The web of today is very conventional. Predictability online is imposed by the constraints of monopolies like Google and Meta, and by their increasingly authoritarian tech world. Without community, and without that sense of maintenance, those who are in charge can do whatever they want, mostly unscathed. It has happened before and it will happen again. Digital media is vulnerable to the whims of companies who owe us nothing.

The New Yorker cites a volunteer archivist on r/datahoarder, a subreddit dedicated to the preservation of digital media, “They do not want you to have or own anything, they want you to rent access to it forever… The walled gardens are being built all around us, and every year, with every new update or service change or company merger or OS ‘security’ feature, the walls get a bit higher.” Valuable media is routinely made unavailable by companies who have no initiative to preserve anything. They’re getting what they want, and if you’re getting what you want for free chances are they’re selling your data too.

Sebastian Majstorovic is the digital historian in charge of a data tracker which catalogues backups generated by volunteers for the Data Rescue Project. His dad is from Bosnia, where in 1992 the National Library was bombed, destroying, among other valuable historic records, many rare manuscripts. He and a team, some of which were recruited from r/datahoarders, are in the middle of racing the White House to preserve before they erase. Government videos like “Rwanda Ebola Preparation” and pages referring to buzzwords like “systematic” and “trans” have been in some cases removed entirely from the CDC website, or altered in ways that can’t be tracked if originals aren’t preserved.
Responsibility for what goes on online is at odds with the “techno-capitalists” in Washington D.C. today. The more we are made to believe that online space does not belong to us, the easier it is to co-opt it.

In a Wired Magazine interview shortly after Neocities launched in 2013, Kyle Drake, the developer behind Neocities said, “You can do a lot with a small amount of space.” This is a website made in Neocities. It takes up almost 79 millibytes. Neocities says on the about page, “Our goal: to enable you to harness the creativity, beauty, and power of creating your own web site. To rebuild the web we lost to algorithms and monotony, and make it as fun and creative as it was back in the 90s.” As AI makes meaningful strides in automating how we conceive of creativity, it's important to recognize why and how it knows what to do: data. Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple have every reason to prefer you told them everything. AI with better pools of information to pull from are better at regurgitating it. Your reliance on those companies puts your information in a pretty vulnerable place. It means that when they change the rules as far as what belongs to you and what belongs to them, it's already too late.