The Handmade Web
It's 3:47pm on a Saturday afternoon in 2026. I'm attending this class by Trevor and Amalina at the National Library. They'd like to convince us to be more mindful about what's happening on the internet.
How to do that? Start at the very start!
At the beginning, there was Geo cities(closed in 2009). But because of the utter dominance of big tech, people now crave something less aggressive. There is now neocities. nekoweb.org is also a resistance against social network (aggressive and alienating).
β¨β¨Amalina: βA yearning for a softer and freer algorithm internet, not about selling yourself or being sold somethingβ.
Ie not linkedIN.
β¨β¨In an era of Global AI Wars, Doom Scrolling and the Attention Economy, its easy to think of the internet as an evil place. Amalina is proposing a third way: mindful engagement with the internet.
β¨There are two internets that we can choose to explore.
Internet #1: Branching
The old-style internet of discovery, blogs, the feeling that you could find anything(for better and for worse. Where you could get bored after awhile.
vs
Internet #2: Singular
FAANG-run web where you end up on endless doom scrolls. You go only where the algorithm takes you.
β¨This does feel like a gentle manifesto to reclaim our attention.