Will Bench

I love to share, sometimes probably too much. You probably too. We all need somewhere to share uninhibited, offline or online. This is all good IRL where one can mediate what comes out of their mouth fairly easily. We can identify where the sound or behaviour is coming from because, well, our eyes and ears.

The trouble is, the online platforms promising a place to do so obscure their Faustian bargain. All the user convenience and community one could imagine, but between you and all of this lies an algorithm. An algorithm that prioritises the competition for attention over authentic expression, alienating rather than uniting. And hence the mediation of what you express and what is received is up to an algorithm whose owner’s top priorities don’t include the nuance of Mr John Smith’s authenticity of expression. Now, this all sounds a bit like the spiel of someone who has been cancelled from said platforms. I promise I haven’t.

And of course its a wider conversation in tech, which I’ll come onto. But the point is, the holy grail is a space minimising the distance and opacity between your word or any creation and how it is perceived online.

This is where tech independence comes in. There is a growing movement of people realising that any online product or platform dependent on the (long) profit motive, is also designed to break, or enshittify.

One way to overcome this is to build from the ground up the product you need. I believe in the empowerment of the first principles philosophy and particularly with the conviviality of DIY. But with tech there is compromise, and today that comes in the form of a hosted website.

So here we are!