1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
|
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="" xml:lang="" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta content="pandoc" name="generator"/>
<meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes" name="viewport"/>
<title>whereami</title>
<style>
html {
line-height: 1.5;
font-family: Georgia, serif;
font-size: 20px;
color: #1a1a1a;
background-color: #fdfdfd;
}
body {
margin: 0 auto;
max-width: 36em;
padding-left: 50px;
padding-right: 50px;
padding-top: 50px;
padding-bottom: 50px;
hyphens: auto;
overflow-wrap: break-word;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
font-kerning: normal;
}
@media (max-width: 600px) {
body {
font-size: 0.9em;
padding: 1em;
}
h1 {
font-size: 1.8em;
}
}
@media print {
body {
background-color: transparent;
color: black;
font-size: 12pt;
}
p, h2, h3 {
orphans: 3;
widows: 3;
}
h2, h3, h4 {
page-break-after: avoid;
}
}
p {
margin: 1em 0;
}
a {
color: #1a1a1a;
}
a:visited {
color: #1a1a1a;
}
img {
max-width: 100%;
}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
margin-top: 1.4em;
}
h5, h6 {
font-size: 1em;
font-style: italic;
}
h6 {
font-weight: normal;
}
ol, ul {
padding-left: 1.7em;
margin-top: 1em;
}
li > ol, li > ul {
margin-top: 0;
}
blockquote {
margin: 1em 0 1em 1.7em;
padding-left: 1em;
border-left: 2px solid #e6e6e6;
color: #606060;
}
code {
font-family: Menlo, Monaco, 'Lucida Console', Consolas, monospace;
font-size: 85%;
margin: 0;
}
pre {
margin: 1em 0;
overflow: auto;
}
pre code {
padding: 0;
overflow: visible;
overflow-wrap: normal;
}
.sourceCode {
background-color: transparent;
overflow: visible;
}
hr {
background-color: #1a1a1a;
border: none;
height: 1px;
margin: 1em 0;
}
table {
margin: 1em 0;
border-collapse: collapse;
width: 100%;
overflow-x: auto;
display: block;
font-variant-numeric: lining-nums tabular-nums;
}
table caption {
margin-bottom: 0.75em;
}
tbody {
margin-top: 0.5em;
border-top: 1px solid #1a1a1a;
border-bottom: 1px solid #1a1a1a;
}
th {
border-top: 1px solid #1a1a1a;
padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 0.5em;
}
td {
padding: 0.125em 0.5em 0.25em 0.5em;
}
header {
margin-bottom: 4em;
text-align: center;
}
#TOC li {
list-style: none;
}
#TOC ul {
padding-left: 1.3em;
}
#TOC > ul {
padding-left: 0;
}
#TOC a:not(:hover) {
text-decoration: none;
}
code{white-space: pre-wrap;}
span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;}
span.underline{text-decoration: underline;}
div.column{display: inline-block; vertical-align: top; width: 50%;}
div.hanging-indent{margin-left: 1.5em; text-indent: -1.5em;}
ul.task-list{list-style: none;}
.display.math{display: block; text-align: center; margin: 0.5rem auto;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<p>But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era
in history, including the Garden of Eden, <strong>everybody just got
here</strong>. 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.</p>
-- <em>Kurt Vonnegut, from A man without a country, emphasis my own</em>
</center>
<p>Since you are on this page, you're presumably lost. That's
<em>ok</em>. I don't really get all this stuff either. Let's start with
some easy stuff.</p>
<p><em>You're on the Internet</em>. Known to some as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes">series of
tubes</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img src="/static/human_router.jpg"/></p>
<p><em>Image of a switchboard courtesy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jersey_Telecom_switchboard_and_operator.jpg">Wikipedia
contributors</a></em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I'm getting lost on your question though, so where are we
exactly?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<em>network</em>. 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 it at the
time, used to be filled with places like this. "Homepages" were a thing,
or were just starting to be at least.</p>
<p>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. 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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing">Astroturfing</a> 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.</p>
<p>Who would really write all that garbage on Facebook anyway?</p>
<p>Don't mistake this for some pity nostalgia piece though. If you look
hard enough--I promise you--that <em>Internet</em> of humans is still
there. Here's a few places I like to poke around:</p>
<p>https://neocities.org/</p>
<p>https://1mb.club/</p>
<p>https://goodsites.tech/</p>
<p>and old <a href="https://archive.md/rav1z">not-so</a> faithful:</p>
<p>https://www.wikipedia.org/</p>
<p>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?</p>
</body>
</html>
|
