The origin story of at-home internet often goes like this: Steve Jobs, a baby-faced college dropout, bent over circuit boards and empty soda cans in his parents’ garage, the hippie protege of Atari who built the first Apple computer using a cassette tape deck and chewing gum as glue.
"[Apple] was ‘Power to the People’,” author Jeffrey S. Young wrote in 1987, “the slogan of the sixties rewritten in technology…” It’s a beautiful mirage.
Today, home computers and their wings of freedom are more wax than feather. We scroll for hours on end consuming everything while consuming nothing. Feeds are the Frankenstein’s monster big-tit babe parented by tech Goliaths like Zuckerberg (Meta) and Chew (TikTok), men who spend more of the work week getting railed in the Senate than in the office. When our fingers go pointing they stick up their hands and claim historical precedent, claim technological innovation, and distract us long enough with a thousand What I Eat in a Day videos to hop the fence and take off. Every online interaction is pay-to-play, invisible money either given to us or - more often - given by us in the name of a never-ending Industrial Revolution. And the wheels chug on, since at this point the machine is strong enough to crunch through the bones of a hundred Charlie Chaplins without missing a beat.
But just because the internet is a pyramid scheme doesn’t mean it has to be. Three decades back we saw computers as the next great opportunity for self-expression the same way we took to stone slabs and crushed berries in 30,000 BCE or to marble and shaved chisels in antiquity. The internet doesn’t want to be a watchdog; it was built to be a medium.
TL;DR, coding your own website is basically a straight sucker-punch to capitalism’s stupid face.
introducing
ANNABELLE’S THREE STEP PLAN FOR TAKING BACK THE INTERNET
STEP ONE: LEARN THE LANGUAGE
HTML and CSS look intimidating, I know. Everything does when it’s an acronym and always written in all-caps. But both are actually pretty easy to understand, and writing in all-caps is a power move. As an art student with virtually zero (0) legitimate coding experience, it helps me to think of web design like this: HTML is the skeleton to CSS’ gory muscle mass. You code HTML first and add CSS on as the icing (the actual graphic design). Luckily, pliferation of the internet grants us plenty of accessible - most importantly, free - resources to teach ourselves. In learning the language on your own, you take your first steps towards internet liberation. It doesn't matter if you have a degree in Computer Science or if you've just gotten out of a fifty-year coma and this is the first website you're seeing. The achievement of coding a website all on your own is a rush. A power trip! If you need a little push to start the journey, trust that even the earliest web Girls did the same things you’re gonna do now. Actually, they did more considering the lack of centralized knowledge. Millions of femmes took to the internet as the latest and greatest form of self-expression. They understood the net's true purpose as opportunity to manifest philosophical destiny in this strange new frontier with a quirky web address and a few dancing lady GIFs.
So where, you may be asking, do I write all this code? Where do I put it when I'm done? Well, there are far too few options for user-generated site development (#fucksquarespace). Fortunately, the hosting platform Today Girl uses is, in my experience, one of the most user-friendly and accessible overlords out there. I know this sounds promotional. Don't worry, I'm not sponsored by Neocities. But when a product does what it promised, you want to share that with others! In my admittedly limited opinion, Neocities is one of the best servers out there. Not only does it push users towards free tutorials on HTML and CSS, but for being free it lets you upload a ton of content. And it lets you push the limits with how stupid your code can be, so I appreciate that. Nobody look at my internal files, they're embarassing. Anyway - Neocities also fufills our mission of following our netgirl ancestors, whose sites would typically be hosted on the now defunct Geocities platform. ('Neo'cities - get it?) This mission is much appreciated by Today Girl. I want to encourage you to host your blog on Neocities. And then email me, because I want to see them!
STEP THREE: SPREAD THE WORD
What good is an Instagram account, seriously. Think about what philosophies that platform - and the majority of other social medias - are based in. Zuckerberg started Facebook as a way to objectify women. Is that a good basis for a platform about connecting? I don't think so. Consider instead the unlimited possibilities of web design. Not only are you freed from any white-knuckle grip on your internet footprint by our all-mighty Silicon Overloads, but you're also granted a blank canvas. You can do literally ANYTHING you want with this little corner, because it's yours! You don't even have to pay rent - and that means both monetary, and also with your data. That's a pretty good deal. Protect yourself, join the revolution, create your own blog! Trust me, the minute you change the background color of your website you'll be hooked. No more of that generic Snapchat bullshit. Personal website used to be the main currency of the inernet. Don’t let yourself be contained in a box. Go forth and conquer!
