Shadow Hog

i am not genuinely mad at people for doing it, but god, it is so eviscerating to have someone say "oh man i love your content"

it's like walking up to a cow and going "dude i just want you to know? the burgers i'm gonna make out of you are going to be so delicious. my mouth is watering already. i cannot wait to exploit you. i see you purely as a resource"

i will never stop reiterating this: "content" was a word created by people who think like this

what is the purpose of the text on a website? to increase visitor count! to "convert" "leads"! to generate organic traffic! imagine being so brainwormed that you think the purpose of baking cookies is to make people interested in the cookie jar. "content" is a word created by the people who invented SEO and ruined google.

"content" is a block on a wireframe (derogatory) that's tucked in between "navigation", "banner ad", and "targeted ad," and just to the left of "column ad (animated)." applying that term to someone's creative output is unspeakably demeaning. applying it to your own is horrifying.

For the last eighteen years we've watched the slow rot and death of the web. In the early days, before capital had figured out how remake the web in a way that best serves its interests, it was very much a network for people. People made websites, people kept journals and fan sites, people met other people on weird little forums, people had experiences that were novel and exciting because the web was novel and exciting. Nobody had a timeline, a feed, a bunch of colourful apps circumscribing their online lives. What you had was dependent on you, what you created and who you met. How you decided to spend your days.

I can't stress this enough: it didn't used to be this way. It didn't used to be this bad. I was technically an early(ish) adopter, first coming online around 1995, dialing into the Saskatoon Freenet from a terminal program and finding websites using the text-based browser lynx. My entire online world in those years was text-based. I dialed in from an old 8086 with a 2400 bps modem I bought for $30. I had a list of numbers for local boards and systems printed out on perforated dot matrix printer paper. I had a cracked version of Telix. I used to get online and go to URLs I found in Internet World magazine, play MUDs and MUCKs, make friends with strangers. It didn't hit me at the time, because how would it, but in those early years, there was barely a corporation to be found.

Then, as now, everything was largely public, but due to search engines of the day being not particularly good, there was more of a privacy in that public. If someone can't easily stumble onto something, if they can't creep you from Google, how public is it? The web felt a bit like a series of long and interconnected streets, where sites and forums, largely invisible to search, only showed up as you started to wander a bit. Strangers left me messages in guestbooks. I did the same for them. There was no CAPTCHA either, because stupid shitheads hadn't ruined basic form submissions yet. The people who were online were there because they wanted to be. In that way, it feels a bit like here at cohost: people who are doing something because they want to, and who have found a community, rather than just defaulting to a community-of-everybody from an app they've installed on their phone.

Social media changed things, of course, making it easier for everyone else to get online, helping out the huge numbers of people who thought computers were too complicated, who just wanted to talk to family and friends. Maybe read the news. Corporations jumped at this, creating vast silos of personal information, and news, and false news, linked to the real names they mandated we had to use. But in terms of the great conflagration, this was just the accelerant. The kindling had been set years ago, when cookies were created, when basic tracking and ad banners were created, when all the bad things that happen invisibly in the background of our day to day lives were just ideas to try to turn the wilds of the web into a fenced enclosure, a place for the cattle and sheep.

Back in 2017 my team at work got torpedoed and I got reorg'd. I stopped doing integration work and was put on a team responsible for the corporate websites. And I hated it. I didn't say anything, because I wanted to keep my job, but we'd have meetings and discussions about SEO and bounce rate and Google Analytics and every time that kind of language infiltrated my day, I wanted to die. It's not that I was opposed to web work - I was doing important public-facing changes and I took pride in making our site easier to use, more accessible, more streamlined. But the awful language mentioned above - conversions and leads and funnels - is the language of the corporate web. Every time I went into those meetings or read those emails I just felt sad. I'd been online for 22 years at that point. There was (and is) a better web possible, and at that point, the happiness I associated with the early web had all but gone, my memories just that.

Last year I'd had enough. I changed jobs. I stopped being a web developer, and got back into integration work. I've been a lot happier. I love connecting systems and making invisible changes that make people's lives better. But I'm also happy to be done with the corporate web, its dicta of cOntEnT, stickiness, organic traffic, rankings. I'm making a concerted effect to be less active on traditional social media (Twitter, mostly), and find my way back to those early years of excitement. The exact conditions can never be the same. But just as corporate interests remade our online experiences, we can do the same in very intentional ways: by making and maintaining websites, keeping link directories, exploring new technology in a people-centric way, and meeting new people online and being good to them. We can stop using corporate sites. We can use aliases, and we can reject the web of anger, the web of stickiness and engagement. So log out. Start exploring. Who do you think you might meet? And what can you find today?