Welcome to the Human Web Collective!

Hello and welcome to the Human Web Collective! What is this all about, who am I, and why should you care?

I'll start with the middle part first, because I'm fun like that. 😂 I'm Jared White. I've worked for over twenty-five years as a freelance Web developer, as well as a blogger and podcaster for ten years around a variety of business and creative topics.

I've always cared about independent publishers, artisans, and toolmakers. A few years back, I created a brand called The Spicy Web as a vehicle for sharing my thoughts as a Web developer promoting ways to Use the Platform™ (aka native open standard APIs) and avoid vendor lock-in. I even created a course called CSS Nouveau (now free!) to teach techniques for establishing good "vanilla CSS" software architecture.

Alas, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Our industry got blindsided by the explosive rise of generative AI. Suddenly, it wasn't enough simply to talk about learning programming fundamentals and making smarter abstractions so newbies get a leg up fast. No, you had to pull Copilot and Claude and Cursor and ChatGPT into your workflow and get the bots to think for you!

Meanwhile, all creative works on the Internet became nothing more than gruel to feed the massive beast—value extraction on a level we'd never seen before. Even the promise of open source software felt like it'd turned into a cruel joke…sharing code with "techy friends" morphed into providing unpaid labor for megacorp AI codegen. And almost overnight, (some) people's tastes seem to change. They liked the endless stream of slop, and couldn't understand why anyone would be resisting the "inevitable" future of AI-all-the-things.

I started to wonder how, in all good conscience, could I continue prattling on about how to build for the Web when we increasingly don't even know what the Web is anymore. The conversation needs to move up a level.

And so I decided to "fork" The Spicy Web and create a new project. I had already started up a property called That HTML Blog to serve as a link aggregator and source of news on WebDev topics, so I moved all my relevant dev-focused efforts there and embarked on something new. Instead of merely lamenting that the Web I once knew and loved had devolved into the Torment Nexus, I decided to DO something about it!

Thus the Human Web Collective was born. Welcome to the Resistance! 👋😃

In my essay A Tale of Two Cyberspaces, I wrote about the bifurcation of the Internet. We now see two separate movements clearly emerging: EmpireNet and ResistanceNet. It gets confusing because the underlying technical infrastructure (the plumbing of the Internet) is largely the same, but these two worlds embody entirely different ethics, goals, and community structures.

Even as we've seen the rise of genAI, we've also seen the rise of hopeful movements like the Fediverse. This very platform, powered by PieFed, is an exciting example of that. When I set out to kick off a new community forum based on authenticity and trust, I knew it had to be a participant in the "threadiverse" and honor Indie Web principals of openness and data sovereignty. Yes, you can sign up here on the Human Web Collective to share links and post comments (and I encourage you to do so!), but you can also use your own Fediverse account on a server elsewhere if you so choose to follow and converse with the topics here.

The ultimate aim of the Human Web Collective is to promote the usage of AI-Free tools & services and support AI-Free content creators and makers of all sorts. Consumers deserve to know if the digital artifacts they are engaging with are AI-Free or filled with slop, and consumers must demand an ecosystem which caters to their preferences. Hey, that's just capitalism, right? 😂

Seriously though, we have an incredible opportunity within ResistanceNet to build new structures and systems which operate beyond mere market considerations. Cooperatives and non-profit organizations and individuals from all walks of life have the chance to wrest back control of the networked systems and digital communities they participate in.

We believe that the only way to win against genAI is to have zero tolerance for it in the output stage. We're not here to police people’s individual workflows in the "pre-production" phase of their work, but we can demand transparency for consumers as to what exactly it is that we are consuming! In our view, there is no room for extruded synthetic data in the production systems and media we bring into our lives. You can read more about our AI-Free stance here.

It's not merely a matter of combatting "AI hype"…there is truly delusional thinking occurring across corporations, governments, and organizations which presumably are meant to serve the people, not subjugate them. Despite what you may have heard, the Singularly is not nigh and AGI is not around the corner…if you can even come up with a coherent definition of AGI (or worse still, "superintelligence"). We're already seeing evidence of hitting hard limits of what current algorithms are capable of, as has been predicted every year for several years in a row. And we're also seeing that the "productivity" provided by adopting genAI tooling and workflows within organizations is in many cases a frustrating mirage, serving no purpose other than to enrich a technofascist oligarchy class while deskilling creative labor.

Your activism CAN make a difference! Join the pro-craft movement and help us build a community here to shore up the AI-Free ecosystem. There are already plenty of tools, service providers, and artisans which have chosen to eject from the madness spewing out of Silicon Valley & The White House, and may our voices be heard. 🙌

Thanks for the read and enjoy the show!
–Jared ✌️
@jaredwhite@indieweb.social

P.S. We are unapologetically supportive of the 🏳️‍🌈 LGBTQ+ community 🏳️‍⚧️ on this server and advocate for promotion of people & products standing in solidarity against fascism, racism, ableism, environmental destruction, and war crimes. This isn't about partisan politics. It's about basic human decency and the right to live in peace on a healthy planet. If that's cool with you, then yay! ☺️