🚧 Personal Web, Personal Sovereignty 🚧

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.

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 make a __GRIMOIRE(not-my-side-hustle, 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.

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.

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.