The Return

I figured starting over here and actually keeping a kind of journal system might be a useful way of managing all of the anxiety and depression and stress I've taken on board over the last year. It's just turned 2024 and I am not where I should be, not even close. I imagine a parallel world version of me that did everything right and I didn't and it kinda sucks.
My main distraction right now is just archiving and encryption. I have so many regrets around my poor data management practices over years gone by. It seems so simple now to practice better opsec and to avoid data loss, I guess this is a fundamental that wasn't really been driven home when the Internet was still taking off. Even as recently as 2006, which feels like just yesterday, you could use services without a phone number and being online didn't feel like the immense security risk it is now.

My approach has come to be a couple of memorised pass phrases and a lot of plausible deniability. The biggest security vulnerabilty is the human element, humans are dumb and clumsy.

I'm drinking ginger tea and CBD oil and doing some weird breathing exercises to try and keep on top of my mind, maybe it will make a difference.

I want to come back and make something of this as I keep seeing the same sentiment reiterated on lainchan, about how people start neocities sites and then they're abandoned and you're just left with an interlinked ghost town of inactive homepages. There's always that sense of somebody used to be there, now there's just whatever notes and clues as to what they were aspiring to build left in their wake.

Another thing I find difficult is talking freely online, pretty much all ideas and beliefs have the capacity to be divisive now. I don't mean opinions on opsec and security, but cultural observations and socio-political convictions. The best I can come up with is putting forward the idea that I still want people who don't like what I believe to have a place online. The right to exist and communicate freely online should be protected above all else. Communist, nazi, trans, conservative, leftist, anarchist, fascist, if you're just saying something in your own corner I can't be bothered to care any more.

Something like privacy and the right to communicate should be universal issues that transcend politics and ideologies. In a world that is characterised by tribal divisions, any opportunity to enjoy common ground and humanise the other should be seized. I have lots of ideas that might be popular with a few people, and could lead to other people wanting to see me locked up, the only people who I'll interact with on this level are in real life.

Often actual crime is conflated with thought crime, censors present a reasonable measure such as, 'lets develop algorithms to purge CSAM from social media networks' and everyone agrees, then a week later your centrist political commentary channel is taken down for being dangerous misinformation. Same system everyone got behind, used to entirely different ends.
It's just tiresome. I always felt something went off in 2001 and everything just changed for the worse. We were set on a course of steady deterioration and now all that there's left to do is watch it unfold. I've lost the will to fight with others, and my biggest aspiration is to be as invisible as possible. Part of this is not using the Internet as a political soapbox, it draws attention, its a magnet for conflict. Nobody needs to know how I exist in my own private, domestic life and the ways I'd like my life to be different. The end game now is existing whilst people know as little about me as possible.

I couldn't comprehend sharing photos of my face online now. Participating in big tech data harvesting schemes. I used to when I was young, because I had no capacity to understand what was really happening. It seems so basic now, to be aware of when they're a product rather than a customer, but at seventeen, the ego boost of photo likes is irresistible.

A few paragraphs in and my head has already settled a little. Maybe the CBD did have some kind of effect. I might try and recover some old blog articles and reshare them here.

Perhaps the take away here should be, I no longer have any desire to participate in any kind of conflict. I don't understand the universe, the world, the human condition well enough to have all the answers. I know whats right for me, I know what I want and don't want in my own world, but beyond that, it's an endless struggle to govern chaos. The one thing all sides should be able to agree on is the importance of becoming invisible as big tech continues to expand in influence and malevolence.