How to Take Down Big Tech

Why you need your own link directory, and how to make one

This post is about three years in the making. In 2022, around the time Elon Musk bought Twitter and everyone freaked out, I first posted here about eschewing Big Tech social platforms and flirting with what people call ‘The Small Web.’ My take had almost nothing to do with individual politics - I said Jack Dorsey was just as bad as Musk and that the attention economy had been anti-human from its inception. I generally believe that concerned leftists need to wake up to the larger issues and start

1. getting to grips with the fact that Big Tech social platforms will only ever get more addictive. IE. TikTok’s execs will not be satisfied until everyone is using TikTok, all the time, at the expense of everything else. Every bit of its design is geared towards this goal. It’s the same for Meta platforms (see the copycat Instagram Reels) and for Twitter and even for LinkedIn, which inexplicably now has a short-video tab.

2. ‘finding community’ (etc.) on websites with respectful design schema and different profit motives - not depending on huge corporate apps for a sense of belonging

3. disentangling the medium (the inhumane, profit-driven behaviour modification on social media) from the message (the incredibly diverse range of ‘users’ and ‘content’ those sites host); getting to grips with the difference between ‘big tech’ and ‘small tech.’

   1. Someone originally commented that TikTok wasn’t so bad because they had found out about crocheting from it. Which is like… yeah you could probably have done the same thing while looking through any second-hand bookshop and without having your attention span mined via a million other things…

4. building their own personal websites and forums, detached from Big Tech corporate interests (this is an existing movement, called (variously) The Alternative Web, the Yesterweb (an actual group of activists, now defunct), The Slow Web, Web 1.0 Revival, The Indie Web, The Old Web, Web0. See: these manifestos)

While this hasn’t quite happened at scale, I think the mainstream narrative has happily shifted from just ‘Musk = bad’ to a larger criticism of Big Tech platforms and their financial models. 2024 seems to have been The Year of Digital Reckonings. Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation went on sale at the start of the year and sparked a global press conversation that converted into real-world impact (see the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign group in the UK). Most people I know think they are too online; I keep seeing minor influencers come up with new and cool tactics to stop ‘doomscrolling,’ like making dopamine menus and starting journals. I have been scrolling less because I have a spreadsheet-based system that forces me to match every post I see with one minute of actual reading.

All of this is great for the individual. But it leads us to a new question: how can we wrest culture from the jaws of social media? Creatives (artists, writers, musicians etc.) arguably suffer most from the profit-based degradation of social platforms - for the past fifteen years, they’ve got the message that they need to keep up appearances to be ‘discoverable,’ which means they also tend to be among the first casualties of tech ‘enshittification:’¹

• Instagram gives artists an initial algorithmic boost so they invest more of their time and money into the platform, and then artificially throttles their reach to followers to encourage them to pay for advertising. This is bad for their self-esteem and also wastes time they could have spent improving their work. It is a net plus for Meta and a net minus for actual culture. (For this discussion, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here)

• Substack looked promising for writers until it recruited a self-sustaining network of users. Then it implemented exactly the same model as every other site, down to the like button, algorithmic feed and infinite scroll feature, even though at that point those features were known to have corrosive effects on mental health.²

We will eventually need to replace the algorithm with something - but what will it be, how can independent creators stand to benefit from it, and how can the average person contribute?

The answer (as above) is to orchestrate a mass migration from the ‘Big Web’ to the ‘Small Web.’ We should gradually stop making ‘content’ to feed infinite scroll systems and move instead to small, information-rich websites, which stand by themselves and are owned by the individual. We can then use these websites to make person-to-person culture recommendations as a stand-in for the old algorithmic system. If there is one thing that should be ‘normalised,’ it is the idea that everyone should have their own webpage, even if they have nothing to sell. I would like to get to the point where you can meet someone in the smoking area of a nightclub and bookmark each other’s web address instead of adding each other on Instagram.

This movement already exists (see here for more). The main issue with it is that it has failed to effectively replicate the network effect of mainstream social media. If a new social media app pops up, a load of journalists will probably spend ages monitoring it so they can write articles about breakout sensations - and if you’ve ever wanted to be a breakout sensation, all of this repeated press might convince you that your best chance is on TikTok or Instagram (etc). The breakout-sensation effect bleeds down until it affects those who are just going with the flow; eventually all the trends and updates will move towards those platforms, and ordinary people will fear missing out if they are not plugged in.

If the Small Web is ever to make a dent in Big Tech profits then it needs an informal press entourage a bit like the one that exists for TikTok (ie. journalists and bloggers patrolling for positive stories, constant name-dropping). People need to get the idea that they can go to the Small Web for things that don’t exist anywhere else, including information and a following, and that long-term investment in the Small Web will pay off for them personally. The Small Web is actually disadvantaged here because it isn’t a walled garden. This generally also makes it more humane - nobody will try to put your tiny site behind a login wall to enrich someone else, or deboost your ‘content’ to control your behaviour. But it also means most people have no real incentive to invest time and money in building a network on the Small Web; they can simply look at things that get big and then go back to social media.

My idea: build a human-first recommendation network that only links to Small Websites. Maintain it until there are a few big ‘breakout’ stories (ie artists/musicians getting discovered entirely through Small Web networks). Once people hear about them, they will want to establish a presence on the Small Web so they can get positive benefits from this exclusive-ish recommendation system. Eventually it will seem as if you’ll miss out if you do not have a ‘Small Website.’

It will probably take a few years for this to take off (expect everything to work much more slowly than on legacy social media). But there’s lots of infrastructure already - you probably already go on Small Websites all the time, even if you have a Twitter addiction. Things you could put under this umbrella outside intentional ‘Indie Web’ circles include:

• the websites of magazines and newspapers, especially niche and independent ones

• portfolio websites for artists, writers, musicians, etc (already a plentiful and fruitful category of the ‘small web’)

• websites for small venues

• certain independent forums (generally self-hosted. Nothing with investors ie. Reddit)

• info-heavy websites made by academics or volunteers (also a plentiful and fruitful category)

• blogs (a HUGE category)

• online radio stations, sound and image archives

OK this sounds cool but how can you begin to contribute in a practical sense to the Small Web, as a normal person who sort of has interests and tastes but not in an institutionally-sanctioned ‘tastemaker’ way?

1. Change the way you interact with the Big Web

Self-help influencers who deal with ‘content addiction’ often talk about swapping ‘consumption’ for ‘creation.’ I think this is an unhelpful sentiment; all good artists are influenced by other people, and ‘creation’ requires time and discipline you will not always have.

I would like to propose a Middle Way:

You probably have a Twitter or Instagram timeline already. Instead of scrolling through it leisurely, do so with the mindset of a talent scout. How much of it is useful, unique, beautiful, and worth remembering? Keep an active list in your notes app of links to this stuff. Work out how many of the people making it have their own website. Have they been interviewed discussing other ‘happening’ things? Repeat ad infinitum.

You might be engaged in academia or focused personal projects. Is there any online resource that has particularly helped you, or that simply looks like it took a lot of work and deserves more traffic? Is there an open-source paper that should be widely-read and isn’t? You should also write that down.

2. Set up some sort of public home (‘small website’) for all of your links

I say ‘public’ in that the public should be able to access it. But it could be anonymous.

I’m using Neocities as a provider because it is free and gives me full control over the visuals and content (if the provider messes up I shall simply transfer the same code elsewhere, and it will look exactly the same). I also like that they make fun of the corrosive Big Tech investment model (the same thing that would ordinarily create ‘enshittification’). I don’t recommend Linktree or Carrd because those things do not apply - both are ‘walled gardens’ with big investors and full control over their users. There are more hosting resources listed here.

You will probably have to create a HTML document in order to make a dynamic list of links. All you really need to know for something like this is:

• bullet list

• embedding links

• basic text formatting

• paragraphs and breaks

You can use a separate list of CSS commands to customise colours and fonts.

I wanted to display my own links in expanding nested lists, so I used this tutorial and then deleted the custom graphics. (I am sure there is an easier way to do this).

3. Try to classify and describe the links

My current division technique

Here you become a sort of combination librarian-cartographer. A one-sentence synopsis of each link encourages discernment, both from you and from the viewer. (It’s also a more effective way to redirect traffic).

4. Link to other link directories

If it’s mine then you should let me know and I will link back!

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I recommend the entire soundtrack to Lucio Fulci’s Una sull’altra (1969; ‘One on Top of the Other’ or ‘Perversion Story’), which I write to probably about once a week. Thank you Riz Ortolani!!!! I’m halfway through a beautifully-restored English dub of the actual film - I passionately LOVE everything about gialli apart from the actual murders, usually a woman will be getting stabbed and I will go ‘OMG but look at that stylishly understated floor lamp.’

1. The social media execs don’t want you to know this, but it is a lot easier to ‘get discovered’ by people who are actually looking for you (and thus will also pay you more than a fleeting glance) if you start a blog/website about your work and include relevant keywords. Social media sites are quasi-walled gardens and very difficult to navigate unless you are actually inside. If you have ever tried to search Google for a specific Instagram post, X thread or TikTok video then you will know how poorly these sites are indexed!

2. I feel we are misinterpreting these technologies as neutral, to-be-expected-as-part-of-any-reasonable-website, etc. They are everywhere because they are very effective at modifying our behaviours for someone else’s financial gain. The inventor of the infinite scroll ‘deeply regrets’ it - the inventor of the ‘like’ button says it has had ‘unintended negative consequences.’ Substack is relatively OK because of its transferrable email list system (you absolutely cannot transfer Instagram or TikTok followers between platforms, that’s how they lock you in). But I am still incredulous at how it convinced up-and-coming writers to go back to social media marketing in the form of ‘Notes’ - this is what loads of people came here to avoid!