I've been a web developer since 1996. I am the lawn who gets off me.
After two decades, I've accrued a lot of cynicism and contempt, especially for all things Internet. RMS just resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation because he thought that what the #metoo moment needs is a bit of his unique iconoclasm. It's a race between the tech giants and the Trump administration for the title "greatest threat to our collective freedom". I have anguished discussions with my wife about callout culture.
I remember telling my older brother how to find my first web page, and he typed in "dsuper.net/tildehansel".
I feel like maybe there's a saving grace here, in tilde-land: for all its command-line-flags-obscurity, it's the most human-sized thing I think I've seen in quite a while. The subtlest enemy that the Internet brought us was a true picture of scale, granting all of us a reason to feel hopeless and helpless and consequence-free.
Sept. 16th, 2019