What I'd like to do with my website (and with the Internet as a whole)

Not too long ago, I mentioned that I wanted to refashion my site in a way that mirrored the things I want to talk and share about on the public Internet. I've had some hesitations on this nowadays, since non-consensual commercial Internet scraping has really soured my want to continue adding things to their virtual fishing net of organic human-made content. The (potential) end goal is to automate the act of being connected to one another (if not make it extremely difficult to figure out the difference between a person or machine); something to be made into a premium experience. If not that, it's a behavior that has folks moving into more private spaces like Discord (or nowhere at all). This has been made more clear with things like OpenAI's Sora and Zuckerberg's persistent want to bring more folks into the "Metaverse". I can see why librarians have slowly come back into fashion as information resources for folks who want information and not an advertisement on the side.

It feels a bit silly to be fixating on how one "publishes" on the Internet today: we've surrendered a lot of control to companies (not platforms) that now shepherd and curate conversation for the many people who use the Internet. Folks over the age of 30 can live in a bit of a personal delusion that the blog will (still) save us all — but there's more folks who are scrolling portrait-length versions of videos than folks who are trying to figure out how the end of Game of Thrones went down from the books. It's something that companies have nudged us towards — not solely of their own will but from our want, as social creatures, to connect and be seen. This is what led to Instagram becoming the behemoth it is today and with TikTok following in its footsteps with a refined (but crowded) interface that rewards people on a dopamine-inducing level for hitting the right button.

I share videos on Instagram in its ephemeral content feed a la "Stories". This is something I do when the moment seizes me and I normally share articles or pictures of things I'm reading. I'm a bookish person! That prevents me from finding immediate value in getting back into video production to talk about the things I'd want to talk about and adjusts the scope of what it is I'm trying to do. This (false) paralysis of choice is annoying. So I'm going to declare a bit of bankruptcy.

Eschewing the Utilitarian Ideals of Protocols (or Platforms)

I don't know nor do I immediately see the particular value of fixating around a particular protocol and platform. Today, they end up being some sort of extension of a company's objective for market capture - ATProto included - or, if made into a project of sorts, the manifestation of a person's vanity campaign. I don't completely agree with a lot of the stances of social networking as a solely a project of liberation or that it can bring us there. Yes, we can connect (to a very limited degree) with folks on the platform across borders. But as the experiment to cram as much of the spectrum of human expression into a computational model grows, the more difficult it becomes to do so — the need to invent new behaviors of engagement. I also want to highlight how these projects tend to exemplify the ideals of folks who rarely have to deal with the extremism of corporate or state violence (let alone interpersonal violence). I have yet to find a technology project on social networking that folds in socio-technological research on its impact and how we can learn to mitigate it.