Category: Links

The Weird Web

In the vast desolation of the modern Web — now controlled entirely by billionaires, venture capitalists, and media conglomerates — there still exist a few noble souls who are keeping alive the spirit of the weird, creative, and human Web of the late nineties and early noughties.

No maps will lead you to the Old Web, but these hyperlinks might light your way:

  • Wiby – a search engine for the Old Web.
  • BoardReader – a search engine that only searches forum threads.
  • Million Short – a search engine that lets you exclude the world’s biggest websites from your search results.
  • HrefHunt – a curated collection of creative websites by real humans.
  • NeoCities – like GeoCities, but re-imagined for the modern era. Their sites directory is what you want to look at.
  • IndieWeb – a community of people building technology that lets you own everything you create, while also being able to participate in Big Tech’s social platforms.
  • 🕸💍 – an IndieWeb webring. You want to start by clicking on one of the websites in the directory.
  • IndieWeb.xyz – an IndieWeb aggregator.

I’m always looking to add to this list. If you know of a website that belongs here, please get in touch over email or twitter.

India is No Longer India

Aatish Taseer writes:

By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life—poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools their children went to set them at a great remove from India, on the levels of language, religion, and culture. Every feature of their life was designed, to quote Robert Byron on the English in India, to blunt their “natural interest in the country and sympathy with its people.” Their life was, culturally speaking, an adjunct to Western Europe and America; their values were a hybrid, in which India was served nominally while the West was reduced to a source of permissiveness and materialism. They thought they lived in a world where the “idea of India” reigned supreme—but all the while, the constituency for this idea was being steadily eroded. It was Bharat that was ascendant. India’s leaders today speak with contempt of the principles on which this young nation was founded. They look back instead to the timeless glories of the Hindu past. They scorn the “Khan Market gang”—a reference to a fashionable market near where I grew up that has become a metonym for the Indian elite. Hindu nationalists trace a direct line between the foreign occupiers who destroyed the Hindu past—first Muslims, then the British—and India’s Westernized elite (and India’s Muslims), whom they see as heirs to foreign occupation, still enjoying the privileges of plunder.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/exile-in-the-age-of-modi/609073/