When you're surfing the web & face a tsunami, make home under a bridge along the information highway

This should be a post I update regularly, because I think it's going to be a cornerstone of future activities...

Whereas the proliferation of social media, cell phones, and related contrivances have for an entire generation leveraged our need for human connection into waves of digital migration (from platform to platform, from device to device), only to undermine and destabilize those connections with perennial expectations to upgrade in service of capitalism and data extraction...

Whereas both NFTs and credit card censorship are occluding creativity, identity, and earnest commerce...

Whereas the rebranding and forced normalization of Large Language Models as "Al" is further destabilizing the ability to search and engage online...

Whereas greater portions of the internet and its content are constrained by a handful of tech giants deploying and relying upon unaccountable black box algorithms...

• whose values, humanity, and relationship with the environment are increasingly beyond our power yet appropriated in our name...
• whose market strategies rely on over-homogenizing their users/products without regard for cultural or political distinction...
• whose privacy and personal safety policies have never been reliably defined nor regulated by corporations, governments, or meaningful institution... 
• whose lobbying and advocacy efforts have undermined democracy, fair trade, and our connectedness with one another and with the Earth in an attempt to outperform one another and the (flawed but sometimes stable) nation-state itself...
• whose reach, however thorough, will never be complete unless the entire thing falls apart...

And whereas the instability of rapid growth and commercialization of the extant Internet has repeatedly deleted once-thriving spaces where humans previously connected, expressed themselves, and deepened their understanding of esoteric, unprofitable topics...

I hereby propose the term "The Under-net" (or "The Undernet") to refer to our preparation for and relationship with whatever (if anything) will be left for us in a future Internet dominated by unending, disingenuous, grifting slop. 

To whit, the Under-net shall comprise each functional part, total, and meaningful tangent of the following:

1. Any lingering sector of the extant Internet, however deliberate or interconnected, that through infrastructure, negligence, or blissful lack of ambition has significantly avoided enshittification, algorithmic optimization strategies, and Al -- particularly those sustaining a user-generated, freemium, early Web 2.0 (or earlier) mindset.
2. Any emerging sector of the extant Internet that, through infrastructure or programming, is designed to proactively reject, block, or circumvent known enshittification practices (including but not limited to mass data extraction, superficial update cycles, and Al and NFT normalization).
3. Any emerging alternative to the extant Internet that does not rely on the same corporate, exploitative (of people and environments), scales of homogenization, and profit habits to connect humans and ideas (and nominally commerce).
4. Any archive, digital or otherwise, of items 1-3 that is maintained for maximal access, security, and stability.
5. Any reemergent or emergent communications technology, technique, or habit that salvages our knowledge, expression, and interconnectedness in the face of a total collapse of the extant Internet.

Please feel free to leave your endorsements or indictments below to help us get started and stay connected.