whateverthing.com

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As a hobbyist developer on a tight budget, my servers generally run on inexpensive VPSes (Referral Link). They're not configured to autoscale. Floods of unexpected traffic cause them to fall over. This fragility is by design, so that my hosting costs won't cause a budget overflow.

On the modern web, however, this presents a problem.

We Begin Our Story ...

On the World Wide Web of ages long past, otherwise known as the 2000s and 2010s, a bargain was struck with the search engines. They would be allowed to scrape websites, so long as they behaved responsibly and obeyed the rules outlined in each site's robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file declared what was to be considered "private property, no trespassing" – and, in some technical cases, "abandon all hope ye who enter here".

This arrangement was beneficial to the websites because it boosted their visibility in search results, bringing in more views. And it benefitted the search engines by giving them better and more accurate results.

The search engines entrenched themselves as the foundational way to find anything on the internet.

And with so many eyes on them, it was inevitable that they would embrace advertising as their revenue centre. But this blog post isn't about ads. This is about something more recent, and much worse for the Web.

We've all heard the complaints that TV adaptations of books have somehow "ruined the book". Balderdash!

A while back, two of the complaints I heard were about the shows "Silo" and "Foundation". Two shows that I have been enjoying immensely - and for which I have not read the source material. At least not yet.

I'm not saying that the people who are saying this are wrong. They are describing their feelings, and their feelings are completely valid.

There was another show that I had heard a similar complaint about. It's called "The Peripheral". In the show, multiple timelines play out, with subordinate timelines being referred to as "stubs".

Going into this New Year, I'd like to share how I'm working to counteract the negative influences I see in the world today.

A lot of people look at society & government and apply their ideals and life experience to thinking of how they would replace it with something they see as better. Historically, this usually takes the form of revolution and turmoil.

For a brief period of time in human history, the concept of democracy has allowed a slight reduction in the ferocity of that churn. In many cases, long traditions of violent and unpleasant regime change have been replaced by peaceful elections.

But what if I told you that democracy could work in areas outside of government, too?

Enter: The Co-Op.

To quote the International Cooperative Alliance, a cooperative is:

"an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise."

A democratic Enterprise. Not even Star Trek has envisioned that. (sorry, disregard that, moving on ...)

Listen, Bill, you don't know me, but I used to be a big fan. That ended some time ago, of course, but it's still something I used to be.

I will admit that I haven't read your latest piece about your new approach to climate change, but I want to you know that some fascist idiots have been using it as justification to slag Harrison Ford.

Have some shame. You've earned it.

Sincerely,

Kevin.

PS: if you could toss a couple million dollars my way, I'd appreciate it.