The "Old Web" never went away!

2024-11-05

The internet has a peculiar habit of dying. Public consensus seems to be that the internet died in 2016, but I could easily see that time of death being pushed back to any number of earlier dates. 2014 (The "fappening"), 2008(launch of the iphone 3g), all the way back to the Eternal September in 1993. Most creatures can't survive dying even once, and yet the internet is continually undergoing increasingly frequent death-events, while remaining undead.

The present state of "social" media coagulating with Artificial Pseudo Intelligence automating slop generation coinciding with the enshittification of search engines, accelerated by a wave of nostalgia for the 2000s, has a large number of individuals preaching the apocalyptic gospel of dead internet theory. With this alongside the historical narrative of the internet's many deaths, we are left with a "fall of man" type meta-structure positioned as the common-sense lens with which to view this technology. This anti-whig history of the internet is not entirely false: we have seen in real time these platforms get measurably worse, alongside the increase in consumer adoption of internet technologies constantly thrusting new users into the space, continuously disrupting existing cultures and flows. But like any historical meta-narrative, it may have use as a generalisation, but it fails to capture the infinite complexity at hand. The anti-whig view of internet history, in its calls to "return to the old internet, bring back forums!", ignores a very simple fact.

Some of us never stopped using forums.

This is actually very telling, as it clearly indicates what sorts of people are writing this history. For the purposes of this post I'm going to call them "normans", because I think it's funny. On the one hand it's a bastardisation of the term "normie", and it also calls back to the Norman invasion of England in 1066. I'm also going to probably end up borrowing some terminology from the realm of real life colonialism. Obviously the severity of the experiences of real life indigenous populations being subject to imperial expansion and colonialism aren't comparable to the harm caused by "internet sucks now", I'm just stealing some useful language. As Matthew Graybosch of starbreaker.org said recently:

"As far as I'm concerned, the personal and non-commercial web is the web; the various names it's been given — indie web, small web, personal web, etc. — are bad framing. It's the commercial and corporate web and social media — including the Fediverse — that we should be othering, instead of permitting ourselves to be othered." I tend to agree with this position, and I will be referring to the "commercial and corporate web and social media" as "meta-meatspace", as coined by Nyx in Hello From The Wired: And Introduction To Cyber-Nihilism.

Finally, I'm going to lump forums, BBSs, imageboards, textboards etc all under the umbrella term of "boards", just for convenience.

Ok terminology now established, who are the people writing the anti-whig history of the web? We can infer from their narrative that they must comprise the following groups:

We know the normans comprise these groups due to the fact that any indigenous netizens would never frame an argument in favour of personal websites and boards as the primary modality of interaction with the web, against meta-meatspace, in terms of a "revival" or a "return", because these things never died. While the users and even the boards themselves may come and go, the cultural practices have been continuous. I myself have visited boards of some kind almost every day for the majority of my lifetime. I frequent boards with 20 years of continuous history. Are these practices under existential threat from capitalists and colonisers? Yes. But that's a very different thing from being dead.

The framing of web culture as in need or revival and by implication "already dead" is an act of erasure. In erasing our existing culture the normans hope to recuperate our self-defence actions and colonise our spaces, all the while framing themselves as being on our side. Well I don't remember us asking for your help.

We're not a monolith. Normans have a rose-tinted view of the web because they haven't really been there. Anyone who's been on the boards knows that they suck. I can think of any number of times when moderators in various spaces have abused their powers up to and including nuking whole websites over personal insults. Like the hill tribes of Zomia, we tend to schism at any available opportunity, forming splinter groups who migrate elsewhere. A lot of us are arseholes or just down right stupid. We argue a lot. We have long lasting feuds between groups and websites. We have a strong preference for anonymity. We use language that we probably shouldn't. We won't tell you where we hang out because if you have to ask, then you shouldn't know.

Normans are obsessed with a growth mentality. They believe that a successful website is a growing website, and that in order to grow you must focus on "accessibility". Now when that comes to ensuring that particular groups with disabilities can still use your thing, this is a perfectly admirable goal. However, this gets twisted into an advocacy of deskilling, a knee-jerk aversion to any situation in which one might actually learn something. I've had experiences with normans where they have been entirely put off the web due to their aversion to having to do something as simple as write html or ssh into a server. It's not complicated, if you're that terrified of technology, this stuff isn't for you. Not everything has to be for you, and that's okay. You probably wouldn't like it here anyway, I'm sure you would be more happy hanging out with your friends in meatspace and going to a "club" or whatever it is normans like doing. The widespread adoption of personal computers and the internet was not some sort of democratising progressive force, it was the cynical business strategy of corporations trying to maximise their customer-base.

As I said earlier, just because the web isn't dead, doesn't mean it isn't under attack. To resist colonisation, we must degrow and rewild the web. This is not to say that the web can't have any new users. It's important to continue to pass down our traditions. It's just that there must be mechanisms whereby new users self-select against normanism, limiting our growth to a sustainable and dunbar compliant degree. Degrowing the web also involves resisting meta-meatspace incursion by any means necessary. Corey Doctorow has noted leaving social media entails high switching costs:

"the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends and customers you lose when you switch away."

As he notes, normans are using meta-meatspace to do meatspace things, keep up with family members, friend groups, and customers. Keep our spaces wild by encouraging anonymity to counter the first two, and non-commercialised for the third. There's no need to convince these people to leave social media, keep them there and then we don't have to deal with them.

For some reason, normans want to immediately be treated as equal wherever they go. They have been trained to think this way by meta-meatspace platforms which discourage the formation of unique culture to maximise "seamlessness" and "user experience". It's important that when we come across newfriend behaviour in our spaces, we call it out and encourage these individuals to lurk moar or go back.

Finally, distrust anyone who claims to have some technological solution to colonisation of the web which involves an additive process. Protocols like gemini and gopher are subtractive, they don't aim to extend the web by building on top of it to fix it. They are coexistant protocols which remove complexity, and in the case of gopher have an even longer history of continuous use than the web. Most importantly, they only aim to facilitate our existing cultural practices. Do not trust people who think they can fix the web by making meta-meatspace even more like regular meatspace. Resist these colonisers like we resisted the Web3 scammers before them.