Other Thoughts and Reflections – Page 2

Local ruins and ruinous beliefs

April 29, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged abandoned, astronomy, culture, geology, Nikon, philosophy, psychology1 Comment

Some days it’s hard to ignore the culture wars that shoot back and forth viciously on digital threads or the hurried whispers of people who feel the uncomfortable cultural shift beneath their feet. I wonder whether we’re just living through especially tumultuous times or whether this has always been so? It has always been so, of course, because nature is change. Even the universe changes from moment to moment. It’s a truth some try to resist and others embrace. Often, we embrace it when young and ossify with age. That’s our nature too. Today’s passionate culture warriors become tomorrow’s slow-moving dinosaurs.

*A door used no more – Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm 1.8 lens*

I’ve always thought it unwise to commit too fully to a rigid set of beliefs. This is not to say belief systems are unreasonable or bad – humans seek meaning in all areas, and belief provides the framework for living in a universe that’s so vast as to cause us terror in dark and quiet moments – if you subscribe to Terror Management Theory. We cling to each other for warmth, just as we cling to belief like a security blanket.

We so often make the mistake of assuming our own beliefs are real and true and that they transcend time. Rather than understanding others deeply and cultivating compassion, we too easily find the beliefs of another person wrong, placing it on a rigid moral spectrum that functions as our own personal guide to undertsanding a seemingly random existence we seek desperately to understand, contain, and explain. In this way, we comfort ourselves.

If we believe the universe has a moral structure inherent, we also tend to find a moral structure in the world and find our beliefs aligning strongly with it. If we believe the universe is mechanistic and chaotic, without moral structure, we align our personal narratives to this view instead. We find that life’s purpose and meaning is tied inextricably to our most basic beliefs about reality. We may be trapped within them at the expense of understanding other people. Either we’re islands of meaning, separated by uncrossable gulfs, or human beings attached to each other by common bonds. Perhaps both.

*The tall church along the old road – Olympus E1*

You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, people sometimes say. For me, there is no right or wrong side, just people who have their own personal narratives, clinging to meaning. We’re all in the vast river of history together. It flows all around us. We’re part of the change happening from moment to moment, whether we embrace it or resist it. Neither approach is right or wrong – just ways of living and surviving and finding purpose and meaning.

I love geology and astronomy. I like the feeling of placing myself in the context of deep time – the kind of time that barely notices our existence because we’re fresh and new. In this way, I place human life in the context of more ancient things. Uluru, the famed monolithic red rocky heart of Australia, started to form 550 million years ago. It was here long before we were. It started to form when multicellular life dominated the planet, long before dinosaurs roamed. Imagine that?

When you look up at the stars, those photons hitting your retina have travelled for countless light years. They’ve struggled and twisted up through impossibly dense super-heated layers of distant suns – the forges of our universe – careened through the cold depths of deep space, entered your eye, hit your retina, and then been processed as a visual signal by your amazing mammalian brain. In this way, we’re all connected to the stars. I love that thought.

Wending my way through photo edits on a quiet day ~ curation, technical considerations, and personal growth

April 25, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Aesthetics and Technique, Creativity, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged art, Olympus, philosophy, PhotographyLeave a comment

It’s a public holiday and I’m working my way through old photos in hopes of finding some stray winners I’d forgotten about. I’ve always been my own biggest critic, editor, and curator. I think it’s good to develop our own tastes as photographers over time. It’s important to connect to our own photos without judgement, reflect on the image and the subject choice, consider the chosen settings, and remember our original photographic vision for the scene versus the actual image.

The key is to do this without judgement. Not every photo is going to meet your developing creative tastes. Not every photo is going to work at a technical level – some will be blurry, some will be rushed, some subject choices will seem odd, and some photos will seem dull. All this is absolutely OK. It needs to happen for growth to happen.

*Sundial on a cloudy day – Olympus EM5 Mark 2 and Zenitar 16mm 2.8 Fisheye lens*

I love the way the sunlight hits the sundial to reveal the texture of the metal in the photo above. All of the rust spots, built-up debris, weathering, and patina is visually interesting. The old Zenitar Fisheye would be a specialist lens on a 35mm camera, but on the half-sized sensor of the Olympus it works out to an equivalent focal length of 32mm and functions as a nice wide lens with a sharp centre and mushy corners. In situations where I want to get close and get in as much of the scene as possible, it’s a great lens.

There’s a little blown out highlight right up the top, but blown highlights and blocked shadows are not necessarily bad things, and in the above photo it’s very small and not distracting. There are so many other elements that make up a photo! Consider these questions: is there any detail in the highlights/shadows that you want to preserve? Will preserving those details add to your photo? If you make a photograph and part of the image features a glowing light bulb, for example, should you decrease the exposure to bring down this highlight so that the filament inside the bulb can be seen? Will doing this compromise other elements in your photo? How integral are those highlights and shadows to your photographic vision? Instead of the sensor having to manage dynamic range that exceeds its capabilities, can you simply reframe the image instead to include less heavy highlights/shadows?

In the photo above, my decision to focus on the car door was made easy by the fact that the window at the top was allowing in a lot of light. The E1 has an old sensor that doesn’t manage high dynamic range so well, so it made sense for me to cut out most of the light from the window in my viewfinder composition so as to preserve the details in darker areas and on the car door. In effect, the old sensor didn’t need to work so hard to contain all of the dynamic range in the scene.

The red paint on the left, the curved red painted area to the bottom right, and the window at the top all serve to frame the weather-beaten door and its message. It may not be the most exciting photo in the world, but it works for me and it’s a good example of connecting a scene to a photographic vision through careful composition and technical knowledge. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always good at that and plenty of photos don’t meet my own tastes, but I keep learning.

Diesel, detritus and digital dust ~ a few more photos from the Nikon D70s

April 23, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Consumer Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged Contemplative Photography, culture, Nikon, philosophy, psychology, Technology, Vintage digital2 Comments

How do you store your digital photo files? In this modern world, it’s a regular concern – how to safely and securely store all of the digital detritus that builds up around us. It used to be so easy when we just had to remember a few passwords. There was no such thing as 2 factor authentication years ago. Security breaches and cyber-hacks have put paid to having an easy life when it comes to digital security. And you know something? I’m a bit burned out on all of it…it feels a bit too much some days.

Just trying to organise photo files feels like a burden. I’ve had hard drives go bust over the years. The ever-swelling trove of files gets bigger and the voice gets louder: “Find an easy way to store all this crap or delete more!” – as if I’m stuck playing a simulation game and the goal is just to move shit around every minute of every day and night. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.

As I said previously, I use Microsoft One Drive these days. At the very least, I can use the cloud to quickly backup DNG files and TIFFs for future download. I know lots of people feel like they shouldn’t have to pay, but in the age of information overload, I think it’s a good idea to find a reasonable solution that offers enough storage for a good price. It’s the business model that Google tends to run with: offer generous freemium cloud storage, but not too much, so that people come to rely on it for their photo and file backups. Then offer paid tiers for more storage room.

I suppose we’re always looking to organise something – photos, files, music, our lives. And truthfully, sometimes all of those files feel like too much of a weight – like a digital albatross. I can’t even tell you how many sites I’ve been locked out of because an old paid email address went bust and now the site is sending the password I’ve forgotten to an email address that doesn’t exist. Or software license codes that got lost in the shuffle of hard drives and file moves. The 21st century has the feel of a password-protected version of copy of a copy of a copy, featuring tiny beige plastic parts that need to be glued together against a time-limit. So, I guess this is my rant about simplicity and complexity, as if there was ever a simple time. And since I work with vulnerable people, many of whom live really tough lives, I must say that I feel a little queasy even making a small complaint about any of it. Life moves and changes and we’re just the floating leaves flung by the ripples and waves as it goes.

I discovered a cache of unedited photo files ~ backups and bad sectors

April 20, 2025August 14, 2025Posted in Photography, TechnologyTagged culture, digital camera, film photography, Olympus, Photography, Technology3 Comments

Do you remember waiting for a roll of film to be developed? I used to enjoy going to the photo lab and collecting those envelopes filled with photos. I’d sit down on a bench somewhere and pore through them excitedly. Sometimes, they’d be from rolls of film I’d been sitting on for a few years, so looking through them was a joyous exercise in reliving those memories. If I had the extra money, I might even pay for 7×5 prints or even a grainy 8×10 enlargement. We don’t experience any of that with digital photography, of course, but there is a close cousin: finding unedited RAW files on drive backups.

*View of the Lighthouse 1 – Olympus EM5 Mark 2 and unknown vintage lens*

I’m not especially organised when it comes to my photo backups. I’ve even lost a bunch of photos from one particular holiday due to my lack of foresight. Admittedly, I’m also a bit burned out on the tech and the multiple passwords and the platforms and…well you get the idea. In short – my fault for not listening to the hard drive that was burping and farting to let me know it was living its final days. So, it’s always nice to discover a maverick folder full of photos files I’d forgotten about.

*Rusty grille and green concrete – Olympus EM5 Mark 2*

I use One Drive a lot for backups now. I usually save a DNG version to the cloud and save a web-ready version for this journal and for sharing (1000 px on the long side and 60% JPG quality, if you’re interested). You might also have noticed that my photos now have a neat black border with some EXIF information on the side and a URL for this place. It’s an unobtrustive way to watermark the photos, record some useful EXIF data, and make the photo pop a little more against the black border. It’s a slightly convoluted process to install and configure, but once set up, the Mogrify 2 plugin works well in Lightroom. I have a license somewhere, but it probaby went down with another bad hard drive incident.

*View of the Lighthouse 2 – Olympus EM5 Mark 2*

In the forest of the night ~ the hostile internet

March 27, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Internet Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged AI, capitalism, cozy web, culture, internet, philosophy, psychology, social-media, Technology, world wide web2 Comments

Have you been involved in a flame-war online? Have you witnessed dog-piling on social media that causes crushing anxiety in the vulnerable? If so, maybe you’ve largely retreated to safer spaces online, cozier and more comfortable spaces, like direct messaging, where you feel like you have more control over your privacy and your online interactions. In these spaces of the cozy web, we distance ourselves from the bots, data scrapers, ads, web predators, profiteers, and shills of the corporatised web.

The Dark Forest

If aliens exist and life in the universe is abundant, why haven’t we made contact yet? The dark forest hypothesis presents one possible answer: the universe harbours plenty of alien life, but it remains hidden and silent for fear of making too much noise and attracting predators. I guess our radio broadcasts into the darkness of space are going to be a problem then!

Yancey Strickler applies the dark forest hypothesis to the internet ~ the top layer is inhabited by predators: data scrapers, bots, surveillance capitalism, marketers, shills, and growing generative AI. The cozier web lies beneath this layer and is where many of us hang out to get away from the internet of predators. You can drill down all the way until hitting the dark web. It’s a complex digital ecosystem.

*Reflections of a network – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

Into this dark forest, we introduce AI, where entire websites are being populated with AI generated content in the hopes that a few stray clicks will make some coin for faceless people somewhere. Error-filled news articles, health tips, wellness blogs, crypto ads and more are being churned out at a growing rate of digital knots ~ most of it designed to make money, gain followers, and inflate reputations. It’s trashy, low-quality, dull content, generated by AI LLMs and lazy and unimaginative human parasites. This is the anti-web – the web where AI talks to itself and we remain hidden in the forest.

Hyperlinks lost

Some months ago, I watched a video that was clearly advertising a wellness product. I didn’t think much about it until I looked closely at the woman in the ad and her movements – they were looped and repeated, her facial expressions betraying the stiff smile of generative AI. It was chilling really. The stuff of cyberpunk nightmares in a world where we don’t recognise each other, question reality, and where human interactions are mediated through digital networks shaped by personal profiles that AI has built to represent each of us so huge corporations can maintain their walled gardens, their power, and their profits.

It’s hard to remember now, but I know it wasn’t always like this. The idea that the internet could be a hostile dark forest seemed far from my mind in the 1990s. The hyperlink once connected intimate digital ecosystems together ~ humble links living on obscure web pages, pointing you in a hundred different directions and encouraging you to surf the web. It was almost aimless. There’d be evenings where I’d dial-up, connect, and then see where a search would take me: a personal page, a few broken thoughts from a person living on the other side of the world, a cool-links page, onwards to another page living in the digital corners, and ending up somewhere obscure and unexpected where I might learn about dolphin language experiments. It’s not altogether different from simply wandering about with a camera, without expectation or judgement.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

There was once a time when it seemed like the web could liberate entire nations and set information free. There was a promise in the medium – a thousand thousand thousand human thoughts and feelings connected by the humble blue hyperlink in a web browser. Instead, we have tech-billionaires who have constructed platforms and closed systems and called it the modern web – Web 2.0 or 3.0, or whatever the zeitgeist and marketing departments demand. In their systems, hyperlinks are nothing more than restricted sections in a social media Bio – a way to funnel the gullible, the vulnerable, and the young to AI-written websites and empty blogs where generating income from clicks is all that matters. The click of the humble hyperlink has been twisted into a way to service the predatory machine in the dark forest. We’re sedentary now, having forgotten how to walk aimlessly, and doomscrolling our days away.

*Tranquil moments – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

More photos from the Nikon D200

March 24, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Consumer Culture, Gear Talk, PhotographyTagged abandoned, ccd, Nikon, Nikon D200, Olympus, Olympus E1, Photography, Vintage digital5 Comments

In my previous post, I sang the praises of the Nikon D200 – first released in 2005. Back then, I could barely afford a decent digital point ‘n’ shoot, let alone a premium DSLR like the D200 ! Even RAW photos from this Nikon feature similar contrast, punch, and compressed dynamic range to those from the Olympus E1 – yet another widely respected antiquarian among cameraphiles and CCD sensor enthusiasts. I’ll not expand fervently on that in this entry, as I’ve done previously! Just some more photos from the hefty and reassuringly solid Nikon D200:

*A rusty old shed somewhere – Nikon D200 and Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 lens*

Notice the old tin shed theme so far? I won’t deny that lonely sheds make for some nice pictures, especially when they’re decaying into the sun-beaten soil.

Seriously, I was going to post something other than a shed, I really was, but I couldn’t help myself! Back to another angle of the yellow shed you saw in my last post. Looking at these photos, I can’t help but wonder again about the image quality perfected in some of these old cameras. Makes you also wonder about the role of marketing and what we believe.

In search of rust and answers ~ what of the future?

March 9, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Consumer Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, Philosophy and Photography, PhotographyTagged abandoned, culture, environment, philosophy, Photography, psychology8 Comments

My interest in rust is, as you might imagine, slightly more than that of the average person down the road. I don’t have data to back this up, but I’m not convinced that the idea of making photos of rusty things is of primary importance to many people as an activity. What I’m quite certain of is that people are definitely interested in the answers to big questions: Why am I here? Are we alone in the universe? Is death the end? What does the future hold?

*In the middle of nowhere that used to be somewhere – Nikon Z5*

Rust and ruin are symbols of decay and time passing. Some people are terrified by this idea, perhaps hoping that science will one day discover the answer to immortality. Others believe they have the answers to the big questions already. For them, perhaps, ruin holds fewer terrors. I wrote about this in a previous post if you want to have a read. I even included one of my favourite poems.

*In shadow and broken steel – Nikon Z5 with Nikkor 40mm F2*

Sidestepping terror to make life easy

I started this post like most others. Truthfully, I didn’t really have much direction, other than the desire to explore rust and ruins as universal symbols that remind us of our mortality in the vastness of the river of time’s relentless passing. But lately, I find myself thinking more and more about the impact that I and others have on the world. For example, my use of shaving cartridges, with all the plastic they include, isn’t just annoyingly expensive, but also destructive. All of that plastic ends up in landfill, contributing nothing to the environment but toxicity.

It’s perfectly understandable that people prefer to have easy lives where everything is mapped out and makes sense. An easy to understand narrative provides us with answers to many, if not all, of the big questions we have. It’s easier to come to terms with the idea of toxic human waste, selfish governments, and genocides when it’s part of a cosmic plan ~ the evil will get their punishment and the good will find peace. Unfortunately, human history is nothing if not a struggle between the powerful and the powerless.

*Rusting in the shadow of trees – Olympus E1*

I think this makes it too easy to sidestep the feeling of terror gnawing at the mind in times of quiet. What does the future hold when we know all too well that the capacity for destruction lies in the same bed as the capacity for art within every human being? I strongly suspect that we may turn quickly and desperately to solutions as a species once it’s too late. The powerful will have squeezed every last drop of value from us and we’ll have been too busy buying fast-fashion clothing from giant toxic factories where people are grossly underpaid and overworked for the benefit of the few. Where do those unsustainable fast-fashion items end up, do you think? What good do they serve, other than to appease vanity?

Living with less

One kind of response I’ve often heard from people when speaking of this topic goes something like this: “But what about the economy and jobs? If we follow environmental policies, we’ll lose jobs. And how do we keep the lights on? Maybe we should think about nuclear power?“

My blunt rebuttal these days is usually along these lines: “The environment isn’t interested in your comfort. We may all need to accept the idea that we must live very differently with a lot less.”

The idea that we must not stall our economy and standard of living as we explore ways of doing less destruction to the planet is not only absurd, it is also dangerous. All this does is serve the lives of people who have vested interests in making money and living comfortably. They don’t want their lives altered and would rather continue driving big vehicles that spray minute particles of rubber into crucial waterways. Yet, nature is change. Nothing remains the same. Living a life with less money, less oil, less waste, less electricity, less gas, less cars, and less fast-fashion is not only wise, it’s likely the only path to take.

*The empty house near the empty hotel – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

A calm night rudely interrupted

March 7, 2025July 27, 2025Posted in Other Thoughts and Reflections, PhotographyTagged culture, Darwin, digital camera, drone, night photography, Nikon, Nikon Z5, northern territory, Photography, psychology7 Comments

One warm night on the ourskirts of Darwin, we pulled the car to the side of a busy road. The marina had caught our eyes. I grabbed my camera bag in a hurry, threw open the car door, looked both ways, and made a dash to the other side. I could see the water more easily from there, but there was no wide walkway offering protection from the speeding cars, so I was stuck close to the concrete siding that formed the road’s crash barrier. The driver, beating even my swift movements, carried his drone and launched it with some excitement.

I’m not one for a tripod even though I have one. My photos tend to be opportunistic and made in short timeframes. It’s the sort of thing you do when you travel with other people who might not have the patience to wait for just the right kind of light. Given the situation, the Nikon’s 35mm digital sensor and sensitivity to low light proved fortuitous ~ I didn’t need to push ISO beyond 6400 and I could use slow but usable shutter speeds if I held the camera still enough and held my breath momentarily. Just as well that the Z5 also has inbuilt image stabilisation to help out in these situations!

There I was, busy making photos of the boats and the water reflections and the hazy orange-hued moon. My friend was busy controlling his drone remotely and flying it further out over the marina and the moored boats. Out of the dark, we heard someone shouting gruffly at us: “What the F*** are you doing? Are you F****** spying on us?”. I’ve encountered this kind of thing before and I’ve no doubt that the audible buzz of the little drone really grabbed the attention of the marina locals. As another stranger once said in relation to my mate’s little flying friend: “Every moron has a drone!”

A lank-haired young man on a scooter, chest puffed out and eyes wide, flanked by his eager buddy, rode up to the edge of the road about 20 metres distant. Luckily, I’d finished, and my friend had just landed his drone only moments before the gruff accusations. The young scooter-using macho-man attempted to impress his surfer-type colleague, who’d now perched himself lazily over the crash barrier to observe: “If you don’t put that F***** thing away, I’m gonna F****** shoot it down!”.

In these situations, I can get a little fired up, especially if I think I’m not doing anything wrong. We were on a public road near a publicly accessible marina. In this heavily surveiled world of security cameras and manufactured fear, people sometimes overreact. And a drone flying overhead may provide the paranoid with an excuse to resort to threats and violence, especially if they have something to hide. Of course, we all know that only morons have drones, so it’s no surprise that someone would take offence!

We started back to the car under the watchful eyes of the two young aggressors, offering them jaded jibes on the way: “What are you gonna shoot it down with? Go ahead and try it, mate!” These are the kinds of words that older men say to younger men sometimes, having undergone the trials of similar testosterone surges once upon a time. But nowadays, we pack our cameras and drones and wonder at the world…

Web gnomes and the technocrat hijack

March 2, 2025August 14, 2025Posted in Consumer Culture, Internet Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, TechnologyTagged culture, freeweb, indieweb, internet, philosophy, psychology, Technology, world wide web2 Comments

In my last post, I discussed the idea of the Indieweb and the state of the World Wide Web. If you have any interest, I urge you to read Olia Lialina’s fantastic essay on the transition from the idea of My to Me on the web. It’s lengthy but contains a wealth of information about how the web has changed and how the web user has changed. It coalesces many of the thoughts I’ve been having for some years now.

Lialina references a late 90s quote from Tim Berners-Lee – the man often called the inventor of the World Wide Web – where he talks about personal home pages:

“With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on to say what they’re interested in. That’s not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It’s exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It’s openness, and it’s great in a way, it’s people letting the community into their homes. But it’s not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself.”

Lialina calls out the arrogance in this statement – the idea that regular people using the web, and enthusiastically learning HTML so they can create a personal home page, are amateurs creating nothing more than quaint gnomes in the garden. A clear divide is inserted between the web professional and the web amateur – between the skilled technologist and the average person on the street.

*Dress me up any way you want – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

The personal home page as rebellion

There have always been people looking to make lifelong careers and profits out of the web. The idea that the web would be a gigantic repository of information available to everyone equally is very much a 90s ideal. Alongside developments in technology, and in service to these professionals and technocrats, the web has changed from something a person logs into occasionally to check email and exercise an alter-ego, to an always-on connection where the idea that you’d even have a home page, rather than a simple Instagram bio, seems odd to many young web users.

When Tim Berners-Lee said that the web isn’t a home for the average web user, he may not have envisioned just how defining that statement would become. Today, giant corporations lay claim to sections of the web and tell us how we should interact with it. Too bad if you want to upload your own hand-made HTML to their platforms, because they won’t allow it. You can’t be trusted to engage in good design as defined by them. And you certainly can’t be allowed to disengage with their data collection because then you’d be worthless to them as a method of making money.

Corporations and technologists making their income from the monetisation of the web aren’t interested in anyone owning any part of it. They want you to stay in their curated walled gardens so they can sell your data, sell your profile, and make you believe you’re getting something useful in return when you spend time filling their platforms with content for free. Need to stay in touch with friends and family? Yeah, lucky thing we have a social media platform for that! Of course, we always had a thing called email where we could stay in touch, too.

Whilst the retro-web revival highlighted by places like Neocities is reminiscent of 90s home pages, and is populated by well-meaning people who want to return to a supposed web golden age, there’s still a pervasive attitude of reworking the ugly design of those original 90s websites so that modern design principles aren’t insulted. The 90s aesthetic is catalogued and examined by the current crop of professisonals. Thus, it becomes another social movement defined by what technologies one had access to, and is assigned space beneath the umbrella of Web 1.0 – itself just another label designed to make conversations about the past easier to grasp.

Of course, we’ve learned so much about web accessibility and our tools have improved to the point where we can now make easy-to-read websites that don’t feature dancing baby GIFs. There’s certainly admission in some quarters that web users in the 90s used the tools they had to make the best websites possible – an admission that the personal home page aesthetic was perhaps not completely a result of people with bad design tastes. But there are also people now who’d like to revive the 90s aesthetic with modern tools like the latest CSS and other scripting that didn’t exist back then, whilst adhering to accessibility and good design principles because, of course, we must do that since it’s best design practice – best practice only in terms of appeal, standardisation, and monolithic design that has, of course, nothing to do with the admirable and simple personal goal of just having a digital home. Not adhering to good design principles would make a site anti-corporate, anti-design, and anti-social, according to arrogant web technologists.

The idea that we should adhere to standards and monolithic design principles seems based on the idea of appealing to the greatest number of people, attracting the most attention, making the most money, and going viral – all of which are core concepts of capitalism that certainly didn’t define personal home page design in the 90s. During the time of the slow web, you’d get excited if a single person emailed you once a month and said how awesome they thought your personal home page was and how you had things in common – and it was a genuinely exciting moment of connection because you weren’t bombarded with likes and followers and subscribers and junk emails every single day. One connection felt real and important because it was uncommon.

What happened to the World Wide Web?

February 22, 2025August 14, 2025Posted in Internet Culture, Other Thoughts and Reflections, TechnologyTagged culture, freeweb, indieweb, philosophy, Technology, world wide web8 Comments

This place being something of a journal, I make no promises that the posts will always be about photos or photography. Truthfully, I’ve never been great at organising my interests into neat online siloes. I’m worse still at expanding them into areas where people might actually connect to them. Mostly, I just post into the digital void. I’m guessing that’s a common experience online.

Sometimes, I reflect on the way the web has changed over the years. I began my online journey sometime in the mid-80s when I connected to a local BBS called Nexus, hosted at a nearby library. It was exciting to hear the dial-tone and plop the phone onto the kludged-together modem that someone in the Amstrad Computer Club had made. The idea that you could send an electronic message and receive one in return seemed magical.

*Struts and pipes and bars – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2*

There was a sense of geekish community in those early days. I was never especially tech-savvy in the sense that I could write code or talk about Unix systems, but I was certainly an interested party. I count at least part of the 90s as fledgling internet days, as people colonised online forums, used IRC, and built the content of the web eagerly via personal home-pages and niche interest groups. Back then, it seemed as though anyone could build a web-site by learning just a little HTML. Nowadays, it’s an exclusive activity and you need a degree…

Where are we now?

Despite big parts of the Unix-driven early web still underlying the modern web of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and slick social media platforms, the web of today is mostly a mundane junk-show of companies selling personal data, in your face advertising, enshittification, AI-powered bullshit, and venture capitalists looking for the next big thing so they can swindle more people. I understand that some are looking to rebuild the personal home-page boom of the 90s, but that time is now gone. That culture was fleeting, and no amount of modern CSS fudging can remake the joyous time that so many people felt when they built their first home-page back then.

*Get more shit done – Nikon D7100 with Nikkor 50mm 1.8*

Honestly, I don’t feel like I quite fit into this new modern web. There’s too much shouting and too much corporatism. There are too many people trying desperately to market their shit to whomever will listen, without offering any genuine communication in return. And social media platforms and communities are only considered successful if they feature tens of millions of users talking endlessly about themselves. Here’s a tip: those billionaire platform owners are only interested in profit, influence, and selling your data.

What happened to those small online communities? What happened to the tiny online discussion forums where the same small bunch of socially awkward nerds gathered weekly? An online community is now only considered successful if the user-base blows out into the millions and I think that’s sad. It’s as though the capitalist idea of growth at any cost has infected us so deeply that our online communities must reflect it, otherwise they’re unprofitable failures.

The web of today is definitely not representative of the exciting web experience I remember. The early web was constructed from more noble intentions to connect people and spread information globally. Back then, people were happy to have special and weird online usernames. Going online in the 90s wasn’t like being offline but with Subscribers and Followers, it was like entering a different world where you could be anonymous and exercise your strange alter-ego and talk about shit you liked without expecting Likes and Follows. Self-centred billionaires have a lot more trouble selling your weird username to advertisers than your real name and personal data! Why else do you think Google waged the nymwars?

Finding the old tribe

Even though we can’t go back to earlier times, there are still people out there dedicated to the idea of the small web. Some of them, like omg.lol, offer simple hosting and other services. Places like tilde.club even open up the Unix-based structure of the web to offer personal home-pages. And if you want to deep-dive into resisting the corporate web and the march of AI into every aspect of our lives, you can find more info at Indieweb.

I’ve also started curating a list of links to small web and indieweb resources. You’ll find sweet little search engines, free static site hosting, minimal and little-known blog platforms, and more!

I’ve written something of part 2 here.