As I am writing this article, it has been more than 2 years since I started working on my webspace. Having recently also passed 100k page views, I thought this would be a good time to write down some reflective thoughts. I still update my website regularly, but even when I'm not working on the site, I visit my page and Neocities daily. Neocities has become an online sanctuary for me. A place that, for the first time since a very long time, feels like a digital home. This made me wonder, why the hell am I even doing this in the first place? I mean, on a surface level it's obvious. I'm just a hopeless nostalgic millennial longing for a bygone era. A man steadily marching towards his mid-life crisis, trying to make up for missed opportunities. All of this is true, but I believe there is still more to my newfound digital homesteading.
The other day I was attending a lecture about AI. The lecture was given by someone with an IT background and while he was trying hard to be neutral I couldn't help but feel like we were on different frequencies. Heck, I was probably on a different frequency with everyone else in the room. The setting was my children's elementary school and the concern, obviously, was how AI is going to impact the lives of our children for better and for worse. I noticed a trend there of most parents being...
A. Very concerned about letting their children use AI. Although the concern extended a lot further to video games, smartphone use and screentime in general.
B. Active users of generative AI tools themselves in their professional or personal lives.
I am proud to say that I have never used generative AI other than that one time back in when it first came out to see what all the fuss was about, but I am apparently an outlier. The speaker explained that by now, 1/3 of all people in the world with an internet connection are using AI on a regular basis. Whenever I see videos of all the cool things you can do with AI, I can only think that I don't want to live in a world like that. I don't want be part of an internet where I have to wonder whether everything I see, hear and read could be generated by a computer. I don't want to have to guess whether the people I see on photo's or videos are real or non-existent. The estimation is that already today, 30 to 40 percent of content posted on social media is AI generated. Image generating AI is improving so fast that soon videos and images are going to be impossible to distinguish from real ones. It's not even that I'm afraid of this brave new world. I'm just tired of having this mental battle against all the things that are being forcefully implemented beyond my control. When smartphones were introduced I told myself that I would not participate, but in the end I broke. I did however promise myself that this would be the last time I would go against my principles.
I retreat to Neocities and the internet archive, because they remind me of what the internet used to be like and can still be if we collectively wanted to. A place for decentralized self-expression. Where people can dive deep into the things that personally interest them and other people who visit their page can learn something new. When I browse Geocities pages on the Internet Archive it reminds me how textual the internet used to be. It was a lot like visiting a virtual library whereas today it resembles a candystore more than anything else. I'm tired of constantly being bombarded with shit I didn't even ask for on the internet. I'm tired of the internet taking our agency away step by step, culminating in the dystopian nightmare called Tiktok where the algorithm chooses what you are going to watch next.
I retreat to Neocities because I don't feel like this is a battle we can win. My absence from most social media sites is a kind of silent protest, but other than that I do not have the energy to fight the tech bros. I enjoy spending time with other people who stepped outside of the walled gardens, away from the algorithms, but I do not expect that most of the world is going to follow us here.
Even though I consider myself an optimistic person, a look at the news these days is enough to make me realize we are living through strange times. Global tensions that are unprecedented in my lifetime, perhaps only comparable to how it felt shortly after 9/11. The difference between then and now is that tensions are likely here to stay. The climate disaster is slipping beyond our control, but there is no sense of urgency among the general population.
As a European I feel betrayed and abandoned by our global ally the United States. At the same time I think we have been incredibly naive in believing that the post WWII order would remain forever. Trump may be the face of all this turmoil, but part of this is just policy overarching presidential terms. America no longer wants to be the world police. As China's power keeps on growing, America knows that a direct military confrontation would be far too costly, hence its new focus on being dominant on the western hemisphere. Europe, unfortunately, is no longer a priority. I don't think the US is going to abandon us, or NATO, altogether, but the message is loud and clear: Us Europeans will have to fend for ourselves a lot more against Russia and at this moment we are not ready!
When I focus my shift domestically I am confronted with a government that seems to be structurally unable to solve the major problems our country is facing. The Netherlands has one of the worst housing shortages in the developed world. House prices have doubled in only a decade. It took me 10 years from graduation to be able to afford a decent, but not even that great of a house. And I know there are people who have it far worse than I. The wealth gap is increasing and the social welfare system has been dressed down by over a decade of the liberal party VVD, led by Mark Rutte who is currently ass-kissing Trump as head of NATO. Homelessness was practically non-existent when I was a kid, but nowadays I see people begging on the street all the time. Amidst all this we have a voting population that is mostly concerned, like the US, with keeping the immigrants out. People keep on voting for the same populists and liberals when those pricks are the ones who got us into this mess to begin with. I've been hearing the same nonsense about the left elite that you hear everywhere in the world, yet 'the left' has not had any significant power in our country since the 1970s. Every election the part of the electorate that leans left or socialist is shrinking and I just don't get why. Is social-democracy not sexy enough? Are people spending so much time watching 15 second videos that they start to believe that major social issues have solutions that you can explain in 15 seconds?
I am losing faith in the stability of our world. And so I retreat to my website.
Before I say anything, let me clarify that I do not hate my life. For the most part I am doing alright. I have a stable job, some friends, a house, a lovely wife, two kids. Yet, I feel like I have always been making the safe choices. I did not grow up with a lot of money. When I was a teen my parents divorced and after that we struggled more financially. My mom took a second job to pay the bills and this really had an impact on me. I became less idealistic and just wanted to be financially independent. When I graduated from high school, I was super interested in history and philosophy, but I chose an education that would enable me to make a stable living instead (don't worry, it's not economics, I work in the medical field). I've never hated my job, but I've never loved it either. It's just something I do. Certainly better than lots of other jobs because I am able to help other people, but also far from being my dream job. Working on my website has enabled me to fiddle around with my identity. Writing old net stories articles and collecting MIDI files is just me role playing as a historian of some kind.
Since last year I have also started wondering if I want to keep living in the Netherlands for the rest of my life. Even though we probably both love other countries more, we still made the practical, safe choice to live in the Netherlands because it would be easier to raise kids here. Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Most Dutch people will not tell you this, they probably don't even realize it, but despite all its qualities, the Netherlands is boring as fuck. This may scream first world problems, I get that, but you have to understand that our country is tiny and a majority of people live in quiet suburbs that were built from the 1960s onwards and that cultural and nightlife is limited. Even in the big cities it is centered around the weekends. Meanwhile, where other developed countries have natural splendor to enjoy, the Netherlands are marshy, flatlands. I've heard several foreigners complain about the complete lack of nature around here and I totally get it. On top of all that, the climate really sucks. It's basically rainy and/or windy and/or cold here.
As I get older I start to think that people were never meant to live in a place like this. When I visit other countries with warmer climates, where you can just step outside without having to think about the weather, I understand on a deeper level that living in a place like that just feels more natural. I want to live somewhere with a warmer climate, where the food is better and people don't spend their free time inside their suburb homes, and more than anything, I want to hike some mountains already!
However, this life is at the moment beyond my reach. And so I retreat to my website.
The problem is that most of what I discussed today is beyond my control. At least in the short term there isn't much I can do about it. So I retreat to Neocities. I spend my free time taking trial samples of another life online. Neocities has been both a blessing and a curse. It did help me realize that I am not happy with the way things are now, but there is not much I can do about it. Regardless, I will continue my webmastering. I love this place, this community and I love exploring the old internet. You can count on me to be here because my website is one the things in my life that is unequivocally a positive experience.