Closer To The Metal

On a late-night car trip from Sydney to Newcastle, my boyfriend, a web developer at the time, was complaining about his job. The software he was responsible for, developed in-house by the company, was fucked beyond repair. The code was bloated. A change to one line inadvertently created a bug in another. In just four months, he’d seen enough JavaScript for a lifetime and wished to move into a lower level of programming. Somewhere in the depths of the machine, where every sliver of memory is at his disposal.

“You want to be closer to the metal,” my friend observed, while driving. That is, to write programs that more directly engage with the computer’s hardware. Not like the work he was currently doing, sitting atop layer upon layer, abstraction upon abstraction, where the air is thinner.

These layers encase digital life, from the hardware we use and the websites we visit, to the algorithms that recommend us content on social media and streaming services. The black boxes that now surround us go to the heart of a greater issue: our relationship with computers and the internet has become alienated. Layers have grown between us and a program’s inner workings, leaving us to guess how it comes together. The files we use on a daily basis – music, documents, TV shows – now live on a server somewhere and are no longer in our possession. In embracing these systems that control our daily interactions with technology, we’ve sacrificed a large degree of autonomy over how we personalise or curate our digital experiences. This development was gradual and took us by surprise once we began to realise what we had lost.

At some point during the first year of the pandemic, I underwent somewhat of a crisis because of this very realisation (thank you, Jenny Odell). I was forced to reckon with my relationship to these platforms and the influence they have over my day-to-day. Despite Spotify’s well-established track record for screwing over smaller artists, it was my main source of music up until 2021. It made discovering new songs for work and leisure far more effortless than manually seeking them out each time. But in doing so, I left my listening habits in the hands of a machine I didn’t know well enough to do the work for me. All the magic that came with consciously discovering new artists and genres no longer seemed appealing. This becomes a problem once every piece of content – music or otherwise – begins to blur into each other and you wish to make an escape from the sameness.

💿

It’s official: the internet sucks now – at least according to The Verge ⏩. Every six months, a writer laments the state of technology. All we do is return to the same four or five apps. Google search results are no longer good. Everything looks the same. Everything sounds the same. Everything has been “enshittified”. Capitalism and the quest for indiscriminate growth, unsurprisingly, tends to be the common thread that unites all these problems. Cory Doctorow blames the state of technology on missed policy opportunities that have led to labour exploitation, tech monopolies and inescapable online surveillance. While this is certainly true, “fixing” the status quo requires more than just regulation, it involves changing the way we interact and place expectations on technology.

These articles generally speak the truth: there is less of a shine to the web than there was a decade or so ago. The authors rely on a sense of nostalgia to get their points across: Geocities. Blogs. Forums. Google Reader. Custom ringtones. These are examples of services that were less centralised, more heterogeneous and more permitting of users to customise their look and feel. Algorithms and recommended content were nowhere to be seen. However, this kind of nostalgia has a limit. We’ve lost a certain knowledge and curiosity over time that is instrumental to enjoying these services to the greatest extent. If we were to suddenly drop everything tomorrow and return to Web 1.0, I fear we would not know what to do with it. This is a shallow way of thinking.

These articles fail to point out that returning to any semblance of the DIY attitude found in the early days will take an extended period of time. Our love for many things in life stems from a desire to know it in and out. Why should the computer, an object that has become intrinsic to our lives, be any different? Why should we expect to immediately comprehend the boundless creative opportunities the internet can offer, when any other creative medium requires discipline? Those who want the web to change – myself included – need to concede that this won’t come quickly, in light of the ‘convenient’ services that now dominate our lives. No-code website builders, streaming services, cloud computing and mainstream social networks have all done away with personalisation and individuality under the guise of simplicity. We wouldn’t know how to create a better digital world for ourselves if we tried.

The learning curve we will face by refamiliarising ourselves with the web’s possibilities will be steep at times. We’re out of practice when it comes to spending extended amounts of time on tasks that don’t bring us income, dopamine or other positive returns. But to a degree, it should be an obligation for each of us to learn the mechanics behind the things we use each day. It took your browser (yes, your browser) seconds to load this page. What were the steps involved and how can we find out? Learning how the internet works is crucial in order to ask the right questions about how we can improve our experience and where experimentation is possible. It will encourage thoughtful, purposeful creations, showcasing the limitlessness of what the web has to offer. Digital gardens will grow once again, carefully tended to by users with a passion for building a home for themselves online.

To be clear, this isn’t to say we must get rid of all Wordpress or Squarespace sites and learn how to build server-side programs for every occasion, big or small. Sometimes a simple problem needs a simple solution, after all. However, the opportunities for users to personalise their experiences on online platforms are now few and far between. Tumblr remains the only major social media site to give their users some freedom with HTML and CSS, and even that is on its way out.

Perhaps the most compelling case I can make is to encourage you to look at the current state of affairs and ask yourself, “do we want more of this?” I will be very pleasantly surprised if one – any – tech company executive was to wake up tomorrow and have a change of heart about what they’re doing to make everything worse. This is one of those semi-infrequent times where perhaps people can make a difference as individuals. Those articles listed above that yearn for the old internet falsely give the impression blogs, forums and personal websites are relics of the past. In reality, they are the part of the (long) path to revitalising the web.

💾

My grandad lived alone for the final decades of his life. Just him, a piano, usually a dog and a pond or two full of koi. When he died a few days before Christmas, I flew home to Perth to help rifle through the files on his computer for anything important. This was a man convinced that technology was out to get him every step of the way – and while this paranoia frustrated us when he was alive, I’m now grateful for it. On a flash drive, hidden within a box of many flash drives, was a set of recordings he made while playing the piano. My late grandad, a talented piano player, created something for himself. You can hear the imperfections as he plays, the briefer-than-brief pauses as he looks up at the sheet music to anticipate what’s next.

Had he been more technologically savvy, these recordings may have ended up stored on an overseas server or on a phone behind a passcode, never to be heard again. Instead, my family, his children, can keep them close. They are an unexpected, unintentional gift. How many of us can expect to give or receive a similar kind of gift in the present day? Our awareness of the files held on our devices has waned with the emergence of cloud storage solutions and an all-seeing search bar. This ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach no longer encourages us to think critically about how we’re curating our desktop and how file storage works. This is a real concern when considering how ephemeral the internet can be. How many email addresses (some very embarrassing) have we created and neglected over our lives? And yet, they’re still out there, filling up a data centre somewhere. Recently, Google implemented a policy to erase any account and its data after two years of inactivity. This irks the librarian in me, but as someone who regularly questions what they’ve left out there in the digital wilderness, it could be a blessing.

In any case, this is about everything I own being closer to home. I first caught COVID-19 in early 2022, towards the tail-end of Victoria’s heavy restrictions. I was confined to my bedroom for a week, unable to speak to my housemates face-to-face. Trying to pass the time, I rediscovered p5.js, a JavaScript graphics library that I taught myself during the first year of the pandemic. The only thing that was visible to me during that quarantine was the traffic light and car headlights beaming through my window shutters on to my bedroom wall at night.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s not impressive! It’s a small, insignificant thing that I created for my own personal amusement and to alleviate boredom. But it was born of curiosity, made up of code that I can see and tweak as I please. It is closer to me – physically and emotionally – than anything I have stored on Google Drive. It lay dormant as “shutters.js” in a folder on my hard drive before it was attached to an email and sent through to the editors of this very publication, who then embedded it into this web page and gave it a new home. Let us not think of our digital possessions as indistinguishable pieces of ‘content’. Rather, it's crucial that we reacquaint ourselves with the files we hold near or far, the sites we visit and the sacrifices we’ve made in place of digital convenience. This is how we begin to peel back the layers.

On a late-night car trip from Sydney to Newcastle, my boyfriend, a web developer at the time, was complaining about his job. The software he was responsible for, developed in-house by the company, was fucked beyond repair. The code was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_bloat">bloated</a>. A change to one line inadvertently created a bug in another. In just four months, he’d seen enough JavaScript for a lifetime and wished to move into a lower level of programming. Somewhere in the depths of the machine, where every sliver of memory is at his disposal.

“You want to be closer to the metal,” my friend observed, while driving. That is, to write programs that more directly engage with the computer’s hardware. Not like the work he was currently doing, sitting atop layer upon layer, abstraction upon abstraction, where the air is thinner.

These layers encase digital life, from the hardware we use and the websites we visit, to the algorithms that recommend us content on social media and streaming services. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box">black boxes</a> that now surround us go to the heart of a greater issue: our relationship with computers and the internet has become alienated. Layers have grown between us and a program’s inner workings, leaving us to guess how it comes together. The files we use on a daily basis – music, documents, TV shows – now live on a server somewhere and are no longer in our possession. In embracing these systems that control our daily interactions with technology, we’ve sacrificed a large degree of autonomy over how we personalise or curate our digital experiences. This development was gradual and took us by surprise once we began to realise what we had lost.

At some point during the first year of the pandemic, I underwent somewhat of a crisis because of this very realisation (thank you, <a href="https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/idle-minds-jenny-odells-how-to-do-nothing/" >Jenny Odell</a>). I was forced to reckon with my relationship to these platforms and the influence they have over my day-to-day. Despite Spotify’s well-established track record for screwing over smaller artists, it was my main source of music up until 2021. It made discovering new songs for work and leisure far more effortless than manually seeking them out each time. But in doing so, I left my listening habits in the hands of a machine I didn’t know well enough to do the work for me. All the magic that came with consciously discovering new artists and genres no longer seemed appealing. This becomes a problem once every piece of content – music or otherwise – begins to blur into each other and you wish to make an escape from the sameness.

It’s official: the internet sucks now – at least according to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization" >The Verge</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/opinion/technology/what-would-an-egalitarian-internet-actually-look-like.html" >The New York Times</a>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-the-internet-isnt-fun-anymore" >The New Yorker</a>, <a href="https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly" >Baffler</a>, <a href="https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/so-much-this-the-sameness-of-internet-culture/" >Kill Your Darlings</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/big-tech-algorithmic-influence-antitrust-litigation/675575/" >The Atlantic</a>, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-ruining-apps-websites-internet-worse-google-facebook-amazon-2023-3" >Business Insider</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224878097/everyday-users-are-complaining-that-the-internet-is-more-chaotic-than-ever" >NPR</a>, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/" >MIT Technology Review</a> and <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/epv8xa/the-old-internet-is-dying-and-something-worse-is-being-born" >VICE</a> to name a few. Every six months, a writer laments the state of technology. All we do is return to the same four or five apps. Google search results are <a href="https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results" >no longer good</a>. Everything <a href="https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/so-much-this-the-sameness-of-internet-culture/" >looks the same</a>. Everything <a href="https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly" >sounds the same</a>. Everything has been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification" >“enshittified”</a>. Capitalism and the quest for indiscriminate growth, unsurprisingly, tends to be the common thread that unites all these problems. <a href="https://doctorow.medium.com/enshitternet-c1d4252e5c6b" >Cory Doctorow</a> blames the state of technology on missed policy opportunities that have led to labour exploitation, tech monopolies and inescapable online surveillance. While this is certainly true, “fixing” the status quo requires more than just regulation, it involves changing the way we interact and place expectations on technology.

These articles generally speak the truth: there is less of a shine to the web than there was a decade or so ago. The authors rely on a sense of nostalgia to get their points across: Geocities. Blogs. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221114211733/https://dirt.substack.com/p/dirt-bring-back-forums">Forums</a>. <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/7/21/22586870/google-reader-ode-end-of-the-good-internet" >Google Reader</a>. Custom ringtones. These are examples of services that were less centralised, more heterogeneous and more permitting of users to customise their look and feel. Algorithms and recommended content were nowhere to be seen. However, this kind of nostalgia has a limit. We’ve lost a certain knowledge and curiosity over time that is instrumental to enjoying these services to the greatest extent. If we were to suddenly drop everything tomorrow and return to Web 1.0, I fear we would not know what to do with it. This is a shallow way of thinking.

These articles fail to point out that returning to any semblance of the DIY attitude found in the early days will take an extended period of time. Our love for many things in life stems from a desire to know it in and out. Why should the computer, an object that has become intrinsic to our lives, be any different? Why should we expect to immediately comprehend the boundless creative opportunities the internet can offer, when any other creative medium requires discipline? Those who want the web to change – myself included – need to concede that this won’t come quickly, in light of the ‘convenient’ services that now dominate our lives. No-code website builders, streaming services, cloud computing and mainstream social networks have all done away with personalisation and individuality under the guise of simplicity. We wouldn’t know how to create a better digital world for ourselves if we tried.

The learning curve we will face by refamiliarising ourselves with the web’s possibilities will be steep at times. We’re out of practice when it comes to spending extended amounts of time on tasks that don’t bring us income, dopamine or other positive returns. But to a degree, it should be an obligation for each of us to learn the mechanics behind the things we use each day. It took your browser (yes, your browser) seconds to load this page. What were the steps involved and how can we find out? Learning <a href="https://defector.com/how-the-internet-works" >how the internet works</a> is crucial in order to ask the right questions about how we can improve our experience and where experimentation is possible. It will encourage thoughtful, purposeful creations, showcasing the limitlessness of what the web has to offer. <a href="https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/" >Digital gardens</a> will grow once again, carefully tended to by users with a passion for building a home for themselves online.

To be clear, this isn’t to say we must get rid of all Wordpress or Squarespace sites and learn how to build server-side programs for every occasion, big or small. Sometimes a simple problem needs a simple solution, after all. However, the opportunities for users to personalise their experiences on online platforms are now few and far between. Tumblr remains the only major social media site to give their users some freedom with HTML and CSS, and even that is on its way out.

Perhaps the most compelling case I can make is to encourage you to look at the current state of affairs and ask yourself, “do we want more of this?” I will be very pleasantly surprised if one – any – tech company executive was to wake up tomorrow and have a change of heart about what they’re doing to make everything worse. This is one of those semi-infrequent times where perhaps people can make a difference as individuals. Those articles listed above that yearn for the old internet falsely give the impression blogs, forums and personal websites are relics of the past. In reality, they are the part of the (long) path to revitalising the web.

My grandad lived alone for the final decades of his life. Just him, a piano, usually a dog and a pond or two full of koi. When he died a few days before Christmas, I flew home to Perth to help rifle through the files on his computer for anything important. This was a man convinced that technology was out to get him every step of the way – and while this paranoia frustrated us when he was alive, I’m now grateful for it. On a flash drive, hidden within a box of many flash drives, was a set of recordings he made while playing the piano. My late grandad, a talented piano player, created something for himself. You can hear the imperfections as he plays, the briefer-than-brief pauses as he looks up at the sheet music to anticipate what’s next.

Had he been more technologically savvy, these recordings may have ended up stored on an overseas server or on a phone behind a passcode, never to be heard again. Instead, my family, his children, can keep them close. They are an unexpected, unintentional gift. How many of us can expect to give or receive a similar kind of gift in the present day? Our awareness of the files held on our devices has waned with the emergence of cloud storage solutions and an all-seeing search bar. This ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach no longer encourages us to think critically about how we’re curating our desktop and how file storage works. This is a real concern when considering how ephemeral the internet can be. How many email addresses (some very embarrassing) have we created and neglected over our lives? And yet, they’re still out there, filling up a data centre somewhere. Recently, Google implemented a <a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en" >policy to erase any account and its data after two years of inactivity</a>. This irks the librarian in me, but as someone who regularly questions what they’ve left out there in the digital wilderness, it could be a blessing.

In any case, this is about everything I own being closer to home. I first caught COVID-19 in early 2022, towards the tail-end of Victoria’s heavy restrictions. I was confined to my bedroom for a week, unable to speak to my housemates face-to-face. Trying to pass the time, I rediscovered p5.js, a JavaScript graphics library that I taught myself during the first year of the pandemic. The only thing that was visible to me during that quarantine was the traffic light and car headlights beaming through my window shutters on to my bedroom wall at night.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s not impressive! It’s a small, insignificant thing that I created for my own personal amusement and to alleviate boredom. But it was born of curiosity, made up of code that I can see and tweak as I please. It is closer to me – physically and emotionally – than anything I have stored on Google Drive. It lay dormant as “shutters.js” in a folder on my hard drive before it was attached to an email and sent through to the editors of this very publication, who then embedded it into this web page and gave it a new home. Let us not think of our digital possessions as indistinguishable pieces of ‘content’. Rather, it's crucial that we reacquaint ourselves with the files we hold near or far, the sites we visit and the sacrifices we’ve made in place of digital convenience. This is how we begin to peel back the layers.

Closer To The Metal

Caleb Triscari