Since you are on this page, you're presumably lost. That's ok. I don't really
get all this stuff either. Let's start with some easy stuff.
*You're on the Internet*. Known to some as a
[series of tubes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes),
but in reality much more complicated than it has to be. In basic sense, your
computer called mine, and mine answered with directory full of pages.
The way you get here is through a device you have at home called a router,
which literally does what the name implies--it routes signals to where they
need to go to make things go beep. In the 60s and
70s, routers tended to be people-based and would spend their time plugging
cables into and out of ports so calls could connect.
*Image of a switchboard courtesy of
[Wikipedia contributors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jersey_Telecom_switchboard_and_operator.jpg)
*
Fortunately, we figured out that was dumb and made robots do the job for us.
Internet companies, governments, and anyone else with enough money and
influence bought huge routers and hooked them all up to talk to each other.
Then they convinced us all to go out and buy a router from our ISP of "choice"
so we could all send cat pictures to each other seemlessly. We got rid of
phones, replaced our phone with our IP address and email, just to ironically
end up back at phones again. All of our devices serve, or at least can serve,
as a router in some way, and all these little robots talking to each other
makes it so you can get lost on some person's home page.
In a way, you could say you've made it to a place my router took you to.
Not my home router of course--that one sucks.
I'm mooching of someone else's, also known as a Virtual Private Server.
These companies run whole bunch of servers, hook them up on a bulk connection
and rent them out for people to run blogs about cats and porn sites.
I'm getting lost on your question though, so where are we exactly?
Precisely speaking, you are in a chrooted web server running on rented virtual
machine in a server farm located roughly in New Jersey browsing the "about"
directory on the "whereami.html" page.
Less precisely, all that means is you're looking at some files I left in a directory
at this address, and paid some people to host for me since local ISPs tend to
be ridiculously expensive if you want to do anything besides host some private
servers for you and your friends and family.
But maybe most importantly, you've reached a webpage owned by another human
being, not a corporation, or a bot, or a government, or work, or a *network*.
All these files were loving crafted by yours truly in vim, in markdown and
converted with pandoc to HTML because of laziness. The Internet I grew up with,
though I didn't really appreciate because I was too young at the
time, used to be filled with places like this. "Homepages" were a thing, or
were just starting to be at least.
But as soon as it started it all got sucked up social media, everyone got coerced
into profiles, templates, and standards to make us easier for ad companies to
study. It's not even unreasonable to believe you're not even talking to real
people on there, because there's a good chance of it now.
[Astroturfing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing) is not
a secret government conspiracy, it's just business as usual at this point.
You used to be able to tell a human from a chatbot from the way they write.
I don't know if the bots at this point are smarter, or if we've just been made
so cynical and dumb by business as usual that we've given up.
Who would really write all that garbage on Facebook anyway?
Don't mistake this for some pity nostalgia piece though. If you look hard
enough--I promise you--that *Internet* of humans is still there.
A helpful tip, CRTL+W will close any webpage you don't like. Not that you
wouldn't like this page... you did read all the way here through all that
pedantry didn't you?