My internet manifesto

It seems that we are all a brand now and a brand, in the year of our lord twenty twenty five, is in constant need of a website. Our accessibility to others must be constant and unwavering, our lives must be monetised, our attention diverted constantly to how we may increase our brand value. This is what the internet has told us, told me. This is how we are to live now.

It's all a sentiment I aspire to rebel against with every fibre of my digitised being. Why should I conform my soul, the soul of my art, to the trappings of a present I didn’t choose and didn’t consent to? Why must it be that my success is determined not by my merit, but by my ability to advertise? My willingness to monetise? It shrivels me. But as a writer, an author, a teacher, and a citizen of this world, I must participate to some degree. Plus, it can be fun.

Which is what I think the internet should be; it should be fun! Not always a happy fun. Not always a fun that diverts you from the harrowing reality of our world, but fun in the sense that our access of all materials is easy, novel, and uniquely situated to take full advantage of the tools at our disposal. Each and every webpage having the same millennial grey ultra modern layouts and colours is no better than scrawling the internet on eight and a half x eleven copy paper and laying out on the ground in front of our houses. Except even that has some flair and personality. I miss the internet of old, with the layouts that reflected the personality that maintains it, but we should pair that creativity with our modern investments in accessibility and usability. There is no reason the two can not coexist. The internet should be for everyone.

Having access to nearly the entire breadth of human knowledge should not be limited to an artificially created group of folks that can afford it. If the internet and our data as a whole can be collected, used, and sold en masse, that every single person should be able to access the entirety of the public internet without any meaningful barriers. Libraries, the first true love of my life, have acted as one of the few meaningful refuges of unfettered internet access with obvious exceptions for sites and content that the library would find in poor taste considering the environment. But even those sites – porn, erotica, resistance guides – should be available to all, as they too participate in the economy of absorbing and exploiting all internet users. There must be an obvious exception made for any sites that peddle and support illegal or immoral acts. The internet should be a safe space. Not always a comfortable one, but a safe one.

Copyright laws are whack as they are currently written. Yes, I shouldn’t be able to copy and paste the entirety of John lee Clark’s work onto my site and then monetise it and claim it as my own. But I should be able to take his work and remix it, blend it with mine, portray it in formats and contexts beyond the original scope and then share it (with proper credit of course!). Being blind and having read much in the way of fellow disabled opinions, copyright laws keep vast hordes of written works out of our hands as people find a lack of profit in converting those works into formats accessible to us. Copyright laws also play an insidious part in punishing poor folks as the rich and powerful use false copyright claims and an expensive court system to remove content they disagree with and that erodes their power.

The internet should equalise us. Not in the way techbros say A.I. will equalise us as those generative models steal content from hard working artists just to reassemble it in lazy and sloppy messes. The internet should equalise our access to thoughts and equalise our avenues for expressing said thoughts. But we should always lead those thoughts with kindness. Wanna be racist? Take that shit out to the garbage. Wanna make ill-spirited insults at strangers? Prepare for retribution. Freedom of speech does not equate a freedom from consequences of your speech.

Against the grain of digital hygienists I think there is value to be found in the attention exploitative content flooding our media pages, but as with all things there should be a healthy understanding of moderation. Doomscrolling, endless parades of meaningless content designed to do nothing but sap our attention, our data, our money is insidious, but there is a kernel of meditation happening in there. A way to shut our brains of even as they are over active. We should allow ourselves to be bored far more often then we are engaged with that content, but sometimes we have a particularly trying shit and the toilet lacks the proper tools to take our mind off digestive reality. Scrolling the feeds is a great way to pass some time while my body passes some waste.