For the longest time (about twelve years actually) I’ve maintained a personal website in some shape or form.
Inspired mostly by Jeremy Keith at the time, I loved his ongoing commentary of all things web and personal that he shared in his web journal. That, along with his excellent talks on the subject of the web, I was always wanting to maintain my own presence on the web.
Which I have done.
My website has gone through multiple domain names, and even more blogging engines behind it. I’ve built about five or six versions of it in Laravel, possibly one in CodeIgniter back in the day, and have migrated to and from WordPress more times than I care to admit.
But that’s all changed now.
AI has grown exponentially over the past couple of years and I for one am both sick of it and fearful of our future — both society and the planet we live on.
Countless companies who all want to stake their own claim to some kind of generative AI bullshit tool, or a chat bot, are sending out scrapers to mass-gather all of the public internet that they can in order to “train” their LLMs — in fact they have been for a while.
I for one don’t want my personal thoughts and posts in that rabble of the earth’s collective sharing, ground down into a planet-suffocating system that is ultimately going to leave us dying of thirst whist the idiots continue generating their social media images / profile pictures with their favourite prompt.
This is why I’ve taken down all of my old pages (about 2,400 of them); This is why I’ve deleted the entire history of me (digitally anyway).
I’m not naive. I know that mine, along with most other pages will most likely have already been fed into numerous model training systems. And yes, search engines crawled web pages any way. But it’s not the same.
And of course the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive still has many pages cached too.
But I can do something from my side at least, and cease to contribute to the web in the way I once did.
I love the indieweb. I love its collective mission to help people own and control their data, as well as having cross-participation in public on posts; conversations between domains using protocols like WebMention.
But all those public conversations are also out there to be gobbled up by tech-bros wearing “Occupy Mars” t-shirts. Sure, they can occupy mars while the rest of us choke to death on a dying planet with our AI-generating “SEO content” and pictures of cats in space suits.
So I’m no longer participating in that Indieweb-focussed feature set for my site.
I’m still having my personal website. But I will be much more mindful about what I share on here. Indeed as we all should be.
I will share programming-related posts and tips; sharing how I approach programming. I may also still share the occasional “personal” thing. But nothing on the scale of how i used to.
So here’s to a fresh new website. And here’s to sharing less.