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<center>
But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in
history, including the Garden of Eden, **everybody just got here**. And,
except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going
on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin
with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate,
liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and
girls' basketball.
-- *Kurt Vonnegut, from A man without a country, emphasis my own*
</center>
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 require workers spend
their time plugging cables into and out of ports so calls could connect.
<img src="/static/human_router.jpg" />
*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 seamlessly. 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.
But not my home router of course--that one sucks.
I'm mooching off someone else's, also known as a Virtual Private Server.
These companies run a whole bunch of servers, hook them up on a bulk connection
and rent them out for people to run fake media companies, 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. Well mostly... I don't own the hardware. But the place is
mine; not a corporation's, or a bot's, or a government's.
All these files were loving crafted by yours truly in markdown, using
vim, and converted with pandoc to HTML because of laziness.
The Internet I grew up with, though I didn't really appreciate it 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 and commodified into
social media; we somehow got coerced into profiles, templates, and
standards to make us easier for ad companies to study. And even I really
liked it for a while, but over time, it got fake. I got fake.
And speaking of fake, 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 the process that we've
given up.
In a way it's a reassuring: would real people 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. Here's
a few places I like to poke around:
https://neocities.org/
https://1mb.club/
and old [not-so](https://archive.md/rav1z) faithful:
https://www.wikipedia.org/
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?
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