THE INTERNRANT

Social media and the masquerade of self

I grew up at a time when social medias were still fledgling little concepts, a time when you didn't really express who you were on the Internet, rather you just stuck behind an avatar or screen name. You would have added a few close friends, shared something not exactly private or personal, and that was that. You had a presence online and this large company did all the legwork for you. This was at a time when things really were more focused on the "social" aspect of the site, so you really only got the things you wanted to see from your friends or people you subscribed to, and not some out-of-touch algorithm forcefeeding you content. Things were simpler.

Then people found out you could make money on this shit and all hell broke loose in the span of three-four years. 1/3 of anything posted online is usually in response of, because of, or freebooting off of somebody's work. You don't make art, or a song, or a video anymore, its just "content", just slop for hundreds of millions to eat up, its creator making the same equivalent, the freebooters also making the same equivalent. Then some machine decides what goes where to certain people, and people chase that high of seeing numbers go up on a screen that they view this algorithm like a verifiable god. Whats worse is that this content rarely if ever truly expresses the creator and who they are; they have to suppress their humanity to appease some machine.

When I browse through sites on Neocities I can get a gist of how this person is, what they're like, no matter how open or closed they are. They're free to express themselves through the medium, and don't have to worry about some dumb robot making their work out to be poor. Its been refreshing this past month I've been on here to be able to so freely show who I am and what I've created, and not get caught up on this drug of likes or comments on a post. But the influencers of sites like Twitter (I'm still calling it Twitter), TikTok, YouTube, hell even Facebook, they're stuck in this glue trap that these conglomerates laid out for them. They depend on this drug to live, its their salary, its their life. They might be in a position that many envy and few ever achieve, its come at a cost of their identity, their humility, and their life outside the 'net. It used to be they would only have to perform an act in front of the cameras, but since the Wired escaped the confines of our computers and flooded our lives, they have to keep this act up outside it as well. Then, they believe in it far more than the people watching. They're no longer themselves, they're the character they put on incidentally, which was swept up into the Hecatoncheires which is the algorithm, its hands moulding this specimen into something different; something ad-friendly; something marketable. Inhuman. One with the machine.

All hope isn't lost, but most is.

TikTok hates my webserver

Another post here because its pretty goofy lmao

So I have a website (bonahnsa.com) which I occasionally use as a webserver to host various things, notably as a FastDL server for my NEOTOKYO server and as a filehost for my site here. I occasionally check the access.log to view the traffic and see if there's any 404's or other things requiring my attention. I get a lot of user agents, and for the most part I let them crawl through the site; I don't really care about SEO, its just a dinky website nobody visits unless they're looking for something specific. Some crawlers like to try and bruteforce my site thinking its Wordpress, I like to giggle at these skiddies. But whats worse are poorly configured bots without caching which register hundreds of requests, often repeat requests, and don't obey the rules of my robots.txt file. This bot is called Bytespider (I'm angry its not 'Spiderbyte'). I learned that Bytespider is a crawler agent by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, or the app of generational brain rot, and its wreaked havoc on my webserver about a month ago. Several hundred requests in a 5 minute period kind of havoc. Someone else even had the same problem to where their entire bandwidth was used up solely by Bytespider. So I excluded it in my robots.txt file and dusted off my hands thinking that was that. I was mistaken. The fucking bot came back in force two days later, so I barred it via IP in my HTACCESS file. I thought that was the end of it, but nudh spahdt, it was back the NEXT DAY under a DIFFERENT IP ADDRESS pulling the SAME SHIT.

So it became a war between me banning numerous IP addresses from this bratty bot and it coming right back under different addressess crawling my site again. Finally, after extensive correction, the bratty bot finally learned to chill the fuck out and index like every other bot does, even if it doesn't want to obey my robots.txt file after reading the damn thing:

But LATELY I've noticed something rather peculiar:

Go ahead and look up those IP addresses. I'll wait.

Did you find it? Wow, what did it say?

Tencent? Now hold on a gosh darn second, don't they have STAKES in Bytedance, the same people I had to boot off my webserver???

Wow! They do! A multi-BILLION dollar company is actively attempting to break into my site with wordpress exploits! Granted its probably just someone using their hosting service to hide behind a proxy for these attacks, but its pretty silly that I have to actively deal with corporations trying to break into my site to harvest like maybe a gigabyte's worth of shitposts. Its not too surprising, actually, I've received 26 attempts at getting an xmlrpc.php file that doesn't exist from numerous IPs ranging allover the globe, and these Tencent IPs are just skiddies from China. But I'll keep imagining I'm making some executive foam at the mouth because I blocked their badly written bot.

AI Fatigue

I think we all dreamed of AI being some advanced miracle that would revolutionize society, looking like those stock videos of people in the future using some holographic gadget, wearing a labcoat in a building that would totally not meet OSHA requirements. Reality is often dissapointing. We do have AI that can rival search engines, AI that can somewhat hold a conversation, AI that can parse things easier than a standard computer... but the bulk of its use seems to be in the creative sphere where people use it to pass things off as their own. "Look at the text prompt I put in this machine," one will say, "I call it 'Raw, masterpiece, highly detailed character design, comic book style, perfectly centered, steampunk female engineer with goggles pushed up onto a messy mop of curly hair, Highly detailed body, Perfect arms, Tools dangle from belts, a trusty wrench is clutched in one hand, a mischievous grin, maximum details, highly detailed, sharp focus, intricate details'!", having all the pride in "making" something but not the pride in the creative process of actually making it. Then, they'll probably use AI to puppeteer it into some gross abomination that will speak to you in a badly generated voice of some celebrity who will hang onto vowels for too long and mispronounce words, sometimes due to a typo the so-called 'creator' left in, then post it again saying "Look what I made!", and the freak stands there, stiff as a board, lifeless as one, only moving their head while the world around them either seems to shift or cling on to parts of their hair and head, their facial muscles not cooperating with what's going on with the rest of the charade. "Look what I made! I bet you can't tell its AI! :)" They jeer again, their post getting hundreds of comments saying it looks amazing, saying it looks so real, so masterfully made. Then any comments saying the contrary, people giving the hard truth and saying "You didn't create anything", "A computer made this for you", "All you did was put text in a box", get lampooned by people who genuinely enjoy the styleless, soulless work of a computer being passed off by someone who hasn't even attempted to create anything of their own.

Yet, I feel like there's been fatigue regarding this. As we've witnessed more and more of it, we also start to see the cracks in it all. How it can hardly deal with hands (which, frankly, nobody can draw hands lmao) how the lighting is always extremely bright, how each character seems to be coated in a film of oil, lack of anatomic continuity where arms and legs either seem to appear or disappear behind something, the list goes on and you start to pick up on these little quirks when you finally know "Okay, this is AI generated". I came across a page of someone on Neocities trying to pass off this person as "human". I'm not going to name them since I'm not sure if its just some art project or if they're trying to catfish other people, but it took me a moment looking through all the pictures of their 'trip to the cabin' and album of all their 'friends' where things just looked off. I started to look closer, and I started to see the little rips and tears. This door looks painted on the wall, this lampshade is warped, you look entirely different in this one picture at a different angle, why does your room always change its look, then I came to the realization pretty quick that, yeah, this is fake, and there was no indicator telling me it was fake. I'm not alone in this either, a lot of people have quickly and easily pointed something out as being AI-generated, from images, speech, and especially videos. Its to the point where its almost immediately obvious, you just subconsciously know nobody created this thing in front of you, we've evolved a sixth sense to detect AI created junk. No matter how many times these programs and systems seem to upgrade and enhance their systems, they can't really shake off the AI's own style of creation. Yet, it doesn't stop the easily impressed from O-facing and foaming at the mouth from the 400th AI prompt that had the word "artstation" typed into it.

Which also brings me to the other aspect of AI creation that's still hot button, where the input data has largely been populated by art and content hundreds of thousands of people made without the consent of said authors, with no way to opt out of it, no way to remove your works from these machines without opening up a large legal battle. And yet these non-creators have the audacity to state there's no problem with it, its not plagarism, and the AI isn't stealing anything. It wouldn't be an issue to let users have the option to allow or license their works to be allowed for training data, but that is hardly if ever the case. Recently there was a ruling that AI generated content cannot receive copyright, which for the most part is a huge step in the direction of human creators, afraid that the things they've created with their own two hands won't be twisted by some algorithm and sold by some Hollywood fatcat. Of course, its only a matter of time before said fatcats will march into the courtroom with their army of lawyers to overturn the decision because the writer's strike isn't going to end anytime soon.

This is not to diminish the things AI is actually good at, however. I myself like to use it as a search engine where Google usually fails, when it gives me forums from 10+ years ago that has no conclusive answer. From time to time it also makes a decent proofreader, or something to bounce ideas off of. Its not as perfect as a human by any means, but its decent in a pinch where I might not want to bother someone for a simple paragraph I'm unsure of. Its just highly unfortunate AI has been reduced to something that makes something for people not willing to invest time, effort and energy into creation, something that will more than likely take away jobs rather than assist people in them. Despite it being a technological marvel, something many people are touting as the "next greatest step", many of us are starting to view it in the opposite way. Call us contrarians, call us non-believers, call us whatever, but one cannot deny how quickly this horse died and how beaten its got in such a short amount of time.

The Centralized Web

Every so often you'll hear the word "Deep Web" thrown around. Many use it to refer to the underbelly of the net which facilitates illegal trade, dubious content, or just an unindexed webpage only accessible by an Onion layer, which is more known as the "Dark Web". I, on the other hand, liken it to any page on the web that isn't on the sites most commonly browsed by people. Anything outside of the ecosphere of Twitter (sorry, """X"""), Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or just about any household site name, would fall under the "Deep Web" category for a majority of people. Lets face it, we're long from the days of "Web Browsing", most resources people need will be on the very tip of the iceberg of the world wide web. Whether it be a needless distraction from the flesh world, a way to make and connect with friends, or something to blow lots of money on, nobody really has to venture away from the tip of the iceberg, nor do they ever want to. Why risk getting a virus on your computer, your information stolen, or getting outright scammed?

I would largely blame it on the way these large corporate industries handle outlinks, or attempts to leave their site for a competitor. Any time you attempt to exit Facebook via an outlink, it will alert you that you're leaving Facebook. Sites that don't have the certificates necessary to provide Secure HTTP (HTTPS) are also vehemently warned about by most browsers, but especially Google Chrome who will label these sites as insecure and block downloads from an HTTP site. On the surface it looks like they have it in for your best interest to make the web safer, but if you're an independent company which is not very tech savvy, having "NOT SECURE" blazoned on the search bar, a popup talking about an insecure site and warning users to not input their personal data, it has and will steer away potential customers who are also not very tech savvy, and most likely back toward the surface web. This is a clear and obvious ploy to keep users on their sites and far away from any other site in order to, hopefully, generate money off of them. Cory Doctorow in his article on the "Enshittification" of the web puts it like this:

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"This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you'd have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can't agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.
Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn't follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users' throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.
Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook's walled garden.
This made publications truly dependent on Facebook – their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.
Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they'd stolen from you."

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Speaking of shitty things Google has done, which would most likely fill an entire encyclopedia, Google's recent experimentation on "Web Environment Integrity" has the potential to completely cut the tip off the rest of the iceberg and shepherd every user into pre-approved sites on their browsers, while outright restricting users from accessing their resources if they are on an unapproved browser, and potentially even keep them away from sites Google doesn't deem worthy. This would prove catastrophically fatal to the world wide web; either bend over the desk for Google and install this set of spyware, or get branded with an "unsafe website" warning. Google has already been deemed the "ministry of truth" when it comes to searching random facts, if it becomes the ministry of truth for every single website we know and don't know about, we're doomed. This egotistical approach by Google as a whole isn't the only attempt to domineer the world wide web, and it certainly won't be the last. The United States government has on many occasions attempted to implement various forms of internet control through congress. The earliest example (I know of) is the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) which aimed to restrict the distribution of pornography and naughty words across the web. This bill was created to "protect the kids", which has since been used many times to restrict web access even to this day. Netizens and major websites participated in a protest which blacked out their pages on the day the bill was signed by Bill Clinton. This protest was, unfortunately, not impactful. Back in '96, the Internet was still mostly a novelty. It may be foreign to us today, but the Internet was something not everyone was involved in. Fortunately, the Supreme Court struck the bill down in a 9-0 vote stating it infringed on the 1st Amendment. However, one bill (or set of bills) which is still of recent memory is SOPA and PIPA.

PIPA and SOPA were two bills introduced to Congress in 2011, sponsored by Hollywood companies (Namely MPAA, RIAA, and ESA) which aimed to protect against copyright infringement and counterfeit goods. Numerous issues of the bill, ranging from modifying DNS measures, restricting sites which even slightly contained infringing content, and provisions which would have removed even non-infringing content, would cause a public outcry on the net. Protests, from independent netizens and even major companies like Google and Twitter would make headlines around the world. I know, I know, how much will change in a decade when they would fight against an act which would ruin the internet. Websites would black out and refuse to operate, the same act that occured in 1996 which initially failed, but in 2011 the tables have turned; there were more than 400 times the amount of people online in 2011 than in 1996, which caused a wider reach and impact across the globe, rallying even more people who may not have heard about the bill to begin with. This would would cause numerous senators to withdraw their support of the bill Congress to not even attempt to introduce an internet related bill in the ten years since.

I remember being awestruck when all this occured, like the Internet was an autonomous bastion away from the influences of Hollywood and Cable TV which would fight tooth and nail to keep its freedoms. Of course, then I grew older, and saw that trust can easily be bought, truth easily suppressed, and triumph only an uphill battle. We rarely ever have a grassroots campaign as successful as the SOPA protests, for one reason or another. Whether its because the vast majority of the internet is full of normies who don't know any better, corporate plants who act as a secret police to break up any dissent against their bills or policies, or even in the case of Reddit which set a time limit for their protest when Reddit began restricting API access.

I still hold hope that we can cause enough distress against these corporate and governmental entities if and when the need arises, but we could not possibly hope to hold a candle to anything when most of the web's userbase is relatively unconcerned, unbothered and staying in their cozy lane while the world is burning around them. The EU passed several Internet laws which gone virtually unnoticed by people on the other side of the pond without much resistance by the giant tech companies, likely because it would cut into their profit margins were the EU ever to restrict Google or Twitter. But as Netizens, we still have the power as our predecessors did ages ago to fight back against these shitty policies which aim to destroy the net as we know it. At least, I believe we do. Anyway this went on longer and way off course than I intended, bye love you <3

The End of the Wild West

The internet as I knew it as a child, and you most likely knew it some long time ago, has been long over. Gone are the days of bad HTML skills being the norm (Well its still the norm but people get paid for it), self-expression (good and bad) and not relying on big corporations to not completely mess everything up (Yahoo ended geocities so I guess that's always been a thing).

Computer lab days were my favorite days in elementary school. Sure, I had a dinky COMPAQ laptop at home I could play games on, but using some clunky machine with a CRT monitor, trackball mouse, and headset which could deform a child's skull just, as the kids say nowadays, 'hit different'. My early memories of using computers, and the internet in general, was on a PeoplePC, where I'd play Reader Rabbit, and from my recollection some weird FPS game which name will probably forever evade me. I was four at the time, and my parents constantly regaled that I miraculously "fixed" the PC by slamming on the keys (It was 99% probably just hitting "save and exit" on the BIOS screen or something), and that I would "point" with my finger like a mouse pointer when I wanted something. Naturally, computers would be the way to go for me. The internet seemed like magic, and as a naive child would often wonder how far the internet would advance as I grew older.

Then, I grew older. I watched what was once a public forum, filled with computer hobbyists and enthusaists exploring a brand new frontier, turn into a caustic nightmare filled with normies who kick and scream if your website isn't formatted for the iPhone 84XliteS. No more does a webpage ooze with mystery on where each link goes with visually distinct design, now we've become complacent with the way things are now. Everything is flat, soulless, boring, and exists purely to sell you something or harvest whatever privacy you think you have left. They'll convince you that you can become successful, famous, and even rich on their platform, nevermind the fact there are millions seeking the same thing, with only hundreds ever finding the right formula to cut past the vines of a heartless algorithm, at the cost of their very identity, soul, heart, wallet, what have you. If they slip up anywhere and they aren't turning a profit, they fall off into the abyss of being blacklisted by the very same algorithm which gave them the success they first strived for. In the end, it benefits them, as the work those people put in gives outsiders a reason to return again, and again, and again. And those very same outsiders will become like the very same who led them into this ouroborous deathtrap of content creation, again, and again, and again.

My first foray into social networking was YouTube, if one could consider it social networking. It was still in its infancy, way back in 2006-07. I would watch Harry Potter Puppet Pals (And numerous flash knockoffs of it), Stick Figures doing dumb things, basically every video that was considered "viral" back in those days (Viral being roughly 10,000 views). The user's freedom of expression was in YouTube's slogan, "Broadcast Yourself", and within reason there was not much restriction on what people could post. Anything from someone's mundane life to the VEVO of a pop artist hitting trending, back when YouTube's Trending page actually meant something. Channel pages were also extremely customizable, even with its limits, but as Facebook rose with its simplistic UI and lack of customization, YouTube felt the need to adapt, and adapt further to commodate giant media corporations by limiting what people could post, and adapt many more times to essentially steal features from what they deem as "competitors" without doing anything to improve the declining quality of its community. Youtube's current posterchilds are typically Californians who peaked in high school, but still feel the need to vlog about their trip to some destination city/country that millions of people have done already. But wait, it's different, they're rich, they drive a Mercedes, wear gucci pants, wear overpriced and overrated watches, and act like they're 18 when the scars of their mid-30's are rapidly approaching and no longer concealable by their makeup brand produced in a third-world Asian provence. Scars not just the stress bags under their eyes, but the scars on their reputation.

Even in this dark age of the internet, there's yet hope even if it seems meek. Independent (or semi-independent) webhosting has seen a small, but impactful, increase in the past few years. With it also came Facebook's change to Meta and its BILLIONS poured into not!VRChat, Twitter's rebranding to X, and the increasing realization that social media is becoming a rat race for arbitrary numbers stored on a server. Sure, many more social media apps will replace the head of this hydra, but more alternatives to a solution or product needing met will breed innovation, for a time, until the cycle restarts itself and we're back with the same number of alternatives.

Anyway, with this should hopefully come more independent pages or at least independent media sites as these multi-billion dollar companies rise and fall, netizen migrants settling in between Twitter (or X) and Mastodon, or YouTube and the 8th YouTube competitor attempt. The more that people become accustomed to the reality of webhosting and how simplistic HTML can really be (sometimes (not really)), the more decentralized the world wide web can become.

I should really stop drinking when writing

Dennogin