On creating over consuming

Sat, Aug 1, 2020

The internet is a miraculous invention. It has the power to make knowledge truly free to everyone in the world. Gone are the days that information is kept behind closed doors, accessible to only a privileged few. But this freedom is something we must fight to protect every day.

I have toyed with having a personal website for many moons. I finally decided to stop faffing about and actually do something about it after attending this talk at Tech Nottingham: How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days.

It was really inspiring to hear the story of the early web at CERN and the project to re-create it for the 30th anniversary. The Q&A afterwards was fascinating, the speakers passion for the project was palpable.

One of the take-homes for me was the idea that right now most users of the world wide web are passive consumers - gone are the days of unbridled experimentation and creativity. There is currently a high bar of entry - it is much more difficult today to simply mess around with some HTML to make a website than when the web was new.

So this is me claiming one tiny, weird bit of the internet just for me. To make up for the hours that I have simply scrolled through feeds in my browser consuming whatever some big tech company wanted me to.

Let’s keep the web weird. Happy hacking everyone.