Why is my website like this?

why does absurdity.today look like this? I’ve been a web designer in some form or another for 10 years. for awhile, making websites was both a full-time job and hobby. then as the years went on, I started to feel burnt out and uninspired. I could no longer find the magic in the web. the delight was lost for me along the way. I’ve wrestled with my identity as a designer and whatever that means for so long that I don’t even know what design means anymore. I don’t even want to use the word, I don’t want to think about it. it sounds pretentious and fake. it might as well be a throwaway word.

recently, I discovered these really interesting pockets of the internet such as the personal web, small web, web revival, old net, yesterweb, indie web, etc. it made me feel like websites were still being made to be humble and unfolding expressions of the self, instead of brand representations. I feel like designers and web designers in particular are more responsible for the world than we give them credit for. I think web design informs our ideas of what is possible so much because we spend so much time on the internet. we spend so much time on social media that we feel like we know what is expected of us. we feel like there are so many limiting factors to what we can express and say, where the early days of the internet felt so new and exploratory and unfinished. now, design has to feel perfect. it has to feel optimized, sleek, and cohesive. all websites look the same. we have been trained to suspect scam and predation behind the sexiest of designs.

I feel like design needs to be taken out of its role as a utilitarian process. and for me, I need to unlearn design. I need to play around and rediscover what the internet is for. and I need to do this by making silly websites. web design creates these subliminal messages for us. it creates these ideas of what we think we can do and what we think we can communicate, where we think we can communicate. but there are so many more options than what we think is available to us. we think we only have these major social media corporations and that we are confined to them, but we’re not. so much more can be expressed. I want websites to feel like they’re tactile, like you’re holding something in your hands, something handmade. and you’re seeing something unfold. you’re seeing questions, not answers. so much of design as I’ve done it and seen it is just answers. you start knowing where you’ll finish, because there’s a limited pallette of acceptable solutions. what good is that? what good is just asserting a will, asserting a brand? I don’t want to feel like a brand. I want to feel like a human being. I want the internet to feel like it opens parts of myself to myself rather than closing them off.

I plan for this page to be a sort of blog that archives the qualities of my relationship with the web. I want to go back through old journals and include ones that touched on the internet here. I also think it could be fun to go back through my early social media days and find insights there. This is a start. More to come.

how can a website reflect the complexities of the self? how can a website feel like it has no center? how can a website feel like it isn’t a brand? how can a website reflect the self? how can a website be a tool for documentation that helps you engage more deeply with the real world? how can a website help you become less addicted to social media? how can a website make you less inclined to consume stuff you don’t need? how can a website encourage you to create, instead of making you feel like you shouldn’t? how can a website be chaotic enough to let you feel like you can make any type of thing instead of just one category of thing? how can a website be destabalizing enough to make you feel like you can really hold the internet and touch it? how can a website have cracks?

I wore my bucket hat. I was gardening.

I fed Magnus a little extra.

I tried to make some space for something else other than clicking. It's called slowing down.

I am literally a part of the information superhighway.

What do we do when we feel we have too much information?

Don't put offbrand Miralax in the offbrand oatmeal.

I feel dizzy from the gardening.

How should I structure my repository?

How to make something of utility?

How to forge a self in relation to becoming, mixed with whatever this is?

Should I go for another walk or am I too tired?

God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn

Quotes from Chapters 1-3

"Nature was no longer a source of wonder but a force to be mastered, a system to be figured out. At its root, disenchantment describes the fact that everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws. In place of the pneuma, the spirit-force that once infused and unified all living things, we are now left with an empty carapace of gears and levers—or, as Weber put it, “the mechanism of a world robbed of gods.”

"To discover truth, it is necessary to work within the metaphors of our own time, which are for the most part technological."

"Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems."

"Taken together, this early work in cybernetics had an odd circularity to it. Shannon removed the thinking mind from the concept of information. Meanwhile, McCulloch applied the logic of information processing to the mind itself. This resulted in a model of mind in which thought could be accounted for in purely abstract, mathematical terms, and opened up the possibility that computers could execute mental functions. If thinking was just information processing, computers could be said to “learn,” “reason,” and “understand”—words that were, at least in the beginning, put in quotation marks to denote them as metaphors. But as cybernetics evolved and the computational analogy was applied across a more expansive variety of biological and artificial systems, the limits of the metaphor began to dissolve, such that it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between matter and form, medium and message, metaphor and reality. And it became especially difficult to explain aspects of the mind that could not be accounted for by the metaphor."

"Many of the pioneers of artificial intelligence got around the problem of other minds by focusing solely on external behavior. Alan Turing once pointed out that the only way to know whether a machine had internal experience was “to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking.” This was clearly not a task for science. His famous assessment for determining machine intelligence—now called the Turing Test—imagined a computer hidden behind a screen, automatically typing answers in response to questions posed by a human interlocutor. If the interlocutor came to believe that he was speaking to another person, then the machine could be declared “intelligent.” In other words, we should accept a machine as having humanlike intelligence so long as it can convincingly perform the behaviors we associate with human-level intelligence."

"For Weber, disenchantment was not merely an ontological hollowing-out—the realization that there are no spirits hiding in rocks or souls lurking in bodies—nor was it the simple fact that the universe could be reduced to causal mechanisms. The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning. The human mind has religious, ethical, and metaphysical needs in addition to its hunger for knowledge. It is driven, as Weber put it, by “an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position towards it.” In the classical and medieval periods, natural philosophy was seen as an avenue toward not only knowledge but truth. Aristotle and Aquinas alike believed that understanding the world brought us closer to God, or the absolute, and so science was necessarily bound up with questions of virtue, ethics, and ultimate meaning.

The mechanistic philosophy of the seventeenth century divorced not only body from mind but also matter from meaning. Once final causes—the Aristotelian notion that nature has intrinsic purposes and goals—were banished from science, the spiritual and the ethical were no longer bound up with the physical processes of life but were relegated to that ghostly and uncertain realm of the subjective mind. In his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, Weber writes that “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” Science is so committed to describing the world objectively, he argued, without presuppositions, that it cannot even affirm its own intrinsic value; it can’t explain why technical mastery of the world is desirable, or why knowledge itself is worthwhile.

Weber was not arguing that the sciences should return to the business of values and spirituality. On the contrary, he was wary of the fact that so many intellectuals of his day were attracted to “antique religious ideas” that were cleverly dressed up in new, materialist guises. The worst thing that science could do was to take up the mantle of reenchantment, presenting itself as a new form of revelation, or what he called “academic prophecy.” In the lecture rooms and the laboratory, the only value that should hold is intellectual integrity. In fact, when it came to the modern hunger for meaning, Weber found a retreat to traditional religions less objectionable than the impulse to find telos or purpose in empiricism. “In my eyes, such religious return stands higher than the academic prophecy,” he wrote. In other words, if you wanted some kind of spiritual experience, you should just go to church."

"In his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener, the grandfather of cybernetics, wrote that “we are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

"The neuroscientist Michael Graziano similarly envisions a future in which we all exist in the cloud. He argues that this is not so different from our current existence. “We already live in a world where almost everything we do flows through cyberspace,” he writes in his 2019 book Rethinking Consciousness. Within transhumanist thought, transcendence depends on the notion that information can be liberated from the material constraints of the physical world: it is an ideology, as the critic N. Katherine Hayles points out, in which “disembodied information becomes the ultimate Platonic Form.”

"What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated."

I look up my ancestry on ancestry.com. I find more Quakers! It makes me feel connection and purpose spread out over time. It takes weight off my shoulders and plops me on a path that goes back and back.

14 day algorithm detox idea from Connor Clary!

(with my own moditifications)

Rules:

• Only one 20 minute scrolling session a day of algorithmic feeds.
• Document feelings after.
• Algorithmic feeds include Instagram, Facebook, YouTube suggestions, etc
• Things that are allowed: books, music, podcasts, audiobooks, movies, YouTube when I directly search for something, directly searching to retrieve, specific accounts, email, texts, Substack
• Things that are gray areas that I'd like to stop doing out of habit: refreshing email, refreshing Substack, looking for new podcasts and YouTube out of emptiness as a reflex. The scroll lull.
• It's not about screentime. It's about the addiction to getting fed content.

Day 1

• mostly Instagram, some YouTube and Facebook
• feels bad, got scared about my neck
• mostly felt conscious of how many hate follows I have and wanted to mute people to reduce stupid content. not really anything of substance. I like the option to scroll and the abstract possibility of discovery more than the act

Day 2

• mostly Insta, why do I even look at Fb? clear it's hout of numbing. looked at a bit of YouTube to scrounge around for future vids to watch, like picking berries idk
• felt like I had excess time
• enjoyed, found some things to look at later
• going on the internet feels inspiring when it's "in its place"
• overall, feeling a big difference in 2 days. happy medium able to surrender to pain.

Day 3

• Insta, Fb, YouTube
• felt pretty benign, like I have plenty of time to fill
• morning scroll to get me out of grogginess
• indifferent

Day 4

• I feel worse than before
• like I'm contaminated
• bored
• filling up time
• an abstract feeling of doom, radiating from a trick of "more"

Day 5

• only did it for 15 mins
• couldn't fill the time
• I feel worse, like my life doesn't measure up, like there's so muchto fix
• I hate this feeling

CHAOS!

Took a break from the detox for a few days. Started in pain, but didn't evolve to make me feel too bad. It's Feb 3 now. How about for sun/mon/tues I commit back to the break and go from there? There can't just be a rigid way of doing it. Maybe I can commit to documenting the experiments and feelings along the way, always engaging in my habits, not punitively declaring them.

[ end experiment ]

It's the part of the day where the magic of the coffee has worn off and the lunch that fills my belly yet depletes my mood has settled in my esophogus or what have you.

I have taken down the picture frames from my wall to see if I'll come up with any new ideas.

I listen to my girl podcast, in hopes of tapping into a parasocial solidarity of internet ennui.

I come into the dimly lit warmest room in the house because my parents prefer to freeze. This is the room I called mine as a teenager. Now it's my up and coming "computer room," where I've transferred my mom's dust-mongering 2011 iMac. I was hoping it would feel less usable and more vintage. I want to install Mac OS 9, see if it will refuse wifi.

I want a word processor, that's it. I want to see a computer again as a machine, not a second limb.This one's slightly there due to its high pitched whirring. But I want a computer that will take away my internet addiction, return me to the kid I was in this room, clicking around on the Windows 95 as a 4-year-old, telling my parents so matter-of-factly—"look! we DO have the internet!" I didn't realize we needed an actual installation of it, a service barely possible in the 1998 rural area we lived in. I didn't realize that one day I'd return to this room at 29, wishing for that disconnection. Now the internet is basically my brain.

History of my computer

• 95 Windows on the silver desk in sister's room
• Computer on the floor in the corner of my room.
• Windows XP on the short plywood desk by my bedside that got viruses from Limewire.
• then I put that computer on a proper computer table, keyboard sprinkeled with crumbs from Burger King, attracting dozens of ants
• switched to this room, wanted my mom's white orb mac
• the same mac before, when it was in the room of mine now
• the silver big mac that still runs
• college laptop
• current laptop from first job
• chromebook

Things I check when I'm either:

1. bored
2. sad
3. exhausted from attention

• instagram
• facebook
• email
• discord
• substack
• new podcasts
• new youtube