It is the year 2021, and the digital written word is dead. Let’s start with a brief history:

  • 1998: Twenty-three years ago, Open Diaries launched and became one of the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers’ blog entries. (A year later, LiveJournal was founded.)
  • 2003: It was only four years after that that blogger.com was purchased by Google from Pyre Labs and Evan Williams. Blogs gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping, and spinning news stories.
  • 2012: Finally, nine years after that, Evan Williams launched Medium, a publishing platform for amateur and professional writers. To quote Wikipedia, “In some ways this was the beginning of the end of the blog as a social platform.²³”

Where does that leave us, now? Well, there is good news and bad news.

The Internet’s Yesteryears: A Retrospective

Let’s take a step back for a moment. The Internet’s landscape as a whole is vastly different from what it was a decade ago, and completely unrecognizable from what it was a decade before that.

There is a deep nostalgia for this period of infancy for the Internet as a whole. Projects like Neocities and SpaceHey created for the sole purpose of recreating the simplicity (and naiveté) of MySpace and Geocities, respectively.

As well as video games such as Hypnospace Outlaw and Emily is Away that attempt to capture the emotional experiences of the time.

It could be argued that there is no real way that the web was tangibly better back then, rather that a large portion of the Internet’s current demographic that grew up with this time period and simply looks back on it with rose-tinted glasses.

However, in spite of the seemingly impossible differences between the Internet then and now, it is ultimately identical still underneath of the hood. The same protocols and interfaces used over twenty years ago are still miraculously powering this thing with the addition of some duct tape and chewing gum.

Want an example? It takes hundreds of lines of CSS to even just get started creating everything, because we are doing things that shouldn’t be possible. Any attempt to make the Internet look pretty is fighting a battle against it, all these digital creations are Sisyphean hacks being rolled uphill endlessly.

Nothing is smarter, everything is just stupid faster.

And we get away with the technical ingenuity that powers the modern web thanks to 1) the seemingly-endless computational powers of current consumer products, and 2) innovative frameworks such as React.js and (the now deprecated) Angular.js, both owned and created by the corporate giants Facebook and Google, respectively.

Which is where we run into the fundamental problem of the post-Wild West Internet era — everything is actually the intellectual property of just a handful of oligarchical, profit-first companies.

Full Circle

And this is where we come full-circle back to the story of blogging — or more precisely — figuring out where a person can have have a voice without it being tethered to a Fortune 500 company. Is it possible to have a platform while protesting the platform?

There are partial solutions to this, such as the decentralized social networking of Matsodon, or the supposedly secure messaging app Wire. But these are band-aid fixes for niche audiences that don’t get at the root of the endemic problems of privacy and independent Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web Consortium, has come out proclaiming that he’s working on a new web, which is being worked on under the name Solid, and we have yet to see if it makes any sort of traction.

For now, we have initiatives such as the IndieWeb, for those willing to put in the work to create something of their own from scratch. I believe this is currently an excellent solution, which is why I’ve been working on several free and open-source projects to help people get started on this, that you can view at my GitHub.

For now though, the fight is small yet long in the tooth. It will take Herculean efforts on the part of advocates and activists in order to successfully persuade people of the necessity to, in essence, completely alter the way they use the Internet and consume content. And maybe it’s an impossibility to return to a web that is free and wild, but it’s damn worth trying.