In the winter of 1999, I was a few weeks into my Army job training in Aberdeen, MD, when I called home one day  to have my step mother ask me for help. She had just bought a domain for the business she wanted to start, and needed some information on how websites worked. Me, being the tech nerd of the family, seemed like the natural person to ask. All the websites I’d made before that lived on free hosting sites like GeoCities or Tripod. I wasn’t even aware they would sell domains to plebs. I immediately gave her the money to buy my own, my first domain kelweaver.com.

I loved the internet. Growing up in rural Georgia, I was excited when our town built a library, because of the wealth of information I could now access. But that was nothing compared to when we got our first modem. The internet was an endless mine of new and exciting information I would never encounter otherwise in my tiny hometown. I spent hours researching anime and Star Wars, pouring over countless fan pages, venturing down many alleys I didn’t know existed, and soon I realized I could use the internet to learn how to make websites, and have my own corner of the internet too. So that’s what I did.

As my skills grew, so did the complexity of my sites. Eventually I was building a website built on the then popular LAMP stack, as I tried to build out a user system, templating system, micro blogging feature, and more things way above my skill level. It was often difficult to find the time to program though, between college responsibilities and a complete lack of focus and follow through on my projects, a problem that I still sometimes struggle with today.

And then Facebook came along. Now, Facebook wasn’t the first social media site. Almost everyone around my age had MySpace already, but Facebook was special. It was exclusive. So when they allowed UGA students to sign up, we did. It was an instant hit. And it was better than anything I had made, which further disincentivized me from working on a personal site.

Likewise, Twitter wasn’t the first microblogging site. I’d been using LiveJournal for micro blogging (though it later became a full on blogging platform) for years, and it was even integrated into kelweaver.com. This is to point out that these weren’t new and novel ideas.

What was novel is what those companies did with those sites, and we didn’t realize until it was too late.

The enclosure of the common lands was a slow and gradual process that took hundreds of years after the Black Death. Feudal lords would begin to restrict the use of common lands until after a few hundred years, there was no common land left. While the enclosure of the internet took a different form, I’d argue we’re now not in much of a different situation. The tech giants, with the free money the central banks offered after the housing crash of 2008, made it seem as if they were unavoidable. They attracted as much media as they could to their platforms, on the excuse that they had all the traffic. Of course, they were lying about their engagement numbers. Soon, websites that had pivoted to Facebook couldn’t even keep the lights on, and went defunct. All the better for the tech giants. If a competing site was getting too big, then the lax regulatory enforcement meant there were no problems in buying them out. In almost no time at all, instead of visiting multiple sites on the internet, you were visiting at most two or three (or famously, in some countries, the only access to the internet is THROUGH Facebook).

And this doesn’t even touch on all the evil data collection. Need I even mention Cambridge Analytica? Algorithms now decided what you should watch and read, driven by metric data that could be sold to any actor – nefarious or not, they don’t fucking care. Truly, we have built a surveillance system that would make George Orwell blush.

I’ve been engaging in social media less these days. I no longer want to support these assholes. I want to return to the internet of my youth, where you had a tiny corner of the internet that wasn’t acting as my personal spy, reporting every little detail up the chain to be sold to whomever. I’m not the only one, it seems, as evidenced by the IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org). So that’s my goal now. Rather than post on social media, I think I’d rather post here, even if that means I’m my only audience. So be it. At least I know what this website is doing with my data. And it’s definitely not selling it to some three letter agency that’s trying to keep tabs on every single person in the world, that’s one thing for fucking sure.