Share ur site manifesto! - page 4 - ☆ ∙ Web Projects

Here's mine. It was one of the first things I wrote for my website.

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Hello and welcome to my Neocities page. My intent for this page is for it to serve as my long-term, ever-evolving refuge from the continued enshitification of the internet. As I’m sure others who seek out oases such as Neocities or Nekoweb are aware, the internet of the ‘90s and early 2000s, Web 1.0, bears little resemblance to the products packaged today for us by Meta, Google, Reddit, X, or Bluesky.

Web 2.0 offers convenience and accessibility, but these qualities come at a cost. We’ve relinquished the responsibilities of creation, curation, and even the discovery of websites to tech bros trafficking in packaged hubs offering one-stop shops for friendships, news, and entertainment. Social media platforms that promised to connect us instead seek to entrap and commodify our attention. And oh boy, entrap and commodify are exactly what they've done.

Spend enough time with Meta, Google, or Amazon, and the algorithm is sure to notice. In no time, your feeds will be inundated with more and more of your interests. There’s never been a stronger recommendation system, one tailored to your ego and designed to feed you content to keep you engaged, scrolling, and purchasing for as many hours a day as possible. If that weren’t bad enough, the algorithms shepherd us into camps, anger us with rage-bait, and turn us against one another, for little reason other than to increase the time we spend glued to and spending money on these platforms. While we lose our time, money, and empathy to this entrapment, the few companies who monopolize the web are fattened at our expense.

With the pervasiveness of the smart phone, these tech bros have unwittingly unleashed the real-life analog for Orwell’s telescreen—a device used to pacify, stupefy, and enrage the population. However, even Orwell hadn’t considered that the real thing would do all of this while simultaneously draining the people’s purse in the process and contributing to levels of consumption driving Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Worse yet, all of this promises to deteriorate further, even exponentially, as those same tech bros decide it's time to force yet another technological “advancement” down our throats with the proliferation of artificial intelligence driven by large language models.

With knowledge of Web 2.0’s very real harms, I’d predictably like to excise it from my life. However, as someone for whom the phrase “terminally online” would apply, I’m not ready to say goodbye to the entirety of my virtual existence just yet. As hard as it may be to admit, the internet has long been and continues to be an integral part of how I experience human culture.

As such, I’ve come to Neocities searching for the ghosts of websites past. Not yet touched by the rot of late-stage capitalism, the internet I remember was a place of experiment and exploration. It was a place inundated with personality. Websites served as both information reservoirs and digital art installations. They gave users a glimpse into the creator’s inner space in a manner unlike any other medium before. Features and attractions could be completely superfluous. Utility was optional. Web pages were the manifestation of the ego molded by their creators and filtered through seizure-inducing gifs, tinny chiptunes, and low-res waifus.

In seeking this past, I wish to return to a period where my internet usage focuses on creation, not mindless consumption. I want the internet to again be in service of my interests, instead of me in service of its. While I’m sure this website will also become a distraction, it will, I hope, become a catalyst for the craft of art and written pieces that might otherwise have remained in my head—a place with a definite expiration date within the next 70 or so years (likely fewer if global trends continue). But even beyond leaving my mark, I just want to be engaged in the act of creation. I am, after all, my happiest when I am doing so. What more can we want from life but happiness?