I’ve been obsessing over a topic recently: The Dead Internet. It’s been a few months and I occasionally have thoughts to scribble down and it’s been a slow burn project to come up with…some way to move to the post-internet world. How do we move forward? Well, I’ll tell you how we won’t.
For some reason, we’ve been convinced that if we simply all just start blogs and a web ring and then we put them on a git repo we’ll be saved. The internet itself will be saved!
I mean, maybe. It’s a more fun experience for sure. But I’m not convinced this is the way. Why? Because you can’t just do more internet and expect different results.
Look, the internet was made for us. It wasn’t designed that way at first, but once access hit the consumer market, it became ours. Like a hand-me-down. It became a world of information, a place to learn new things, meet different people, play fun games and everything in between.
But we’re in the post-happiness future. Advertising Executives and the rest of the Grift-Economy Mafia sit at the table and we’re no longer welcomed. We’re simply wallets meant to be drained and we just have accept that.
And honestly? Yeah I do accept that. Why? Because the corpse stinks, dude. It’s time to move on, it’s time for us, the users to build something new that’s fundementally incompatible with Corpo corruption.
There’s a lot of pre-text and rambling I need to do. But what am I even getting at? That the internet can be saved? The opposite, actually.
You can’t save what’s already dead.
There’s some controversery here, but the internet is gone, it’s passed, it’s dead and it’s corpse is stinkin’ up the place.
Obviously it isn’t! Because if it was, how the heck are you reading this? It’s not meant to be literal, but what I mean is that the underlying “Concept” of the internet is dead.
That is, information that is available to anyone with communities built around that information to help facilitate conversations and discussions. Sounds a bit vague? Well I mean, yeah, it is, a bit.
Here’s the problem with the “Old Internet” way of doing things, were we all build communities to share information: Well, you forgot to figure out a way for John Q Shareholder to extract value from those exchanges. That’s just not going to work. So you need to soak the page in advertising, the mods need to look the other way when we astro turf our products, you BETTER delete those critical posts if you want to keep your soft power here. Oh well, we’ll just own the subreddit/facebook page, it’s fine, a quick text message to Zucc and we’re good to go.
A little on the nose, yeah. But you need to be.
The core issue is that the internet is now just…4 sites, basically. It’s Facebook, it’s Instagram, it’s TikTok. You are funneled there and the TechnoFacists have built walls around those communities to keep you in. They don’t step on each others toes. They simply enjoy their monopoly and feed you ads and garbage non stop.
You can blame the users. But their friends are there and honestly, many of these people aren’t like us. They don’t remember the good times because they weren’t around during the good times. Or maybe they’ve just forgotten.
When I say the internet is dead. I mean that we’re no longer in control of it. We are simply guests to the CorpoNet. The Internet is long gone. The only choice is to watch this 2 minute ad about a product you’ll never buy so you can get another fleeting hit of dopamine from the AI generated content designed specifically to hit your weak points to get you in a vulnerable enough mindset to buy something.
How did they do this?
Power
These Corpos have all of the power. They don’t just have a great hand, they control the whole deck.
They are right now pushing laws and regulations to “Protect the Children” that they will ignore, but you cannot. You, the humble person reading this, cannot make a community.
Well, I mean sure you can. If you’re able to and willing to comply with the vague and impossible to iplement laws that they’re pushing. Yes you must verify EVERY piece of content that your community even vaguely smells MUST be free of ANYTHING that might be bad for a child.
Oh and if you make a mistake or you just can’t keep up, you will personally be fined several hundreds of thousands of dollars and thrown in jail for decades.
The Corpos Lobby for these laws because they shut you and I out. They don’t worry about the laws because they simply will not follow them. All they need is a Million Dollar Walmart Steak Dinner at Mar-A-Lago and it’s all good.
They won’t even get to court, their case will never be chased, complaints never answered and the public never made whole. The laws are meant to bind you, not them.
This is the power that they have. Starting a web ring or making a blog doesn’t fix this because you’re just too small of a target right now to matter. We’re not pulling communities together that will disrupt their markets. So who cares what we do? You aren’t allowed to make a community that could ever become anything, we’ve been disarmed and neutered.
Today, they have even more power. Plagarism Machines and Slop tools making the generation, proliferation and censorship basically taxpayer subsidized and scaleable, the TechnoFacists can, at scale, control dialogues, communities and the narrative, anywhere everywhere all at once.
I will bet money, real cash that this already happens. If your not outright banned immedietely, maybe a community isn’t being run by these facists, you’ll quickly find yourself drowning in a sea of gaslighting and group think in order to control the narrative.
An AI Generated post about someone who’s sitting by their window enjoying a cup of hot cocoa. They claim that Nestle Cocoa is the only brand that sits well in their stomach. An subtle advertisement.
You write “Yeah, the babies Nestle killed really help settle my stomach to”. Within seconds, dozens of accounts pop up, you’re comment is reported, your post downvoted or deranked, “That never happened”, “This guy posts to $Community, like I’m goin to believe him” etc, etc.
That’s the problem: We have no power. We exist to be marketed to and there’s nothing we can do about it. So, what do we do?
Leave behind the CorpoNet.
It’s a scary thought to be sure. But…bare with me for a moment.
I want you to imagine something for me.
It’s your day off, chores are taken care of and you’re being a little lazy. So you jump on to…well my working name is AlohaNet in honor of the grand daddys of internet protocols, but also It’s got ALOHA in the name, c’mon.
Anyway, you hop on. You have a baked in social system right in your web browser. Nobody can get between you and your friends. You send a few encrypted by default messages to your buddies. Maybe join a chat room and just hang out.
You’re looking for a new horror series or movie to get in to. So you search around, using the Horror Media tag to find relevant results. Again, the search is baked right in to your browser. You poke around but you want some place that’s a bit…underground. The mainstream has bored you, so you jump on the index and search for Media communities, than Horror and you hop around, jumping in to these forums, bbses, chatrooms, web pages. Any form you can imagine, exists. Each account chatting are all real people because you, after all, had to have your “Person” verified as existing.
On one page, you find a few people talking about their favorite early horror movies, you decide to jump in, make a few friends and add them to your buddy list. You can follow their activity and you decide that you only care when they interact with Horror content.
You find that your new buddy has their own blog where they travel around a bit, find old horror films, digitize and then upload them to his site for anyone to watch. You read some of his reviews, thoughts, processes, you find it incredibly interesting, so you add it as a watched page. So whenever it’s updated, you get a notification. You decide you want to know when it’s got new video content, you don’t really care about minor updates or small posts.
Before you go, you want to support his work, you decide to send him a dollar from your digital wallet to his tip jar. 100% of that money goes directly to him without any middlemen. He’s not gettting 70 cents, he’s getting a god damn dollar, the FULL dollar.
All of that, and more, is possible on the AlohaNet.
So, we can have something like that…or I mean, you can hang out with the corpse
Summing it all up.
I’m starting to meander. Anyway, the only way out of the CorpoNet is literally out of the CorpoNet, we don’t need to build blogs and webrings, we need to leave the entire rotting corpse to the vultures.
So, what does the next thing look like? What would the AlohaNet look like?
I’m glad you asked. Here are the absolute hard requirements for whatever the next global community is.
- It cannot scale.
- Humanity has to be verified
- Everyone needs ultimate power of what they want to see
- The community must be sustainable
- It must be anti-fragile
That’s it, those are the five pieces to our little puzzle. I won’t be going deep on to any of them today because this is already…rather long. But let me briefly expand on them.
It Cannot Scale
If it can be done at scale, it can be abused at scale. Our adversary can scale their operations to limitless nonsense. If any of our processes can scale, especially the new member pipeline, it can and will be exploited.
Humanity has to be Verified.
One person, one account. you get banned, it’s gone. This and #1 are the most important steps. By verifying the human, tying their account to their very person, it’s impossible for Corpos to scale and set up Astro Turfing campaigns or influence the community in any meaningful way.
Everyone needs Ultimate Power in what they choose to see.
The tipping point of internet enshittification were the TechnoFascists deciding what you got to actually see. There ins’t a “No” option, just the Rapist Mentality “Maybe Later” attitude that got us where we are today. The user decides what they see, who they communicate with, everything without any go between. The system is built on this core principal and it cannot be changed or modified in any way.
The user is absolute.
The Community has to be Sustainable.
Remember Beenz? Yeah, that was great. I mean, it wasn’t but the IDEA was great.
The micro payment is the cornerstone of the new global community. Instead of relying on the TechnoFascist to provide meager wages by assaulting the viewers, instead just…let the users pay them directly. No middle-man, no having to give some dick-head 30% of your donations because they created no value what-so-ever.
Users have to be able to share their wealth for content easily without problems.
I mean, I was hopeful that Bitcoin and other like currencies would fill this void, but alas, the Useful Idiots of the TechnoFascists have turned it in to Digital Beanie Babies…
It must be Anti-Fragile
When the new community gets enough members and there’s enough potential money to be made, the Fascists will deploy every tool. They’ll demand laws for…uh, the Children! They’ll demand access “it isn’t fair” they’ll whine. They’ll tell the government it’s a cess pit of porn and illegal gambling (but not, like, our gambling, in fact you can get $100 NOW on sportsbooks!)
That means that there cannot be one central point where everything lives. Big community servers that act as regional hubs maybe. But the individual sites would ideally be locally hosted like many blogs are now.
Something I’m VERY excited about our efforts like MeshTastic and Reticulum. “Alternative” Communication lines that would allow non-Phone and ISP communications would be absolutely amazing for our new community.
More to come
This is…maybe teaser is the wrong word. But this is sort of the first part of a much larger topic: Building the AlohaNet. Wherein the technical problems are hard, and the society problems are harder.
I know I haven’t scratched the surface of something like this, nor will I be the one to fulfill it…maybe. But one day, maybe one day, we can have nice things again.
Anywho, more to come! We’re all moved in to our new place, I’m…in the process of running networking cable up to the den so we can finally play more games together. Bringing my stream back, maybe a monthly/biweekly stream that’s longer would be enough for me. I have a lot on my plate these days, but I still want to experience some Retro PC Games.
This is dad, getting the kids easter baskets ready.
