Author: THENATHE

Article referenced throughout this post

This article proposes two really interesting points that seem to counteract each other: point one is that people will retreat to the most convenient place on the internet while still holding on to the previous places they were a part of, and point two is that people desire like-minded communities and will skip out on the bigger internet in order ot find that. This idea of the dark forest and cozy web is interesting because it is both new and old (like most of this concept, it fits and yet is self contradicting). Historically, people in the 90s did a lot of stuff on the federated internet, like browsing forums for specific topics (a lot of this still remains in car forums), IRC was the discord/slack of that era, and personal blogs were all the rage (even my dad had one!)

Now, people moved to less federated services that still provide the middle ground, but not without first passing through the eye of the beast. In the early 2000s to mid 2010s, much of the internet started to move to friendster, then myspace, then facebook, and then away from all of those (with the other ones like twitter, tumblr, etc mixed in at varying points) because they began to realize that they didn’t really want everyone they know to see what they do.

Now, most people maintain 3 distinct layers of what they do on the internet:

1. Public facing, or ‘the dark forest’ — facebook, twitter, linkedin as social networks, and Google and email as services, all of which are owned by one or many massive conglomerates that decide literally everything about the platform and sell your information. Littered with bots and advertisers/advertising networks
2. Semi-public — personal blogs, posts on nice forums, video game communities (mainly because these sites are often not crawled/crawlable or are not commonly searched up), and stuff like your browsing habits on netflix/hulu etc that matter to advertisers, but fit into the scope of “does it really matter if xyz ad company knows I watched ‘Good Girls’ last night on netflix?”
3. Private, or ‘the cozy web’ — a place where individuals mod other individuals and you are only 1 layer removed from the owner (easily in direct contact). Discord, slack, all of your DM type social media (snapchat, whatsapp, messenger technically, texting), specifically places that are gatekept.

So now that we have our robust definitions, why does this matter? Well, what is the similarity between discord and IRC? Well, other than discord adding DMs, emoji, and voice calls, they’re essentially identical. It is strange to me that we collectively were on IRC, saw facebook and went “wow, that is awesome and so much better than IRC!” so we swapped, then later went to IRC 2.0 IE discord. Will we eventually see facebook 2.0 and swap to that in favor? Will it repeat?

Moreover, what consequences does the current atmosphere of the internet hold for society? I am a firm believe in, and am often found rambling, about how cell phones are awful for society at large. My reasoning is that pre-smartphone, the only people that were chronically online were smart people that were either losers, had a weird schedule, or lived way the fuck out there in the boonies, so they had somewhat of an excuse to chat online. Now, with instant gratification only seconds away, IRC 2.0 is profoundly harmful to society in a way that OG IRC was not. What does the future have in store? Will society realize that constant contact with others is bad and instant gratification is causing societal incontinence? I sure hope we realize before it is too late.

One of the big concerns I have with posting stuff on the internet is how people will use it against me. I had a revelation today that was quite telling, and I feel like sharing it would be beneficial for all would-be readers, even if that ends up just being me in the future. However, if anyone were to look at it, say, from the group with whom it affects or potential future groups of which I would be in a similar role, those individuals would likely be offended and/or take action despite the fact that it most definitely is a correct observation.

I think most people try to think they are and they act more moralistic and kind then they actually are. I know I do. But this leads to this level of anger when corrected, telling people “yo that was kinda a dick move” isn’t taken as a wake up call, but rather a personal attack on their character. Posting things on the internet is kinda the same thing. While some people like to go to a therapist and vent about their issues to someone who legally cannot speak about them to anyone else, I figure I might as well set up my ideas for the world to see. The only problem with that, as outlined above, is that, for my own well being, I must censor myself so that I do not dig my own grave, so to speak.

Maybe the answer is to grow a backbone, or maybe the answer is to roll over and take it, and maybe the answer is to let it roll like water off of a ducks back. Who knows? My dad probably did, but there is yet another thing I never got a chance to ask him.

Often times when nothing at all is going on I tend to have a drink. Usually vodka, straight, and only because I liked to get it down as fast as possible to skip the tasting part. Unlike my father, I think mixed drinks and cocktails are disgusting unless it’s a kind of milkshake. I digress. This particular evening I decided that I wanted to archive my dad’s facebook posts, as, in his later life, his facebook profile was a lot like his old website: a convenient way to share his thoughts with his friends and family. I think he really transitioned over only because it was more convenient and public, but the part that is unknown to me (and likely will be until I myself meet him in heaven or whatever lies beyond) is why there was such a large gap between Motman’s Hideaway and Facebook dad, something like 14 years.

Like my dad, I carve out a place here on the net for myself in hopes that maybe one day someone will read this. Unlike my father, however, I have yet to live a full and rich life, knowing many people and doing many things, so the chances of someone stumbling upon this out of the blue is fairly unlikely. But, I hope, maybe, someone comes to look at my server tutorial for long enough and gets curious. Who knows…

Back on track here, I write this post because I think it is fairly interesting that someone’s life can fairly accurately, yet completely falsely, be summed up by what they post on the internet. I see some of the wittier things my dad posted on facebook and think for a moment “wow, this guy was a genius!”. And, having known my dad for 24 years I can certainly say that is true, the wit he shares online was a lot unlike his wit he hand inherently: he was more of a playful, funny trickster IRL, whereas online he poses himself as a ‘pondering fool’ or other wit-meets-intellect type persona that was most clearly not him in his common state. But, at the same time, this is how he viewed himself, and how he strove to be, and so I guess in a way he shared only his best parts, or at least what he thought were his best parts.

I have known people for a long time on the internet, and while I also strive to show only my best parts, with the fact that I am chronically online in the frame, I am certain that I often share my worst sides, and my most normal sides as well. My worst parts are always anger, frustration, jealousy, envy. But not my dad. His worst parts were always good: overly trusting to his own detriment, self deprecating (which, inadvertently, kept him honest), sometimes overly joking, the list goes on. But note that none of these things are like “torches houses” or “beats children” or “verbally berates people” or “smashes shit out of anger”. I’m sure my dad did his fair share of not-so-great things in his life, as all men do. But I think the measure of a great man is not how much good you do, nor how little bad, but rather the offset of good vs bad. I think my dad swung very, very, very far in the positive direction.

I leave you, dear reader, with a nugget of my dad’s philosophical wit, of which, at the time of writing this, I still do not fully understand. Maybe it will come with age:

The Challenger Deep challenges not the depths of my misunderstanding ~ Timber Tom Wyma

There is a snowstorm coming in tonight according to all major weather services, and it looks like it’s gonna be a big one. I don’t normally really care about winter weather because my job is very accepting of working from home, but this time I am a little more conscious of it because a girl I am sweet on might be able to hang out, but I would have to drive in the snow to give her a ride (drats!). Prescott has a history of really overplaying weather (or underplaying / no-playing ???) seemingly at random, so I wanted to go check the NWS radar to be sure. I look at this thing and have little to no idea what is going on. Like, there is a large blob over LA, and there is a REALLY large but presumably not very bad blob (due to the colors?) over the area between Havasu and Prescott. I really have no idea what I am looking at. But my dad would have!

My dad used to run Motman’s Hideaway (You can find it brought back to life from the depths of internet hell here) and he would regularly post forecasts based on what he saw from the doppler images, and, from my history knowing him, they regularly came true. That, to me, is pretty cool. He had no background in weather-anything but he was able to determine all of this information about what was going to happen. During my lifetime, my dad was always able to tell when it was actually gonna be a really bad storm despite what the weatherman said, and I think that is pretty cool. There is a huge list of random shit my dad could do seemingly from nowhere, and I could write probably 200 blog posts about them.

I really am lucky to have known such a cool dude.