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I don’t know why we talk about walled gardens. That seems to imply something beautiful, something worth defending. It conjures images of beautifully maintained flowerbeds protected from the outside world. But that’s not what Facebook built, what Instagram built, what Twitter built. They built paved, unshaded, barren hellscapes, trapped us in them, and surrounded us with guard towers and razor wire, intended to keep us in, not protect us from anyone else. There's no "garden" here. The Internet used to be a connected web of message boards and personal websites. I’m talking 1995 to 2005, when being online meant owning your piece of the web, carving it out yourself, maintaining it, giving a damn about it. It was the age of truly sovereign digital identity and content, built on a direct connection between creators and audiences, who found and fell in love with each other on their terms. HTML was an almost democratizing force, giving a generation of people the tools they needed to stake their claim and plant their flag in the ground. The personal website was a statement of intent, a manifesto, a portfolio, a piece of digital architecture you could be damn proud of. And then something changed. Social networks came along with the seductive - and entirely bullshit - promise of “easier publishing.” Running a website is too hard, they told us (it’s not), it’s too expensive (it wasn’t), and finding an audience is impossible (never true). In the world they promised us, backed up by a credulous media that breathlessly and unquestioningly reported on their Fauxtopian visions, we could replace our websites with their tools and thrive. By abandoning our properties for Facebook pages and channels, we could tap into a global audience with the potential to become household names on a web that would connect every human being. It was a vision they had to sell us at any cost. Why? Because the venture capitalists who funded these platforms - Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk - needed a return, one way or another. The path to that return was forced centralization, bringing in every creator and user and eliminating any other channel or option. And once we’d bought into their platforms, they had to keep us hooked. How? Creating artificial barriers. Capturing our audience, convincing us there was no other way to reach them, and manipulating user behavior through dopamine mining and gambling techniques until they’d lose any motivation to leave and follow us anywhere else. SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals. And mobile-first design pushed users toward apps they could scroll through forever instead of websites that felt static, frozen almost, compared to the instant gratification of a news feed. And then came the algorithms. Algorithm-based distribution entirely, ruthlessly, and irrevocably replaced organic discovery, leaving us all scrabbling and scrambling for attention, changing ourselves and our behavior to appease an ever-changing codebase that few people - even few platform owners - understand. And through it all, ownership was quietly stripped away. We lost everything when we gave up our websites and gave in to the platforms. Our audiences became entirely controlled by intermediaries. Our monetization, too. RSS didn’t die, but it was quietly suppressed and forgotten. Direct distribution was the next casualty, as platforms and algorithms increasingly hide and punish the sharing of hyperlinks. And as much as I abhor the concept of the personal brand, I loathe it all the more now that it’s platform-dependent and entwined with the brands of billion-dollar social media extractors. This was always the plan. This was always what they wanted. This was the only way to justify the billions of dollars spent, their billions of dollars in paper valuations. Want evidence? Just look at the years of platform API restrictions, the devaluation of HTML skills (you can’t customize your channel, and damn you for a fool for trying), the marketing campaigns that targeted and obsessively seduced independent creators, and the VC dollars that helped to acquire, shut down or deprecate every other option creators had. And it worked. The tech giants grew and grew and grew. The creator economy platforms functioned as middlemen. Advertising networks consolidated power, and data harvesting gave the platforms total control. Look where it got us. All of us. Look where we landed. Look what we’re left with—no walled gardens. Just guard towers and searchlights and snarling dogs keeping us at bay. I’m not a doomer. I can see a way out of this. But honestly? It's up to you. You can choose not to be a part of a broken system. You can choose modern personal website frameworks, own your piece of the web through Ghost, and treat these social networks as channels you use instead of pretending they’re spaces you own. You can tap into direct monetization tech and build platform-independent audiences through email lists and decentralized social media. Or, if you're a reader, if you're just somebody who cares, you can actively look for the folks who are doing the work, and give them your attention and your time, instead of handing it to whoever the algorithm has served you today. Personal websites matter - now, more than ever - because we can see, clearly, with our own eyes, what happens when a handful of companies control and own the medium and the message. It gets silenced, suppressed, and subtly reshaped without us. We get caught up in echo chambers, divided from each other, and force-fed content at the lowest common denominator. And at the end of it all - we get Trump. We get Musk. We get Zuckerberg. We get a pipeline of content slop, pitched as free, costing us everything. I want a world where finding content is harder. Where it takes a little more work, and where we appreciate what we read, watch, and consume because it didn't come easily. I want a world where musicians don't have to tailor their music to the 5-second attention span of a million swiping doomscrollers and can instead rely on the support of an audience who care enough not to sleepwalk their way through the Internet. I want a world where not every writer is devoting their time - and their audience's time - to helping Substack justify its VC valuation through the homogenization of the Internet. I want a world where Elon Musk is broke. The rest of 'em, too. We can't keep pretending everything is okay. We can't keep pretending the world we have, without personal websites and autonomy and without having a Goddamn say, is an acceptable place for the Internet to end up. Because it's not.
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