• bit/byte/bytes

Wish it had worked out lol


adorablesergal
@adorablesergal

Spotted this thread by Kavaeric over on Bluesky, and felt it was important to boost it over here.

I don't feel there's anything inherently wrong with wanting to set up a nice little static HTML homestead on Neocities to live out your digital cottagecore fantasies, but I do think the real problem rears its ugly head when it's assumed that everyone should build a house just like yours.

Even if we could, in good faith, put a proper desktop or notebook computer in front of every person on Earth so they weren't stuck with, say, a flip phone or something, those people would still need to know English to comprehend almost all code, and the tutorials from which to learn that code. They will have no choice but to learn our way of doing things in our language and using our concepts.

In another post, Kavaeric highlights work to escape that digital colonialism, and I've seen efforts elsewhere to shape and understand technology on the terms of the peoples and cultures who will be using it.

Animikii had put out an ebook a while back (that I can't seem to find a link to on their site now, darn it) on indigenous data sovereignty, of also creating programming languages and storing data in a way that is meaningful to them.

One particular passage I remember from that ebook is the difference in expression of a treaty between a first nation and european colonizers, with the colonizers using pages and pages of elaborate legal documentation to describe how the land was to be parsed and treated, and the indigenous peoples using a simple band of beads depicting parallel lines astride a river to describe a succinct summation of non-interaction--the lines would never intersect, end of story. Or at least, it would have been nice if it ended there, and what everyone learned the hard way is that excessive colonialist verbiage scrawled on pages and pages of dead trees didn't make concepts more precise; that excessive verbiage enabled the atrocities to come. Which of those forms of data storage would these people find to be superior, to serve their best interests? The beads? Or the data storage method that led to most of their deaths?

At some point there needs to be an understanding that these people need to be asked what they want out of this fantastic future we find ourselves in that delivers cat pictures on demand. It isn't right to give them our tools and our building plans and a book of standards that interface with our plugs and pipes and say, "try to catch up." That is, frankly, an insult. Arguably, there's a lot of other things that maybe have a higher priority right now for some groups; I don't think a village struggling with a lack of clean water is really thinking about what data sovereignty looks like for them. Also, it's not like any of us can individually snap our fingers and solve the world's ills. We can't even convince our own governments to give a shit about climate change.

It's something to think about, nonetheless, that our little CSS crimes here on Cohost are an indication of extreme privilege, as is forklifting our social lives from Twitter or Tumbler over to alternatives like Bluesky or even Threads, heaven forbid. Most of the Internet-connected world will only ever see the Internet through a billionaire's phone app, and even that is privilege.


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in reply to @adorablesergal's post:

you're certainly correct about privilege and all that, and we're not qualified to comment on the decolonization aspect of what you're writing but it seems plausible. thank you for saying this.

the cottagecore comparison, frankly, offends us. we can only speak for ourselves, but when we do small-web stuff we're trying to model what it means to cherish creative expression. we're not a white supremacist trying to sell people on a return to an imagined past which would turn out, when examined even slightly, to be a theocracy with rigid gender roles.

I would argue there's a difference between cottagecore vs straight-up fash-worshipping volkcore. There's some truly impressive old-school sites that I spy on Neocities all the time, but the point is that this is still a very particular pathway of expression that may carry deep meaning for y'all, but it isn't a default.

oh, sure, yeah, not any sort of default. fully agreed on that point. what we try to do personally is identify the aspects of the past which were good and are worth trying to bring into a modern context, to see how they might make sense today, how we might fix the problems that led to them going away in the first place. a lot of that is absolutely the inclusivity problems.

we don't care whether future generations like the same things we did; in fact, we know they won't, and already don't, and that's a good thing. trying to force the world to be static would be wrong. past generations kinda tried to do that to us and we have it as a personal resolution not to re-enact that bullshit. (we don't actually use neocities personally, just so you know, but that really isn't the point.)

we do care that future generations have the opportunities we had, to explore ourselves and figure out who we are and what we care about. to that end, FUCK the corporate web, you know? when we see a system of oppression we are gonna get to work on dismantling it. making fun little things is only a small part of that work, of course, but we do think it has a role to play.

anyway - yeah, we imagine there must be people doing cottagecore stuff who don't understand the white supremacy connection and would not condone that connection. the world is big, and organic. we appreciate you clarifying <3

Yeah, at some point there has to be acknowledgement that we can't go back and that's fine. Some things should be left behind, like I work on the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Restoration Project, and there were a few problematic things sitting in those files that we got rid of despite our desire to be "period-accurate" to the dev era the game was being made.

I'm sure the original devs didn't think much about the homophobic jokes or the porn of questionable legality or the Confederate States of America battle flag they put in those assets, but we've got 20+ years on those guys in understanding why that shit isn't okay, and we know how Duke wouldn't be okay with it, either.

But that's us putting in the work on understanding those things, and making sure we don't put out a game that will appeal to people we'd rather not appeal to. This has garnered us an immense amount of grief from a small segment of the fan community, but too bad so sad; we're the devs and not them. If they want to make ultra-racist KlanDuke, the leaked files are right there.

Cheers, and I hope y'all have a nice weekend!