mjfer.net

Since you are on this page, you're presumably lost. That's ok. I don't really get all this stuff either. Let's start with some easy stuff.

You're on the Internet. Known to some as a series of tubes, but in reality much more complicated than it has to be. In basic sense, your computer called mine, and mine answered with directory full of pages.

The way you get here is through a device you have at home called a router, which literally does what the name implies--it routes signals to where they need to go to make things go beep. In the 60s and 70s, routers tended to be people-based and would require workers spend their time plugging cables into and out of ports so calls could connect.

Image of a switchboard courtesy of Wikipedia contributors

Fortunately, we figured out that was dumb and made robots do the job for us. Internet companies, governments, and anyone else with enough money and influence bought huge routers and hooked them all up to talk to each other. Then they convinced us all to go out and buy a router from our ISP of choice so we could all send cat pictures to each other seamlessly. We got rid of phones, replaced our phone with our IP address and email, just to ironically end up back at phones again. All of our devices serve, or at least can serve, as a router in some way. And all these little robots talking to each other makes it so you can get lost on some person's home page.

In a way, you could say you've made it to a place my router took you to. But not my home router of course--that one sucks.

I'm mooching off someone else's, also known as a Virtual Private Server. These companies run a whole bunch of servers, hook them up on a bulk connection and rent them out for people to run fake media companies, blogs about cats, and porn sites.

I'm getting lost on your question though, so where are we exactly?

Precisely speaking, you are in a chrooted web server running on rented virtual machine in a server farm located roughly in New Jersey browsing the "about" directory on the "whereami.html" page.

Less precisely, all that means is you're looking at some files I left in a directory at this address, and paid some people to host for me since local ISPs tend to be ridiculously expensive if you want to do anything besides host some private servers for you and your friends and family.

But maybe most importantly, you've reached a webpage owned by another human being. Well mostly... I don't own the hardware. But the place is mine; not a corporation's, or a bot's, or a government's. All these files were loving crafted by yours truly in markdown, using vim, and converted with pandoc to HTML because of laziness.

The Internet I grew up with, though I didn't really appreciate it at the time, used to be filled with places like this. "Homepages" were a thing, or were just starting to be at least.

But as soon as it started it all got sucked up and commodified into social media; we somehow got coerced into profiles, templates, and standards to make us easier for ad companies to study. And even I really liked it for a while, but over time, it got fake. I got fake.

And speaking of fake, it's not even unreasonable to believe you're not even talking to real people on there, because there's a good chance of it now. Astroturfing is not a secret government conspiracy, it's just business as usual at this point. You used to be able to tell a human from a chatbot from the way they write. I don't know if the bots at this point are smarter, or if we've just been made so cynical and dumb by the process that we've given up.

In a way it's a reassuring: would real people really write all that garbage on Facebook anyway?

Don't mistake this for some pity nostalgia piece though. If you look hard enough--I promise you--that Internet of humans is still there.

A helpful tip, CRTL+W will close any webpage you don't like. Not that you wouldn't like this page... you did read all the way here through all that pedantry didn't you?

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