escaping the black box
A few weeks ago I saw someone on Bluesky sharing their short story as a series of screenshots from their word processor. My first reaction, as you'd expect, was horror1, but looking back on it now I think it's actually a somewhat fascinating phenomenon. It isn't really a joke that there are only three websites now; the only inaccurate thing is calling them websites. They're apps, and they're where online happens for a lot of people.
It's not weird for artists to primarily share their art on social media, for communities to form of people sharing their art with each other and with their followings; the fact that a writer who is part of one of those communities decided to share their story the same way all of the artists they know do, as pictures attached to a social media point, is not actually that surprising. Social media is where the art happens; even if they knew how to post something elsewhere, what's the point? Why would you make someone leave in order to read your story? It's a natural followup to the already extant trend of "my post is too long so I'm just going to take a screencap of the post" hack.
Personally, I think anyone who posts art online should always share it on their own website, but then, it's always been important to me to have a space on the internet that is mine. Molly White recently posted an essay on a philosophy called POSSE, or "Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", which is more or less how I have always, by default, operated.2 Social media is not mine; not only is it in no way under my control, it feels like a public space. The metaphor of the internet, to me, is about places.3
The early days of the internet have been on my mind for a while now, ever since the daily knowledge cohost page posted a little history as their farewell to Cohost. (I've linked their Bluesky, which is still ongoing. You should give them a follow!) Specifically, about Geocities and its many successors and imitators: that encouragement to just go out there and make something. I had countless websites; I had a couple on Geocities alone, and one on most of the other competitors: Tripod, Angelfire, Crosswinds.
I don't even remember how I learned HTML, except that I more or less taught myself so I could make a website on Geocities. Now, of course, HTML is fairly quotidian, but I was a kid; at the time, it felt like magic, like I now understood the infrastructure on which the entire internet was built. I learned that you could delete other people's posts on the Nintendo of America BBS by locally hosting a copy of their post and inserting a simple delete button in HTML code.4 I felt unstoppable.
What that means for the present day is I have always intuitively known that it is possible to learn how to do the things that happen on your computer. That sounds obvious, but it is the difference between seeing the internet as a black box, and seeing it as something that is fundamentally understandable.
One of the many bad ideas of Elon Musk is this: he wants to make Twitter more than just a social media platform. He wants to make it everything; he wants it to be your bank, and the way you handle payments. He wants to make his website the only place you ever need to go.
The increasing centralization of the internet has always been alarming; the fact that our experience on such of the internet has been carefully crafted by corporations who nakedly do not have our best interests at heart, in order to maximize the chance that we click their ads or buy their products, is disheartening; the fact that it's so exciting to find a little corner of the internet like cohost or BearBlog which is devoted to an ad-free, non evil existence is demoralizing (but their existence itself is encouraging; keep fighting the good fight!). It's not that the internet has always been good, but that many of the good things the internet once had are either extinct or endangered.
For many people, though, this is the only internet they have ever known. The corporations have done their best to stuff it all back into the black box; we do not need to understand, we only need to open the app and let the algorithm5 serve us content.
I think that building our own little spaces helps to combat this. Even apart from providing a little haven against corporate control, it helps to break that hypnotic rhythm of forever opening the same three websites, and it reminds us that there are other options. Because sometimes the hardest part is even knowing that the alternative exists.
I have spent countless hours of my life looking for solutions to the problem of "how can I share text with people". Occasionally the solutions I found were rather suboptimal, but for the most part I would find a blogging service, and find a theme that I liked, because presentation matters. I cannot imagine a more user hostile experience than "here are twelve screenshots across a thread of Bluesky posts."↩
It is, technically, not generally a place I own, but this little corner of the web is mine, and I have started actually saving backups and archives, and BearBlog's tagging system makes it a lot easier to navigate and find old posts (and works in such a way that I can convince my brain to actually use it efficiently, which has seldom been true of tags).↩
The central metaphor of Geocities, the reason its addresses were so weird, is because it very explicitly imagined the internet as a physical space. So it imagined your website as a digital house on a digital street, with a digital street address; and indeed, you could explore by just wandering around those streets, and meet your neighbors. It wasn't, like, social in that way, but it reinforced the metaphor.↩
Again, I was a kid.↩
The algorithm's fundamental black-box-ness is itself a pretty big problem, and we can, of course, see its deleterious effects on the nature of the internet in all of the various SEO slop websites that flood your search results any time you try to search for info on a game; that it's now all AI slop is merely an acceleration of a long extant problem.↩