MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

reclusion

published: 5-24-2018

Lately, the world has been getting a hell of a lot scarier.

I open my web browser to look up a simple tidbit of information for a school project I won't even remember in a week's time, and I'm immediately bombarded with several dozen trackers and analytics scripts and even the occasional cryptocoin miner. I block all of these scripts, and the webpage results in five layers of popups and sidebars that I can't exit out of because the relevant scripts aren't loaded, or, if I'm lucky, the page just stops working at all.

So I get frustrated. I open said pages in Lynx or a similar text-based browser, and voila, the page somehow doesn't immediately kick me off. Except I have to scroll through five pages of topbar links before I get to the actual text, and even then, the text is muddled with all of the alt texts of the images that didn't load because it's a text browser and you apparently need some fancy-dancy X server wizard shit to load a simple image. Never mind a video or a game or anything that isn't sound or text.

Living purely in a terminal in [insert whatever year it currently is] is self-inflicted hell, unless you're using a shitty hand-me-down computer from the Ice Age, in which case you can take off the "self-inflicted". I had a pretty comfy TTY-only setup on my grandma's old computer with Ubuntu Server 17.10, which was the last version that had 32-bit support. Except for the fact that I couldn't connect to any other WiFi networks except for the one I set it up at, and I couldn't tell NetworkManager to actually do its job because that requires nmcli and, at least last time I checked, you can't install packages from the internet without... the internet.

And that's just for networking. Listening to music, okay, sure, if you're okay with memorizing a Byzantine-tier amount of keybinds, you could probably get away with cmus. If you especially hate yourself, you could use youtube-dl to get some cool videos to watch. But good luck watching them without X. One could probably use Calibre's CLI tools to eventually hammer out a basic ePub file, but for working on the Peer Review Edition, I need to have that HTML editor on the left and a live preview on the right, just like in Calibre's GUI ePub editor. And last time I checked, unless I set up some weird config with nano (the only sane terminal text editor) and an auto-updating w3m in a multiplexer, that's just not going to happen.

For the past few months, I've been having an obsession with trying to live 100% in the terminal. An obsession bordering on... autism, if you will. (Which I have.) Some things I've managed to migrate 100%- okay, that's a lie; it's only music I'm comfortable only accessing through a text interface. Other things, like email and chat, are workable in a terminal, but only through an obtuse interface (Finch with the libpurple-matrix plugin) or with an unnecessary amount of config involved (Alpine, configure your own damn server configs for once).

I know the benefits. Faster loadtime, far fewer distractions, longer battery life, less disk space taken up with bloat. (You don't need the whole Electron runtime just to burn an ISO to a disk. cough cough Etcher cough)

But are the tradeoffs- not being able to participate in the modern internet, in modern life- worth it?

There are a lot of things that scare me about the modern internet. But we need to talk about Google first.

Google pretty much has the monopoly on search engines, even become synonymous with the concept of looking things up on the internet, even though I can name at least seven alternatives off the top of my head. (For your information: Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, YaCy, Searx, Qwant, Ecosia, maybe Ixquick?) My school uses Google Classroom for fucking everything, from class announcements to dropboxes for assignments to class discussions. Long gone are the romaticized images from my youth of class bulletin boards and wire baskets for assignments and, you know, those weird days where you'd walk into class and all the desks were arranged in a circle and you'd actually talk face-to-face. Everything has to go through the big G now, apparently.

I'm not one to fall for ultra-fundamentalists screaming "oh my god, this is secretly Satanic" at everything, but I step inside my school, and it's like one big ritual to the smiling god of California that claims to do no evil. Unquestioned omnipresence over every aspect of the student's life. Email correspondence between teacher and student. Document collaboration, whether alone or with groups, smiling normalcattle not even aware that alternatives to Google Docs exist, like AbiCollab or Airborn. File storage. Consumption of art and media. Consumption, not enjoyment, because everything quality and worthwhile is locked behind a paywall or restricted by arbitrary limits of per-month views or per-day skips or what-have-you. The mere act of browsing, with Chrone sending literally every single thing you do to Google's servers. You could blink, and its telemetry would send another packet to Google.

Teachers unthinkingly sacrifice their students' privacy for a modicum of convenience.

Teachers unthinkingly sacrifice their students to become the next customers of the big G.

I remember the entrepreneur unit in ninth grade social studies class. A whole month talking about people like Vanderbilt (who I stole my last name from, if you're wondering) who brutally ran other people out of business and started a monopoly. The teachers shook their heads and wagged their fingers and warned us about the dangers of allowing so few people to amass so much extra-governmental power over the populace.

What would happen if Google ceased to exist overnight?

What would happen if the USA government got out of bed with the big G and its promiscuous willing to share data and took its anti-monopoly laws seriously?

Normies would have a fucking meltdown, that's what. All their centralized data, placated into allowing one website to be their sole beacon of access for so long, just... gone.

But I digress big time. Where were we? Complaining about the modern internet?

Ah. Let's continue there.

I go to Scribus and try to download a document that I need for one of my extracurricular studies, and I get hit with a registration wall. I try to make an RSS feed for a Facebook page for an indie band I like, and I get hit with 504's and entries clogged up with 700 comments I didn't ask for and potato-quality images that require me to load the original Facebook page with all of its JavaScript and tracking code just to see the original in semi-decent quality. I go to literally any archive website (a requirement if one's going to link to somewhere on an imageboard) and I get hit with CloudFlare and its botnet Google Street View captchas because I was so audacious as to try to surf the web with Tor or a VPN (or both) enabled.

Why does WordPress need so much JavaScript to display a simple page? I load up my old website (if you're reading this before I shut it down for good) and it looks like fuarrking trash. Half of the sidebars are broken, there's big ugly boxes where the ads should have gone, and everything looks out of proportion because only paying users get decent CSS. But I load the home page for this lovely site you're reading this on right now, and it looks the same no matter what flavor of NoScript I'm using, because it's just static HTML and a dash of CSS so it doesn't look straight out of a Gopher screenshot from the pre-Eternal September days of the internet.

Why does every news site need something as elaborate as Disqus to have comments on their site? Isn't a simple HTML form enough?

Why does every "social" site need to be the second coming of Jesus Facebook? I grew up on the tail end of a more chaotic era. I was in elementary school when Chanology was relevant. Imageboards were obscure and chaotic and not just seen as places where Trump fans and borderline Nazis festered. There were actual forums for all sorts of different interests. IRC channels were everywhere. (Although I fuarrking hate IRC, but that's a story for another day.) If you could name it, there was probably a little corner of the internet where you could hang out and immerse yourself in said thing.

Now everything is spontaneous. Everything is documented. Everything is worthless if it can't be instashared. Hell, today I made kabobs (kerbobbers? quebobbos) in Foods class in school, and the first thought I had when holding my kabob dripping with wet raw meat juice was, "Hmm, I should take a picture of this."

It worries me.

I want the old internet back. I want weird personal webpages like you see all the time on Neocities to run rampant and free. No hard restrictions on who can express themselves, just knowledge of basic HTML and the spirit to keep working even when copy-pasting a template to keep your formatting consistent for the hundredth time. Websites on Neocities feel like I'm stepping into a person's house, if only for a moment, admiring their furniture and the pictures they've hung up on the walls and their choice in paint and carpet and everything in between. Social media just feels sterile and cold, one bland hard-to-fuck-up template for everybody.

I want the internet populace to scatter like so many dandelion seeds on the wind.

But, for now, I wait. I sit here on my bed on my old Android tablet with GNURoot Debian and type away in an HTML document in Nano. I pluck away on the keyboard of whatever device I've temporarily enslaved with my Tails drive and figure out what packages work well with the persistent packages feature and which ones won't work because they haven't bothered to implement SOCKS5 proxy settings.

I sit here, and I wait in my self-imposed digital monastery, watching the world crumple to ash around me.

And I wait for the SDF to finally receive my $1 registration fee.