Rewritten FTA: The Digital Forest
Anyway, sometimes the internet is like my hometown. Stay with me on this.
To start, this was the first entry on my old website, but instead of just reposting it, I've decided to update it with my current thoughts and the like. Enjoy.
I'm going to tell you that I grew up in a small town, over and over again, and I guarantee you'll get sick of it.
I do this because every time I tell someone "oh yeah I'm from a small town", they'll say something akin to "Me too! Our town only had 400k people" and, yeah, that's fine. I'm not the authority on what actually constitutes a small town, but...my town had just under 1,000 on a good year. We might as well have been classified as an unincorporated village, but in my state that was reserved for every other town in our county, which had under 500 people.
Anyway, sometimes the internet is like my hometown. Stay with me on this.
I saw a post on Tumblr once, a long time ago, that compared the vast unexplored forests of the northwest US to the deepest depths of the ocean; dark, unexplored, not fully understood. I connected with those feelings, as where I grew up, we were small groups of people somehow making a living in very small pockets of these forests. To be frank, you could go just a few miles out there and be lost altogether, it was very easy to....just leave. It felt like you could very easily sever the threads tethering you to civilization if you just went far enough into the woods.
I think it's a misconception that in order to find the small, secret, or just isolated digital communities, you need to get onto the DARK WEB with your TOR BROWSER to find ONION SITES. When in reality a lot of places just aren't indexed or really advertised. I hold a very small web presence, and you found me just fine, right? Really, most of that non-corporate digital whimsy is Clear-Web. But, it's not something you're just going to stumble in to. You have to move with purpose, know where you're going, and that's why it doesn't get found.
You find a lot of what you'd expect, honestly, but that's the joy of it. Off the top of my head I've seen a place made to advertise a fictional internet cafe in a fictional city, someone's NSFW drawings done in total ASCII, and about 10 different digital anarchist manifestos. That's....lovely. Each one is maintained, thanklessly, only for the joy of it, and that fills my heart with so much joy.
When I was young, from ages 7 to 10, I would do something I have no explanation for, even with years of hindsight. I'd wait until everyone else had gone to bed. My parents were quite old, so they'd go to bed around 9pm, but I would always wait until 2 or 3 in the morning. I'd quietly get out of bed, and head downstairs. My parents built our house from the ground up, and one thing they included was a lot of windows. I would find a window, look out into the forest, and just....stay there. I couldn't tell you what I was looking for, if anything. But I would sit or stand motionless, looking into the woods until sunrise, at which time my Dad would wake up, find me, and gently get me to stop doing what I was doing.
Did you know that Web Rings still exist? I kind of want to add Angus Systems to one, or make my own since enough people I know have gotten onto this train of making websites. I love it. I saw someone say that we (people) end up joining audiences when we're looking for communities, and that hit hard. Web Rings and keeping track of people via their personal spaces feels more like communities than what I feel like most of us are used to. The same goes for small internet spaces in general, honestly.
As I got older, around my mid-teens, I would spend evenings sitting on our front porch, staying out as late as I could. Just staring out into the woods. My relationship with my parents at the time wasn't...ideal, and around this time it was especially reaching its boiling point. When our fights got...especially bad, I'd take the truck and drive down to a deeper part of the forest entrance. We already lived past where the roads stopped being paved, but further still were pushed-down tracks of grass and dirt left by logging trucks many years ago. I'd drive down one of these trails until I couldn't see my house, and once the road ended, I'd get out and walk. There were many times I'd stumble upon something; a deer or bird skeleton, a mess of blood and bones, a strange rock formation, or something left by someone else. Technically nearly 190 Acres was "our" property, but if no one knew you were out here, who's to say? My parents put up all the signs, but it was impossible to see who could be out there in the trees. My sister and I were just told to be careful.
I don't agree with the statement "The Internet is like the Wild West". Instead, I think of it as a Digital Forest. Looking out, you can't fathom what's all out there, or whats even just hiding through the trees.
Let's go on a journey, together.