Intention Will Save the Internet, Not Software

Drafted between April 24 and July 28, 2024. Published July 28th, 2024.

I recently came across a large Mastodon instance by chance. Being a federated space, most of the posts were about the stuff that I'd expect: online privacy, hot takes on Supreme Court rulings, clever things people thought of while standing in line at the cafe, and links to interviews with authors of recently published books. The people in this space seemed intelligent, thoughtful, and friendly. They were sharing their opinions and exchanging knowledge in earnest.

The thing that struck me, however, was not how different the experience of reading this feed was from corporate-owned social media, but how similar. There are meaningful differences between the two, but to the human nervous system, they are functionally the same thing. Here's how the scroll goes:

Anxiety. Anxiety. Brief amusement. Don't care. Anxiety. Don’t understand. I agree. Anxiety. Oh, nice. Oh wow, I’m mad but I don’t have the energy to get into an argument about this. Anxiety.

And so on.

This was a different place than Facebook or X, yes. There wasn’t an algorithm, there weren’t ads. I have been mostly off of social media for years, but after Twitter collapsed I was interested to see what happened when people started picking up their toys and going elsewhere. I thought they might create something truly different, but now I see that what they actually created was the same old experience of social media's brain-destroying feed, except without corporate profit or influence.

It’s not that online platforms aren't important influences on the kinds of content we create and the effects they have on us. They absolutely do, as I’ll discuss below. But the platform, and the type of content created through it, is not enough to deliver on the promise of the internet as a place where all people can equally and freely share information for the betterment of our species. That promise has always been fragile and has always relied on human attention and stewardship, which is different from platforms and systems with ready-made slots for content. We should not confuse building systems for managing content for the hard work of being kind, equitable, open-minded, and well, human.

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It may feel like there was a time when social media didn't seem so exploitative or so brain-breaking (the two go hand in hand). But I think it’s actually the case that there was a limited community of people who, for a limited time, got to use a platform like Facebook the way they wanted until Facebook figured out how to maximally exploit their experience. In hindsight, the “good ol’ days” were really just a part of Facebook’s journey down the road of enshittification, not what Facebook was ever supposed to be. The barest reading of the history of Facebook on Wikipedia will show that right from the beginning Mark Zuckerberg never had any intention of fostering connection between people or protecting private spaces for it to happen.

To put is succinctly: social media already kind of sucked to begin with, so why are we working to save it? Perhaps it’s because we’re blinded by nostalgia. Or perhaps because a growing portion of internet users are too young to remember what social media was like before the algorithm and hyper-exploitative corporatization, so they assume a corporate-free social media will also be free of problems. But social media was already problematic long before the signs started to show from the outside, and it merely enhanced problems that already existed in our culture. An entire generation of people, for instance, has grown up with their parents posting pictures and embarrassing personal details to Facebook without their consent, even before the algorithm. Facebook as a platform certainly helped shaped the behavior, but it didn’t cause it. The same thing was happening on blogs, YouTube, and pre-Facebook Instagram at the same time. And the problem of thoughtlessly displaying your child’s body for your own gratification and profit goes back much further: Jackson 5, Judy Garland, Mozart. Facebook simply made it easy and banal.

And this isn’t just limited to social media platforms. Problems of all sorts inhere in the interactive online spaces that existed before social media: Message boards plagued with flame wars. Chats infested with bullies and predators. Blogs full of the inane and self-aggrandizing. The feeds that lower our self-esteem and raise our anxiety, by that measure, are late-comers.

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I’m not saying that corporatization doesn’t make a difference; it certainly does. I remember Instagram before Facebook bought it. I watched in real time as a small, lovely corner of Instagram turned into an influencer-infested cancel-ground thanks to the invisible guiding hand of the algorithm. In 2015, I was very interested in tarot but felt put off most of the online spaces around it. They were usually New Age, pagan/Wiccan, or occult, none of which I had any interest in. Then I stumbled upon a relatively small queer, social-justice oriented tarot community. It was completely decentralized and sprang up by chance, and for me, it was an oasis. An addictive oasis, but an oasis nonetheless. I soon developed problems spending too much time looking at and posting to Instagram. And I also felt a kind of desperate emptiness after I scrolled for too long, similar to how I felt after reading an issue of Seventeen magazine when I was a teenager. But I still enjoyed much of the content I saw and felt like I was part of a community that would not have been able to form through any other medium.

Then in April 2016, Instagram rolled out changes to everyone’s timelines. People protested the change initially, but chose to stay on the app. I did, too. Then as the months went on, everyone’s feeds became well-crafted soundbites of sage advice interspersed with pretty pictures of things to buy. These were the posts that got the most traction. It took a couple of years, but the community eventually became an echo chamber of self-righteousness and it was noticed if you did not fall in line. People shouted truisms, political directives, and unsolicited advice past each other, all while posting their conspicuous consumption. It became exhausting to scroll through Instagram because in almost every post, someone was “advising” me what to think, do, or feel. My addiction to Instagram took a few years to kick, but by the time I finally got off of it in 2019 or so, there wasn’t much left worth going back for.

But none of this means that the algorithm turned social media into something fundamentally different than it had been before. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were all hostile to the human nervous system prior to the algorithm, only they were less efficient at mining our attention for profit. There was never a time on social media that wasn’t beset by conflict and exploitation; the algorithm simply sped up the process. Awfulness inheres in social media in part because any content feed takes away choice and consent from the reader. (It’s not just the internet. There is a long-standing similar awfulness in 24 hour news tv.) In the world of Web 1.0 (which I’m not idealizing either, but we’ll get to that), most websites consisted of lists or grids of links to click. When faced with a list of links to click on, I choose which one to click. If I make a bad choice and don’t like what I’m reading, I just hit the back button until I’m in a place I like better. The choice was bad, but it was mine to make; I take accountability for it. But feeds, even chronological ones, take that choice, and that accountability, away.

In Web 1.0, you had to find things to click on. With social media, things click on you.

In the transition from clicking to scrolling, the experience of browsing the internet becomes about encountering again and again things that we did not intend to see, even if they are mixed in with things that bring us pleasure. Remember that it has always been bad etiquette on the internet to show people something they weren’t expecting. Rick-rolling, and its much worse predecessor, goatse, were disrespectful pranks that people played upon each other. There’s a reason for that. When we click on something expecting to be taken one place but instead are shown something we didn’t consent to, it stings. We thought we had agency in the choice we were making but another choice was made for us to watch a bad Rick Astley video or see a man’s anus.

Even under the best of circumstances, social media is the process of other people making those choices for us, and us making those choices for other people. I can choose to post something that I find cute or moving or disturbing, but I have no idea when or how others are going to receive it. Even before the algorithm, a chronological feed of others’ posts was still a chaotic jumble of their needs, worries, boasts, and outrages. The algorithm capitalized upon that—amped it up to make it more addictive—but it for the most part only magnified the problems already existing in social media. The reverse chronological feed of content had already been a problem for years before the algorithm. This problem was called the blog.

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In her article “How the Blog Broke the Web”, Amy Hoy makes the argument that the blog was the first widespread format to flatten out the content that people posted on the internet. When Hoy began surfing the Web in 1993, the internet was a mostly small, decentralized, heterogeneous collection of personal web pages. Creating and accessing them took a lot of privilege, expertise, and work. The people who did so were spontaneously using the few tools at their disposal to share about things that interested them for no reason other than enthusiasm and pride. There was no pre-set format for how a page should be structured. Conventions arose, like having a Site Map or an About page, but each person had to decide for themselves how to arrange the content. You came back to the same static page each time, with maybe a few links marked with one of those tiny gifs that said “New!” But the content, arranged by the mind of the person who created it—for better or worse—stayed stable.

Hoy points out that Web Diaries, which were eventually called Web Logs and then Blogs, were greatly outnumbered by home pages in the early days in part because how much of a pain they were to update. The Web at that time was not built for people to frequently post short pages with small amounts of content. In order to make a diary entry findable and link to the next, you had to hand-code changes to the HTML of at least three pages: the diary page itself, the entry just before it so the new post appeared when you clicked on “Next,” and the index where everything was listed in reverse chronological order.

Then there was the advent of Moveable Type in 2004, the first content management system that was widespread and easy(ish) to use. I had completely forgotten about Moveable Type, but seeing a screen shot of it on Hoy’s page brought it back from my mental graveyard. Even though I only started getting online regularly in 2000, seven years after Hoy, I remember this. The blog became the cool, new thing. Within a couple of years, it was a wave that washed through most corners of the internet, leaving those old home pages looking outdated and dorky. More importantly, those old pages had relied on nothing except manually-updated links to be found. Blogging platforms, on the other hand, made it easy for blogs to link to each other and we started getting the first spontaneously cohesive communities like the ones that would later pop up on social media.

My first two or three years on the internet as a teenager were a mostly Web 1.0 experience. I made homepages and shrines that, as far as I can remember, were mostly about my devotion to various anime characters. After a few years, I abandoned those kinds of online spaces for, among other things, blogs, and I became a serial blogger myself. I did write some personal diaries, but overall my writing took a more serious turn. What I said had to matter, had to have a point. I wrote long-forgotten blogs on various platforms (Moveable Type, Blogger, Vox, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Wordpress, and probably more), moving on from each when I lost interest in a topic. Because blogs were supposed to be about topics rather than people, otherwise your readership would lose interest.

It really is true that the medium is the message. Blogging changed how I wrote and thought, the kinds of things that I was putting online and the kinds of content that I was consuming. Then a cool new thing came around that I couldn't really see the point of, but was clearly very trendy: micro-blogging. I remember when Wordpress rolled out themes specifically for micro-blogs. I don’t know who maintained their own micro-blogs, but there soon arose a place that could do all of that work for you, that would centralize everyone’s microblog, in fact: Twitter.

The changes to content that micro-blogging necessitated were obvious, especially since the 140 character limit was at first a technical limitation more than a choice. Unlike the world of blogs, as well as Facebook or Instagram, which all hooked me for a long time, Twitter struck me as a miserable place to be right from the start. Too disjointed, too shouty. I did try for a while to keep up a Twitter account alongside my personal blogs. I also had short-lived academic account early in grad school, along side my short-lived academic blog, because we all knew that the best academics spent even more of their time doing unpaid labor writing about their work on blogs and Twitter, in addition to producing the work itself. I eventually gave up both in exhaustion: further proof, along with my total uninterest in post-modern literary theory, that I was unfit for an academic career.

But even after I left academia, I kept creating content. Or rather, I kept creating online spaces for my content that I never updated as often as I felt I should. Somehow along the way, it seemed imperative to me: because I could produce content online, I had to do so in order to exist in any meaningful way. I can’t have been the only one who was feeling that, who was looking for anything that could be turned into content to stuff into the gaping mouth of the void. In the 2010’s, there came the pressure not only to create content, but to become marketable and have a personal brand. You were supposed to start writing under your own name and poise yourself as an expert on a topic. Blogging became content marketing and social media posting became influencing. It seemed that the only right way to exist on the web was not simply to have a presence, but to monetize it. This eventually evolved into the newsletter platforms like Substack, which I also tried my hand at briefly with the same results.

We had all decided on our collective purpose, then. We became advertisers for ourselves, whether or not we actually had businesses. In my Instagram tarot community, for instance, an inevitable trajectory arose. People who had been posting about tarot out of personal interest started selling readings (as I did), and anyone who was already selling readings started a coaching business to help tarot readers become more profitable. It may have been miserable and lockstep, but we finally found a common implicit purpose in posting: to make money and to put money in others’ pockets. Changing social media from a social space into a marketplace was a convenient way to keep those feelings of pointlessness and self-indulgence at bay, two problems that were born as soon as people began posting things to the internet.

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On October 13, 2002, some guy named Donald Brook published an essay called “Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs!” (This was written during a time when simply using excessive profanity, including ableist language, was considered cutting-edge comedy, so be warned.) This essay exists on a completely un-styled HTML page with a table of contents at the top, divided into seven sections. Brook offers a history of weblogs up until that point and unkindly speculates about why people are driven to share their personal lives online. He also talks about problems with communication that weblogs foster, including how the form just feels like people publicly announcing things of no importance, and how most comments are just that: comments, with no intention of dialogue.

But mostly what gets Brook’s goat is the vapidness of weblog content. He does think that weblogs have legitimate uses by professionals and serious writers. The villains here are the bad writers who have nothing to say and who yak about the trivial details of their lives that nobody cares about. Brook ends by satirically suggesting that every weblogger post a statement to their blog each month that includes sentences like “This is a stupid document; it is meaningless drivel that I do not expect any of the several billion people on my planet to actually read.”

Keep in mind that Brook was writing all of this about 8 years after the first weblog appeared and two years before Movable Type. It was a time when a person could still hold on to the term “weblog” with curmudgeonly persistence, when you still had to know something about HTML to blog, and when only about 50% of American households had the internet.

I don’t completely side with Brook here. He’s being satirical, but he’s also being snotty. A blog that he sees as trivial may be a lifeline to someone else. Say, someone’s personal blog about their struggles with fertility or conversion to a new faith. He mostly limits “legitimate” blogging to people who are already considered experts and celebrities, underestimating the power of the blog itself to make someone into an expert or celebrity.

But yet, I do think his essay merits consideration as a historical document. In the fight to wrest control of our online content from corporations, in the championing of our right to create and share content without someone stealing it or profiting from it, it’s become uncomfortable to ask whether that content is worth creating or sharing in the first place. Instead, I’ve seen blog-hyping around web revival spaces which elide the frustrations and problems with blogs that have always existed. As if blogs, simply because they are not social media, are inherently good. It goes something like this: “Yeah!! Blogs! Write a blog! It doesn’t matter what it’s about! It doesn’t matter if it’s bad! I’ll read your bad blog!!”

I, dear reader, will not read your bad blog. It’s not because I’m better than you. I myself keep a bad logs of my life on paper, otherwise known as journals. They are often whiny and concerned with minute details that I’m not even sure I will care about 6 months from now. Every once in a while I also include a thought in my journals that seems worth developing, so I set that aside in another notebook to come back to and maybe eventually publish online. But overall, I write the same kind of vapid crap that Donald Brook is talking about. I keep it to myself, not merely out of a concern for privacy, but because I don’t think other people will care about it. I will absolutely read your good blog, though.

Blogging is a genre of writing, just like novels or technical manuals or magazine articles. Blogs are bound by a set of conventions that we have agreed to observe. And just like any other genre of writing, there are people who are really good at it and people who are less so. Some people have a knack for making the raw materials of their lives into an entertaining narrative. We saw some of them become widely recognized writers during the ascendancy of the blog (let’s say, between the years 2004-16.) People who were able to cross over into the publishing industry or who became journalists with major media outlets on the strength of what they had blogged about. A perfect example, to choose one of many, is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s blog The Yarn Harlot, which made Pearl-McPhee into a published author and a knitting celebrity. It’s still going after 20 years.

The explosion of social media and its problems is really just a larger-scale reiteration of what happened when everyone started blogging. I joined Facebook in January 2006, when it was only open to people with a .edu email address. Later that year, it was opened up to everyone and the experience of being on social media came into the larger public consciousness. I wonder if by that time Donald Brook updated his inevitable blog with an entry entitled “Why I Fucking Hate Facebook!” Everyone was getting on Facebook and everyone was complaining about how everyone else was on it. People were sharing details of their lives that nobody cared about! The nerve! I remember that taking a picture of what you ate for lunch was a particular target of complaint. Snark sites arose just to mock the things that people posted publicly. And then a few years later, moms and aunts and uncles discovered it. Facebook was no longer just for cool young people and, boy, did those cool young people (of whom Donald Brook was almost certainly no longer one) have something to say about it.

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It’s good to remember these things in order to keep our designs and desires regarding the internet in check. Again, while not idealizing Web 1.0, I think many would agree that life online has gotten worse as we’ve continued inventing new methods for sharing internet content. I don’t want to downplay the skills of the many people who have made internet infrastructure what it is today, but it seems like we keep trying to do an end-run around shitty human behavior by inventing new platforms for sharing information. I have had my behavior influenced by a number of content management systems, social media platforms and dating sites, but in each case I had to decide for myself what using them ethically meant.

Yes, any online system for content creation will undeniably shape the content we create and how we interact with other people around that content. Web 1.0 had a lot of flaws, some of which were technical limitations, some of which were social. The rise of blogs, and then of social media, trained us to think that different kinds of content are important, depending on the medium we’re viewing it through. But I’ve been around the block (I accidentally typed “blog” instead of “block”) enough times to be suspicious of claims that a change in the system in itself will change the internet for the better. It makes a difference, to be sure, but does it make the difference that people want? I just don’t think that any platform in itself inspires creativity or genuine connection. Even a place like Neocities, which is designed for each user to build their site from scratch, still contains a lot of junk sites with unoriginal content.

I think instead we need to revisit our relationship with the content that we create. That’s why I like Maggie Appleton’s explanation of the Digital Garden and different patterns for tending to them. You can bring that ethos basically anywhere—to a newsletter, microblog, or hand-coded website. It’s about thinking through the knowledge that you’re presenting and being intentional about how you present it. How would my words on the internet change if I stopped thinking of them as hot takes—snappy one-shot thoughts supposed to exist unchanged for all time—and started thinking of them as planted seedlings? How internet discourse change if we allowed people to learn in public, which of necessity means making mistakes? How would we communicate if we allowed ourselves to say, I don’t know; I’m still figuring this out? The internet might become what it has only rarely been: human.

The internet will not be saved by a platform. It will only be saved by people. People who are thoughtful about what they post, care about the people they come in contact with, and choose ethically, insofar as it’s possible, whom they give their money to online. Yes, it matters if we can have fewer algorithms, more security, less persuasive design, fewer deceptive design patterns and if the private, everyday person stops being treated like a cash cow by scammers and corporations alike. But a good internet just as importantly depends on our tolerance for incompleteness and imperfection. It depends on our right to walk away from it, to go dark for a while, and to not feel pressured to create content because the alternative seems worse. It depends on our ability to hold pieces of ourselves outside and apart from it, and then to come back to the fire when we are ready to share what really matters to us.