Internet Artifacts

Nice site. I miss the pre social media, pre-hypercommercial, pre mass surveillance Internet of old. It was mostly the product of genuine, sincere self-expression. Now it feels and even works like an infomercial, a scam, everywhere you look, filled to the brim with grifters and corporations trying to take ahold of your attention (and money). It's disgusting and inefficient at almost anything you attempt to do on it because of that terrible fact. It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world, and its enforcers: normies. For many, many years now, it's been the exact opposite: it's turned into the epitome of what it helped us escape from, and it permeates every moment of our waking lives, directly or indirectly.

The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.

> It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world

This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.

Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.

The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.

Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0]. It's lightweight on purpose, and the capsules (gemini "sites") are mostly text. There are aggregators [1] and even search [2].

0: https://geminiprotocol.net/

1: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

2: Gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/

>Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0].

Heh. I've been around the block in terms of compulsively trying to find alternatives to the ill-fated world wide web, my friend. I've hosted content on many of them, too, including gemini, which I really liked.