Let's grow a digital garden

The internet should be about people! It should be about their art and weird quirks, their deep thoughts and silly ideas.

That ideal requires participation though. And participation beyond what's convenient. Putting your personality into any space is the essence of art.

And to me, art is the essence of what it means to be human.

Since I doomed us all with those pompouse thoughts into creating stuff and making everything deeply personal: Here is my part of it.

So what is this then?

First and foremost I wanted an actual home for my music that I control, from which I may spread my creations at my own terms.

Also I wanted a playground for some of the more strange ideas that are running through my head.

So expect some music and some other quirky ideas and playthings turn up on this site over time.

Also this is very barebone as it is now, as I wanted to get something out before I get it perfect. So there are a few things missing that will be added over time. Such as an RSS feed and comments and stuff.

So here it is: My own little garden, coded by hand on top of 11ty and I intend to expand it over time.

Feel free to explore, read a bit and stick around.

But why though?

I saw the internet grow up. I was part of it. We felt like it's the wild west out there and every day I came home from school to spend a few hours clogging my familie's landline, I'd find another strange and colorful corner in this amazing unfolding landscape.

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Advertisers and big companies would stumble blindly in this forest that they couldn't understand at first.

We smirked and took their school money. They had no clue what they were doing and it was free money to build a better world, right? - So we made advertising sites that noone would ever visit, invented auto-clickers as soon as they would figure out how to track engagement while trading Photoshop and Windows XP copies on pirate sites out in the open, laughing at how stupid the man seeminly was.

Without realizing it though, we built capitalism and advertising into the core of whatever it was that we were building. And since we took away its usual powers it needed to evolve... It learned to sell what we gave it: Our engagement.

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Capitalism as a idea has (debatably) brought us to greener pastures as human beings from where we were about 150 years ago. Or so they say...

Whether you believe in that or not, it is however also obvious that capitalism or the idea of maximising individual capital has a huge problem functioning where trust and coorperation are needed as it will inherently search for a way to create individual gain.

Within the mechanics of the internet this shows itself as companies try to sell users and user trust between each other, maximising how much they are able to control and manipulate their product with or without their consent.

And so the internet got a bit bleaker and a bit colder and a bit more boring... until someday the joy was gone from everywhere but some niche little corners.

This is made even more precarious as mass data scraping for LLM training and recreation has become commonplace. Not only are users supposed to give up everything they put online into the hungry mouth of our vector-weight overlords but with Audio and Image reproduction tools and no further guardrails it is way to easy to be attacked with alligations of copyright infringements for one's own creations

How to revive a dying internet?

Individualism can be assumed to be what made the internet awesome while also being what brought it to it's knees. So let's be more specific:

Individual expression and creating the possibility for as many individuals as possible to speak out, be heard and find their community was what initially made the web into this beautiful colorful rainbow. A few individuals trying to gain provit from that by controling, selling and encroaching on the freedom of others is what brought it's demise.

The early internet was a vast jungle of small villages connected by hidden precarious pathways where one had to know how to navigate and find clever tools to be able to find their way.

And as the highways we built in suggession to that don't serve us anymore, we are driven to sharpen the machette again and draw up some new maps to bring back the life of this place.

Today more than ever it is important that as many people as possible own their platform as to spread out the power again of what is birthed into the web and how it is presented. In other words: You need a website.

I am so glad to see that there is a growing community around the Indie Web that is ready to regrow what made this place special in the first place: The weird and strange expressions of real, artsy, stupid, intelligent and beutiful humans.

🫶

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