On the nature of the Internet

At it’s most pure form, the internet was never meant to be centralized the way it is now, with just a few massive platforms capturing the vast majority of human attention.

If you’ve been long enough on the web, you might remember the forum boards, the IRC channels, the absolute insanity of early web development.

Somewhere along the line, we accepted corporate blandness as a good enough replacement to the thing that made the internet great. The weird and quirky wasn’t in accordance with the ROIs expected by the shareholders, so it got smoothed out.

It’s not even just the fact that, by adhering to the standards of a third-party platform, we’re slowly turning ourselves — and culture along with us — into tiny little blobs of sanitized sameness.

No matter how much effort we put into Instagram carousels or Youtube thumbnails, how clickbaity the titles, and how SEO optimized the captions — we are still depending on somebody else’s interface, search mechanisms, and rules to play.

For as long as this is so, were are operating on rented digital real estate. Because of this, we can just as easily be affected by algorithmic volatility, lose control on how the relationship with our audiences happens, relying on someone else’s permission to run our own thing.

So what are these fundamentals abstracted away for the sake of our convenience?

Underneath all the feeds, likes and memes, the internet is just a bunch of computers talking to each other, sending and receiving little packages of information across invisible wires. Everything else — every app, platform and tool — is just an interface built on top.

We used to write our own code, host our own pages and connect them to our own domains, decide what was shown and how, link them however we wanted.

This meant we had to learn how things actually worked. What broke, what loaded. How one line of code could change everything. Without necessarily thinking about it, we were becoming literate — technically and creatively — in the Internet as a medium.

There was a learning curve to it, but in exchange we had full creative freedom, but most importantly: ownership and permanence of the thing we built. No shadow bans, no takedowns, no annoying policy updates.

Now, platforms wrap all that behind shiny dashboards. They own the hosting, domains and links, control the distribution and access to an audience, and decide what a “good performance” looks like.

Things are easier, sure. But convenience always comes at a cost: we no longer need to know how the internet works, and that ignorance is precisely what keeps us dependent.

And I don’t mean to look back at the past with rose-tinted glasses, but as I struggle to build my own platform, and as I continue working with clients going through the same thing, I am reminded of why it’s important for everyone looking to build something on the Internet to understand these fundamentals.

It doesn’t mean that you have to write your own code, but you do need to understand what’s yours and what isn’t.

Your domain? Yours.

Your mailing list? Yours.

Your Instagram followers? Not yours — they belong to Instagram.

This awareness changes how you think about your online presence. Placing your website at the center of your ecosystem, while all other channels become roads leading people to it.

With time, trends and platforms might change, but by consistently taking care of your website — the one place on the internet you will always own — you build something that lasts.