More than anything I think we miss the time before corporate presence on the internet was so prevalent. Most webpages you visited were made by some individual. It seems to me, looking back, that this was a time before the internet was for anything. It simply was, in a way that has long since been lost. Before the internet became a "replacement" for things (Wikipedia became the new Encyclopedia, Amazon became the new mall, social media has become the new… everything), the Early Web was protean, a half-formed thing that became something different for each person who approached it. Individual expression shaped the early web, and each website carved out a unique space. An individual could have an inordinate influence in this space. I think of the inordinate amount of time I spent at Anipike (an anime directory) going through different Dragonball Z fanpages, never knowing this hub was the creation of one person (Jay Fubler Harvey, a fellow mixed kid) that at one point categorized over 50,000 links. It was a personal passion project that became a hub for Nowadays, the kind of personalized curation in directories, webrings and links pages has fallen away in favor of an algorithmically-mediated experience of the web, where big-money corporate sites have a distinct advantage. Where did my rhizome go?

When I found Neocities I was certainly hit by waves of nostalgia. The old-web feel, the variety of niche interests represented, and the aesthetic all hearkened back to an earlier era that I had almost forgotten how much I missed. Over time, however, I have come to see this as more than mere nostalgia-play, though there are elements of that. As the web has slowly disintegrated into kind of corporate/social-media soup, occupied by various brands and people who are now, somehow, also brands, individual expression has always remained but was really buried in this algorithmic "click architecture", exemplified by search results ranked by views, keywords and date. "Relevance" is not something search engines have ever been great at surfacing, and instead have always used a combination of keywords and engagement as proxies, usually surfacing the most inflammatory or salacious content instead of what is best.

This is not to say that I don't like social media, or the internet in general nowadays. I am pretty much chronically online for better or worse, and social media is an incredible new way to share experience that has caused much good, alongside the not-so-good. What concerns me is not losing the best of what was. What Neocities does for me is really re-centers the web on the individual - both the creator and surfer - and carves out a space that is "far from the madding crowd" in a sense. It encourages community in a way that other parts of the web actively discourages ("why would you include a link and encourage your user navigate away from your site, for Pete's sake!"), and allows space for nuance in a world that generally buries it.

That said, this corner of the web may never get many views. That's totally fine and perhaps beside the point. I think to the monasteries in medieval Europe, which were also isolated and secluded, but within them they carried classical Greek and Roman learning through the largely illiterate Dark Ages. This same fire helped rekindle western thought during the Renaissance, and shaped our world today. The way I see it, folks here are similarly holding on to a kind of flame from the Early Web (can we at this point call it the Classical Web?) and carrying that flame into the future. We will never go back, certainly, but we shouldn't want to. We don't know what the Future Web exactly looks like, beyond its current feudal iteration, but the flame of the early web will be ready to kindle future rebirths.

I'm so put off by social media nowadays. On the one hand there is genuinely so much creativity and communication happening, but on the other hand everything has become an ad. Everything, down to our very selves. The logic of the algorithm guides what we see, how we act in order to be seen. We are all seeking 'engagement,' which in the end measures not the engagement of two people, but each person's engagement with the abstract machine of the algorithm, which mediates all. The logic of monetization and ad revenue have atomized our attention literally, blowing it to smithereens. Optimizing clicks, swipes, likes and views means that the shorter a thing is, the easier to digest, the better. Long and careful consideration is discouraged in favor of constant acceleration, a velocity in which all of reality goes by in a grey indistinguishable blur: the tragic, the comic, the profound and the trite.

The good news is that we are still who we are as human beings. We all crave depth, we crave meaning, and we crave connection. And we will have it by any means necessary, even in environments that discourage it. I see people on apps like TikTok making longer-form content now, and for smaller audiences, baring their souls to people who start as strangers and maybe become friends. In the end, not everything is about views and likes, because one heartfelt DM from someone who relates to you can be worth 10,000 views.

I'm encouraged, but at the same time I want to work toward something different, show another possibility to engage online. A website as an extension of self, a digital double. It is not constrained by a particular app and its way of slicing the world. It is platform-agnostic and fundamentally nomadic - you can back it up on a flash drive if you need to, without worrying that your content would be erased or banned. I'm not sure what the end result will be, but more than anything right now I'm enjoying the process. I'm carving out my little piece/peace of the internet here, one HTML tag at a time.

But isn't this grander meaning, this sense of a collective calling, a delusion? A kind of coping mechanism to give us back a sense of control and orientation in a world in chaos? If this is the case, then not only is there no anchor of meaning in the present storm, but there is no lighthouse guiding our way forward, no "meant to be" future to redeem our present suffering and make it somehow worthwhile. This plague, our suffering, our deaths (and by extension our lives) are all without meaning. As cynical and nihilistic as that view may feel, it is surely the view that best reflects the set of material facts that constitutes reality. 'Meaning' is simply not an attribute of the world or any of the things in it. Instead, we have evolved cognitive biases toward magical thinking and irrationality, because otherwise what we know would kill us.

But does reality consist merely of material facts? Perhaps for the vegetable world, certainly the mineral, but for ourselves, at least, there is a symbolic dimension to reality, and though it is as thin and epehermal as a soap bubble in places, it gives the whole material world all its color and weight. Itis through teh influence of this hidden dimension that we know the events and things around are not meaningless (if it were meaningless, by definition we wouldn't care, couldn't care, but we do). Instead, everything has meaning because everything is connected to us, connected to everything else. Everything causes everything else, is a necessary condition of its existence. Things have meaning to us because they condition our existence, define the scope of what's possible.

Which brings us back to a cursed year. As a spiritual person might frame it, "why is God doing this to us? Why is this happening to us?" To find the meaning it is to find the telos or end goal. What futures are being conditioned by this? What is the aperture through which we're passing, and what will it change about us? What is it making possible?

We can't answer this definitively now, of course, because the future hasn't happened yet. But even now we can see new possibilities emoerge into view, with the way we live our lives, work and relate. Remote learning and working, the accelaration of automation, the rise of a new hyperconnected isolation that would have seemed mad to our ancestors. But also - a groundswell of deep-rooted antagonism to these very same things. An absence of the physical that perhaps makes the heart grow fonder. In a cutlure and age obsessed with replacing the physical, perhaps we are meant to learn more deeply about the nature of physicality itself - not only the dangers of it, but the irreplaceable aliveness of it.

Whatever does happen, I know this time will be looked back upon as a kind of test. In a world that seems more senseless by the day, we're being challenged to make sense of it all. Making meaning from tragedy is not about rationalizing, about reading signs that are "out there" in the world. It is about telos - about seeing the possibilities conditioned by the present and choosing a specific path forward, choosing our future which retroactively gives meaning to its past. When we get to where we're going and look back, what we went through will all make sense, not because that meaning is inherent to what happened, but because we put it there.

All those things that are supposedly a benefit of the digital space - the erasability, copiability, hypertextuality - seem to work against me rather than in my favor. Something about the digital text seems to proliferate in an unhealthful way, causing a story to branch, sprout mutant limbs, denature in some way. Even the mouthfeel of the words turns out wrong somehow, lacking texture and fullness. Perhaps it's in my head, but it seems like the page-brain barrier has been made too thin by the speed of typing. Without friction from pen on the ragged tooth of paper, the word processor results in a flimsy text lacking bite: too mutable, too quick, too easy to create and therefore too easy to destroy. These words remain not just digital but virtual. Weightless, depthless, they have all the appearance of words but they are not. They are potential words.

Writing by hand, in contrast, is a visceral experience. Before I put my mark on paper I often have to pause, think about what I'm saying, because it costs me something to undo it. I am making a small choice, but an irreversible one. Whether by whiteout, a strikethrough, or totally crumpling the paper and starting over with a fresh sheet, there is no way to completely eradicate the trace you leave. That greater sense of commitment lends weight to what you're doing, gives words a life of their own outside of you.

Of course, like so much in the modern world, it will pass through a series of filters, edits and touchups before being presented to the world in what is ultimately a digital format. But what I find writing by hand, at least for the first draft, does is change my relationship to my own thoughts, cforces me to commit in a more meaningful way. Word choice is significant. Sentences have consequences. Text grows roots. And isn't that much truer to life?

In Gnosticism the Demurge is often seen as malevolent, but perhaps he is worthy of our sympathy, if not our worship. Perhaps the Demiurge suffers the same illusion that we do, and believes in his own efficacy. One could read the creation story of Genesis a little bit differently, as a demi-urge who, moving over the face of the abyss (which, of course, already contains everything as unrealized possibility), creates cleavages over and over, distinctions which force the waters to recede and thereby "create" our world: distinctions between light and dark, between wet and dry, between plant and animal, between good and evil, ad infinitum. Everything that he creates is good, but in some way it is less than the Pleroma which receded to allow it. His week of frenzied creation could be read as an attempt to restore the original totality that was lost by introducing new elements over and over again. At each step he sees that while it is good, it is in some sense incomplete, and he is always chasing after a nagging sense of loss. With the introduction of man, created in his own image, this endless quest is continued in us. We, too, are born with a sense of incompleteness, and spend our lives chasing after totality. We imagine that this totality is God, but it is really the formless abyss that is older than God Himself.

This indivisible remainder is a constant reminder of the incompleteness of God's own conquest over that initial formless deep. There was nothing created that wasn't already held there in the primal abyss of the beginning. There is something perpetually unformed still dwelling in the cosmos, and that uncreated source is in fact the wellspring of all creation, even God himself. This is a fact that, according to differing interpretations, either God himself is unaware of, or desperate to conceal from us in order to hide His shame at his own limited nature. In the end, of course, the waters of the Pleroma which receded and thereby allowed our universe to form will swallow up everything, and everything (God included!) shall be simultaneously nullified and returned to fullness.

That side of our nature is clearly adaptive, but there is another side of our nature often disparaged and equally necessary: ambivalence. What Keats called 'negative capability.' It isn't a state of not caring, but an ability to care in both directions at once, to hold in relation multiple feelings about something, oftentimes conflicting feelings. Instead of active, it is a more passive mode, which rests in observation. Indecision is no problem here, decision is not the task, but rather sensation and inward synthesis. In fact, decision does a kind of violence to our own sensation, by narrowing the band of our focus. Suddenly, certain phenomena are 'peripheral' and others are 'central.' In narrowing our vision we hend narrow our world. To decide is inevitably to reduce ourselves, and there is a power in remaining open... undecided.

Ambivalence is about weighing out everything carefully, gradually. It avoids impulsivity by saying 'not yet,' and indeed sometimes there is as much restraint and self-discipline involved in ambivalence as there is in decision. As will all virtues, temperance is key. Any virtue in excess will become a vice. That said, it seems to me our culture holds much more space for determination as it does for ambivalence, and so a lot of very unsure people feel bad about their being unsure. Our conception of ouselves may change if we begin to see the ambivalence / polyvalence not as a problem to be solved but as inherent to who we are, a stunning capacity - a gift. It is not an inability to decide, but a capacity to perceive from many sides. We can with practice even see from other perspectives, reducing our own inherent biases, and perceive some of that rich polyvalence that is inherent not only to us but to reality itself. Reality is many-splendored, and like the world we are not one thing but many things. Many drives and intensities, all criss-crossing and inhabiting a single space. If we can keep that space of indecision open, it is in that space that we can learn what to desire.

Eventually, later, it will be time to decide.