Web manifestos are becoming more and more common and I wanted to throw my own two cents in. I understand that this doesn't necessarily help the flood of conflicting manifestos circling around the internet, but I think that many of us fundamentally want the same things and need the same kinds of spaces.
First of all let me just say that my goal is not to return to Web 1.0, or the "original web," or even to create nostalgic feelings in the people passing by. I agree with many people that the internet has become "sick" in its current state but I do not necessarily agree with their diagnosis or their prescription. That is fundamentally what this manifesto is about; looking at the web from the perspective of somebody who grew up on the New Web and wants to escape from it, rather than somebody who grew up on the Classic Web and wants to return to it.
I'm writing this article because people have come to believe that silence is complacency. I refuse to be complacent and so I must also refuse to be silent. This manifesto represents my ideas and not anybody else's. This manifesto is inflammatory. This manifesto is from the perspective of American politics. This manifesto is not Correct or even comprehensive. It just has to Mean Something.
If it Means Something to You, then I have succeeded.
The Internet (World Wide Web) as it has existed for the past ten years, starting roughly with the centralization of social media throughout the 2010s that led to billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos/Andy Jassy, and Mark Zuckerberg dominating the online space.
The Internet (World Wide Web) as it existed prior to the centralization of social media. It is not necessarily better than the Modern Web, but it contains many design concepts that people still find appealing in the wake of the social media boom.
A movement to reject social media and the Modern Web that gained traction after the Covid-19 pandemic and the crypto/NFT/Web 3.0 bubble of the early 2020s brought the flaws of the Modern Web to the attention of the general public.
On the Modern Web, You are a commodity. Specifically, you are a Brand and therefore the original owner/creator of one or more Products. The most important Product that you create is your Data— a concept that covers literally everything you do and everywhere you go. Social media, the cornerstone of the Modern Web, first became profitable (and therefore "sustainable" under capitalism) when it started keeping track of your Data and selling that Data to advertisers and other profiteers. The Modern Web is so invasive that it exists everywhere in our day-to-day lives and completely dominates our state of living. It defines our social opportunities. It demands that our Data is who we are, reducing humanity to a string of numbers and tags that can be owned and sold.
As a Brand, You serve an important role both to capitalism as an institution and captialism as a market. As an institution, capitalism wants you to work and be profitable for the sake of promoting capitalism. As a market, capitalism wants you to be profitable to advertisers and other companies for the sake of fueling the economy.
In other words, as long as you are on the Modern Web (and Everybody is on the Modern Web) you are either selling something or you are being sold to someone else. You are worth more as a gear in the economic machine than you are as a living breathing human being. The products you buy and the products you sell are literally your entire existence on the Modern Web; everything else is a soothing tactic, a conglomeration of "fun features" and "comfortable spaces" that ultimately take your money and your individuality as a person.
Because Data (Information) is the core of the internet's profit complex, raw data— media, analysis, scientific studies, news, and educational materials— have been commercialized as well. In other words, it has never been more expensive to educate yourself on the internet. It has never been more expensive to own (or more often than not, rent) books, movies, TV shows, and games from the internet. Literacy is at an all time low. Technological literacy in particular is almost nonexistant on the Modern Web. You are more likely to find someone who knows how to Sell a Product than you are to find somebody who knows how to make a website or put together a computer.
As a result, the internet has been restructured around users who are ignorant of how the internet works. Computers have been redesigned to be most accessible to users who are ignorant of how computers work. And, most disturbingly, social media has been built from the ground up to service users who are completely dependent on social media. This is how corporations are able to take control of our digital presence; we do not think that we have the tools to exist on the internet without them, and so we become reliant on the corporations to provide us with their version of the internet. People beg social media to change its policies instead of leaving. People beg hosting sites to lower their rates instead of self-hosting. People happily pay for services that they could learn how to do themselves. This is how the crypto boom started in the first place, and it is why social media has become such a cesspool of toxic bullshit thinking. Something needs to change.
We will not have a unified, decorporatized Web until we can teach users to create that unified, decorporatized Web. Ultimately the internet can be made for us users, or it can be for the companies that have done nothing but strip the internet of its joy and purpose for the past thirty years.
People are not Brands. Data is not a quantifiable measurement of a person. It is up to You to understand when a website is trying to make you into a Brand. Read the Terms and Conditions. Demand transparency about data handling and profitiability metrics. Block out the desire to be advertised to. Use ad blockers. Demand better from proprietary machines. Work with your community to stand up for open communication. Touch grass. Pull your personal information off of the internet. Stop uploading pictures of yourself and the people you care about; the site you are uploading to does not care about you in the way you care about your friends. Practice fundamental internet safety; never use your full name or address unless you absolutely have to. Make yourself unbrandable. Be a complete freak. Get banned for good reasons. Reject anyone and anything that believes you must be profitable in order to be Real.
Pirate everything. Break paywalls. Demand ownership of your body, your mind, your hardware, your software. Form a union. Join a union. Start a strike. Use an ad blocker. Reject the puritanism of the Modern Web. Stop paying for media, start paying for smut. Make them unprofitable. Demand Objects, not Products. Buy directly from creators. Support your local library. Get involved in your community. Make a new community that doesn't rely on shareholders. Push Fair Use to its absolute limits. Make your own website. Set a crypto mine on fire. Tell everybody to fuck NFTs. Leave any website that forces you to look at ads. Understand that the endgame of the Modern Web is the endgame of capitalism, and that the only way to get out unscathed is to tear the system down. Profitability is not the cure for a dying economy, it is the disease. Don't let anybody convince you that the Modern Web is sustainable: It isn't.
Pirate everything. Find resources. Share resources. Create resources! If you know how to do something, teach it to somebody else. Create real standards for media analysis. Make a copy of every textbook you've ever read and reupload it. Support the Internet Archive. Vote and protest and fight to keep the internet free and accessible to everybody. Demand mobile and screen reader accessibility. Share what you know and speak up about what you don't know. Push back against corporations that claim to know everything. Stop believing that the internet is hard to understand. Self-taught isn't always worse than school-taught. Speak up against anti-intellectualism; things do matter, games are art, modern art is meaningful, themes are fundamental to understanding, empathy is the first step towards communication. Carve a place for yourself out of the Web.
I don't think a hosting service has to be morally good in order for it to be useful. Neocities is free and looks like the internet that I want to live on. That's all that matters to me. If they start pulling some bullshit, I will happily host my website somewhere else, or host it myself, because I can (and will) do that. Remember that you can do that too.
Federation is interesting but I think it's fundamentally missing the mark when people believe it's the end-all-be-all solution to the internet's problems. A federated network is just another kind of Web network. It can be used for good things or for bad things. Personally, I think that it's important to remind ourselves that federation has existed for as long as the internet has, and that the state of the network reflects the people who use it and not the systems that maintain it.
It's bad.
It's fun, it pushes you away from the "internet soup" of social media, and it gives you perspecive on what the internet looks like when users are in control. It is allowed to be a place entirely for you, that looks like what you want it to, that has everything you want it to have. Never settle for less.
Change doesn't happen instantly. I can be a user on a website without supporting them financially. I try my best to use social media that doesn't sell me the fuck out (to varying levels of success, boo) and the rest of the time I just keep myself to sites that I actually enjoy being on.
Additionally, I don't think that the ideal "Postmodern Web" is completely free of social media. There is a time and a place for it, especially when it comes to networking with other users, but I don't think it has earned being the Biggest Thing on the Internet. Running a social media should not make you a billionaire, that is ridiculous.
I think that we can make our own space. The corpo-nightmare of the Modern Web will probably continue to exist for as long as it manages to be profitable, which by my calculations should be about as long as capitalism dominates the global economy. However, we don't have to interact with any part of the Web that we don't want to. I think that people have forgotten how insulating ourselves from certain parts of the internet is a perfectly normal thing to do. The part of the Web that people call the "Web Revival" has existed the entire time that the Modern Web has. It's all relative to how many users want to use one aspect of the Web or another.
In other words, even if the Modern Web still exists, the Postmodern Web can be its own separate space that doesn't follow the Modern Web's rules. That's kind of what makes the internet awesome.