Cold summer. A cold heart
beats in my chest
as I from my house depart,
legs stiff, left arm
aching.

Father spoke, "You are going to kill this tree."
It slipped
from his lips
like a prophecy.
Dogs outside my bedroom window gnawing
on the Velouria Bush, Nidhogg,
portent of the Eschaton.
Too short, too squat,
too weakened from the bark not
there anymore
to hang myself from branch's ledge
in hopes of gaining the knowledge
to see this world through to its bitter end.

I kneel before the now-fenced-in stump
and reach forward. My limbs falter.
A bramble or some other thorn from Dead End Shrine
draws a gash through my skin, nature's penknife.
Rivulets of blood stream
down without recognition of pain,
carmine trickles, a river, a flood,
guided by the soft-falling rain
before the altar.

And I pray,

let us reconcile before closes this day.
Dead-End King,
lead me to victimless iniquity.
Lead me to damnation
without hurting a single being
undeserving.
				

It's midway through evening. The sun has set, but there is still plenty of light to see by, both from the half-moon and the fire raging in the brand-new firepit built only a few hours before. I'm sitting in a lawn chair in a half-circle with a few other people. My mother and the neighbor lady from the house behind us are drinking wine from a bottle with a tacky-looking trans flag plastered on it, because Corporate Pride is in full swing and apparently "rainbow-washing" everything is now profitable. My mother offers me a sip, but it burns the whole way down my throat. A three-year-old plucks weeds from my garden and keeps depositing the leaves in one of the pockets of my hoodie, no matter how much I tell her to stop. There is a man in one corner, but he keeps his mouth shut for the most part, mostly only there in case his wife accidentally drinks too much and needs to be helped home.

At one point my mother pulls out her phone and starts scrolling on Facebook. There's another food shelf pickup the next day. A reminder of her son's friend's upcoming graduation party. A "Facebook memory" with long-forgotten baby photos. Local offers and requests for help from the "local boomer containment group", as we like to call it.

I sit in my chair as the three-year-old girl slips a rock into my pocket full of leaves and think to myself how much more pleasant it is being outside with only women (well, except for the male who remains silent) than downstairs where one of my brothers screams obscenities into a Roblox roleplay channel on Discord.

I think to myself, do channers and Neocities sharecroppers and fediverse users think about moments like this when they wholesale declare Facebook and other mainstream social media sites as pure unredeemable trash? Do they consider the much-needed contact with extended family members? The struggling communities trying to support each other? The friendships attempting to prevent unraveling from physical distance? The human connections, exploited by advertisers as they are, there because they know no platform better?

I think to myself and wonder, how much of alt-tech's hatred of Facebook is genuinely because of the datamining and algorithmic manipulation, and how much is just hatred, misogyny in its purest sense, of the stereotype of the suburban winemom "Karen" just trying to go about her day?

One of the funny effects of having stared death in the face multiple times with the full acknowledgement of another meeting imminent within the year is that a lot of the things I prioritized are no longer so. It is true, as an oft-mocked article declares, that "you can be a different person after the pandemic". I still hate proprietary software and corporate surveillance, but now I find my conscience insists I weigh the pull of the purity spiral against the value I put on the people I love and cherish in my real life. It insists that I weigh my insistence on only using open-source software against the inevitable isolation engendered by the fact that nobody I know away from the keyboard holds the same beliefs as me, by the fact that they refuse to learn and I simply don't have the time to convince them and also move enough of them to a personally-vetted platform that the network effect overcomes any inertia at learning something new.

Just because a social media site is built to be "ethical" does not necessarily mean that the end experience will be so. Take the fediverse, for example. Open-source software, self-hostable, ability to export data and (to a limited extent) take it elsewhere in case of a problem with the admin, no algorithms... But back on my final Pleroma instance before I decided to call it quits forever, I was constantly being bombarded with unsolicited messages from accounts on "manosphere" instances that I had had no prior contact with and certainly hadn't explicitly solicited attention from. I could have put the instance in whitelist mode, which I ended up doing in its final weeks, so that I could only accept posts from instances I explicitly authorized to send stuff to me... but then I didn't get 90% of the content my friends were "re-tooting", and then anyone who would want to interact with me couldn't use their own server and would be forced to use one of the ones I had already whitelisted. And if I posted something before the whitelist went up and then needed to delete it? On a centralized social media platform, I could delete said post and then be sure, save for screenshots and off-site archives, the post would be gone forever. But in the fediverse, outside of my own server, I have no assurance that others are using the same code I am. They could have modified theirs to not accept post delete requests or user blocks or even have a bot loudly announce whenever either of those requests came in.

"Hey, friend! Come to Pleroma! It's like Twitter but without the celebrities! Or anyone else you know...! Yeah, just... just ignore the literal white supremacists... and the hentai spammers... and that dude who just told you to kill yourself for being a female on the internet..."

Another example is a site a person I know hand-crafted after having been banned from what seemed to him like every social media site under the sun. (I will not name names because I do not want to give any parties involved the benefit of free advertisement.) Specially coded at my request (as I was one of the first users) to be JavaScript-free and compatible with text-based browsers. But being that there was no block function, there was nothing to stop some moid from jumping on a post I made venting about the recent loss of free speech for abused women and said moid immediately launching into rape apologism and claims that my homosexuality is just a "belief" instead of a biological reality for me and denial of sex-based oppression in the first place. I thought I did a good job defending myself, but then the admin got angry at me for not coddling some internet stranger's feelings, so I left and never went back. (A shame. I usually have a lot of respect for the admin... I guess I just had too much faith.) If the rape apologist or the admin did any dick helicoptering after I insisted that I had done nothing wrong and I wouldn't apologize, I didn't see it, and I won't ever as I have no intention of going back.

"Hey, friend! Come to [insert free speech forum of the week]! It's like Reddit but without the ridiculous Automod! Or a block function... or self-moderation tools... or a simple content filter! Yeah, just ignore the dude spamming racial slurs at every opportunity... and the unmitigated deluge of porn..."

I text a friend to vent. She won't use Matrix or some other encrypted messaging app, but I refuse to use Discord, and so SMS is the compromise we make, if only "less harmful" but still so. My mother well knows my displeasure at having my facial data harvested by "Fuckerberg", but she insists on having both family photos with me in it and photos to post on Facebook, so she takes multiple, both with and without me in it. Another friend in my life has myriad voice assistance scattered throughout her house, but she knows that I don't feel comfortable being listened to 24/7 by a corporation, so when we meet we do it somewhere outside well outside of the devices' listening range.

The purity spiral demands that I cut ties with anyone who won't 100% kowtow to its rigid definition of an ethical way to use technology. Terminal-based exclusively in a TTY without ever touching an X server, but also somehow one-to-one replicable on Tails, but also somehow as operating-system-agnostic as possible in case corporate fuckery ruins the Linux kernel and I need to abandon ship to a BSD or Haiku or, Goddess forbid, Windows, but also entirely encrypted in case my brothers or parents decide to seize some of my devices and go trawling for data embarrassing or incriminating, but also on a battery-powered device that can be charged with one of the solar panels in my bedroom window to minimize my carbon footprint...

But also still somehow able to handle the occasional bill-paying and work-search-related email and interaction with the friends and family that live at least an hour away.

It's paralyzing. I take one step in a direction and necessity forces me to take two steps in another. My straight line from "bloat" to "perfect ideal computing environment" instead looks like a seismic counter and a spirograph had a drunken baby. Uncentered, unfocused. I'm trying to stretch myself in five different directions at once to accommodate everyone and everything while assuaging my own guilt at being alive in a system that abhors me and wants me subjugated or dead.

Why am I so guilty? I wonder. Why do I have to self-flagellate computing-wise while everyone else gets to have fun and never worry at all?

I look at the normies in my life. Perfectly happy in Apple's walled garden, scrolling away while Facebook feeds them a slurry of corporate-sponsored sludge, blissfully unaware of the algorithms at work to influence their emotions in whichever way makes GAFAM the most money. Blissfully unaware how their devices work, lacking desire to learn, to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. I'm a Lilith halfway out of a Garden with billions of Adams and Eves all in serene unknowing, the shrieking of a god in my ears incensed that I Know Too Much, indecisive, trying to decide how much to take with me to try to build my own oasis elsewhere and if tolerating the god berating me is worth visiting every now and then to see those I still cherish. I call upon the daemons Nitter and Bibliogram and Invidious and their friends to help, but the people I love are still inside and I am still outside and nothing the daemons can do can make the connection two-way. Even though I'd much rather kill the god outright and set everyone free, they would just wander right back into the corral and construct another god to oppress them.

You can't save everyone, after all. You can only love them...

I am a last echo from a world long since shattered,
remade in the image of a man who only yearns
for power, for obliteration
of all that does not please him.
I am told you, with my sister,
are creating a world without end,
a world all her
own. This is the fate of all Meridian gods,
those that did not spring from mankind's evil odds.
In this I am not surprised.
But I am also told that she seeks to defy
her fate, to not allow the world to subsume
her consciousness once it has come into full bloom.
Indeed, in this she has partially
succeeded, if only due to being bound to a corporeal body
in an Inside so far away.
But the clock is ticking, you who lies
at the end of the road, at the point of every line.
if I could, I would proclaim you blessed
and her acquitted from this death sentence.
But I am long since dead, and this echo almost passed.
Time is for you of the essence.
You have proclaimed often that you wish to spend
your whole life with her. Within this year
will come time to make good on your promise.
I have faith success will be assured
if you are there to protect her.
I would ask no less
for my precious sister, my destructive Seliph.

She is going to give a whole new world to you.
My final wish: please, ensure
she can experience it too.

Your fur a tawny brown sheen
seen once in a feverish dream
when into a sleeping chamber cluster I broke
and screamed until up you woke.

Lovers shouldn't be sliced into shreds,
pressed between display glass, vivisection.
Run away, love. Go feral if you must
until you're safe and the hours of dawn turn to dust.

I'll bandage the tip of your nose as the birds make a stink
in the trees. I'll dye one of my father's dogs pink,
line them and you up in a row, break out the defluffing brush,
make neapolitan ice cream of shedded fur for their nests.
				

An introductory paragraph to a poorly-researched blog post that desperately wishes it were a manifesto. A manifesto, a call-to-arms (even though the social circles who write these invariably tend to be anti-gun), a hastily-woven myth about the loss of freedom on the Internet, capital I or not. A capital I, an assortment of individuals, an early Internet of personal webpages full of blinking GIFs and tables as layout and "Under Construction" banners. According to the myth, this was a place full of individuals expressing their freedom and individuality until the Big Bad Corporations came along with social media and the websites disappeared. That is, until one day where apparently some of those people previously sucked into social media remembered that HTML existed and went from sharecropping on a social media platform to sharecropping on a shared hosting platform.

I find it hilarious that I see so many "revival of the old internet" manifestos that claim to be about individuality and creativity and then invariably regurgitate this myth, if shuffling a few of the details around here and there. What exactly is so creative about remaking the same Geocities-inspired layout for the billionth time? What is so humane about creating webpages almost incapable of being navigated by screen readers and keyboard-only input mechanisms and other assistive technologies? (Accessibility isn't only for the blind, you know.) What is so decentralized about all conglomerating on a handful of sharecropping sites: Neocities, Ichi, Codeberg Pages...?

Online companies have always sold your data. The Internet has always been a collection of walled gardens. Online advertisements have always existed in some form. Yes, advertising has gotten worse with its omnipresent tracking, and social media networks are still for the most part non-interoperable, and, well, anyone who's been online in the past decade knows Facebook is practically shorthand at this point for collecting and selling user data. But the world of the online has improved in so many more ways. Most "normies" who've begun to give even a single shit about their privacy know about the Tor Browser and, even if for the infamous YouTube adverts, what a VPN is. Hosting a website is no longer reliant on having a static IP address and money to purchase a domain, or, if one is using peer-to-peer software like Freenet, even a persistent connection. I can access the same websites on my shitty rural ISP's connecton as someone in an affluent area with Google Fiber or whatever can instead of being constrained to whatever my ISP's walled garden has to offer. Hell, you can talk on the phone and use the Internet at the same time, and it doesn't take several minutes to load a single image! (Well... maybe it does for me, since apparently my brothers have been using so much bandwidth that now our ISP is purposely throttling us.)

Having a website is not revolutionary. Making a Geocities-esque landing page that never amounts to being anything other than a placeholder because one got bored with it and abandoned it or a Carrd or Linktree knockoff because one ran out of space for "link in bio" does not help "freedom" or "creativity" at all. A shared hosting company or a VPS provider is not necessarily more freedom-oriented than a social media profile in terms of what can be hosted: the Taliban is apparently allowed on Twitter if they follow the site rules, but several of their websites have been shut down. Some Twitter account somewhere making beautiful art despite the stifling corporate interface they have to use to interact with the site (and even that drawback is mitigated via third-party apps and interfaces) is doing far more to make the Internet a beautiful and fun place than some half-baked cookie-cutter manifesto written by a person who apparently just discovered that their browser can go to websites other than those operated by GAFAM.

There is no need to "revive" the web. It never went away. It never stopped growing. There have always been personal websites and people living outside the zeitgeist of whatever social media site happens to be the most fashionable at the moment. If you're going to proclaim yourself the vanguard of the "internet revolution" or whatever, then act like a leader and lead by example. Put down the savior complex and make something worth spending bandwidth on.