Kill the Internet

Kill the Internet is a new initiative being created by CJ the X. I think it's really relevant to the ideas behind the small web (which CJ has written about before!) but diverges in interesting ways worth discussing. CJ discusses some of their plans for KtI in this patreon post (private) and I'm pretty excited about it overall.

Kill the Internet IRL in Austin, TX

I attended the Kill the Internet IRL event CJ hosted with Jared Henderson and Michael Burns (known as the host to the now defunct Wisecrack channel). There's (intentionally) no recordings or anything of the event, so any references to the event are filtered by my own subjective experience of it and my sometimes poor memory.

Jared Henderson’s talk

The small web is largely about posting things in public. I and many others put a LOT of information about ourselves on our website. It's controlled, but evidently a lot of people are pretty darn open about themselves. Jared talked about this in his talk. He brings up The Circle, a book that includes a woman who chooses to live stream their entire life (before sites like twitch were even a thing), and how even when presented with ways to end the experiment she continues to do so, and how essentially always having an audience affects her decision making and ultimately who she is.

That's an issue with social media that I don't think the small web actually avoids. Posting at all, on your own site or someone else's, is engaging in an act of performativity (the sociological term, referring to social constructs coming into existence through performance), but one that is then out there forever(ish), discouraging things like growth and changing opinions etc. Sort of like flanderizing our selves. And Jared proposes "living in darkness" sometimes as the antidote, to allow us to play with our identity in a way that isn't immediately observed, recorded, and judged by others forevermore.

As a quick aside, he also briefly touched on the idea of authenticity, and it made me realize something in relation to my own ideas of identity: authenticity is a euphemism for essentialism. The idea that there is some "true" self we each have that we can discover and then choose to present to others, and until discovered however we present ourselves is somehow "wrong", an incorrect guess at our "true" self. I am not a fan of essentialism, and believe our identities are both fluid and unique to each observer of said identity (including our self-identity, which is how we perceive ourselves). Thus, our identities are affected by the societal context we live in, which is called constructivism.

CJ the X’s Talk

CJ the X's presentation (which was actually first, this post just felt like it flowed better starting with Jared's talk) is about a lot that would be hard to give proper justice to, including some deliciously incendiary takes like "democracy is disenchanting". But a lot of their talk was more about arguing for IRL activities and how recordings or write-ups of IRL experiences don't capture their enchanting quality, which while fascinating doesn't really tie into the small web that strongly.

It was actually it was something they discussed in the Q&A session that I want to bring up. It was pertaining to in-groups and out-groups, and CJ discussed how solidarity requires a "solid" group, and I thought that was pretty interesting in a society of "big tent" communities. The internet, to me, is the biggest tent of them all. It's a network filled with strangers you'll interact with once and never again (or influencers who you'll see again but won't interact with you ever again). A big positive about the small web imo is that by "shrinking" the web you are able to see the same names again. I've only somewhat recently joined this forums, for example, but already feel a lot more comradery with the people I see and interact with multiple times, and it makes those interactions nicer, having slightly more stakes due to potential social consequences that prevent us from just being assholes to each other. But on the wider web this idea often gets attacked with scarewords like "echo chamber", and so it was nice to see CJ argue that in-groups (even ones which value their exclusivity) and tribalism don't go hand in hand. I honestly think the "everyone is a stranger" effect of the big web leads to a lot more dehumanization and hate than people having small groups of friends they've met online and interact with regularly.

That said, I think there should be some porosity between these groups, and an internet that's just private group DMs would certainly have negative consequences, like when it comes to organizing large scale movements. It's something I've put a lot of thought into and like experimenting with ideas of how to structure communities so that you can see your "digital neighbors" regularly but can do the digital equivalent of "walking down the street" to meet people further from you without jumping into the ocean of strangers. In that regard, I think the small web's linking culture is a good example of a network where you can bookmark a few pages you like and when you feel like it "surf the web" via buttons or other links on those pages to find new pages and people.

Michael Burns’ Talk

While still enjoyable, Michael Burns' talk was more on the comedic side of the comedy <-> philosophy spectrum and didn't really give me any new insights or thoughts on social media or the small web. But it was chill getting to meet him and he loved seeing my wife's notes and drawings made during the show!