There Is an Internet That Is Mine & I Would Like You to Live in It With Me
Metadata
Highlights
- Softness cannot be optimized for or solved with software. Technologies are relations, not objects to be solved (View Highlight)
- Trips to the bookstore at the mall after school also included “needing to print something at the computer cafe” which meant how many League of Legends games could I play with decent ping, back when every guy & girl I had a crush on smelled like shit and played like shit in this space that swept up every bad signal—all I cared about was that we were here, doing something together, and we loved it. (View Highlight)
- With the internet’s infrastructure, our placemaking might begin with analogies to ideals of libraries & fields, but should continue with using this technology’s unique affordances & nascency to reimagine how these physical references might be made even better, and should continue even further with the constructing and naming of places that only exist on the internet. As the file metaphor dies just like the Garden of Eden, I wonder what imaginaries and subsequently constructions will become part of the internet’s own mythology. So I won’t answer whether our thinking of the internet, especially from this heavily technological perspective, should draw from architecture or whether questions of governance & politics should guide it more—the answer is everything. This is why we begin with and always return to physical associations, and why more technologists must embed history and the humanities into their practice—for technology itself is a human practice and construct. When we talk about building rooms on the internet, we also talk about the entire world the internet is positioned in and all of these ecologies. We need to also talk about flow of labor in the construction of these rooms: ending at the website hosted on a corporation’s server with a quirky Top-Level Domain managed by an operator you are unaware of only invokes the handmade , but to what extent? Is it mostly for the aesthetic sense? There are very real physical pieces behind our fantasies for a softer web, one that most of us are incredibly detached from. (View Highlight)
- So I will ask you about participation and who is shaping the web in your imaginary: if your parents are a part of it, who you are looking to be intimate with, what languages you imagine this web to speak or birth, if you know who is already shaping the internet you operate in, and how you have intersected the internet with the world you live in. I’m conscious: is our reimagining and reclamation a collective act? Who is building it, and who is it built for? Is it a respite from something? Are we already aware of the current world it exists in? Who is holding the tools that shape this world? What structures and political dynamics are you reinforcing in your internet? Does this tenderness only serve you? (View Highlight)
- I want to tell you that there’s an internet that’s mine and that you could live in there with me. I want to know what internet you’re imagining. This begins with a recognition of lived experience and all the experiences concealed to us; my life on post-colonial property and the truth I’ve found on the internet. I think, the beautiful thing about this technology and the position we’re holding in shaping it is that it is indeed malleable and growing and learnable—that it is built upon technologies and the life work of thousands, that it is actively served upon technologies I’m still learning to even see and name. And that we can open up this question for the entire history of technology is in relation to how we’ve gathered and interfaced with the material world. I argue that more than a question of tools, the question of technology is one of changing minds. (View Highlight)
- Sometimes I remember the digital more than the physical, other times the other way around, while each persistently reminds me of this world where it’s up to us to define and construct these boundaries. (View Highlight)
- In a class I took with her again two years later, I took the prompt of ‘collecting’ to collect purely digital artifacts and captures. It was mostly out of convenience when I was locked up in COVID time in a house & neighborhood where I was afraid to really move around—feeling like the small person I was back in the Philippines finding relief only in the computer, which she didn’t take kindly. The other undergraduates collected junk mail and COVID signs, which were everywhere and equally thoughtless. If only I could articulate then what these acts of securing digital-native materials mean, that they are at larger risk of disappearance, that securing and treating them as precious as physical material (for they are all built on physical infrastructure) is a radical act in itself. This was before I had those intentions. (View Highlight)
- Technology, when thought of as tools, are most interesting when we center on what they provoke and what imaginaries they expose us to. So both a prayer and a computer are rightfully technologies. They can both bring people to lie, to sin, to better the world, or to transcend. (View Highlight)
- A room, a vessel, a container, a space for rest, a space alone, a space that is intimate, a space we can customize, a space between spaces. We can continue to use these languages to open people to these gentle reimaginations of technology, and pay more conscious attention to whether it meets these qualities in the first place or if a more radical restructuring is necessary. (View Highlight)
- One of the reasons that I’m so fascinated by screens is because their story is our story. First there was darkness, and then there was light. And then we figured out how to make that light dance. Both stories are about transformations, about change. Screens have flux, and so do we. (View Highlight)
- I question too, what we can learn from other forms of media pushing intimacy and immediacy onto us, making us share in universal pain and joy and desensitizing us to all emotions—so much that feeling this intimacy could absolve us from acting, the same in recognition of a social ill sufficient when we continue to choose participating it. Digital media, the computer, our modern technologies, especially in their detachment in role of ‘tool’, as something that we use and moreso that happens to us, have complicated all these questions (View Highlight)
- Note: i understand the feeling around absolving from acting, being overwhelmed by emotion but don’t understand the crusade against tool here
- It is insufficient to say that content on the internet, for instance, lives when it is tweeted and dies when it is deleted. Its complex lifespan has begun. It has already been shared in private DMs, mocked on Quote Retweets, screenshotted, edited, what have you—a strange, uncertain record with provenance dependent per platform begins. KnowYourMeme might try to chronicle its legacy, but the internet’s Ship of Theseus is ruthless. Instead it’s deepfried and reimagined and recontextualized. (View Highlight)
- Friendships are still a bit strange to me as security has been intertwined with intimacy on social media platforms: close friends or circles as layers of knowing; the discomfort I used to feel when calling people I met on the internet as “friends” when I knew more about their lives and was in closer proximity to them than people who would call me friend in college. I like that in my social contexts, it seems we’ve used the term ‘mutual’ as a step before ‘friend’, something I’d never directly address someone as in person but a healthy position in that vast internet realm of “people I interact with regularly through material we individually put out but haven’t had much direct conversations with”. Too much focus on digital status signals as indicators of actual interest are also the strangest evolutions of these mismatches between reality and the online. A decade ago, I called my friends ‘affiliates’, essentially befriending people by filling out application forms to email to them. There are in-betweens that we can find. (View Highlight)
- I can teach hundreds of people how to make websites, but I need to resort to more wide-reaching platforms like Facebook or the email to reach my family and everyone from school. The platform is undeniably toxic and harmful, but has also cultivated interesting corners for care. The trickiness is there’s no way to easily uproot people. There is no one solution or migration that will aid us of our ills—we have now settled, made be. While we deserve better, the greater fear is the newest self-proclaimed savior abandoning us. (View Highlight)
- Facebook groups, a hellslum but also the space where large-scale community archive projects and self-aware cringey meetcutes alike occur. The best tool is what we have access to, where all our people are. (View Highlight)
- These spaces have faults but we have made them ours. We have always been communally struggling for our own agencies, pushing the boundaries of our spaces against those in power to generate meaning of our own. The history of media is a history of capturing these objects and shaping them to our own devices, entwined with a history of struggle and organization. The internet no different than the pen, the former just an extension for the latter. I am not arguing for unnecessary struggle to force growth, but I am bringing us to how resilient the internet already is because humans already are. The internet cannot just be uprooted because there exists already hope and history within it. To have faith in a machine you must have faith in yourself. The story of the internet is our story.
The answer to this is not just in tooling or infrastructure, but it’s a good place to start thinking. There is no technological solution nor pattern language to saving the web. Like the awareness of no one-size-fits-all approach for any network or space, a love for what the internet could be prerequisites a careful love to what it already is and how it can differentiate itself from this world. Hyperlocal and folk spaces on the internet can be shaped with as much care and for the scale you dictate, a making of a world. A careful appreciation for the hands, thought, labor, and maintenance that goes into these folk spaces is critical; websites are placemaking, placemaking is worlding, worlding can occur within the vessel of the website. A careful contextual care and sensibility when shaping online spaces (View Highlight)
- Note: We will always struggle against the powers that be. How might we empower us to win that struggle more?
- It is in this consciousness-raising, this expansion of the internet and of programming, that it can be used beyond corporate, transactional interests—revitalized to express and show love with more ease than before. Like any society, it is not only architects, builders, or engineers that move us towards this collective consciousness. We need people to bring themselves and assume new identities—perhaps where the role of ‘technologist’ is fluid and all-encompassing. Where ‘technologist’ is everyone and anyone concerned with the role of technology, empowered to use it to shape their experience in our pervasive digital world. Spreadsheets will be as potent but more easy to use, but I’m interested in a technological fluency with poetics, love, and radical communal flourishing as its centerpieces. At the core of this human experience, we use technology as a tool to express care & love, to exist together with sincerity. (View Highlight)
- Someone has to want to live on this internet with you. Someone has to see the internet that you imagine.
The internet is not built by an individual and it has become more than infrastructure. It is a reflection of our collective participation and inhabitation. The internet is not the garden I could not access, not a house that I have never built; it is also the private places I reclaimed, all my illegal activities, all the shitty cafes where I found love, all the places where I found respite, all the places made so hostile that I still made for myself. I am the maker of the internet (View Highlight)
- We need to forge more ways to carve an internet that is ours. The act of forging begins not with a catch-all tool, but with people. It begins with faith in how humans have always made the most of where they are. The tools and capacities are already there, but there are decades of injustice that we need to begin rewiring, and decades of placemaking that we need to take more seriously and draw from. We ourselves should move towards the very possible engagement with the internet (even the most puerile platform). Tenderness is already there. People have, against all odds, offered their sincere selves. That I grew up in an internet of love and understanding in the worst platforms imaginable because humans have made it this way. (View Highlight)
- There is no ‘pure’ internet to find. There is no secret innovation, platform, or tool that will rid us from the failures of the ones before. There is no one machine that reproduces the feeling of being loved and being understood. There are only the people behind these machines and their intentions — their love permeating through no matter how desolate the body has become.
There is no one alternative fork that rids us of the sociopolitical tensions and compromises necessary from the infrastructure that makes networking at this scale possible. We forget that technology is a human act. There is no alternative future but the ones we are already acting and walking towards today. (View Highlight)
- Places with pluralities include how humans have networked and captured the most infrastructurally sordid of places. Pluralities that have come forth, principled with offering us genuine agency in choosing our modes of participation. Pluralities of the internet that recognize what modes of being have only existed on the internet, and a dignifying of these ways of being. Pluralities that work against the romanticized metaphors of place that disregard the unique nature the internet has given us. Pluralities that recognize the histories of abuse and exploitation in any system of gathering, including that of the internet. Pluralities of the internet that understand the complexity of human relations and being, of modes of gathering. Pluralities that understand how the internet has become its own, many of our owns, against all odds. (View Highlight)
- All of us, by every form of participation, already shape the internet. Humans are resilient and so is the internet. Humans are loving and so is the internet. Humans are culture and so is the internet. A computer is a vessel, a tool, only a carrier of human belief and thought. When we recognize that a diverse participatory imaginary is key to constructing this future, we will better thrive. There are already tools and people who can drive the infrastructure, people who steer culture, people who live and inhabit these dwelling places. (View Highlight)
- That the shaping of the internet we want is a human act.
I want you to see the internet that is mine and how you can live in it with me, and how there is an internet that is yours that is all around you. (View Highlight)
- I’ve kept this blog since I was sixteen as my own form of radical being. I feel safe enough to be naive here, in this alcove atop of servers not my own, but know that my caretaking is always extending and seeking more agency. I talk about carving spaces on the handmade web to artists & technologists who speak languages closer to mine, am beginning to assemble DIY machines, and return to publishing & teaching people how a computer works. Sometimes we begin with how to think of the mouse as an extension of the body, other times how to reclaim agency and autonomy on the internet as a form of will, and others a glorious surrender to human intelligences that has given us these tools and how we can continue the human act of wielding and creating. Most of the times it is just telling someone that this computer is now an extension of themselves and they simply must learn to wield the limb: they will learn, they do not care, they have no insight to the market, they risk it all, they teach themselves at 80 when their eyesight is blurring so that they can see someone they love and be with someone they love.
And they are why we still build technology. They are why there is still love here.
There is no one solution I can offer, just a way of seeing where they are and what the computer & internet can do for them. They are all technologists to me. (View Highlight)
- The internet will only truly become a place once we recognize it for what it is. A place that cannot map to a city, a garden, or a tree—but might turn to their principles and apply them in new ways—once that should swear towards radical reinvention, not the failures of the old. A blurry dissolving of selves and areas. A place where all the people I love are here at once and also all apart. A place that freed me from the real world. A place that is not free from the real world. A place built atop of the labor of human hands, where the act of laying down wire is no less holy than writing the lines of code we are in. (View Highlight)
title: “There Is an Internet That Is Mine & I Would Like You to Live in It With Me”
author: “Chia”
url: ”https://chias.blog/2022/there-is-an-internet-that-is-mine/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
There Is an Internet That Is Mine & I Would Like You to Live in It With Me
Metadata
Highlights
- Softness cannot be optimized for or solved with software. Technologies are relations, not objects to be solved (View Highlight)
- Trips to the bookstore at the mall after school also included “needing to print something at the computer cafe” which meant how many League of Legends games could I play with decent ping, back when every guy & girl I had a crush on smelled like shit and played like shit in this space that swept up every bad signal—all I cared about was that we were here, doing something together, and we loved it. (View Highlight)
- With the internet’s infrastructure, our placemaking might begin with analogies to ideals of libraries & fields, but should continue with using this technology’s unique affordances & nascency to reimagine how these physical references might be made even better, and should continue even further with the constructing and naming of places that only exist on the internet. As the file metaphor dies just like the Garden of Eden, I wonder what imaginaries and subsequently constructions will become part of the internet’s own mythology. So I won’t answer whether our thinking of the internet, especially from this heavily technological perspective, should draw from architecture or whether questions of governance & politics should guide it more—the answer is everything. This is why we begin with and always return to physical associations, and why more technologists must embed history and the humanities into their practice—for technology itself is a human practice and construct. When we talk about building rooms on the internet, we also talk about the entire world the internet is positioned in and all of these ecologies. We need to also talk about flow of labor in the construction of these rooms: ending at the website hosted on a corporation’s server with a quirky Top-Level Domain managed by an operator you are unaware of only invokes the handmade , but to what extent? Is it mostly for the aesthetic sense? There are very real physical pieces behind our fantasies for a softer web, one that most of us are incredibly detached from. (View Highlight)
- So I will ask you about participation and who is shaping the web in your imaginary: if your parents are a part of it, who you are looking to be intimate with, what languages you imagine this web to speak or birth, if you know who is already shaping the internet you operate in, and how you have intersected the internet with the world you live in. I’m conscious: is our reimagining and reclamation a collective act? Who is building it, and who is it built for? Is it a respite from something? Are we already aware of the current world it exists in? Who is holding the tools that shape this world? What structures and political dynamics are you reinforcing in your internet? Does this tenderness only serve you? (View Highlight)
- I want to tell you that there’s an internet that’s mine and that you could live in there with me. I want to know what internet you’re imagining. This begins with a recognition of lived experience and all the experiences concealed to us; my life on post-colonial property and the truth I’ve found on the internet. I think, the beautiful thing about this technology and the position we’re holding in shaping it is that it is indeed malleable and growing and learnable—that it is built upon technologies and the life work of thousands, that it is actively served upon technologies I’m still learning to even see and name. And that we can open up this question for the entire history of technology is in relation to how we’ve gathered and interfaced with the material world. I argue that more than a question of tools, the question of technology is one of changing minds. (View Highlight)
- Sometimes I remember the digital more than the physical, other times the other way around, while each persistently reminds me of this world where it’s up to us to define and construct these boundaries. (View Highlight)
- In a class I took with her again two years later, I took the prompt of ‘collecting’ to collect purely digital artifacts and captures. It was mostly out of convenience when I was locked up in COVID time in a house & neighborhood where I was afraid to really move around—feeling like the small person I was back in the Philippines finding relief only in the computer, which she didn’t take kindly. The other undergraduates collected junk mail and COVID signs, which were everywhere and equally thoughtless. If only I could articulate then what these acts of securing digital-native materials mean, that they are at larger risk of disappearance, that securing and treating them as precious as physical material (for they are all built on physical infrastructure) is a radical act in itself. This was before I had those intentions. (View Highlight)
- Technology, when thought of as tools, are most interesting when we center on what they provoke and what imaginaries they expose us to. So both a prayer and a computer are rightfully technologies. They can both bring people to lie, to sin, to better the world, or to transcend. (View Highlight)
- A room, a vessel, a container, a space for rest, a space alone, a space that is intimate, a space we can customize, a space between spaces. We can continue to use these languages to open people to these gentle reimaginations of technology, and pay more conscious attention to whether it meets these qualities in the first place or if a more radical restructuring is necessary. (View Highlight)
- One of the reasons that I’m so fascinated by screens is because their story is our story. First there was darkness, and then there was light. And then we figured out how to make that light dance. Both stories are about transformations, about change. Screens have flux, and so do we. (View Highlight)
- I question too, what we can learn from other forms of media pushing intimacy and immediacy onto us, making us share in universal pain and joy and desensitizing us to all emotions—so much that feeling this intimacy could absolve us from acting, the same in recognition of a social ill sufficient when we continue to choose participating it. Digital media, the computer, our modern technologies, especially in their detachment in role of ‘tool’, as something that we use and moreso that happens to us, have complicated all these questions (View Highlight)
- Note: i understand the feeling around absolving from acting, being overwhelmed by emotion but don’t understand the crusade against tool here
- It is insufficient to say that content on the internet, for instance, lives when it is tweeted and dies when it is deleted. Its complex lifespan has begun. It has already been shared in private DMs, mocked on Quote Retweets, screenshotted, edited, what have you—a strange, uncertain record with provenance dependent per platform begins. KnowYourMeme might try to chronicle its legacy, but the internet’s Ship of Theseus is ruthless. Instead it’s deepfried and reimagined and recontextualized. (View Highlight)
- Friendships are still a bit strange to me as security has been intertwined with intimacy on social media platforms: close friends or circles as layers of knowing; the discomfort I used to feel when calling people I met on the internet as “friends” when I knew more about their lives and was in closer proximity to them than people who would call me friend in college. I like that in my social contexts, it seems we’ve used the term ‘mutual’ as a step before ‘friend’, something I’d never directly address someone as in person but a healthy position in that vast internet realm of “people I interact with regularly through material we individually put out but haven’t had much direct conversations with”. Too much focus on digital status signals as indicators of actual interest are also the strangest evolutions of these mismatches between reality and the online. A decade ago, I called my friends ‘affiliates’, essentially befriending people by filling out application forms to email to them. There are in-betweens that we can find. (View Highlight)
- I can teach hundreds of people how to make websites, but I need to resort to more wide-reaching platforms like Facebook or the email to reach my family and everyone from school. The platform is undeniably toxic and harmful, but has also cultivated interesting corners for care. The trickiness is there’s no way to easily uproot people. There is no one solution or migration that will aid us of our ills—we have now settled, made be. While we deserve better, the greater fear is the newest self-proclaimed savior abandoning us. (View Highlight)
- Facebook groups, a hellslum but also the space where large-scale community archive projects and self-aware cringey meetcutes alike occur. The best tool is what we have access to, where all our people are. (View Highlight)
- These spaces have faults but we have made them ours. We have always been communally struggling for our own agencies, pushing the boundaries of our spaces against those in power to generate meaning of our own. The history of media is a history of capturing these objects and shaping them to our own devices, entwined with a history of struggle and organization. The internet no different than the pen, the former just an extension for the latter. I am not arguing for unnecessary struggle to force growth, but I am bringing us to how resilient the internet already is because humans already are. The internet cannot just be uprooted because there exists already hope and history within it. To have faith in a machine you must have faith in yourself. The story of the internet is our story.
The answer to this is not just in tooling or infrastructure, but it’s a good place to start thinking. There is no technological solution nor pattern language to saving the web. Like the awareness of no one-size-fits-all approach for any network or space, a love for what the internet could be prerequisites a careful love to what it already is and how it can differentiate itself from this world. Hyperlocal and folk spaces on the internet can be shaped with as much care and for the scale you dictate, a making of a world. A careful appreciation for the hands, thought, labor, and maintenance that goes into these folk spaces is critical; websites are placemaking, placemaking is worlding, worlding can occur within the vessel of the website. A careful contextual care and sensibility when shaping online spaces (View Highlight)
- Note: We will always struggle against the powers that be. How might we empower us to win that struggle more?
- It is in this consciousness-raising, this expansion of the internet and of programming, that it can be used beyond corporate, transactional interests—revitalized to express and show love with more ease than before. Like any society, it is not only architects, builders, or engineers that move us towards this collective consciousness. We need people to bring themselves and assume new identities—perhaps where the role of ‘technologist’ is fluid and all-encompassing. Where ‘technologist’ is everyone and anyone concerned with the role of technology, empowered to use it to shape their experience in our pervasive digital world. Spreadsheets will be as potent but more easy to use, but I’m interested in a technological fluency with poetics, love, and radical communal flourishing as its centerpieces. At the core of this human experience, we use technology as a tool to express care & love, to exist together with sincerity. (View Highlight)
- Someone has to want to live on this internet with you. Someone has to see the internet that you imagine.
The internet is not built by an individual and it has become more than infrastructure. It is a reflection of our collective participation and inhabitation. The internet is not the garden I could not access, not a house that I have never built; it is also the private places I reclaimed, all my illegal activities, all the shitty cafes where I found love, all the places where I found respite, all the places made so hostile that I still made for myself. I am the maker of the internet (View Highlight)
- We need to forge more ways to carve an internet that is ours. The act of forging begins not with a catch-all tool, but with people. It begins with faith in how humans have always made the most of where they are. The tools and capacities are already there, but there are decades of injustice that we need to begin rewiring, and decades of placemaking that we need to take more seriously and draw from. We ourselves should move towards the very possible engagement with the internet (even the most puerile platform). Tenderness is already there. People have, against all odds, offered their sincere selves. That I grew up in an internet of love and understanding in the worst platforms imaginable because humans have made it this way. (View Highlight)
- There is no ‘pure’ internet to find. There is no secret innovation, platform, or tool that will rid us from the failures of the ones before. There is no one machine that reproduces the feeling of being loved and being understood. There are only the people behind these machines and their intentions — their love permeating through no matter how desolate the body has become.
There is no one alternative fork that rids us of the sociopolitical tensions and compromises necessary from the infrastructure that makes networking at this scale possible. We forget that technology is a human act. There is no alternative future but the ones we are already acting and walking towards today. (View Highlight)
- Places with pluralities include how humans have networked and captured the most infrastructurally sordid of places. Pluralities that have come forth, principled with offering us genuine agency in choosing our modes of participation. Pluralities of the internet that recognize what modes of being have only existed on the internet, and a dignifying of these ways of being. Pluralities that work against the romanticized metaphors of place that disregard the unique nature the internet has given us. Pluralities that recognize the histories of abuse and exploitation in any system of gathering, including that of the internet. Pluralities of the internet that understand the complexity of human relations and being, of modes of gathering. Pluralities that understand how the internet has become its own, many of our owns, against all odds. (View Highlight)
- All of us, by every form of participation, already shape the internet. Humans are resilient and so is the internet. Humans are loving and so is the internet. Humans are culture and so is the internet. A computer is a vessel, a tool, only a carrier of human belief and thought. When we recognize that a diverse participatory imaginary is key to constructing this future, we will better thrive. There are already tools and people who can drive the infrastructure, people who steer culture, people who live and inhabit these dwelling places. (View Highlight)
- That the shaping of the internet we want is a human act.
I want you to see the internet that is mine and how you can live in it with me, and how there is an internet that is yours that is all around you. (View Highlight)
- I’ve kept this blog since I was sixteen as my own form of radical being. I feel safe enough to be naive here, in this alcove atop of servers not my own, but know that my caretaking is always extending and seeking more agency. I talk about carving spaces on the handmade web to artists & technologists who speak languages closer to mine, am beginning to assemble DIY machines, and return to publishing & teaching people how a computer works. Sometimes we begin with how to think of the mouse as an extension of the body, other times how to reclaim agency and autonomy on the internet as a form of will, and others a glorious surrender to human intelligences that has given us these tools and how we can continue the human act of wielding and creating. Most of the times it is just telling someone that this computer is now an extension of themselves and they simply must learn to wield the limb: they will learn, they do not care, they have no insight to the market, they risk it all, they teach themselves at 80 when their eyesight is blurring so that they can see someone they love and be with someone they love.
And they are why we still build technology. They are why there is still love here.
There is no one solution I can offer, just a way of seeing where they are and what the computer & internet can do for them. They are all technologists to me. (View Highlight)
- The internet will only truly become a place once we recognize it for what it is. A place that cannot map to a city, a garden, or a tree—but might turn to their principles and apply them in new ways—once that should swear towards radical reinvention, not the failures of the old. A blurry dissolving of selves and areas. A place where all the people I love are here at once and also all apart. A place that freed me from the real world. A place that is not free from the real world. A place built atop of the labor of human hands, where the act of laying down wire is no less holy than writing the lines of code we are in. (View Highlight)