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Pre launch of the real site- storing future content in drafts.html
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bsnyder2 committed Feb 19, 2024
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Ben Snyder is a
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/index.css" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>The bsnydernet in 2024</h1>
<!-- Spinning globe gif -->

<p>Here are the core principles and goals for the bsnydernet.</p>
<ul>
<li>
Be a repository of software/tech art, history, theory, and silly things
that exist for the sake of enjoyment.
</li>
<li>
Show you how joy-producing, empowering, and praxisful it is to reclaim
your digital agency in a time where we perceive our interactions with
technology as empty.
</li>
<li>
Recapture the soul of the creative, scrappy, non-homogenized, and
non-corporatized internet; reconceive of software as an animistic
object.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
Big things coming! In the meantime enjoy the clip of the week and the song
of the week.
</p>
<p>
See you soon, Ben
<br />
<a href="mailto:ben@bsnyder.net">ben@bsnyder.net</a>
</p>
<div id="clipoftheweek">
<p>Clip of the Week</p>
<video width="460" height="258" controls>
<source
src="/assets/video/cheetah-meowing-U2ff0XyVPJE.mp4"
type="video/mp4"
/>
</video>
</div>
<div id="message">
<img src="/assets/img/construction.gif" />
<p><i>Under construction ...</i></p>
</div>
<div id="firstsection">
<div id="crtwrapper">
<div id="crtbox"></div>
<img src="/assets/img/crt.jpg" />
</div>
<div id="links">
<p class="projectlink">
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</div>
</div>
<br clear="all" />
<div id="clipoftheweek">
<p>Clip of the Week</p>
<video width="460" height="258" controls>
<source
src="/assets/video/cheetah-meowing-U2ff0XyVPJE.mp4"
type="video/mp4"
/>
</video>
</div>
<p class="works-cited">
WEBSITE NOTES<br />
WORKS CITED<br />
The CRT image is from Craiglist by an unnamed seller, download the page
<a>here</a>.<br />
The cheetah video is by YouTube user Kel88, see the video
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2ff0XyVPJE" target="_blank"
>here</a
>.
</p>
<p>
All of this is open source of course. Inspect element and see how I did
the hexagons!
<br />
I think this is all navigable via screen reader, but if it's not lmk and
I'll fix it. Web accessibility is a priority and overuse of JavaScript is
lame.<br />
This is the stuff I've picked up being engaged in tech for the last few
years. Final note and manifesto: making a personal webpage from scratch is
really fun and empowering, and I think anyone can do it. I strongly
believe that anyone can learn programming, and it makes me sad how the
world views it as limited to some intellectual elite and largely
uncreative. The tools are pretty easy to pick up, and making your own
vanilla site especially inspires much more love and joy than website
builders like Squarespace or heavy frameworks like React. Email me if you
want any advice on setting up your own page!
<br />
Resources. HTML/CSS, Python Game development.
<a href="https://www.pygame.org/docs/" target="_blank">Pygame</a> and
<a href="https://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/tutorials/" target="_blank"
>SDL2</a
>.
<br />
Some things that have brought me joy and peace of mind recently
<br />
The world itself
<br />
Healthy habits
<br />
Art (creating)
<br />
Art (experiencing)
<br />
THE MANIFESTO
<br />
I realized that many days, I was spending 23 hours connected to a
computer. Wake up with my alarm set on my iPhone, check my email during
breakfast. Go to my classes where I take notes on Google Docs (I use
pencil and paper or
<a href="https://www.vim.org/">Vim</a> now), half of which are about
computer science. Do my homework which is writing words on Google Docs,
coding, or using some proprietary software. Make this website. Browse
Wikipedia, watch YouTube, scroll through Instagram Reels. Watch TV and
play video games. Record my music into a DAW. Bring my phone on a run and
listen to music. Human interaction is often via text, Instagram DM, or
Discord, and if in person it often centers around video games or TV.
<br />
It is not conspiratorial to say that the people who control our world have
technofascism as their goal. (<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025"
>That is not to imply their methods are not overtly, classically fascist
as well.</a
>) Capitalists want us all to gradually bury our lives in the technologies
they have authoritarian control over, in order to distract us from the
global progression of fascism they condone and support; and eventually
take away all those digital, bread-and-circuses ways of life on their whim
when we have no longer have the ability to function without them.
<br />
Even taking these small steps, making these small changes to take back
your technological independence, is incredibly rewarding, praxisful, and
human.
<br />
ANYWAY,
<br />
Tech is NOT inherently capitalist alienation and YOU can make the
landscape better with your good intentions and creativity. My goal is to
show how I have been working to reclaim my life in this digitals world,
and how you can too. 1. try to not use computers as much as possible. If
you find that some interaction isn't bringing you joy and (i.e. social
media), consider finding an alternative. 2. When you would get something
out of technology, fight to make the experience exactly what you want it
to be, and supplementative rather than replacive. You can find ways to
limit the time you spend with any technology, and live your digital life
without relying on big tech- there are ways to do basically anything
without buying into it. And enjoy it! Make your own websites. Make art.
Explore the intersection of nature and technology. Contribute to
open-source projects. Use free and
<a href="https://www.libreoffice.org/" target="_blank">open-source</a>
<a href="https://www.mozilla.org/" target="_blank">software</a>. Eschew
the cloud and store your photos on external hard drives. Learn to
troubleshoot and repair your own devices. Degoogle. Learn to use a
terminal and love filesystems.
<a href="https://thenewoil.org/" target="_blank">Unsurveil yourself. </a
>Enjoy
<a href="https://www.newgrounds.com/" target="_blank">Newgrounds</a>
and the
<a href="https://www.demoscene.info/" target="_blank">demoscene</a>. Play
Flash games and relive your childhood. Learn how CPUs work. The world is
tech, and drawing and creating joy from it and being conscious of your
interactions is increasingly punk and what the world desperately needs.
Tech is inherently dangerous, the world is already a science fiction
dystopia, and we should be terrified. You can try to ignore it, but that's
just going to keep getting harder, so understanding the state of it is the
way to really protect yourself. But tech is also a source of art, culture,
and joy, and we need to treat it like that too.
<br />
Under all these capitalist layers of abstraction, computers are pretty
cool, and you can still peel those back if you learn about them
<br />
Socializing Getting off social media I would really like to think that we
can revert back to a world without social media, as we managed to survive
with for a long time. What I think people forget is that before the
mid-2010s, the internet was a fun, supplementative way to interact with
people you never would be able to in real life, and share your passions
and interests and engage with others who felt the same, rather than an
alienating replacement for socializing in person. The death of the forum,
followed by the death of the MySpace page, followed by the monopolization,
homogenization, sanitization, commercialization, and enshittification of
social media has eroded our ability to perform and conceive of digital
self-expression. I get inspiration from looking back at the things people
created in the past, and seeing how I can reconceptualize their ideas
toward what I want to create. One of my solutions, which I have been able
to enact with my
<a>Luxury of Time</a>, has been to make my own website which I have
complete control over in its content, presentation, and identity - to me,
it sufficiently feels like an <a>Object with a Soul</a>.
<br />
A lot of people think the solution is decentralized social networks like
Mastodon, which from what I can tell sort of solves the problem of control
by big tech (though maybe not for long), but not the alienation and
soullnessness of digital expression as we understand it. We need to
completely reconceive of what digital expression can provide by;
Abstraction and speed as capitalism, and the art of doing things as
inefficiently as possible
<br />
<br />
Self imposed limitations, on the Atari 2600 they had 4 kilobytes of space
to make a video game, and people made some incredibly awesome stuff. (for
reference, this essay is X kilobytes)
<br />
I am paying one company (<a href="https://porkbun.com/">Porkbun</a>) to
assure everyone that bsnyder.net should go to my website, and storing my
files on another company (<a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>)'s
servers so I don't have to need to have my computer on all the time. But
all of that is just for convenience: if I wanted to, I could just host the
website directly from my computer and tell everyone my IP address.
<br />

Molleindustria<br />
Nicky Case
<br />
The Luxury of Time and Financial Stability The only reason I am able to
write is because I have the luxury of time to think about it
<br />

It is in the interest of the capitalist elite to erode our attention spans
so we ignore the deteriorating physical world. If you have the time, go
for a walk and don't listen to music. It is in the interest of the
capitalist elite to commodify the experience of natural world and
spirituality/"mindfulness"- as we increasingly engage with it as an
activity and an aesthetic, equivalent to watching a TV show and captured
through digital reproductions, than the basis of our existence. o not
connect with the souls of . went and watched clouds in the beautiful Ohio
sky for half an hour the other day. It's interesting to consider how
industrial society is really an anomaly: before the last 200 years, I read
some thing about how industrial society is an anomaly and really has no
basis in what humans are.
<br />
I realized that I can just ask people to go on walks and they like doing
that. It enables so much more real conversation and connection than
<br />
methods of value extraction under feudalism/capitalism have been improved,
<br />
Not Being a Luddite, an Anarcho-Primitivist, or Ted Kaczynski. The
progression of technology continues to augment inequality and alienation,
and in many ways erode quality of life. But that's because it is a tool of
the feudalist/capitalist system, not because it is inherently bad;
demonizing it, rather than the forces that shape it to be an instrument of
injustice, is fighting the wrong enemy. We can hear someone's voice and
thoughts from halfway around the world, we have more mediums of
experiencing art and creativity than ever before, and no one has smallpox.
The surplus value we already have from production is enough to prevent
humans from having to do any work if spread fairly, and we have the
progression of technology to thank for that. It's really easy to take for
granted all the things that make our lives easier in inequivocally good
ways.
<br />
It's a double-edged sword, since once technology makes it easier to do
something, it must be done that way from now on for the profit motive,
even if it brings less Objects with Souls to the world. It's also
increasingly difficult to be mindful when we have access to so many forms
of stimulation and entertainment- we are not limited to a single
experience that requires us to be fully present and engaged.
<br />
Limitation and spiritual awareness in and technology.
<br />
Coming up with new words for things if I don't like the connotations. I
realized that the terms "making" and "mindfulness" feel poisoned by
commodification for me, so I am going to say "creating" and "spiritual
awareness" instead now.
<br />
What we can control is the ideals we are about and our interactions with
the world. Real change comes from the common perception of how we want to
live our lives. Being radical in your mundane interactions with the world
and the people around you brings empowerment
<br />
ASMR and spirituality
<br />
Contact: <a href="mailto:ben@bsnyder.net">ben@bsnyder.net</a>
<br />
Have a nice day, Ben
<br />
The main points:
<br />
Get an ad blocker (uBlock Origin). It's free and takes one minute to
install, and you will be saving hours of your life and a significant
amount of your sanity.
<br />
Bypass paywalls to news sites. 12ft.io
<br />
Degoogle yourself as much as you can. Use Firefox and DuckDuckGo, and
Apple Calendars if you have an iPhone. Google unfortunately has a
stranglehold on cloud storage and email
<br />
Animism is so in: appreciating the material souls of a wasteful society
</p>
<p>Animism is so in</p>
<script src="/js/index.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

<!-- Blog about de teching -->

<!-- USE a11y CHECKLIST and also talk about web accessibility in manifesto -->

<!-- Don't want to do minimalistic design, so maybe do the crt? Get a real photo and alter it, not a stock image -->

<!-- SONG OF THE WEEK (archive) (mp3 player bar) -->
<!-- Jewel intuition -->
<!-- CLIP OF THE WEEK (archive) -->

<!-- Visitor counter! -->

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