Khürt argues that the indieweb is not defined by its enemies, a positive sounding notion that’s hard to disagree with. No-one wants to succumb to the enemy’s framing of the world, do they? It also chimes with a certain part of the tech community looking to reaffirm the indieweb they want: free of the “noise” of politics — a purely hobbyist, technological concern.
Khürt states:
The indie web did not originate as a protest movement. It emerged from a set of constructive, generative ideas about what individuals could do with the web: own your content, control your identity, publish on your own terms, connect with others without intermediaries deciding the terms of engagement.
Presenting these ideas as sui generis, conveyed in an immutable, canonical text doesn’t free them from historical enquiry, even if you do chuck in a couple of nice adjectives. We’re not fundamentalist Christians, nor Marxists insisting the end of capitalism is inevitable any time now because Capital tells us so.
Khürt is responding to Coyote’s essay How LLMs & Chatbots Are Bad For the Indie Web, which acknowledges different interpretations of the indieweb concept before exploring his own. This strikes me as a reasonable approach, compared to Khürt’s indieweb fundamentalism, however much Khürt tries to dress this up in a rational-seeming interrogation of Coyote’s essay.
Besides, even if we do accept the indieweb.org website as the word of God, it does in fact outline some familiar enemies:
Our online content and identities are becoming more important and sometimes even critical to our lives. Neither are secure in the hands of random ephemeral startups or big silos. We should be the holders of our online presence.
But honestly, social media’s central role in the rise of the indieweb is fucking obvious, isn’t it? Why have POSSE and webmentions unless you’re trying to recreate social media features on individual websites? Dehistoricising principles means you don’t “require a villain”, but in the real world that villain has loomed over our efforts to publish independently since the mid-2000s.
Independent from what?
What is Khürt really arguing for when he encourages us to not be defined by our enemies? Why decontextualise the indieweb?
Since the late 2010s we’ve seen an increasing awareness of the dangers of big tech, whether that’s Meta’s role in the Royhingya genocide, the use of AI by the US fascist regime to gut government departments and identify its enemies, or Substack’s platforming and monetisation of neo-Nazi content.
These are harsh, ugly truths that some of us may be in a position to ignore as they don’t seem to directly affect us; if you’re a CIS male with a well paid job in tech, for example. Some of us may have joined the indieweb to get away from this sort of noise — let the politics take place on Twitter, Meta or wherever, but not here, on my indieweb.
Furthermore, decontextualising the indieweb reduces it to a set of technical problems, and therefore action to a narrow set of technical solutions, only performable by tech-savvy folk, such as Khürt the cybersecurity analyst. This is the decades-old belief that tech is how we solve problems reconfiguring itself for the age of tech-scepticism:
The indie web was not made by people writing essays about what was wrong with the web. It was made by people who got fed up and built their own sites, their own tools, their own standards. That is the tradition worth honouring.
If we look beyond the faintly contemptuous tone of “writing essays” (and indeed “protest movement”) we can ask fed up with what?, and explore the indieweb’s role in resisting AI, cyber-libertarianism and fascist-friendly publishing platforms. All evils facilitated by people working in tech, after all.