This is going to be a draft of a blog post I intend to write. I want to post here first to see if anyone resonates with what I'm talking about. Please comment if you identify with this, or know another name for what I'm going for.
You may already be familiar with that XKCD comic. Number 2347, "Dependency."
It captures a peculiar phenomenon of the internet. Much of it is developed by big companies. From the Cisco switches rerouting packets to the YouTube javascript running on hundreds of millions of devices right this moment, the internet is dominated by corporate tech.
But the thing is, despite it's massive impact, big tech is not the whole internet. In fact, we know that the internet wouldn't work properly if it was only the product of big tech. You need the wikipedia volunteers. The open source programmers. The hobbyist web-tool makers. The free ad-block maintainers.
These are the municipal volunteers of the internet. The roadside litter cleanup crew. The mural painters. And I think we all know that the internet would be a horrible place to live if it weren't for these people. The profit motive that fuels big tech leads to greed, closed-source code, and walled gardens. Every company would need to write their own crypto libraries. There would be no ad-free online encyclopedia. There would be no neal.fun.
I'm going to suggest a name for these people. "Netkeepers." A person who sees a problem on the internet that needs fixing, and fixes it.
But what motivates the Netkeeper? Not the profit motive, obviously. So what then?
Let's do a case study from my own life. I would describe myself as a Netkeeper. One example of something I've done is Blamscamp, a bandcamp-style player that you can embed on itch.io to sell your albums. I made this when it was announced that Epic Games bought Bandcamp. I saw that the internet had a problem—that bandcamp was a single point of failure in the selling-albums-online space—and I did my best to fix it.
I did this because I want a better world. I don't want it to become impossible to buy albums anymore. And if I can do my part to steer us away from that future with two days of gratis hypomanic programming, then I'll do it. I don't need to get paid for it.
But there's the problem. I do this because I believe in it, AND I do it for free because I don't need the money. I don't need the money because I already have a job that pays well. I don't need to follow the profit motive because I'm already comfortable. Capitalism isn't actively threatening my existence, so I have the luxury to spend time doing stuff I find interesting and important for free.
If I didn't already have a stable income, or I had a job that took all my energy and left nothing for myself, I wouldn't have been able to create Blamscamp.
And this is why this post is titled "The Netkeeper Needs to Exist But Can't." I'm not actually a Netkeeper. I'm a hobbyist Netkeeper. A true Netkeeper would be someone who could do it full time. Who finds problems on the internet, fixes them, and is paid for it. Not paid for each problem they fix, but paid unconditionally. Paid because the community has trust that you'll do the right thing with the energy you have.
So, can a true Netkeeper exist? Maybe. The only obvious option to me is Patreon. However, how do we describe what we're doing? If our Patreon says we "do random stuff for the internet," will people actually donate?
And this is where I reveal this is actually a manifesto. I feel like Patreon could work. We could make the Netkeeper real. But we need a better phrase than "I do random stuff for the internet." I suggest we popularize the word "Netkeeper."
Imagine a Patreon where someone proudly describes themselves as a Netkeeper. Every month they post updates of what they've been up to, like a Tom Scott newsletter. You pay them because you believe in them. You believe they can steer the internet in a better direction with the time, money and energy.
There could be directories of Netkeepers. It could be your job title. It could be how you spend your career break, gap year, or retirement.
But the Netkeeper can't exist. Not right now. The concept is knocking on the door to our reality. It wants to come in, it wants to become real. The Netkeeper needs to exist. I think we can all agree on its value. Maybe not on the execution, that could use some ironing out. But the concept, the concept is perhaps something we can believe in.
