A photograph of a very late sunset on a beach. The sky is glowing with the gradient of light and the incoming tight is lit up on the beach. The sun is just on the horizon and is very yellow. The words About This Site appear in the bottom left of the image.

I was there, Gandalf, I was there 30 years ago when everyone started to "Have an idea for a website" and the festishisation of the idea and the Internet began, when the dream began to be poisoned. I was there in the time of wild naivety, of believing that the world wide web was going to bring us all together, not blow us further and further apart.

I'm still that wildly naive.

I was there before there was "web 2.0", before there was "social media", before there was Google, when Apple made clunky beige boxes, when Microsoft didn't think the world wide web would amount to much and tried to start their own brand alternative, when "illegal download sites" were going to destroy the lives of musicians and film makers. I could keep typing at length about the before times, but the point is made, things sure have changed here on Walton's Mountain.

This isn't nostalgia, its a recognition of how awry things have gone from those early days of optimism, how astray things have gone for us as people, as cultures and societies. The Internet revolution was going to grant us freedom from hegemony of half a dozen media companies who controlled everything....to deliver us to a future in which half a dozen different media companies control everything. That's the problem with revolutions, they revolve, right back to where they began.

The baseline has shifted, today is normalised, there ain't no going back.

I don't want to play by the rules that try to limit us into algorithmic boxes that bombard our now infinitely fractured attentions to try to sell us things we didn't want 3 seconds ago, in the hope that we may individually be able to defeat our GenAI "assistants" and grab enough of someone else's attention to go big.

Meanwhile, the fetishisation of the idea has reached its zenith (nadir?) in GenAI; no longer do you even need to make anything yourself, you don't need to learn anything, or create a single thing. The Internet will do it for you, all you need is THE IDEA.

I'm done with it. I resign.

I'm packing up. I'm downsizing. I'm digital vanlifing. I'm DIYing it again. I want a human sized and human facing online life once more.

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