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

[genderjumper]

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.

Comments

[flamingsword]

Have you been reading Cat Valente’s “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things” series? Bc this is a lot of the same conclusions in different language and coming from a different perspective.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

Came here to recommend this. She went and nailed her 99 Theses to the Cathedral doors.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is a great resource. I have boosted the signal.

NO, THANK YOU!

[genderjumper]

Your encouragement means a lot!

Re: NO, THANK YOU!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yay! It's important for people to work together. One of the things I do all the time is link articles that I think my audience will appreciate, on topics we care about. I actually have folks who use me as a newsfeed. :D

[galadhir]

Obviously Ao3 and Dreamwidth. Mastodon has also seemed to be fairly stable over the past few years and deliberately designed to avoid enshitification. Reddit is pretty good too, although I don't know who owns that.

"Breathing room"

[yknode]

This is fantastic. I've been thinking about this lately as well and started compiling a partial list of software / online tools and spaces that don't use "Al" just so it feels like there's some breathing room.

For example, Ellipsus is a collaborative writing tool to replace Google Docs for long-form / fiction writing and is meant to work well with Archive of Our Own (AO3).

There's also Pagebound which replaces GoodReads and other platforms that have already started introducing "Al".

Here's my full list: yknode.link - Software without "Al"

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.

This is where I think digital gardens and personal website networking might come in. I'm glad you included this last because I agree that we need larger networks and tools that are accessible to people and we can't expect everyone to be able to run their own website. (Individualist solutions is not what I want to push). However, as part of the whole, having more personal websites that can grow into a network would be a great way to navigate the future Undernet. I'm even thinking about people who might want to build old-school indexes to their favorite parts of the Undernet!

I wrote more about this idea here.