starbreaker.org: manifestos

🚧 Personal Web, Personal Sovereignty 🚧

2024-03-23T04:03:47-04:00

I really should get out of the habit of writing manifestos. But since 32bit Cafe is doing a code jam to celebrate their first anniversary and the prompt is “What has being on the Personal Web done for you?” I suspect that this might become a manifesto.

The short version is that being on the personal web has given me a sense of freedom I can’t find elsewhere.

I often feel like a prisoner. In particular, I feel like a prisoner of my sex, my gender, my ancestry, my nation, and my class. I’m an American, but I am not as free as my country’s incessant and pervasive propaganda says I am. Without the Web, I am subject to the tyranny of geography, my opportunities for social interaction limited to people nearby who might be willing to entertain the notion of conversation with a middle-aged metalhead who doesn’t and will never attend their church and most likely doesn’t share their ideals or interests. Moreover, in the “real world” I am subject to laws, regulations, and rules in which I had no direct say. The corporation for which I work is essentially a private dictatorship, and when I go to work I leave my rights in the car. I cannot easily opt out of any of them, save by withdrawing from society, something I have already done to the extent I find practical.

Solitude (1897), by Thomas Moran (public domain)

On the corporate/commercial internet, the situation is little different. Though the tyranny of geography is less of an issue, if I wanted to interact with other people on a platform like Reddit I am still subject to arbitrary rules in which I had no say. I could, for example, be kicked out of subreddit for going against the prevailing groupthink. I got banned from a Reddit-like platform called Tildes for celebrating the losses of billionaires and saying something about wanting to see them party like it’s 1929 by throwing themselves off the roofs of skyscrapers so we could see if they’d bounce higher than their stocks — or a dead cat.

Which was fair enough, really. I didn’t own that platform, but was merely a guest there. I never had a right to post there. And since I wasn’t playing by the rules, management was within their rights to give me the boot.

But on my website, I am the owner. I am the operator. I rent space on a host. I lease a domain. I’m doing the work and paying the cost to be the boss. That means I can say or write anything I damned well please on my website, as long as I don’t say anything not protected under the First Amendment or the last couple centuries of case law pertaining to the First Amendment.

On my personal website, I am not obligated to use my “real name” or reveal more about myself than I care to. Moreover, I can use any pseudonym or invent any sort of persona I care to. On my website I could be mostly the person I pretend to be at work. I could claim to be your Uncle Gilgamesh or the successor to Joshua Norton, the Second Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Maybe I’m actually a cat? How would you know?

On a personal website, I need not entertain opposing viewpoints unless I choose to. For example, my blog doesn’t have a comment section and I don’t think it ever will. Instead, if you have something to say you can either email me, or you can link to my post and quote it with commentary on your own website.

And if you don’t have your own website, I suppose you could link and quote me while commenting on whatever parasocial media platform you favor. But I’d rather you had your own website. More on this later, either in this post or another.

One might reasonably ask how much it costs to run a personal website. The Devil’s honest truth is that it need not cost that much at all. I certainly don’t need to monetize my joy by trying to make a side hustle out of my website. Leasing the domain name “starbreaker.org” costs me about $15/year. Renting space on Nearly Free Speech costs me as little as $5/month. That’s a lot cheaper than my Final Fantasy XIV subscription and a hell of a lot cheaper than the $40/month I pay Apple so my wife and I can both use Apple Music and Apple TV. Furthermore, if I didn’t insist on having my own domain, I could make do with running a website on Neocities and have an address like “starbreaker.neocities.org”. So could you. You could do it right now, if you wanted.

Given my operating expenses for @@here, one might reasonably assume that I could very easily monetize my website and get paying subscribers. However, to do so I would probably need to switch from a static website to a platform like Ghost. Self-hosting Ghost would be cheaper than using the official platform, but not necessarily by much since I would need a virtual private server instead of a directory on a FreeBSD machine running Apache. Then there’s the matter of getting people to pay for a subscription. That would involve marketing and self-promotion. I would have to start using social media. I would have to turn my hobby into a __GRIMOIRE(not-my-side-hustle, side hustle). And for what? So that every subscriber could become my boss, and threaten to cancel if they don’t like what I write or how I write it?

I get enough of that at my day job, where I build __GRIMOIRE(cathedrals-on-quicksand, cathedrals on quicksand). What I don’t get at my day job is the one thing I get from running a personal website: autonomy. At my day job I am not free to do my job my way, at my own pace, with the tools of my choice. At my day job I am obliged to choose between laptops manufactured by Dell or HP, both of which run Windows 10. I am obliged to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio. I am expected to develop software according to a specific design using C#, the .NET Core Framework, Entity Framework, etc. And that’s fine most of the time; I knew what I was getting myself into when I agreed to take the job. If my working conditions become sufficiently disagreeable, or I keep getting raises that are in fact pay cuts because they don’t exceed inflation, I will seek work elsewhere.

But with my personal website, I don’t have a boss. I don’t have to use a particular software package on a particular operating system or a particular computer. I can structure my website in any way that suits me. Whether I build my website by hand, using artisanal HTML and CSS, use a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo, or run my website on a content management system like WordPress or TextPattern is entirely my choice. I can publish anything I want, any time I want. If I go a few weeks without posting, that’s my business. If I can’t sleep and end up belting out half a dozen posts, that’s likewise my choice. I won’t say that running a website isn’t work, but this is my work done my way, and that is absofuckinlutely priceless.

And, yes, I got that phrase from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It was the one of the few things she got right.

I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn’t matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there’s nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I’ve got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.

My work done my way. It seems like little enough to ask, but the world seems to think differently. I've lost count of how many times people have told me I'm wasting my time because nobody visits personal websites anymore. It may seem that way, compared to a big platform like Facebook or Twitter. But that's OK. It doesn't matter how many visitors I get. Even one or two on a quiet night is sufficient. My site is there for you if you want it, because I want it to be there.

Nighthawks (1942), by Edward Hopper (public domain)

I want you to have the same sense of freedom and empowerment I have online. I don’t want you to be a digital sharecropper, somebody whose posting enriches some already wealthy techbro because your ‘engagement’ brings in more advertising revenue. I don’t want you to be subject to censorship by some faceless, nameless, and all but unaccountable moderator or administrator.

I want you to be free, but I cannot make you free. You are the only one who can liberate yourself. The first step is wanting to be free. The second step is learning how. I won’t lie to you; learning to build and run your own website isn’t easy, especially if all you’ve got is a smartphone.

If you don’t have your own computer, I’d suggest getting one. It doesn’t have to be new. It doesn’t have to be a high-end machine optimized for gaming. It just needs to work.

Likewise, you don’t need fancy software. You might not need any software at all. Just use your web browser and go to Neocities. Create an account. Go through the tutorials. Make your first web page. Now you’re on the personal web, too.

It isn’t magic. You don’t need a JavaScript framework. You don’t have to learn everything there is to know about HTML and CSS in a day. You don’t even need to bother with a stylesheet at first, let alone any JavaScript. Knowing a few basic HTML tags is all you need: <h1>, <h2>, <p>, <a>, and <img>. If you can mark up text with headings and paragraphs, create links, and add images to your page, you have enough HTML to build a basic website, and the more you learn the more you can do.

I started learning back in 1996 as a college student who didn’t even have his own computer. I built my first website while hiding in the computer lab instead of eating lunch. I’ve had some kind of website ever since. It hasn’t always been easy, but having my own place online has always been worth it to me.

I hope you’ll come to feel the same. I want to see you wearing your independence like a crown.

Ghost: “From the Pinnacle to the Pit” (official video)

If you ended up building a website for yourself because you read this, please email me and tell me where to find it so I can link to it.

🚧 This is Not My Side Hustle 🚧

2023-07-19T21:02:03-04:00

a public response to an unnamed bozo’s sales pitch

So, yeah. I got an email overnight from somebody who visited my site and had important questions like:

How do you support this website without advertising?
Why do you give away your content with a full-text RSS feed instead of running a newsletter?
Why do you even bother having a website when you can write on Substack or Medium and not have to deal with the technical stuff?
Why give away your fiction instead of selling ebooks on Amazon?
How do I expect people to take me seriously if my writing isn’t a side hustle?

Of course, if I paid him (and if I acted now I’d get a discount off his usual fee) he could devote his attention to me as a social media guru and help me boost my profile, grow my followers, and achieve the prominence I deserve so I can write for a living.

This is a silly sales pitch from a silly person who probably can’t deliver on any of their promises, and such cosmik debris hardly merits a personal response. Nor can I be bothered to quote their email with attribution; I am instead paraphrasing and condensing. Nevertheless, the questions I abstracted out of this clown’s bullshit might be worth answering.

supporting a website without advertising?

This one’s easy. I am not a “content creator” (except in the bathroom, where everybody creates—or excretes—content). I have a day job; for my sins, I am a full-stack thaumaturge at a Big 4 consulting firm. It pays me a ~~fairly generous~~ salary that was respectable before the plague, and is barely adequate today. I rent a domain for about $15/year. I rent space on Nearly Free Speech by depositing money into an account that is debited based on how much traffic my site actually gets. If the account runs low they email me and I top it up. Since the site is static HTML (with a little CSS as a treat) and has no server-side or client-side code, hosting and running site usually doesn’t cost me more than $5-10/month.

If you do the arithmetic you’ll find that it’s not that expensive to run a website, especially if you don’t get a lot of traffic. I spend more money per year on streaming TV subscriptions that Madam Catastrophy uses more than I do, and even she acknowledges that they’ve become like cable TV in that most of what’s available isn’t worth her time to watch.

I certainly spend a hell of a lot less on this website than I do meeting the annual deductible for my ~~capitalist death panel~~ employer-provided health insurance.

Even if I were to monetize, all I would do is make my website shittier for what might, if I’m lucky, amount to enough money per month to take my wife out for pizza. I’d have to report the income, ad revenue is 1099 income and thus taxed differently from wages and salaries from a W2 job, and tax prep for a W2 job is already more complicated than it needs to be thanks to lobbyists working for the likes of Intuit and H&R Block.

RSS or Atom feeds are “pull technology”. It’s there if you want it, otherwise you can ignore it. When you’re ready you pull the feed and get updates. This, in my opinion, is how the Internet should work.

Newsletters, app notifications, etc. are all part of the opposite paradigm: “push technology”. This is particularly blatant with notifications in smartphone apps and on websites, which will often call them “push notifications”.

The difference between pull technology and push technology is that the former relies on polling and the latter runs on interrupts. Every email you get from a newsletter and every notification from an app or website is an interruption, a demand for your immediate and undivided attention.

Push technology may be more effective for certain purposes, but at what cost? The use of push technology has turned computers and the internet from technologies that could serve and assist us into technologies that rule us.

I don’t want to contribute any more to that than I already might at my day job.

On a more practical level, if I collect personal details like names and email addresses for a newsletter then I become responsible for how that data is stored and used. I become liable should that data leak or be stolen. The European Union in particular has become more stringent in regulating the storage and use of personal data, and with good reason.

We’ve seen what corporate surveillance firms like Google and Facebook do with the data they collect. We’ve also seen the harm that can result from data that gets leaked or stolen. Particularly memorable is the case of Ashley Madison, a website for men who wanted to set up extramarital affairs with chatbots pretending to be women. Apparently people killed themselves after being exposed.

I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I do this, perversely enough, for fun. Part of the fun is—should it ever be necessary—being able to tell GDPR enforcement apparatchiks to eat my unwashed ass in B♭ major and six-part harmony because not only am I a US citizen operating on American soil, but I don’t collect data on EU citizens in the first place. I don’t even have HTTP server logs, let alone cookies or a mailing list.

I don’t keep secondhand fuel rods from Three Mile Island in my basement, so why would I want your data? It’s just as toxic.

why have my own website?

I don’t want to be a digital sharecropper. I’ve done it before – I used to have 20,000 followers on Google+ and 1,500 on Twitter in 2014 – and it wasn’t worth it.

Google+ was dragged out behind the barn and executed in 2019. Sometimes I miss it, the way you might sometimes miss an ex even though you really weren’t all that great for each other.

I don’t miss Twitter. I don’t get to miss Twitter because it just won’t fuck off and die already. Twitter is still hanging on under Elon Musk, but instead of being the virtual equivalent of a bathroom wall it’s now competing (with Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, and Gab) to be the worst toilet on the internet.

On a more idealistic level, I still believe in John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. I still believe the internet is a place where everybody willing to build their own space online can enjoy mostly unfettered freedom of expression, one of the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Am I completely free to speak my mind straight from the heart on my personal website, regardless of how offensive it might be? No. My host can still give me the boot if I post anything too egregious, but they host sites far more offensive than mine, because their speech is still legal in the United States and protected by the First Amendment, and donate the hosting fees they collect to organizations opposing their nastier clients’ views. They call it “Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons”, and it’s a policy of which I wholly approve.

Does this mean I don’t participate on platforms I don’t own and operate? No. ~~I’m on the Fediverse and I’ve recently joined a couple of old-fashioned web forums.~~ I maintain a presence on a couple of old-fashioned web forums, among them the one run by 32bit Café and Basement Community. Not to mention MelonLand and the Midnight Pub. But I do so knowing that I am a guest and that what I can freely post on my own website might not be suitable for these platforms. However, it’s no different from going to a bar. I might be able to walk around with my cock hanging out at home, but that’s not acceptable behavior out in public so I need my own place in both meatspace and cyberspace.

Furthermore, while there are people who seem to do reasonably well tying a domain they’ve rented to their accounts on Medium or Substack, I suspect that they will regret it if these platforms ever run out of venture capital and must shut down for lack of revenue. Substack supposedly funds itself by taking a 10% cut of subscription fees from paid newsletters, but we’ll see if that revenue is enough to satisfy investors ever hungry for an ever-growing return on investment or if Substack faces enshittification like every other platform seems to do. Also, Substack is still a Nazi bar.

why give away my fiction?

I already tried selling it. I published __WITHOUT_BLOODSHED over a decade ago, and __SILENT_CLARION a few years after that. For a couple of years my novels sold well enough to complicate my tax prep. I got quarterly royalty deposits, received 1099s, and had to report the income. I had to track business expenses: authors’ copies, promotions, advertising, conventions, accommodations for conventions, meals, hookers, blow, mileage, etc. Every April I’d lay awake at night wondering if this would be the year I faced an IRS audit.

I actually had to run a business. I don’t think I did particularly well at it, and I would rather not attempt it again, at least not as a third full-time job on top of my day job and being a halfway-decent husband.

I’m not interested in trying to sell books on top of my day job any longer. I’d rather just put them on my website, where they’re available if somebody wants them, than settle for the less than the deal I want.

What sort of deal do I want? I can explain it in four words: replace my day job. That’s right. I want the same deal Charles Bukowski got.

And if I can’t have that, maybe you’ll find this more palatable. I don’t give a damn if you’re The Atlantic or part of the New York publishing cartel: if you want me to write for you, I want you to put me on your payroll as a full-time salaried employee getting a W2 every year. I want at least $125,000/year with the usual benefits, annual increases to cover the cost of living, and guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime. You provide requirements and deadlines and I’ll meet them. I’ll even pretend I give a flying fuck about the corporate culture if the money’s right.

Just like I do as a software developer. Don’t give me shit about not having a MFA that would “qualify” me as a writer. I don’t have a BS in computer science, either, but I manage reasonably well without it. This is still America, dammit, and you don’t need a degree to prove that you can do things—unless you intend to practice law, medicine, or actual engineering. You can just do it.

But my Starbreaker saga is off the table. You don’t get to publish that, whether I retain copyright or it becomes “work for hire”. That is my work, done my way. I’m writing it to scratch my own itch, because __GRIMOIRE(literature-aint-burger-king, literature ain’t Burger King) and if I want have it my way I’ve got to do it myself.

dude, this is a personal website

This bozo wasn’t the first to ask me why they should take anything I write seriously because I make no attempt to monetize my website. I doubt they’ll be the last.

Nevertheless, it needs to be said: this is a personal website. It might look quasi-professional because of my (lack of) design sense, it’s still my personal website. This is a place for me to express myself. I tell you up front that I’m not a guru or an expert in any particular field, and that nothing I post should be considered factual unless independently verified.

Somebody trying to post as an authority in their field would not tell people that their website is basically television and you shouldn’t believe anything you see just because it seems plausible or rings true to you.

And, really, if you can’t take something seriously unless it’s paywalled or fills your phone’s screen with auto-playing video ads, then you might want to get professional help. In my thoroughly unprofessional opinion, you’re suffering from capitalism-induced traumatic brain injury.

And if this turned out to be a rant, what did you expect? How many times do I have to say it? This is a personal website. Rants and half-assed manifestos are to be expected.

This is certainly not my side hustle, and your side hustle __GRIMOIRE(shite-hustle-no-revenue, can eat a giant bag of dicks).