& I think the kids these days are still hurting

Roxanne, it's the 23rd of October, Twenty Twenty Two, & I think the kids these days are still hurting. To them, I want to say,

Make a website. I mean this sincerely when I say it, make a website and it will save your life. It's not about sychophantic faggotry or any debates or discourses, but presenting the idea of a website as a mean of continuing to persist and survive. I've often presented my recent works as aggressively 18+, putting up walls, throwing out razors and knives in hopes of preventing quote 'the wrong crowd' from finding it or entering a space that I view as not for them. It's almost a childish approach, no? A treehouse with a little sign nailed in the front that says no minors, no annoying people, no normals, but I still in the end stick to it as my standard operating procedure. Why?

In a lot of ways I acribe it to some sort of cultural malaise, not necessarily brough about by a differece in age or what generation one aligns themselves with. but instead to look at it from the perspective of how one interacts with technology in general.

The way I first found the internet, and technology in general was an old shitty Windows terminal running 98, which we eventually upgraded to XP and connected a small printer to the system. The internet was still small, still shit in a lot of ways, but in other ways infinitely expansive. Small, shoddily crafted fanpages made by kids and teens, rudimentary shockwave games, and of course, places that were perhaps a bit more eccentric and unwieldy. Shock sites, misinformation, people oversharing or acting out of control on SA, later early 4chan, and just enough insanity to make the average person vomit and the unaverage person want to dive deeper. It's something I miss in a lot of ways even if it still exists. I found works like Asscastle and other indie comics from threads on SA by people who would come in out of morbid curiosity, only to fall in love. I used to exchange files, some fakes, others treasures, on /mu/, discussing, debating, fighting, and connecting late into the night, on a shitty monitor in the corner of a laundry room. It's looking back at it with a rose-tinted perspective sure, but it represents a genuinely different approach to media consumption and engagement that you simply don't see replicated in very many places these days. The best way I would describe it is conversations built on literacy, exchange. It's an approach that placed large focus on conversation and tete a tete, even if the enlightened exchange between two individuals that usually read something like:

> Hi there, anyone have suggestions on getting into new music? I'm looking to get into some new stuff. [some stock photo off of the internet of a guy looking at an ipod]

> hhi OP, how dare you post on here without reading the introductory charts, normfags out, kys

> ok but anyone seee that new fleshhhhlight? I heard it perfectly replicates fish genetalia but I'm afraid to try it [image labeled mynewwife.JPG, reverse image search gives no results]

> Jesus christ dude, why are you posting this on the fucking music board

I'm not going to pretend this was Plato and Aristotle musing about the nature of life here, but maybe it was like, still worth something, it felt fulfilling in spite of how childish it was at times. People, being people and playing in the sand, marcating lines and territory, drawing and scribbling little glyphs into a site where most of their words would be forgotten. But no one minded. Speaking to another soul was all that really mattered. Nowadays, there seems to have been a paradigm shift away from literacy and discussion on the web, in favour of consumption. Internet speeds are lightning fast compared to how they were only a few years ago, and an economy of text is now an economy of images and video. On paper this is a great thing for a painter and comic artist right? I can just put my work up on a social media platform and people will enjoy it! Of course, things are always more complicated. Every exchange one makes comes at a cost, and I feel the price here sacrificing truth as if it were Isaac on the altar of God. Previously someone could make an ED page about you or call you a retard on 4chan, not great experiences, and in some cases people got brutal, but you could always log off or generally, go somewhere else. These systems were fucked and often caused really intense damage but you could block the small group of sites causing that and move on, it didn't chase you that far. Walls could always be built and constructed to keep someone out. The mantra of 'log off or go somewhere else' seems cruel, but was a way of life. And regardless of what you did or how bad it got, one thing was always true. Your website was a safe space.

Your own personal website almost existed as a sanctuary, which irrespective of all hate, comments, and letters could exist isolated from it all. People cannot write on your site if you do not want them to. People can not suddenly add images or spread misinformation, rumours in a space that was coded and administrated by you. You had control. It was a last bastion and something that one could always return to as a source of comfort, a secret little haven that you could shape to your whim with your own hands. In a reading like this, a personal site is almost akin to a place of worship, the webmaster their own bespoke god that places votives up in a form of some strange, arcane, masturbatory worship. Some would argue that it's a pathetic display of loneliness, while otherrs would point to the fact that it is inherently, a tool of self-empowerment that can save lives and often times is a wonderful example of the way a tool that allows people to create can be used to reduce harm, encourage self love, and allow people to truly express themselves. Of course, like many things created in the time of menthols and maladaptives, money and sorrow must be exchanged to keep a candle alight. Signs were there from the start sure, banner ads, strange schemes to make web browsing profitable, aol leakages and site hacks, different attempts to make money off of this new creative nexus, but everyone knows when things started to pick up.

Different sites all trying to parrot off one-another while simultaneously jockeying to be the source of everyone's everything, creating this strange ameoba where everyone gives away information but no one produces or authors anything truly of their own. You are not a 'person' nor a 'user' but merely content. It is expected you stay in line with whatever's in with your circle, be the most current, always online, 24 hours, newest model, ready to embrace to reaping machine every hour of every day of your life. Even those who think they're 'too aware' or 'too alternative' or 'simply different' are treated the same as every other worthless waste of bits and bytes on the platform. Regardless of whether or not you consent, regardless of whether or not you're even that profitable or appealing, you get put up on the butcher's block and the choice cuts are taken. Maybe that's silly, overly dramatic, absurd even. But it at the end of the day is how the modern web seems to work. Artists give up their art, provocateurs their rantings, mourners their ravings, and so on and so forth. I feel the only exception to this is this manifestation of communally imposed schadenfreude, which doesn't really seem to rely on an individual's posting or giving up of information, but rather the ability to mark someone as an idol of hatred and watch as blow after blow comes their way. The serpent's kiss.



Let's get the usual rouges gallery out of the way before digging into this subject in its entireity. The Fool, The Magician, The Hermit, The Devil, and a whole host of other random transfems on the internet (although it obviously isn't only experienced by creators like that) all who have allegedly committed some irreconcilable crime that is always referred to with vague gestures. "Don't forget what they did before you interact with them" is a common phrase exchanged these days. It's smart, right? Always approach it putting someone on the defensive while making it seem like they're the aggressors. Namesearch, tag people, unfollow and demand for the defacement and universal abandonment of anyone who chooses to disagree.

Personally, it feels like kids with hammers smashing anything they can find in hopes of some sort of grasp towards morality. Of course, these are not all children. But a child is not a kid is not a grown one. One can return to any stage at any point, but it feels like that middle phase is the most dangerous, simultaneously the most and least human our souls will be before they're snuffed out. A little army of boys and girls n others slowly chipping away at others lives. It's a way of consumption that eats at the very being of another but it almost feels done in a way that makes it like a game. The mirror game. Reflect your worst aspects onto another and watch them crumple and wither until they slowly vanish from the public perception. It's at least how it worked in the past. I think it happened to too many people now, others are starting to come back, reverse the tides. The attackers only have so much power as the victim lets them.

CALLOUTS, TRULY, ARE THE BEHAVIOUR OF PREY MASKING AS A PREDATOR

But I think it doesn't change too much. These little figures still try and tear for any bit of power and control they can find. And it can drain a person and break those without the mental fortitude. Why do they continue to do it? Why persist in something that only works part of the time? Again, I think some of it is reclaiming that sense of power that was lost, but maybe it's also that lack of a safe space. HTML is no longer a hard requirement to make a space online. To an extent it hasn't been since Myspace existed, but it's been increasingly distanced, polished, the customisability and freedom associated with the internet pulled away bit by bit, until nothing remained except a little funnel that extracts more and more each year. Speaking from a development standpoint, we went from intimate fully customizable websites, to mostly customizable blogs, barely customisable accounts, and now, all that's left. A little image and a few characters. The rest gets chopped up and sorted into snippets for the hounds to devour. I feel in a lot of ways it perfectly explains why everything is the way it is, and why everything feels, wholeheartedly wrong. In youth, we traumatize eachother, cut into the ones we love, cry, scream, shout, we hurt. There were ways to cope with it in the past, going to the mall with friends and crying into your frosty, sneaking out to the park with a 6-pack, or logging on to that safe shrine to everything you wanted to be where no one could hurt you. I think in many ways a lot of these places are dying out. Malls closed. Car dependancy makes parks and strips of green inaccessible, and the internet is slowly becoming depersonalized and harder to truly enage with as a safe space, especially if you never got the tools some users got in the past.

The whole reason I was spurred to spin this thread was a post I saw from someone young and hurting on the internet, asking where they even would have learned the tools to make a website, or what good it would even bring. It's apathy produced by ignorance that devolved into anger. Maybe that's why that urge for blood flows so strongly and radicalism and puritanism is so happily accepted in these spaces. It's a way to feel like you're physically carving out a space for yourself, making the internet sanitized in hopes of feeling at home somewhere. Maybe they don't realize it's suicide. Maybe they do. It seems to be a vast group of different age ranges united in their station in life, no matter how old they get, still angrily cutting and hacking away at sinew and consuming eachother before nothing is left. No "internet public enemy" remains and a feed of endless bots and advertisements is all that remains.


But I still love you. I am still here. Make a website and we can lick our wounds in peace.