion: disappointment. A post came across my timeline that linked to a post of the same author that made me question my objectives in a few different spaces, most notably the loosely organized IndieWeb community. It reminded me that, especially as someone who reads and writes in multiple languages, that words mean things; even beyond the assumptions or agreed upon stances of a self-selecting community[2]. Things like this have influenced a lot of my decisions, like my leaving of the SWICG due to the very eager nature of allowing representatives of companies that have been explicitly damaging to the health of the open social Web. I don't believe in reaching across the table with folks who are aid to work on systems of harm[3]. Some folks are comfortable around these kinds of folks — my morality isn't domestic nor is it something that's a toggle.

This leads me to my point. I got more interested in the open social Web due to a clear understanding of the role that corporate hegemony has on sharing public opinion on events and the welfare of people. The events I've been directly involved in New York and in California contributed to this perspective heavily. I did also see the great benefits around returning a modicum of autonomy back to the people who use, share and make technology on the regular. These things led me to try to write more on my own domain[4]. However, the ability to connect with people in the same way that we've been (slowly) domesticated to deem as social on the Internet through the silos has been more valuable to me than leaning into the idea of POSSE — until one went through the Herculean effort to craft it themselves, figure out how to make one of the options promoted by the Wiki or other folks work for them or - on top of the cost of a domain name - pay someone else to do it all for you. This isn't an issue for those who have the means and don't have the tight assumptions of online connectivity that folks who came into use in their youth post-Obama (2008). However, for the folks who are the ones who end up mattering to my communities the most - these are all trinkets of the behavior of a subset of a subset of the Internet culture that I didn't realize (at first glance). Despite that, the underpinnings of what was advertised on the Wiki still resonated as something I thought I could bring back to the spaces I occupy and have more folks understand the value of. Ironically, it wasn't my use of Linux, my knowledge of Perl or things I've done before that brandished me a neck beard title in a circle I used to run in - it was talking about websites in this manner.

Amy Hoy wrote a piece that I revisit often because I think it answers what explains this behavior. I should note (not to age anyone but to show the speed of the shift) that I was born when she mentioned her first entry to the Web. My first time getting online was via dial up by way of AOL (and ordering a new free trial disk every month until we got banned) — not through school or some sort of camp, but by scratching at the door of an utility that many had claimed was open to all. This underlying tendril of "open but not really" is something I think that sticks a lot when I think of the open social Web and how it's aimed to be developed. It was great for those who could get in, had the resources and knowledge on how to participate and didn't see it as anything more than a novelty for nerds (like myself). When it "grew up"[5], all of that cutesy stuff was either moved into a closet of nostalgia, shelved into random corners of archives like Wikipedia or worse, made into pseudo banners of the former Web now made commercial. These were things that aren't talked about explicitly — you have to hunt around for this context. You might know chunks of this depending on how much time you've given to ISPs to exist in these spaces. But this is context that I try to come back to when it comes to forming the Web. At every turn of calamity, one could look to its genesis coming from either a commercial interest, sometimes but not so infrequently, coming from a white man who wanted to make a name for themselves[6].

The sociopolitical aspects of a space help determine what kind of ideologies and logics can prevail within them. This is something that San Francisco's techno fascist mentions in his book, The Network State, in the notion of his exploration of what makes up a new country (as well as his choice to mimic the flip of sides — reminiscent of the "flipping" of the two largest political parties in the United States). Since I've grown aware of what I've expected in a space and what I'm coming in to expect, I need to make some choices.

Does this mean that I'll remain active in the IndieWeb? Perhaps, if only to contribute to things as I maintain the only parser for Microformats in Rust, a utility list in Rust and I have the same utility project parked for Elixir. Languages that aren't as popular, prominent or promoted — despite the front page claims of plurality, it's (understandably) up to each user to keep them up. But I do think that I will move to expect extremely less of the space. It is not a plutocratic space in all tense of the term and unfortunately relies on the free labor (of those who can provide it, willingly) of folks who currently can't be supplanted (seemingly due to a lack of communal want).

Does this mean I'm pushing towards other things? Not really. As I mentioned on Mastodon and I make clear in other ways, platform or protocol supremacy is idiotic. It's a sure-fire way to watch something die over time due to atrophy, stagnation and the same kind of logics that keep aging bureaucratic blobs reviled by the majority of their subjects. I'm also not a "purist" as I have made clear with my choices and actions of platform and protocol plurality; which mirrors my being as well. I'm more interested in getting people to engage and use the Web in a constructive way than I am on forcing people on how to do so. This could be considered my reflections of being around the community for the last five (or more-so) years; we'll see what I think in another five.

  1. Or the open social Web, the linked Web — whatever phrase or slogan you'd like to use for an existence on the Internet driven by people and their personal, ideally non-commercial or non-extractive, interests. ↩︎

  2. This term sounds a bit detracting but it's the best one I can use to a space in which the folks who are the most represented are the ones who show up the most. This is indicative of any space — be it digital or in the physical. ↩︎

  3. I don't expect this to be something folks to understand if they also believe or endorse things like a colonial system of governance like "two state solutions" (look at how that has worked out for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas), or endorse things like what's outlined in The Network State or even defend the right to be a bigot. These things share the common threads of supremacism, either through finance, state control or homogenization of life under a single objective. ↩︎

  4. The domains I've used, from jalcine.co.cc to jackyalcine.com or jalcine.me have changed largely due to cost. Despite the nature of it being cheaper than a phone line, the utility of it in everyday life is so low that its value becomes non-equivalent. This is, largely, a fault of how the Internet is organized more around a form of feudalistic behaviors versus something that mirrors the classic American western narrative of "carving out your own lot of land". ↩︎

  5. This being when Doctor Eggman decided to ditch the planet/fox for burning/laundering money and the online cafe became one of the most profitable spaces since the discovery of cobalt in Africa for electronics or uranium for war. ↩︎

  6. This has been changing ever so slowly but the attribution for this for this makeup still skews to the same kind of representation you'd see in legal offices, governance, film production and the like. It's intrinsic of anything made in the United States as the ones permitted the right of invention tends to be the such. Tangentially, I do not understand why acknowledging this is so difficult for white men — you'd think folks would want to have claim to a lineage of creation. ↩︎