What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
-Carl SaganTools are an extension of body. Pen and paper was a set of tools that extended our mind and mouth. The invention of movable-type press magnified the effect of those pre-existing tools of writing. Different inventions not only started extended various capabilities of our organs, but they also started magnifying the effects of other tools.
Writing was the core extension of thought. Gutenberg’s press was an amplification of it. Internet was a super-amplification.
This was the idea of early-internet. A rich and instant connectivity across the whole human species. Imagine what human thoughts interacting at such a scale could produce. You bet it felt more than magic.
Things changed. Hedonist capitalism became the new religion. First, tools became a commodity for sale. A little later, humans too were on sale. Attention became the currency of internet, and whatever this extension-of-mind thing was, they took its photographs for use in their advertisements and then shoved it into the trash-can. Corporations became the new State.
The husk remained; the essence was lost.
I had always been an anemoic of the early days of internet when the term ‘monetization’ was unbeknownst to the internet folks. It was considered cool to make cool stuff and publish it for free. The internet was human-centric.
Whenever, I glimpsed a truly original and authentic content on the internet, I was wonderfully amazed. Slowly, spanning across various stumbles, I kept going down a rabbit-hole. There is this term called ‘surfing’ the internet. I kept surfing and going down and down the rabbit-hole. And then, boom!
That internet still exists. It is hidden from the average internet user because of the gatekeeping by internet Big Bros. Surfing the web is now highly discouraged. Retention is their metric, which means how much they prevent you from ‘surfing’ the web, from stumbling across something purely original. But this doesn’t mean that that internet does not exist. There are still thousands or more of purely personal websites, that run no ads, contain no-BS, and have no motive other than to exist peacefully as a harmless corner on the internet. They welcome a random internet surfer with their warm idiosyncratic design, show them around and then direct the surfer to another cool corner of the internet that they had visited sometime on their own ventures on the web. You see the difference? They do not gatekeep information to make the user artificially stay more time on their site, instead they actually tell you about more cool places to visit. And why won’t they? The fact that you are visiting their site, means that someone else linked their site from which you got there. So, you get this awesome community of awesome people who make websites with purpose no other than to do awesome work. Or if that’s too much awesomeness, think of it as extension of thought.
Most of our modern media is designed for masses. And it is a popular maxim in the internet-world that if you are making it for everyone, you are making it for no one. For content to be understandable for a very wide variety of audiences, mass media have to make sure that it is never specific-enough for anyone. That is their problem, they wish to please everybody, which is impossible. The corporatish blogs on the internet attempted to solve this problem by being niche. However, they instead started to please the search-engine algorithms that brought ‘traffic’ to their site. Besides, being too niche is also robotic, because a single human being can have a very wide variety of intellectual tastes. While, with the personal blogs or websites, people inherently don’t want to please anyone (because nothing’s monetized), rather their core objective is to connect with other human minds – to find interesting people with shared interests, who think about things they think about (not in a conformist sense, but in a broader sense of intellectual tastes). What drives these people into spending so much time building and maintaining something un-monetized is something these corporatish people will never understand, because this tasty food is foreign to their taste-buds.
Consciously or subconsciously, I built this blog as a homage to the fading memory of early-internet blogs that lived in some deep corner of my mind. Having made numerous, long and exciting visits down the rabbit-hole, I no longer need to hold on to that fading memory. Because when the person who you thought was dead stands alive in-front of you, why bother with the photograph?
Big Bang Blog is dead. Long live blogging!
This was the final post at Big Bang Blog. The domain bigbangblog.pk will expire in January 2025. Big Bang Blog will continue to exist on the Internet Archive. Thank you for reading!
