If you read it and have questions, that's what the unbolded parts are for.
Hi. I'm a programmer who dislikes the modern internet. I will explain why and provide an alternative in the form of code published to the Public Domain.
I'm not Google/Facebook/Amazon. I can't change how those places behave and I do not have their money or resources. I have a Raspberry Pi, a $10 domain I forgot I owned, and time on my hands. That's all I need to make and publish software that more closely fits my ideals.
All code on this site, including the page you are reading is Public Domain. I am not distributing binaries. I want people to look at the code, study it, criticise it, understand it, make copies for themselves, modify it in any way they want and spread it.
Bored of writing for now. Going to turn attention back to coding the Gemini browser until the thought of writing interests me again. I'll write more about how Tumblr gave a bunch of Zoomers brain damage after I finish client validation. This one document is starting to get long, so I will probably split the different writings off to different pages.
Have you ever heard of Javascript? It's awful. It powers lots of privacy disrespecting tech. If I told you I could uniquely identify your device, even if you were on incognito mode or not, that I could get your real IP address, even through your VPN, and that I could make your CPU mine Monero for me, just because you clicked a link, you'd assume I had a 0-day vulnerability giving me remote code execution attack capabilities. But that's just Javascript, and we're all cool with it for some reason. That's not even all the awful it's capable of. All those creepy web trackers from Facebook and Google which power the digital advertising panopticon are written in Javascript. Truly nasty stuff. Client-side scripting can't be reformed and must be abolished. Arbitrary code is by definition, arbitrary. There is no way to make the technology secure or privacy respecting. It has been proven that "just trust us bro" isn't exactly an iron-clad promise from tech companies that privacy is respected.
Client-side scripting is the lifeblood of the targeted ad industry, and the rise of the targeted ad industry has allowed garbage content to flourish. Clickbait could not survive without targeted advertisements. If your awful clickbait site needs skynet to violate my privacy to try to manipulate me into buying something I don't need, then your content is low-value shit and your site doesn't really deserve to exist. Want of money is not a justification to spy on everybody, package the data up and resell it.
To achieve a better internet, I think HTTPS should be abandoned in favor of a new protocol which uses TLS and does not include client-side scripting. Work towards this aim is being done with Project Gemini. I am currently working on a command-line Gemini browser which will be released as soon as I finish implementing client-validation over TLS to enable end-to-end encrypted sessions between client and server. Should the Gemini protocol add client-side scripting or other spookiness I dislike, I will make my own protocol with a different name and port number which I will maintain.
I'm writing this partly because of a conversation I had with a 20 year old Zoomer. Mr. Zoomer was 14 in 2016. He was reminiscing about how free and open the internet was, and lamenting the changes which have been occurring since 2018 which have severely limited internet freedom. While I agree with him that 2018 was a very bad year for internet freedom, I was astonished that he had idealized 2016 of all years! The 2016 internet was already a badly crippled, heavily tracked, heavily censored husk compared to the 2008 internet. He could be far freer than he could even imagine. I know this is true because I lived through it.
I am not a professional historian or writer. This document is written from the perspective of a common man living in the west who lived through these events. As is the nature of life, there were times when I paid more or less attention to internet drama or politics. I do not claim this to be comprehensive. I'll provide as many sources as I can recall and find, preferring to use the internet archive when available. I encourage you to take everything skeptically and do your own research. You don't know me. I could be wrong. I could be dumb. I could be lying. Research for yourself and form your own opinion.
For Zoomers who are too young to remember, or for people who've forgotten, the internet used to be very different culturally. There were tons of sites, free speech was the norm, and anonymity was relatively easy to come by. Way fewer people used the internet. It was more of a novelty for hobbyists than a daily facet of life/utility. In those days, you didn's need internet access, and there wasn't a whole lot to do on it but talk to people on niche forums or watch edgy Flash cartoons on Newgrounds. Then around 2008, social media and smartphones hit at the same time. Normies were suddenly on the internet en masse and everybody was moving to Facebook. This wasn't too bad in those days. Discussion was still relatively free and open. Normies mostly posted innocuous things like pictures of what they were having for lunch. Inane but tolerable.
People who were easily offended and resulted to Reductio ad Hitlerum arguments weren't taken seriously or empowered to get people banned or fired from their jobs. They were mocked with Godwin's Law. You could talk to anyone, from anywhere, about anything. Suddenly there were more opinions available than just whatever was on TV. This was a big deal because before the internet, basically all information came through television. Television was controlled by a small number of people, and presented false choice in political thought in the form of a dozen or so cable TV personalities providing slightly different flavors of the same ideas and information.
In general, whatever personality you were watching had the same opinions on foreign policy, more or less as every other personality. They'd argue only over cultural issues of low importance (like if Marilyn Manson caused the Columbine shooting) or minor technical details of the implementation of controversial laws (like if abortions should be allowed out to X weeks, or X-2 weeks). At this point in history, the range of ideas expressed in media was very limited. There was no "fringe" because those people couldn't affort to own TV stations. All, or very close to all information came from the establishment via TV. There were no serious alternatives. The internet was the first and only challenger to the informational supremacy of television. Political ideas which previously were not being expressed were easy to find and read. Topics which were not discussed on TV were discussed at length on the internet. You could openly debate anything from any position with any other person without restriction.
People in those days weren't looking for an alternative to television, or aware one was even possible. They weren't even aware the internet was becoming an alternative to television. Television had been around forever and was very widespread. People assumed the only real changes to media we would see would be bigger screens and better resolutions. The popularity of the internet organically happened. Televised content had gotten horrifyingly uniform and dull and the internet was the first interesting thing to come along in years.
The combination of anonymity and cheap, instant global communication was something that the world had never seen before. The intellectual freedom of that kind of environment creates is hard to describe to those who have never experienced it, but once you have experienced it, you never want to give it up again.
In those days there were still authoritarians online. They would still show up with the classic authoritrian stance that any content they disliked or disagreed with shouldn't be permitted to be posted or discussed. Their naked calls for censorship would be seen for what they were and the general population would tell them to just leave and go make their own hugbox forums if they couldn't handle free and open discussions. There was no popular support for the idea that their hurt feelings were a justification to censor internet discussions at large. Authoritarians had absolutely no power over free discussion, and that was great.
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street happened. This event was largely organized online in these sorts of mostly unmoderated spaces. Loads of people were screaming "We are the 99%" and trying to unify along class lines, for better treatment of workers and a more equal US economy. This threatened some very rich people, so they unleashed an absolute mind virus of an ideology called intersectionality. Intersectionality fractured the movement into a bunch of smaller, competing groups who squabble over stupid things of no consequence and are doomed never to unite for any meaningful change again.
Around this time, social media made two major changes. Algorithms changed from pushing quality content to pushing the most divisive intersectionalists imaginable, and big tech started listening to the authoritarians demanding that anything they disapprove of be censored. Overnight the internet died, and a new, less interesting, less useful, less friendly internet was born.
The next couple sections all happened at approximately the same time. It's hard to describe how fast the rate of social change was, and how swift and severe the drop in internet freedom was, but I will do my best. Occupy broke the internet.
The first wave of jannies were people who were total societal rejects who had nothing else going in life. They spend all day online reading every post to find things that upset them, then delete the offending post. They do it for free. It was one of the internet's earliest instances of bioleninism. Suddenly the worst, least qualified people on earth had control of the world's most advanced communications systems and an outsized influence on the ideas which were allowed to be expressed on those communications systems. People naturally didn't like this, but in those days bots basically didn't exist, and a few dozen jannies was nothing in the face of millions of people who wanted to talk freely.
The easiest way to prevent unity and promote infighting among workers is intersectionalism. However, intersectionalism would eventually fall out of favor no matter how hard the wealthy tried to prop it up. Ideas come and go. There needed to be a longer term solution to reduce the odds of workers unifying.
Things continued like this for a while. Jannies realized the futility of their efforts, but instead of just letting people speak freely, they started screeching at big tech, attempting to shame them into making better tools for Jannies. The excuse they used to justify censorship was the same as always. To contain "hate speech" and "misinformation". Both nebulous terms which can be defined and redefined to justify any amount of any style of censorship or tracking. At this point in history, "hate speech" was the more fashionable of the two to complain about when cheering for censorship.
The first robojannies were not the super complex AI sentiment analysis monstrosities of today. They were dumb word filters which poorly addressed low-effort trolling. If your account pic was an anime girl and you were trying to spell out the n-word in a Twitter thread, one letter at a time with other anime girl avatars, you were probably all going to get banned. The accounts that got banned were mostly run by teenagers being immature with new tech nobody fully understood.
It was incredibly low-effort content, if you can even call it content. However, these teenage shitposters were portrayed as being the second coming of Hitler and anyone who questioned automated censorship as the solution was accused of either supporting bigotry or being bigoted themselves. This was a frustratingly disingenuous performance by the authoritarians, and nobody could seriously believe their arguments. Rather than argue, authoritarians just focused on becoming more and more toxic to push for what they wanted. They'd circumvent logical debate entirely and just focus on smearing those who disagreed.
Eventually the internet caved and accepted the presence of the web's earliest robojannies. This was a catastrophic mistake, because it established two bad precedents which have done much damage to internet freedom. First, it established that there was some content online which it was justifiable to censor automatically without debate, discussion or even presentation. Second, it established that incredibly toxic behavior could impose censorship on a formerly free system.
To pacify those who care about intellectual freedom or free speech, automated censorship was initially sold as only removing the worst of the worst. Content which was shocking or low-value trolling. It was sold disingenuously as a way to make the internet "safer", as though anime girl avatars making edgy jokes were some serious threat to anyone or anything. Of course once the technology was sufficiently advanced and it's usage had been normalized, the list of topics and targets for censorship began to grow.
Around this time, shadow bans came into fashion. They were not widespread then, but have become moreso now. I'm going to credit Reddit for effectively inventing the modern shadow ban. The technique predates them by decades, but Reddit was one of the earliest, largest and most zealous adopters of it on the modern web.
The premise behind a shadow ban is pretty simple. You secretly ban a user from a forum. The user recieves no notice that they have been banned. While logged in, the shadow banned user can see their own posts and comments. They can interact with with content as any other user. However in reality the shadow banned user is in a prison of total censorship. Nobody but the shadow banned user can see the shadow banned user's content, so nobody reacts to it. This creates the impression that the content is unpopular and that posting it is a waste of time, leading to the shadow banned user leaving the community.
Shadow banning is a form of gaslighting designed to discourage some ideas from being discussed, by creating the false impression that nobody is interested in having a conversation. The point of a shadow ban is to prevent discourse of any kind on a particular topic.
The addition of automated censorship demonstrated that being loud and toxic was an effective way to make Silicon Valley do something. Toxic people would post awful nonsense and less radical people would share it. Around this time, crowdfunding came into existence, which caused attention activists could get online to be worth real money. More toxic people were able to get more eyeballs for a same reason a trainwreck will have more interested viewers than lecture. Some of these eyeballs would convert to crowdfunding donations. Social media effectively gamified being a shitty person. Activists competing for eyeballs and Patreon donations evolved new and increasingly more toxic ways to get attention.
This evolution of toxic tactics, combined with intersectional activism and grifting snowballed until an event called "Gamergate". Discussing Gamergate in depth would be a long undertaking beyond the general scope of this document, but I may return to it one day as the large, negative impact it had on the internet is hard to describe to someone who didn't watch it unfold and consider it's fallout critically.
I chose Kiwifarms.net to link to because it was around during the events, and allowed nearly unmoderated speech in discussions around it. This was very rare and precious at that point in history. The main antagonists of Gamergate were so toxic that even 4Chan banned discussion of the topic or any of the main figures. The users of Kiwifarms.net are also in the habit of archiving primary sources which prevents some things from being memory-holed. The primary source information is the most interesting material in my opinion. My linking to the site is not a sign that I endorse or somehow cosign any of the posts there. They belong to the authors alone. Kiwifarms.net is one of the few sites which has not been paved over with the entirely false narritive that the activist grifters involved in Gamergate were blameless victims of an irrational harassment campaign rooted in misogyny/racism. They were not. This narritive exists to try to vilify those who disagreed with the activist grifters in hopes of silencing those who disagreed and dissuading new or neutral people from looking into the matter further. The goal is to make the topic so radioactive that the activist grifters get whatever they want without so much as discussion. Kiwifarms.net managed to resist that. If you're going to Kiwifarms.net to read about the events, be polite. Don't shit up their threads. Ideally don't even make an account. Just read. You are a guest there, be a good one.