A lazy perfectionist's cyberpunk survival guide to the technological hellscape
People have always and will always need tools to participate fully in society. If there are tools people don't have the skills to make themselves, and the legal/social contexts don't ensure full agency and access to those tools, subculture and disobedience are the last refuge. This is the theme of my favorite cyberpunk media, and increasingly of our real world.
A collection of philosophy and minutia presented as ostensible solutions to social problems masquerading as technological ones. Not not a manifesto.
The Facebook/Google/Amazon-dominated internet arose because the technical cost of building a modern website rose far beyond what the vast majority of amateurs could manage, so everyone moved to templates and then to services and finally to platforms.
A platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Google's algorithms, however, are not just a computational technology; they are communicative technology. They bring together the millions of individual decisions that users make every minute... Algorithms facilitate a knowledge that exceeds the self... Algorithms help us to see ourselves in the scattered and disparate patch work that is the web. But they do so at such scales that the individual user is little more than an algorithmic self, a flattened data point among millions.
I think about the raw volume of data we're producing now, every moment more stuff to save and post and host somewhere and it starts to stress me out... Because storage is so cheap, because it's way easier to just buy a few more terabytes than sort back through 20 years of work, I do think it's a little strange that we've all been enabled to become like, digital harders.
On the internet, you can never fully leave your past behind because everything you ever said is in some ways still being said.
everywhere online, i find dead links. sites reorganize and move. accounts are deleted. old youtube playlists aquire holes as more and more videos become unavailable. the permalink starts to seem like a naïve fantasy. websites are made by people, and like people, they live and die. sites become ghosts, haunting the pages that linked to them. no one is obligated to keep their site online forever, but neither am i obligated to forget.
The Internet, its algorithms, and its software [are] material objects because users experience them—along with hardware elements such as keyboard, mouse, smartphone-... as limiting, constraining, supporting, and enabling.
One counterintuitive thing about active communities is that they sometimes use clunky, outdated tools... Gratuitous change is an easy way to break trust with your community, or break features you didn't even know you had.
Or, basically, the internet and other technologies are made up of design decisions that affect our lives. They're the results of social problems, they reproduce social problems, and we cannot trust the corporate internet or any other tech companies to have our best interests at heart. I don't think that the way forward is some every-man-for-themself bootstraps off-the-grid solution, but I also want to continue to strive towards spending my time on the internet interacting with good information, good communities, and good art. And then I want to go to bed. Turns out the cyberpunk dystopia is much more mundane than my middle school self could have ever imagined.
As with many things on this site, I find myself at the intersection of a lot of very specific needs, constantly flung to the fringe use-cases of mainstream technology just trying to live the life I think everyone deserves to have access to online. I need resources, constantly. Here are some I might like to find again. Over time, I hope to have more of my own words and advice here.
This is a particularly actively-evolving page. In the process of restructuring the rest of this:
Philosophy
- My favorite non-prescriptive write-up of the indie web ethos I've seen
- Low Tech Manifesto
- Dylan Beattie's talks on computer history and the sociology of computation (try looking up the names of these talks on invidious or youtube, if you're so inclined). Not as radical as a lot of this list, not half so radical as Cory Doctorow, but I still always appreciate that there are versions of these ideas that even relative normies are coming around to looking at the history of computing. And his talks are fun.
- Permacomputing, or making decisions around programming, tech purchasing, and tech usage that prioritize reduced energy consumption, reduced e-waste creation, and reduced acquisition of new technology. This involves a lot of working with what you have and trying to repurpose existing or old technology for new purposes, as well as asking what resources are really necessary for what you're doing and how to make the software you're making/using more efficient and less resource-intensive. Ask, often, "does it need to be a computer?", "does it need to be online?", and "does it need to be new?"
- The Paranoid User Reference, including many thoughts on how tech interacts with security and anarchy. Browse with some salt ready.
Data Saving & Sharing
How do I store and share my files? What do I keep? What do I want to be public?
Many of us have more music, photos, documents, games, etc than we want to store on any single hard drive, and we're worried about hard drive failure, and we want to be able to access things on the go from any number of devices. How can we do this without our entire digital lives being subject to data scraping and removal at any time subject to big tech TOS?
The two functions that Google Documents provides over desktop applications – shareability and remote access aren’t aspects of Google’s mega-servers. They’re just workarounds for the lack of distributed ID and unfindability of edge nodes. With alternate workarounds that otherwise allow your friends to log onto your home PC to edit documents, and find your home PC in the first place, you could easily host your docs, run your webmail, hold up your end of the social network, store and share files, display your photographs, and run your website, from your home... Data held by a third-party in the United States just isn’t safe. How much of these services can and should we be running from the comfort of our own homes?
- Storage solutions at home (NAS)
- Starting your own non-WWW network of computers
- QOwnNotes with NextCloud server? Can use encryption & version control
Online Community
How long do I stick with a platform? What do I actually want from each community? How do I keep up with friends scattered to the winds?
Voice Calls & Mobile Tech
What amount of technology access do I need on me at all times? When does it help and when does it hurt? What habits to I want to develop in the downtimes of my life? How much of my location and other data can I keep private?
As much as I would love to not need a smartphone, having access to the internet and all of my data on the go is super useful. Some ways to make it suck less or rethink the relationship we have with our mobile tech.
- Mobile phone OS options; copyright-alternative licenses.
- Custom rotary cell phone project
- Dumbphones
Videos & Online Art
What will the internet even look like when youtube is gone? What will be lost? Can we make the thing that comes next better?
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about online video. It takes longer to watch a video than it does to read an equivalent amount of text, but learning isn't actually all about speed most of the time. Sometimes I need someone's voice to continue even if I look away or lose focus for a second and would just be rereading the same sentences fourteen times. It expands to fill up as much storage space as you can possibly throw at it, which is not an immaterial problem with no impact on the world. It is inaccessible by default and difficult to search or skim. The difficulty of reliably hosting video has played a huge role in centralizing the internet. I also do not know who or where I'd be without it--I owe the inception of most of my very best ideas to youtube videos, and only some of those creators have been fairly compensated. And these artifacts are so very hard to archive. The playlist rot is already happening.
- Invidious, an alternative youtube frontend
- A neocities-hosted beginner's guide to VPNs, torrenting, and sources of media, including places to look for subtitle files.
- Another, shorter guide (on tumblr) to torrenting with links to potential sources of media.
- Setting up your own media streaming server
Web Browsing
Mostly, ways to access content without ads, without tracking, without google services, or by networking more directly with the other netizens we want to talk to. I'm assuming you've already got an adblocker and use something other than Chrome, if you're here. If not, start.
- Resources for a more private and less obnoxious web-browsing experience from a Firefox-hater
- RSS: its benefits over other "subscription" methods, setting one up, and modern RSS feed readers.
- Syncing RSS feeds to various social media
- Wiby, a small web search engine that combines manual, opt-in curation with modern search tools
- Degoogle, a list of alternatives to all of the google products you're using
Software to Make Stuff
Text files and code are easy to do totally open-source and GNU, but it's still sometimes hard to find good ways to make signed documents, art, etc.
- Masterlist of privacy-minded software
- PDF editors and signatures for linux
- Open Source pixel art, low poly art, and other graphics utilities
Desktop Computers & Linux
I'm still a little bit of a Linux baby, honestly, so I'm doing a lot of dual-booting and trying to get used to using it.
- Maximum-security Linux setup and other things that can be done with limited resources
- Cheap, accessible, personal freedom-minded computing with a lot of slightly alarmist takes on the future but some philosophy I agree with
My Own Cyberpunk To-Do List
- Move stuff off of dropbox or set up end-to-end encryption (See Joplin Notes here)
- Find a mail client I don't hate for rerouting outlook and then move away from gmail
- Get a paper agenda
- Change my default search engine
- Finish setting up my media PC