I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet recently. But then, haven’t we all? Constantly, we’re considering this thing which has consumed us all whole, prodding the edges of the sac that binds us, while we try not to drink the increasingly toxic amniotic fluid we’re swimming in. We’re a global cabal of smokers, each of us desperately chasing that nicotine fix of our first time, that first drag, even if it made us cough our guts up at the time.

For me, it was Livejournal. Then Myspace. Then Facebook, and finally Twitter. That period, right up to, say, 2016, is what I think of now as the halcyon days of the internet for me, personally. Back when it seemed to offer us so much hope, such a sense of community. Of possibility.

Fast forward a scant ten years, and where do we find ourselves? A technofascist new global order is gunning people down in the streets. At the same time, billionaires extract the last drops of profit from a dying Earth, and generative AI tells us all that there is no value in any human creation.

To quote a film made three years before I was even born: ‘I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.’

For a little while now, I’ve been wondering how we step back from all of this, not on some grand scale, not as some revolution, but just me. My own private revolution. I’ve scoured Reddit boards on de-googling, cut my subscriptions to some of the most evil corporations (but sadly not all), and just generally ruminated on what the future might look like if we were all to do the same.

When it came to social media, my behaviour had already changed quite significantly from those glory days of early Twitter. I was never a major player, nor a power user, but I was part of a few separate communities, linked to music and writing and politics, and just generally connecting with interesting people. But around the same time as the world started to turn to shit, when that Orange Fascist first came down that escalator with a shit-eating grin on his nauseating face, I changed the way I presented myself online. I became a Self-Published Author, and suddenly I wasn’t going onto Twitter or Facebook or Instagram just to talk shit about bands or David Cameron fucking a pig — no, now I was trying to SELL BOOKS.

I never really fully rationalised that disconnect, and found myself increasingly stepping back from regular posting. At the same time, I was maturing, my opinions were becoming more nuanced, and faced with an increasingly violent discourse about, well, everything, I found myself with less and less to say, because to say anything was to invite rancour down on your house. And nobody likes rancour in their house.

Then, it all went to shit, and we all ended up, well, here.

Last year, I deleted both my Facebook and Instagram accounts because of both the continued enshittification of those platforms and the fact that they were clearly both ushering in a new golden (orange) age of fascism. Oh, and when I found out that Meta had stolen all my books as part of its AI training model. Like all the others. Then this year, I set up new accounts, because I am hopelessly addicted to them, and there are some FB groups I missed, and I like following bands on The Gram.

I left Twitter long before that, when Musk came in and flooded the zone with shit. I joined Bluesky and a few Discord servers, and I wondered how long it might be before I was fleeing those, too.

At the same time, I started to follow a lot of writing about tech, and about its relationship to big fascism. I decided to change the way I consumed news, moving more to sources I trusted, like 404 Media, Garbage Day, and Cory Doctorow, accessing them through a good old-fashioned RSS reader, like the days of yore (2002). I deleted social media from my phone (then added it back again, then deleted it again) so that I would push myself to read more long-form journalism. And I started thinking about what the internet might look like in the future, once we move out of this enshittified state.

And that’s when I read this blog post:

It has had a fairly profound effect on me.

So, here’s the thing - I’m a bit of a paradox. I’ve always been a fan of tech and an early adopter of things. But I have absolutely no tech savvy whatsoever. Back in the early days of being online, I tried to learn HTML and failed to build even the most basic of websites. I started an Open University degree in IT a few years later, and abandoned it after only a few months because I just couldn’t get to grips with any of it. I still love tech (and hate it, and fear it), but I still don’t understand how any of it truly works.

I’ve never been a gamer — I find it frustrating, not fun — but much in the same way that I love music but can’t play an instrument, or am an obsessive Arsenal fan but can’t kick a ball, I am perpetually excited about technology, even though I still don’t really understand what a Github is. (I assume it’s the same as Pornhub, but for gits, right?).

So, when I looked at the Fediverse — or more importantly, at Mastodon (around the time of my own X-odus — none of it worked for me. I loved the idea of it, right? You get a social media that’s free of corporate control, and you can follow people everywhere, right? Except when you dig in a little deeper, that’s not true, is it? Sure, you can have an account on App A, let’s say, and follow someone from App B. But how do you find them? To go to App B, you need a separate account, right? So how does discoverability work? And how interconnected can it bem if you still need a different loging for every app? I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Then there was the massive complexity involved in setting up a Mastodon account — and what server to join, etc etc. Now, I’m sure if you’re reading this and you find this stuff easy, you’re scoffing, right? What an idiot this guy is, yeah?

I see you, rolling your eyes, maybe even tutting.

Stop that. It’s unbecoming.

And there’s the rub. It’s not easy, which is why, in my estimation, it’ll never truly take off.

But I read the above blog post by Joe Basser and on several occasions found myself pointing at the screen in some kind of Leonardo DiCaprio cosplay and thinking, ‘yes, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking, this whole time! This is what I envisioned the future of the internet being!’ But immediately I began to dig deeper into THE ATMOSPHERE (silly name), and found myself, well, a bit lost.

There was a lot of talk about nodes, tokens, and all sorts of other stuff. And, you know, that’s fine. I get it. We’re in the early days of this new internet, and most people involved at this early stage are coders and builders and people laying the general infrastructure of the possible. The pipe layers, and I don’t mean that euphemistically.

But for any of this to cross over, to break containment as it were, it needs to be able to be VERY FUCKING EASY to do. This is why Bluesky succeeded in relative terms against Mastodon. I mean, I have a Masto account, but I can’t really work it all out, and so I never use it. You can call me an idiot (and you’d be bang on the money), but I’m not sure if you’ve noticed or not, but the whole world’s a great big blue and green idiot, these days.

Even then, Bluesky is still a relatively small part of the internet. Which is fine — nice, even. But if ATProto or THE ATMOSPHERE (but seriously, do we have to call it that?) are going to break containment from the left-leaners, the coders, out into the real world, then THE ATMOSPHERE (ugh) needs to deliver, and deliver HARD. It’s got to make people want to break away from the AI swill feeds from Meta and the Nazi playground of X.

So what am I saying? What is the point of all this, some…. checks notes ….one thousand four hundred and forty-one words in?

Well, I’m setting up this blog as a way to go through my own navigation of this brave new world. Working as the idiot at the heart of an idiot’s guide to THE ATMOSPHERE. (Actually, maybe it’s growing on me).

As for the why, and the how, and even the who of it all, well, that’ll all come in the next few posts. Or it won’t. Maybe I’ll trip over my own shoelaces and hit my head, and that’ll be that. But, basically, I’ve got a lot of thoughts about THE ATMOSPHERE (no, it’s still a shit name), and about the future of the web, and words are really the only way I have to express all that.

As for who might read this? Well, I’m guessing probably nobody. I’m long enough in the tooth and have been around the internet long enough to know that this is probably of no interest to anyone, and even if it is, it’s likely not going to get in front of those eyeballs. And hey, I’m a fiction writer, I’ve spent years writing novels that have been read by fewer people than I have fingers. I’m used to it. I’m not really posting this for that reason. Hell, I might not even share it anywhere else but here.

This is all for me, and if you’ve made it this far, it’s for you, too. Hello, friend. I’m leaving comments open, in the hope that people will talk through their own thoughts on this, send me useful articles, point me in the direction of cool new apps, or just tell me what an idiot I am. It’s alright, I can take it.

(Newsflash, I can’t. Please don’t call me that.)