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Liberate the Internet -- creating networks off of platforms

People have been saying this for years but looking toward the future, it's important that we end our reliance on "platforms" that can easily go from enabling to silencing our voices and communication.

Don't get me wrong, we have used social media to spread information and awareness to a great benefit over the last 2 months, I am not saying we need to abandon those platforms. What I am saying is that we need to be ready for when they find a better way to suppress us or shut us down entirely. At some point it will be more work to fight the algorithms that it will to just go elsewhere.

Here is a post I saw earlier about using RSS feeds to collect everything you want to follow.

Here is a post where I talk about different types of platforms.

But I am thinking about the future here. About how we become connected, stay connected, broadcast, converse, etc. I say the more we take it into our own hands and the less power we give major platforms, the stronger our digital ties to one another.

I may be on Tumblr now, but the next thing I want to do is create something akin to a digital garden. (Read more) (How To)

I'm imagining a very near future where we not only cultivate our own spaces online, but link to each other's spaces constantly.

Ongoing dialogue where we link to a post or page from someone else's website and then write our own thoughts

Featured sites where we list the websites of our friends, people we admire or follow, etc. so if someone likes what they see on our sites, they can easily find other people who they may also want to follow.

If this sounds familiar it's because this is how social media already works, but these same principles can be applied outside of centralized platforms.

And people already do this to some degree even with things like linktr.ee where they put their own stuff but also stuff they're involved in or stuff they like/admire.

But let's do it some more.

Edit: I've created my digital garden here.

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Sociology should be a mandatory course for all STEM students. The amount of people that think we just need "technology” to solve all our problems is frankly scary. Take basically any problem we face today and the root cause is always societal. You could create some magical new technology that creates 100% free and clean electricity with no cost to operate it or to distribute it, and the capitalists will still find a way to monopolize and monetize it. You could make a miracle machine that builds houses out of thin air at no cost and we'd still have a housing crisis. You can completely automate the production of absolutely everything and people will still have to spend 90% of their life working for pennies to survive. Every time we've developed some new technology that's meant to make our lives better the capitalists just used it to further consolidate their power. Advancement in technology without appropriate societal changes don't make things better. You can go back to 100AD and give Romans all the modern weapons and medicine and fertilizer and shit, and the Roman empire will still fall, because they'll just continue killing each other in constant civil wars and resulting famines and plagues, except now they'll do it with F16s.

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what's a digital garden

I shall start my exploration of the concept of Digital Gardening by sharing the definition of Maggie Appleton:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.1

Digital gardens move along the spectrum of personal notebooks, wikis and blogs, but they transcend their limitations and get closer to the ideal of the second brain by rejecting the idea that content should be organised linearly or chronologically. Instead they are organised like webs of knowledge, connected with hyperlinks of common themes, ideas and thoughts. Not only does it cultivates the gardener's ability to enter in dialogue with the thoughts they had in the past and to constantly grow and rewrite themselves, it also makes for a fascinating user experience.

A digital garden, as I see it, should capture the compelling feeling of following a rabbit hole, letting one's curiosity take the reins. It should be a terrain for exploration for both the gardener and the user. Maggie writes "You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream." 2 It reminds me of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Their non-linear structure allows for a deliberate and individual path to be chosen. They rebel, in a way, against the commercial, advertised, AI-generated internet that is pushed towards us nowadays. Instead, they are an unfiltered, destructured, consciously and humanely built space on the internet, where one can cultivate the seeds of their intellect and imagination.

In the first conversation I had with my boyfriend after discovering digital gardening, I expressed my need to break free from doomscrolling and content that I did not have time to or was unwilling to digest and process. Nowadays, it is so easy to be sucked into a mode of consumption which destroys the individual and aims to replace it was an advertisement machine, a brain-dead puppet for corporations to tramp on. Digital gardening and the process of taking notes and consuming content mindfully breaks from the bad habit of scrolling and offers a space to speak at length and get lost in thoughts.

Indeed, we are all fatigued by fast-paced commercial media, and we forget that the media we consume is what shapes us, not only as artists but also as individuals. Therefore, it is not really about consuming less, but about consuming more mindfully, and taking ownership of the thoughts provoked by the media we consume. We should not only let it change us, we should be critical thinkers who engage in a conversation with the art and the media that goes through us. We should disagree, add onto, reflect, and put in the work to cultivate ourselves mindfully. Anna Howard 3 puts forward the idea that a way to become more creative is to take notes. My main take-away from her video was that her idea of taking notes was akin to creating through thinking original thoughts and writing them down. It is no longer about copy-pasting content from an article or film. It is about digesting, reformulating, conversing with the art. The note taking that she does is less about the actual content of the media and more about her own vision of the world. It is inspired by it of course, but she makes it hers through the act of note taking. It is in my opinion very similar to the process of creation, through which we let ourselves be influenced by the works of others, and "digest them", mash them all down, mix and churn them into something uniquely ours. 

At their core, digital gardens rebel against the idea of what a website "should be" or "should look like". They aspire to be less perfect and performative than the usual blog or wiki, which we have been taught should look professional, official, consistent. But I am not a "tiny corporation" 4 . I am not politically correct, I am not objective, I am not fixed in time. I can choose to revolt against this limited view of humanity. Like ourselves, digital gardens are imperfect, unconventional, ground-breakingly unique, and in constant evolution. We are not are not structured by the subjunctive. We simply are, in all of our messiness and imperfection. This is what makes them so beautiful. Digital gardens capture the experience of picking at someone's brain and unveiling patterns and connections.

Finally, they allow themselves to be incomplete and biased. Writing with a partial and situa voice is a difficult exercise for my perfectionist self, but it is a healthy one. The mythical idea of perfection is against our human nature of evolution and change, and it is founded in authoritarian, objectivist and hierarchical views of knowledge. It is the birth of inequality. We all have a voice and a perspective, and we all grow and let ourselves be influenced by others. As such, no writing should have the pretension of holding the complete truth. The digital garden positions itself as a human piece of writing.