Technoelitism and the IndieWeb movement

While I was surfing some new IndieWeb sites the other day, I had a little bit of a mad-at-the-young-people moment of being upset that so much of the modern web experience is algorithmic schlock that people just accept. I was contemplating writing a tongue-in-cheek “kids these days don’t even know how to browse the internet” blog post (these do exist and I think they’re pointing out something valid that’s separate from what’s being discussed in this article), but I quickly realized that I didn’t want to do that.

I thought again about all of the self-written, curated and (often) beautifully-themed sites that I looked at tonight, and I was struck by how many of them were about computers. I had to remind myself why sites like Twitter/Youtube/Facebook/TikTok exist. They’re selling the idea that you can publish content easily and disseminate it to a broad audience without having the technical know-how to build your own website. We don’t really think about them in that way anymore, most people don’t ask themselves “would I like to make a Twitter profile or would I like to make my own website?” but that is fundamentally what is being offered. A little slice of content dissemination, just for you.

I don’t have super coherent thoughts around this, but I started to grow somewhat wary of my own feelings of technoelitism after making this realization. The IndieWeb movement is super cool, full of (generally) very cool people doing cool shit, but there’s a massive number of people who lack the knowledge (or inclination) to participate in it, even as an observer!

On one side of the coin, we have true self-publishing where people own their own content and are free to say what they want in whatever format they want. It comes with the large caveat that tooling either has a learning cost associated with it or has a monetary cost associated with it, or both. It also lowers the possible reach, at least in today’s world.

On the other side we have surrendering content to big tech. They provide convenient on-ramps for creating and disseminating content, as long as you’re publishing that content to their sites according to their rules, and allow them to control who sees your content and when. It’s not hard to understand why most people choose this. The rise of short-form video lowers the bar even further, you don’t even need to write in order to get your ideas in front of an audience on TikTok, you can just speak into a camera. This is a powerful lowering of the barrier to creation that has allowed a massive number of people to have voices heard that otherwise would not have been heard. This isn’t something that I see talked about too much in the IndieWeb movement, but it’s massive and it’s real. Not that there isn’t a massive amount of schlock on Youtube/Twitter/TikTok, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that there aren’t real insightful voices on most/all of the big tech platforms. Would these be people that could/would have personal websites or books in a different era? Maybe, maybe not.

In a similar vein, I have seen some people recently bringing up the issue of technoelitism in the Linux community. Ruben Schade wrote a Mastodon post pointing out the should-be-obvious fact that sometimes people need to run Windows and these people probably deserve more empathy than scorn, and was hounded to the point of requiring moderator action to delete offensive responses by Linux users. They were incensed by the idea that someone would use Windows for any reason, and from my outsider vantage point it almost feels… quaint? In 2024, faced with the reality of what “computing” is to ~99% of the population (using a web browser or a mobile app to access one of ten endless-scroll feeds) and the externalities of that, how is the hill you’re dying on “we absolutely need to bully Windows Desktop users for not being as smart/zero cool/elite as me for using GNU plus Linux.” These people appear to be on the wrong side of the wrong argument. We should be thinking about ways to help people get better use out of their technology, rather than yelling at them for taking (what seems like to them) their only options.

I believe that we should have better on-ramps to letting people control their own digital presence. It’s super easy to make a Twitter/Facebook/TikTok account because somebody gets a little bit richer every time a new account is created. There will never be this same kind of financial incentive for the IndieWeb, because if there were it wouldn’t be “indie” anymore. As a movement, we should think about making things that are actually easy for people to do, rather than superficially easy. There’s a massive amount of IndieWeb publishing tools that are targeted at developers (we can kinda roll with the punches when a tool isn’t all-the-way-there), but not quite so much for less-savvy users. Tools like omg.lol attempt to strike something of a balance, and I’m interested to see where that site goes (some people certainly love it). There are a lot of great personal websites and blogs out there today, separate from the fray of the addiction web. A lot of those are run by people who already work in technology to some extent, and it shapes the culture of the movement. One IndieWeb blogger coming from a non-technical background noted this issue in a May 2024 post (emphasis his).

IndieWeb is a social club for developers, and apparently, not for me.

IndieWeb, a standard for the smart ones. Its member exclusivity works really well, as it prevents people like me from joining. It’s a coding test for the privileged. If you can solve it, like the Three Body Problem, you’re one of the cool kids—just like the Oxford Five. You’re deemed worthy to fight against the Big Tech, for us. It’s up to you, yes, you, to decide how the future of the web can be shaped. It must feel good to be an elite.

He posted an update on this post a few days later, recanting his complaints and blaming them on a bad day, but I think it’s touching on something very real that the community shouldn’t be overlooked. His site has quite a lovely design incidentally, he built everything himself with HTML after designing in Figma. If the person that willed himself to make this site is feeling this way about the community, I shudder to think what someone approaching IndieWeb with less ambitions would come to think.

A lot of people in the IndieWeb movement harken back to the days of the early web, when the mountains of personal websites of dedicated nerds were most of the content available on the web at the time. Wariness about nostalgia aside, something often lost in these conversations is that a lot of those personal websites were about personal interests other than computing/the web/blogging. They were about people’s fandom obsessions, recipes (and they didn’t precede those recipes with 500-word stories about the style in which the author’s mother used to boil water), birdwatching, anything! As social media became more pervasive, these are the people that left the personal webpage game and moved their publishing into the walled gardens of big tech. I think these are the people that the IndieWeb movement should be courting.

For those in the IndieWeb community, think about ways that we can make it easier for non-technical people to get involved in the movement. Are there authoring tools that we could build to make our circles bigger? Think about how the content you publish and consume centers or does not center technical people, and what you might want to do about that. If it does center technical people, maybe seek out some non-technical IndieWeb sites, if you follow several non-technical people already, maybe write about what those cool people are doing! And for the love of god people, write about something other than computers (yes I know I write about computers).