Dear brother,

He who does not want his harvest to be burned must not set fire to the harvest of others. He, who wants to live in security, should accept the right of others to live in security, and he who is irritated, or raged by an aggression, should not aggress others. He who cherishes the lives of his people, should remember that God created all people equal at birth, in death, and in their human values, that’s why he should remember that the lives of others are also cherished by their people. He who strikes people with remote control missiles should except, that there would be someone to seek revenge, for his dignity and the dignity of his people, and consequently does something harmful, or fatal, by stabbing a dagger in his body, or taking his life by a sword.

He who sees himself as a man, who revenges his dignity, should not deprive other men from their dignity, and he who calls for the respect of his people, men and women, should respect the people of other nations.

He who remembers God, must not ignore or forget, that God the Almighty, is capable of everything, and of providing the weak with what makes those who underestimate them, make heed of their rights and respect them.

In any case, the security of humanity is, in our view, a responsibility on the shoulders of all good people. Any irresponsible action on the part of superpowers may give way to a counter irresponsible action by the people, even if the smaller nations do not take such a course of action.

Saddam Hussein

These thoughts about structuring one’s content led me to think: exactly what is the structure that houses my content? Sure, my content is housed inside my personal website, but what does my website represent? I am a person who often thinks in metaphors, so to concretely represent something in a nonliteral way helps out a lot.

[…]

The powerful thing about having a website is that it could literally be anything. It can be structured however you’d like, and you can share about whatever you want. Your site could be a library of information about wildflowers; it could be a shrine for your favourite anime; it could be an alternate reality game. Heck, it could be all of these things combined: an alternate reality game in which you collect and document wildflowers in real life, whilst featuring characters from your favourite anime. The world is your oyster.

biko

I touched on the problems of centralisation and why de-centralisation was a key tenet of the old Internet in my acclaimed article Make the Web Great Again, and Discord does not get nearly enough bad press for its role in destroying this aspect of the Internet. Much as the dreaded Reddit has largely paved a fascist monopoly over the niche once occupied by a bounty of independent Web forums, Discord has done the same with the chat world, replacing the sea of independent and free IRC servers with a single corporate walled garden whose owners each user must avoid offending in any way, lest they be entirely cast out of the public square.

This problem is so endemic on the modern Internet that not only is there a sea of unintentionally comical Neocities “Web 1.0” websites featuring their owners jabbering about how much they miss the old Internet while inviting people to chat on the webmaster/webmistress’ Discord server in the same breath, but even actually respectable people and outfits (who I will not name out of politeness) that have migrated to Discord because all of their misguided friends use it and refuse to budge. Even I, for all of my frenzied rabble-rousing, briefly created a Discord account a few years ago to speak with a friend before quitting the service out of disgust.

Nonetheless, for all of the social issues it causes me, being autistic has also given me the stubbornness of a mountain, and I have long since vowed to never touch the service again no matter who or what I may need it for. Each person who avoids big technology companies pushes the stake slightly deeper into the frigid, rotten heart of the privacy vampire that Discord and other big technology companies are (no offence intended to comparatively benevolent actual vampires with this comparison). Each person who avoids these services is also one less carrot for the vampire to dangle away over other people’s heads to convince them to stay in its cave.

Koshka