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<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>
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<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 require workers spend their
time plugging cables into and out of ports so calls could connect.</p>
<p><img src="/static/media/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. But not my home router of course--that one sucks.</p>
<p>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.</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. 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.</p>
<p>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. And even I really
liked it for a while, but over time, it got fake. I got fake.</p>
<p>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. <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>In a way it's a reassuring: would real people 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 of humans</em> is still
there.</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>
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