With the times

To live happily, live hidden

I've been on the internet for close to thirty years, and I've always tried not to make too much noise in public places. I won't lie and say I was absolutely successful, but I think I kept my internet footprint small enough.

It's not only because I'm shy and happy to fly under the radar, but because every word posted on the internet adds to the noise. My ideas are middle-of-the-road at their best; anything I could have posted would have made good content harder to find, and good answers harder to reach.

So why a blog, the epitome of self-importance?

Average down

I can understand many usages of generative AI, but the one I interact with daily is effortless content, clearly made to try to extract a few pennies from the algorithms. Slop on video, slop on social networks, slop in games, slop everywhere. The noise exploded a thousandfold, and my stuff now beats the average, by nature of the huge drop in quality. It’s sad that my impostor syndrome only disappeared when I started comparing myself to non-human output, but I at least now have the confidence to display my work online.

For that, I needed a platform. Honestly, I would have been fine with anything, but then came the second problem...

Techno-regicide

I recently read Yanis Varoufakis's book about the rise of techno-feudalism. For those who haven't heard about it, it's the concept that software has become the base of the whole economy and said software is owned by a few big actors, lending us the right to use it to extracting value from us; very much like a lord extracted value from their serfs simply by owning the land.

I'm not sure if the hypothesis is sound or plain bollocks, but it at least makes a lot of sense to my Philistine ears. It also seems like a problem I can fight at my very small scale. Right now, it's still easy to own some of your services. Buying years-old data centre hardware to make a cheap home lab, running local services, building my own solutions... I can do all that! I even find it fun!

My answer is this blog, the most pre-social network media there is, which is self-hosted using open-source software. There are no ads nor trackers of any sort. You'll find the occasional post about a thing I did, a piece of software I wrote, or a machine I built. I don't expect readers, but if you believe it can be of interest, there is a nice little RSS feed right here.