End Times Vibes on the Old Frontier

The last few years have been really bittersweet for me online. Four years ago, Clarissa asked me if I'd heard about Geminispace - how it's a bit like gopher, a bit like the web - to which I said, no I haven't. She gave me a few links. I read them and was intrigued. The easiest way to get started being via pubnix. I remembered those from the 90s and 00s. sdf.org, I think, though my memory may be a little off. A whole revolution in the 2010s creating a constellation of these, now called tildes. Get an account, get writing.

I was kind of taken by this. It had been a long, long time since I'd had anything resembling a net presence that wasn't a simple social media profile. Same as most of us, I'm sure. I kept up personal homepages until the mid 00s. These were varying degrees of personal. All under my name, but designed for different audiences. This one for my Computer Science studies. That one on my ISP's webspace, for friends and people who know me offline. Another one elsewhere, on friends' personal domains, where I was still [winter], but first name only, the hope being that the people I didn't want to find me, wouldn't. And they did. And so in the end, that was maybe the end of the website as a deeply personal conduit for me. I kept up on forums. One for the TV show Andromeda (Ex Isle). Another for the open source game Vega Strike. Later, the Harmony Central guitar forums, while they were still good. But into the 00s I could feel my activity dropping off, the gravitational pull of social media too strong. Why go on forums when I can catch up with all my old friends on Facebook? It's hard to keep in mind how revolutionary it felt then, before it started facilitating genocide, before it started putting AI martial arts fighters and thicc babes up and down my feed. It used to be good, and by the time it wasn't, it had trapped people in its stupefying, infinite feed.

A long period of public silence. I was active on reddit for more than a decade before deleting, so I guess people could've found me by guessing my username. I have to assume that the same people who creeped my website in the early 00s creeped my reddit profile a decade later - obsession is obsession, and a part of my life I've always lived very publicly online. This may have been a mistake, but I don't think so. I think my mistake was getting involved with a certain sort of person to begin with. I can't take it back. What can you do? Keep living, and keep doing what you love.

For me, that's always been being online, since I first dialed up a BBS when I was 13 on a friend's computer. The way the text scrolled across the screen, the way it opened up my life to possibilities beyond the immediate realities of the city I'd grown up in. It was intoxicating. I met people. Most benign. Some of them not. But this is true everywhere. Good people, idlers, psychopaths, jerks. Look at your own life, and I'm sure you'll see them, too.

I made GeoCities sites and I made personal websites for my interests, and later I made an online journal site. I'd met some girls my age serendipitously on ICQ. They messaged me, we hit it off, I learned they were writing down their lives on handcrafted websites with small text and custom images made in cracked copies of Paint Shop Pro. I'd been reading mc's old net.diary and was fascinated by it, the openness, the honesty, the mess. My life was simpler (but about to get more complicated). And because you could just make a site for whatever you want, I did.

The earliest snapshots of my journal site dates back to June 1999. I wrote, but not so openly, yet. I never talked about night-riding at a friend's acreage, tension between us as I rode one of her horses slowly around a paddock, the way she looked up at me, the way I held that gaze. I also never wrote about her friend who came west from Montreal to visit her, and how something simmered between the two of us, too. No, it was about books, about my failed job-search, about the classes I signed up for at the local university in the fall. My journal had some of the shape of what I really wanted, but none of the details. I wasn't the open book I hoped I'd be.

A couple of years of that and I was done, my life stabilizing after my early teen years. Not the beautiful, pastel-toned mess I'd envisioned, not the writer's life in the south of France that one email penpal had confessed to me she wanted for herself, but something sensible. A degree, a girlfriend, the prospect of a long-term career, something approaching the normal and sensible, even if certain other aspects, like children, were never going to be part of my life.

But there was something about that moment in time that was good. Possibility and community, two things it's felt like there's been less and less of online. In the days before social media, you had to find your misfits, and they _were_ misfits: especially in the days before high-speed internet, you had to be unhappy with your offline life to want to go online. You were all looking for something. A connection, a spark, something offered by someone else.

I've felt reconnected to that through Gemini, my new openness fostered, if I'm being completely honest, by the taking of a pseudonym. No longer my first and last name, or a diminutive of the first. Probably I'd be easy enough to identify by old friends, if they ever found this site, this protocol, this rekindling of a good part of the old net. But let's be honest. There's privacy in this public space. Regular people aren't going to care about Geminispace. They're too busy, trapped elsewhere in engagement and disinformation loops, caught by what the kids call brainrot, not thinking about what they'd like to do because other entities are making that decision for them.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that it's bittersweet, and it is. Geminispace is a quiet corner of the internet, so niche it may well not even exist. Meanwhile, the open web has simultaneously been growing and shrinking. There are unquestionably more sites on the web than there have ever been, but does it feel that way? How often do you go on Google and find some fascinating site curated by a person, rather than some sort of corporate or government entity? Google surfaces fewer and fewer interesting sites, and the WordPress-ification of the web means that so many of them look the same. Image, large text, call to action, hamburger menu. There used to be curiosity and joy in discovery. Now there's scant little of any of these.

When ChatGPT and image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney started showing up on my Twitter feed in 2021 and 2022, it was an "oh shit" moment. For a moment, these things felt huge to me, a feeling that quickly ended. As people kept posting what they'd generated, it was clear there was a kind of sameness, a normalization, a levelling-off. That "oh shit" went from the immediate look of things, to the thought of what was to come.

And I was right. AI shit is everywhere. Un-alt text'd AI images on Bluesky. Thicc babes (AI-generated) tugging at their bikini strings on Facebook. Videos, videos, videos. Anything that can be looped over and over, harvesting clicks, harvesting attention. I have seen the best minds of my generation beholden to engagement metrics. Ironic that my interest in the personal internet was rekindled at the very moment that tech evangelists begin to burn everything down.

I'm not talking about energy costs, though I could be. I'm not talking about water usage, either. Rather, I'm talking about the insatiable need for human-created data, and how the actions of the big tech companies over the last two decades have meant that there is less and less that can be easily harvested by their spiders. You've tried looking at images on Instagram, right? Login wall. Twitter? Login wall. Facebook? Yeah, okay, you get the idea. Companies aren't dumb, and they know what their most valuable resource is. But by paddocking their users for so long, the result is that there's a dearth of data on the open web. What's driving the engagement machine now is AI. And AI needs training data, and novel training data is becoming increasingly rare.

Everyone wants to make money off AI now. The best datasets are massive, and private, so what's to do? Make spiders, crawl the open web, over and over and over. It's estimated that half of all internet traffic is now bots, and honestly that feels like a massive underestimation. Over on Mastodon, I was discussing this with one of my mutuals - over 90% of his indie web traffic is bots. I believe it. The old dead internet conspiracy theory becoming real. Everyone wants a dataset for their terrible idea. And traffic is free, right?

The problem comes with the huge uptick in traffic due to AI spiders. A number of projects have reported problems staying online due to a huge increase in AI-related scraping. The spiders hammer the servers over and over, so many of them simultaneously that the servers begin to buckle under the load. What's to do? You might have run into a stopgap already. If you think you've seen, "Verifying that you're human..." more and more lately, well, you're right. More aggressive blocks (some of them country-level!). Alternative techniques, too. Cloudflare has written about what they call an "AI Labyrinth", designed to trap agents that don't respect robots.txt in an infinite maze of bullshit content. This is a win in a couple of ways: the AI spiders are kept away from the real content, and it directs them to bullshit data, endlessly machine generated, that (hopefully) acts as poison in the dataset.

It's tragic that we've even gotten this far. The web used to be open, and free, and for everyone. But in the last few years, the pressures of AI slop and social media in general have made a weakened web even more useless. Twenty years ago, it was one of the jewels of our collective creation. It became such because of the work and love put in by hundreds of millions of people. But in the two decades since, the bright light of the web has become increasingly dim.

It's been bittersweet finding something similar in Geminispace, though I'm hopeful that the willful non-commercialness of this space means that it's immune to the types of problems that we've seen elsewhere. We'll see, I guess. But I look at what I used to make on the web, at my indie web site now, at what I've created here: if you love to make things, and to see what others have made, you'll always find a way.