Image by Chris Benson

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The early aughts were an exciting time for the web.

It was around this time that services like email, social networking, and community boards that were typically reserved for tech-savvy folks who spent considerable amounts of time in front of a computer screen, exploded into the mainstream consciousness by several young tech entrepreneurs trying to bridge the gap between these niche digital communities and casual computer users.

MySpace (2003) Facebook (2004), Gmail (2004), Reddit (2005), and Twitter (2006) all launched in rapid succession to each other, quickly becoming darlings of the web because of their convenience and ease of use, with millions of people who aren't typically digital citizens of the web being able to step into that world without much friction. Feature-rich digital services no longer require an extensive background in technology to understand and use.

For a time, it was good.

I was already waist-deep in the internet, becoming infatuated with its creativity possibilities as a young graphic designer in the mid-90s after being introduced to Adobe's Photoshop and then HTML in college.

I was already enthralled with up-and-coming niche creative networks like Okay Player for music, PixelSurgeon, HalfProject for cutting edge digital design inspiration from all over the world. I loved artists like Gmunk and Yugo Nakamura for their sublimely bizarre interactive work that stretched the imagination for what was possible. I was a massive fan of PlayStation which showcased the fevered brilliance of Joshua Davis who melded code and art and the raw, sleek, and sexy genius of Huny Young that would always push the boundaries by intersecting art and culture in way I am still envious of.

Having a tech career was the furthest thing from my mind and I never thought of being a brand name in the industry. My main motivation for sticking with graphic design and web development was because of the dynamic culture around it. I got deeper into it because I was captivated by the thought of conceiving an idea, drawing out a rough approximation, transferring that to the computer to design, and building something to put it out for the communities I was a part of to check it out and talk about it. That feeling of end-to-end creation and instant (constructive) feedback was intoxicating for me as a creative. It was just fucking cool to be a part of.

My interest in digital design opened me up to a world that existed beyond my geography. I would share work and ideas on the aforementioned communities I was inspired by and other weirdos and nerds would put their stuff up and we would feast on the result of likeminded people delving deep into what they loved and sharing that passion with other folks we barely knew but had the same level of enthusiasm for experimentation and exploration.

I loved creating and I loved the beautiful souls who shared that. I don't think it was meant to last, but that time made a massive impression on me and shaped what kind of creator I wanted to be. I didn't want to refine my skills to land a job and monetize my skill set. I wanted to get better for the sake of pushing my ideas as far as they could go. The most valuable currency to me was having another artist say 'Yo, how did you do that??'

It was at the tail end of this era that large-scale social networks started popping up.

The magic of Facebook and Twitter was that everyone used them. And with a much larger swath of people in the digital space, more insights, more culture more experiences that I probably wouldn't have access to beforehand were now possible. Not only were my niche creative homies hopping on there, but everyone else was too. My digital social circle expanded in a way I could not have possibly imagined. It was a strange and wonderful time when people all across the planet were realizing the power of being connected directly to each other, and for a time, it was great.

Unfortunately as things go in the US, everything is built under the spectacle of capitalism, so it didn't take long for these platforms that were initially created as places to bring people together and connect to morph into nefarious mechanisms for profit, hate, and even contributors to crimes against humanity in other parts of the world.

It would be bad enough if these were isolated incidents but the dark reality is that these platforms have realized the revenue-generating potential of encouraging the worst parts of human behavior and have committed to giving space to the worst people online to keep their engagement numbers favorable, even going so far to pay the worst perpetrators of bigoted behavior online.

This has been the state of the web for the last two decades, which is a far cry away from what many called the Golden Age of Web that shaped my experience and undying love for the internet as it's potential for a shared existence.

But the one thing that being an old head who remembers the wild and untamed creative web that was a precursor to the neatly packaged, commodified, and monetized internet that ushered in a dark age of the internet has is perspective. That perspective informs the belief that the nature of the internet is to change as no one controls what it can be and who can contribute to it. Sure, corporate houses like Adobe, (who I will never forgive), Micro$oft, Google, etc can influence the direction of the web, but ultimately we are still using the same tools. These places can make platforms to make the implementation of these tools easier. Still, their ability to change is limited by their adherence to a profit and not creative motive, which is why so many corporate creations simply and utterly fail.

While tech marketing concocts narratives spreading the falsehood that innovation comes from the business sector, the unvarnished reality is that the most interesting ideas still come from the unexpected corners of the World Wide Web.

While Twitter continues to crumble into an irrelevant mess because of the ego of an insecure billionaire, the emergence Activity Pub protocol has given us the ability to not only mimic the social media experience of popular destinations but to forge ahead and explore beyond the boundaries of what corporate entities can offer.

While problematic because their developers grew up in this current regressive era of the web and who want to emulate the centralized platforms that ushered in this time, the existence of platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube give us a glimpse of what is possible as we work to exit corporate spaces that have defined our online lives for the last two decades. Not only is de-coupling possible, but it is inevitable as these once darlings of the web place themselves at odds with the communities that make them what they are. The internet is a dynamic place that has always had room for new ideas and directions.

While on the surface it seems this current period of the web is inescapable, the subversive truth is that with so many people being online, more minds are doing the work of figuring out how to free us from the clutches of places that, to put it mildly, do not have our interests in mind.

I can remember a time when if you wanted to have your own space, you would have to search for guides on how to set up servers and languages and emails and a whole bunch of other nerdy shit that even vets such as myself got annoyed by. Our love for doing things on our own overrode our impatience with trying to cobble together instructions from poorly written documentation, but sometimes it was just an awful experience that required a lot of time and effort.

Fortunately these days the tools for creating personal non-generic web space have improved considerably to the point you don't need to have an exhaustive background and endless patience to get it up and running. With a bit of knowledge, anyone can create their realized digital infrastructure.

A standout in this field of bringing digital services to the masses is Yunohost which has lowered the bar for entry for self-hosting your online life to an almost trivial level. Once set up, it gives the everyday soul access to a suite of applications and services that can be installed with the click of a button and almost completely remove the need to use platforms that continue to decline in quality and betray our trust. Of course, self-hosted infrastructure is still a work in progress. However, it again reveals a definitive direction that deviates from the centralized norm we've become accustomed to and provides a viable alternative to people who value their freedom, privacy, and the commitment to make the world a little less awful by limiting our contributions to places that are making it so.

The state of the web isn't changing. It has changed. More and more people are moving away from the centralized platforms that have proven time and time again to be detrimental to our online selves and our well-being and choosing to explore the open and free web that still exists, but this time around has better tools to reduce the effort it takes for us have a corporate free existence.

It's not going to be advertised and broadcasted as it does not fit the idea that we don't have better options other than inferior exploitative platforms, but real progress under oppressive systems rarely gets attention.

Gil-Scott was right when he said the revolution wouldn't be televised, but he didn't anticipate that it would be digitized.

Ha, and who watches traditional TV anymore, anyway.