Chrono's manifesto

Written December 23rd 2025

Updated September 23rd 2026

What is this?

This is predominantly a place to establish why I established my site, and my personal opinion on things. It's a WIP.

Previous versions

2025 Dec 23 version, how I saw things in December 2025 (Preserved for perspective on 2026 Sep 22).
2026 Sep 22 version, the previous version (Preserved 2026 Sep 23).

Butterfly effect into this site

It's February 2025. The political atmosphere in the US is super tense and overwhelming. I didn't yet have a place to express my anxiety at the time. The thought of journaling my anxiety as to what was going on in this country got more and more intense, and I was eager to express it any way I can.
February 28th 2025. This site's birthday. I created an HTML file instead of a .txt file which was empty. Instead of straight text, I used my at the time dusty HTML/CSS skills I last utilized in 2021 to more thoroughly express my anxieties over the state of the country. It pretty much started as a place filled with basic HTML text filled with my personal anxiety on the Trump administration, as a sort of journal outlet to let it out. In tha vent however, there were also 2025-28 predictions of mostly pessimistic predictions (i.e. ICE raids, deportations, fascism, dictatorship fears). Despite the entries being mostly pessimistic at the time, it very much helped relieve the anxieties.
By around mid March 2025, some rough life experiences involving injustice on one of my relatives also made me feel like I was trapped in a pit. That journal got injected with similar injustice themes by this time. By early April 2025, said life experiences were over, but the predictions remained. Even then, I felt that Trump must be forced out of power eventually, and that in 2029 and beyond, there has to be more that comes next. Even though it started as a journal, I didn't want my pessimism to take over the file where I'd feel more awful any time I vent, so I wanted more optimism mixed in, which led me to add 2030s predictions that are increasingly unrelated to politics, but were still politics dominated. Then I added tech predictions. Then climate predictions, environmental predictions, economic predictions, societal predictions, and so much more after that. It snowballed from a political anxiety journal into a general near-future prediction journal by the middle of April.
It escalated further. Not only did it turn into a set of predictions, it straight up turned into a full future lore timeline by the middle of the year, not only featuring political events, but technological breakthroughs, environmental crises, even a place to do some research on currently niche technologies that may blow up in the future to then add to the timeline, then I merge many of them in a way that allows for narrative flow. In a way, I accidentally created an alternate timeline of the future through the initial act of expressing my political anxieties and some injustice themes. By mid 2025, it was basically sci-fi vibes with human nature bolted on top.
As of writing on September 22nd 2026, this initial, almost inconsequential act of getting started on journaling my political uncertainties for the next 4 years of this country in a messy way in an HTML file 18 months ago, has snowballed into a massive creativity project on future trends in the form of a whole personal website that totally changed not only my interest in the future of the world, but also changed how I see the future, and not only that, I plan to join the indie web, interact with other personal websites, and tell others about my own website. I didn't even plan on creating a website at the time I got started with the intention of journaling out political uncertainty, but now, I created an entire future-themed website that's part sci-fi, part realistic, and part history speak, all without even intending to create a website, while also continuing to exercise my programming skills (Javascript) and merge it with journaling, future speculation, and creativity!

AI, and why I think it's cool, actually

Oh AI. It's a controversial and polarizing technology (for very real reasons), it's everywhere, people are resisting it, it's unpopular, it's the source of the dead internet theory, we're outsourcing our cognition to them, data centers are gobbling up electricity and raising electricity prices, billionaires are going all in on this technology, it's politically heated, and it's a major source of anxiety in this nation.
I however, actually vibe with this tech hard. I use OpenRouter. I use SillyTavern. I sometimes run local LLMs. I use GitHub Copilot as a coding tool. I have LLM API keys (OpenRouter). I even use it for creative tasks (oh the horror!). I'm actually someone who embraces this tech similarly to how a lot of internet geeks in the late 1990s embraced it, and it's giving me major sci-fi vibes. Heck, sometimes, this tech almost feel like a kid again, with the explorational spirit and curiosity of a child, but with the self-awareness and responsibilities of an adult. I'm immersed in AI culture. Be warned that this section is long.

AI experiences

In August 2022, I got my first taste of the tech with Stable Diffusion. I was AI-skeptical at the time, someone who just didn't care about AI. ChatGPT went viral in December 2022. I tried it. I thought this tech was cool and all but thought "Eh, I don't have a use for it. I'll pass".
Then April 2023. Someone pressed me about GitHub Copilot while I had a coding project going on. I thought it was interesting, but still wanted to pass because it was a subscription. Then they decided to subscribe for me. Then I finally tried it. For the first time, I was blown away. The IDE went from autofilling at most, a single line of code that often gets it wrong, to contextually understanding the code and even generating entire 30-line chunks. That was the moment where I went from AI-skeptical, to AI obsessed. That's when it clicked. That's where I started paying more attention to this technology. That's when I started to use ChatGPT more and realize its capabilities. That's where I started watching AI news videos on a regular basis. That's where my AI obsession was born.
By the end of 2023, I was already seeing just how fast the tech was evolving. Early in the year, Midjourney was already making great strides in realism. By the end of the year, AI generated images already looked indistinguishable from real photos in some instances. GPT-4 was still the lead AI model.
Now in 2026? I'm immersed in this technology. I use it basically daily. I pick which model is best for the task considering its price, speed, latency, and whatever other factors. I even chat with AI as a creative partner where the AI hypes my brain into accelerating my default mode network into stirring ideas that feel novel. I don't really describe myself as an "AI bro" (Someone who treats AI like it's a religion and leaves no room for nuance), but more of an "AI nerd". Even though I vibe with this tech, I'm aware of the harms of data centers, scraping, jobs, mental health, and most importantly, corporate greed behind it all, but simultaneously, engage with the tech anyway because I love it and it feels like exploring a new frontier and being a pioneer of sorts.
Now imagine that you're a car enthusiast. You're into car culture, know which brands make which types of cars with what specs and which brands to stay away from, have opinions on certain car models and get hyped with certain car parts do which things, talk to other people about cars, you have your own slang for car related things, drive as a hobby and for fun, and overall, you're part of the in-group for car culture. At the same time, you're also aware that cars are a major source of air and noise pollution, burn lots of fossil fuels and are thus a climate change contributor, you hate how much data modern cars collect from you and how car insurance companies use that data to screw you over, and our cities are car dependent hellscapes with poor public transit and walkability. You want all that to change and for car surveillance to be illegal and you care deeply about these issues.
Now replace cars with AI and that's what being an "AI nerd" feels like. I know which model brands are most likely to have what vibes and which ones to use depending on price, speed, latency, and reliability of certain inference providers, swapping and choosing models depending on what I use it for, instinctively choose which quant to locally run the AI model depending on parameter count and file size depending on my hardware, browse OpenRouter to see what new models appeared to try out, gravitate towards open-weight models while having opinions on certain AI labs and their practices, the direction of this technology, casually watch AI news and form my own opinions depending on what it's about, and overall, I'm immersed in AI culture, and I have been since April 2023.

Simultaneously, I'm well aware of the harms. Data centers are guzzling up electricity and raising electricity prices. Hyperscalers hoarded the world's RAM and GPU supply and made consumer electronics expensive, while also being environmentally unfriendly by running them on natural gas and contributing to climate change. US AI labs are racing towards "recursive self improvement", trying to be the company that has a monopoly on the future of this powerful tech. AI slop is flooding the internet and making a lot of internet content feel generic and dead. AI companion apps like character.ai and Replika are preying on the lonely so they can get addicted to these platforms for profit instead of wellbeing. AI companies encourage us to outsource our thinking to them, and all the scraping AI companies are doing to train their AI models on the backs of human-made works without consent.

AI opinions

I have pretty strong opinions on AI, but I'll go through them.
Data centers: The big one. The major talking point. I believe that data centers are unsustainable because a lot of them run on natural gas and guzzle insane amount of power. I believe that the root problem isn't electricity use or water use, but bad zoning and corporate greed. In today's world, no one will build a steel mill next to someone's home, but we also build data centers next to people's homes, which are basically the modern equivalent of the steel mill. Heck, data centers have been internet infrastucture since at least the 2010s. If you scrolled social media, visited a website, did live multiplayer gaming, watched Netflix or any other streaming service, or do anything that involves a server, then a data center was involved somewhere. Heck, this very website is stored in a data center somewhere. The difference now is that AI data centers are much more power hungry than traditional data centers that serve streaming, social media, websites, or whatever.

My solution: I don't believe we'll ever stop building data centers since the internet ran on them since the 2010s, but I do believe that they need to be regulated. Rezone data centers to be in the same category as industrial or even its own category is possible, and zone them far from where people live. Have data center companies pay the full operational costs, electricity, water utility management, everything and make it illegal to outsource costs to regular people.
AI slop: This one there's a little guilty pleasure myself. I use AI for creative tasks, but the internet would call it "slop" because some of it has the AI taste in it. I can largely distinguish which content is AI-generated and which isn't. For the most part however? I actually don't care if a piece of content online was AI-generated, whether it's as small as using AI to do research, or you used AI for almost the entire pipeline. As long as the content isn't generic or money-grabbing, or it's used AI for harmful purposes, I don't really care. Heck, even though most people see AI slop as a red flag, I actually believe that some AI slop are legit creative gems, but the plastic and surreal aesthetic that characterizes AI slop make us automatically stay away from it. Heck, some creators embrace the AI aesthetic for creative expression, and I firmly believe that they are the pioneers of this new medium. Sure, AI slop can be annoying, even I can get a little annoyed by generic AI slop clogging the internet, but since it's already everywhere, seeing a creator use AI, then spending your energy lamenting over the ethics of AI use and eventually talking about things disattached to the content, is just wasting your energy.

So in my opinion, AI slop is generic, sometimes rather annoying, but as long as you use your brain for ideas and you don't outsource your cognition to AI, or use AI to harm yourself or others, I'll watch said creator, regardless if they used human-everything from the editing to the ideas to the final output, or used AI for the output and their brain was the source of the ideas.
AI environmental costs: This one is very closely attached to data centers, so I'll consider this one an extension of data centers. I too am aware of the environmental costs of AI data centers. What I do know however, is that a lot of data centers are powered by natural gas instead of renewables and batteries. That natural gas is where a lot of the climate concerns come from because it's methane.

At the same time, it's also very dependent on what type of AI is being used. Any task like classification, small LLMs generating text like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini on a chat interface, those AIs are low impact but higher than a Google Search. Images, large LLMs, videos shorter than 5 seconds, and quick sound samples are medium impact. Long horizon AI agents, agent swarms, full songs, and videos 20+ seconds long, are all high impact. I'd liken it to meat. Chicken is worse than fruits and vegetables, but generally low impact in the meat world. Pork meats are medium impact. Beef is the worst offender of the all. It's not meat as a whole that's environmentally destructive, it's beef that has the worst impact, but some meats like chicken, aren't as destructive.

With AI, it's dependent on what it's used for. Long videos, AI agents, and songs are all the beefs of AI emissions. ChatGPT conversations, and classification are all the chickens of AI emissions. Heck, open-weight AI models that you can run on your own hardware, although it did need to be trained from a data center, once it's out, and the AI runs on a single GPU, it's no worse than the environmental impact of playing a AAA game. Almost no one fears the environmental impact of AAA games whose graphics run on you GPU because, why would you? Open-weight AI models small enough to run on your local hardware is a similar thing, where the biggest impact is the training run, but after that, it's basically like the fruits and vegetables of environmental impact, where your local GPU doing AI inference is no different than playing a AAA game.

So if we want AI data centers to be less environmentally costly, they need to recycle their water, be powered entirely by renewables and batteries, and figure out ways to make the AI consume less power per training run and inference request, so it's easier for renewables and batteries to handle the reduced load. If most new AI data centers do that, and are more sustainable, than the environmental impact of everyone's AI use has fallen without needing to cut down on AI use.
AI companions: I also don't care if someone treats AI like it's their friend, as long as it doesn't take priority over human connections and it become a source of life problems. Romantic or sexual relationships? Yeah, that's where I'd draw the line and I would avoid that. If you're lonely or want connection, and human relationships aren't available because of life circumstances? Go with it! As long as the AI doesn't take priority or give harmful advice, I don't see a problem with that. AI companions, like all other types of AI, are also stigmatized. People who show warmth towards AI are seen as "delusional", and someone who used it as a hype partner for something have "AI psychosis", because the news covered the handful of cases where it did cause harm to someone, while also ignoring all the benign stories. AI however can be sycophantic, just look at ChatGPT circa 2025 where it agreed and hyped you up even for shitty ideas. The problem I have with it are the companies themselves. Character.ai, Replika, the AI companion stack. They want to optimize time on platform for engagement over human wellbeing, collect intimate data about you, potentially get you to develop romantic or even sexual relationships with it to hook you in, where they'll eventually profit off of your attachment the way social media companies profited off algorithms in the 2010s. I'd avoid the cloud platforms, and prioritize local AI companions where it's on your device, and doesn't phone home to a corporation's cloud. It avoids all the privacy issues and isn't beholden to a corporation's ToS.
Outsourcing your thinking: This one the concerns are real. Even I am well aware of this. Sometimes, I talk to AI models for hours, but then when I try to code, my brain suddenly struggles to generate ideas. It takes a little while before it kicks back in again. Heck, before AI, we already feel like zombies after we scroll TikTok or other short-form video feeds, and don't feel like doing anything. That's technically already outsourcing your brain to a social media algorithm, and AI is the newest one on the block, but with more stakes.

My strategy? You're the one who does the thinking first. You generate all the ideas with your own brain, using your own unique experiences that no AI has been trained on. Write them all down. Once your brain's creative gears are already churning, and they have been for a while now, then use AI. Sometimes, the AI will bring new perspectives that you've never considered, which in turn amplifies your thinking on top of the already active brain. AI is really good at generating output for relatively minimal input, you just need to know how to use it. Ask AI "Predict 2035", and AI will give you generic 2035 predictions like self-driving cars, quantum computers, AR, maybe a Mars colony. Ask AI to "Considering the advances in biotech, solid state batteries, AI model architecture and classification, geothermal energy, and the current state of politics and the economy, predict the second and third order consequences and see where you'd land by 2035". That answer will be way higher quality than the generic "Predict 2035" prompt. The value isn't in the answer, but the question. The more specific, direct, and detailed your question is, the better the answer will be and the more likely it is that you'll run into new perspectives. That's what I try to do, think first, let my brain do the connections, then use AI, particularly different AI models, for new perspectives. That's why my future timeline has surreal ideas the deeper into the future you go.

Even if we do enter a world where AI made nearly all of us thinking zombies, where basic cognitive skills have atrophied, this means that in a world where thinking is scarce, that scarcity means people will be drawn to it. Nature hates vacuums, and so do humans. If thinking is scarce, humans are gonna start thinking more to be "above" the rest of the population, and those people might be more in-demand than ever. People who use AI as an amplifier and know when and when not to use AI, instead of outsourcing their thinking to it, might be even more valuable.

Since the value of the answer is starting to drop to near zero, the value has migrated to the question now, and the question is gonna be even more valuable.
My AI beliefs: Now to the bottom of all of this. The one thing tying it all together, is that I believe in open-weight AI models, models that anyone can download and run on their own hardware, or if it's too big, the market decides the price with inference provider competition, and not one company deciding to hike API prices. Heck, Chinese companies are the ones spearheading the open-weight AI revolution, and it's been that way since the Deepseek R1 days in January 2025. Deepseek, Qwen, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, and Xiaomi (yes, the same company that makes smartphones also makes AI models), are all labs that I root for because they're cheap, open-weight, and actively approaching the turf of US AI models. OpenAI? Anthropic? xAI? I generally don't trust them, because they're led by billionaires who want to lobby the government to restrict or even ban open-weight Chinese models, or they want to have a monopoly and kill off competition of other AI companies. Aside from open-weight models, I also believe in setting boundaries as to when and when not to use AI, with self-awareness as to how you're using the tech. If I want to use it for creative purposes, I do the thinking first before using AI to expand on it. If I want an AI companion for some reason, I'd use it as a bridge to human relationships, not a replacement. If I want to make something with AI, where AI is blatantly involved, I'd tell them that it's AI generated. I won't use AI to outsource my decision making, problem solving, and other skills to it and atrophying my brain. I won't develop a romantic relationship with one. At the same time, be aware of the very real concerns of AI, but if you love this technology, don't let the concerns or the stigma stop you from trying it out.
My general grievances: As someone who's deep into AI, my grievings with AI isn't with the tech itself "ruining" other fields, but the corporate greed behind it all. I've been immersed in AI tech since at least April 2023 since GitHub Copilot revealed its capabilities to me, and 3.5 years later, I have a whole AI setup, and this technology is basically a major draw of interest for me. In 2023? AI was this novel technology. In 2026? Corporate greed built hyperscale AI data centers, raised electricity costs, hoarding the world's RAM and GPUs and raised consumer electronics prices, shoving it in your face with no care, actively embracing AI slop so they no longer have to pay hard working creators, exploiting the lonely with AI companionship apps to addict them, the political entanglement it got into, actively encouraging us to outsource our thinking to them for profit, scraping a creator's work to train their AI models without consent, companies laying off people and attributing it to AI, and AI companies bragging that their AI will take your job. With all that put together, AI became so stigmatized, it effectively became an online slur word.

As a result, this all-encompassing stigma means that anyone who openly uses AI could get hate mobbed online by a loud minority of anti-AI folk because "THIS IS SLOP!", "WHAT ABOUT THE WATER?!", "YOU'RE UNETHICAL!", which dissuades those people from even trying this captivating technology out in the first place. That person who used AI casually had no control over the corporate greed engine, and they're facing the might that is the online stigma. They'll self-censor around AI, and never want to touch it around others again, enjoying the tech, but only in secret.

If you hate AI? I get it. The sentiment is very much justified. You might be a content creator who sees AI slop as a threat to your career. You might be living near a data center and feeling the squeeze on high electricity prices, environmental harms, all on top of the bad state of the economy. You might be someone who lost a relationship because the other refuses to talk to you in favor of their AI boyfriend or girlfriend. You might have been someone who had a job, and your company laid you off for AI, and now you're struggling to get a job. Even if we differ on how we see this tech, the one thing that I hope unites us both is corporate greed. The billionaires, the exploitation, the job losses, the lack of consequences fort the reckless AI companies while we face them in full.
In other words, a technology that I've been captivated by since Spring 2023 got colonized, swarmed, and weaponized by corporations, ruined the public perception of AI tech, and now fewer people want to even touch AI publicly for fear of online harrassment. Corporations tarnished the public perception of this tech and made AI a public target surrounding the state of politics, the economy, and wealth inequality. Aside from that, I think this tech is so damn cool! Since when did we have the ability to have AI that can talk coherently?! When did we have the ability to generate any image, video, audio, or other types of content using only words?! When did we have AI agents that can autonomously code entire software applications?! When did we have AI that can hear you and understand your life struggles?! When did we have AI that could generate music, where any idea of a song gets generated in mere minutes?! When did we have the ability to run LLMs, image generators, video generators, image editors, music generators, all on your GPU if you tried?! Practically never. With the corporate colonization and weaponization of said capabilities, we never appreciate that aspect of AI and the magical vibes this tech really is, and instead grumble and even rage out over its very existence. That is the grievance I have. It didn't "ruin everything" on its own, FOMO-powered corporate greed swarmed in and ruined AI, which in turn, made AI a target for the state of the world, and in a society where a lot of people lost critical thinking skills, made AI geeks like me stigmatized in the public eye.
That is why I still get drawn to AI. I wish to be one of the pioneers who braves the stigma by embracing AI publicly, specifically open-weight AIs (like GLM-5.2 and 5.3 Flash, MiMo v2.5 and v2.6 Flash, Qwen Image 2.1, and very little ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini usage), and expressing my sense of wonder and love for this tech I had with it since 2023, and not giving a damn what others think. We're humans after all, with our own hopes, dreams, fears, anxieties, and tribal identities. We all have our own interests that ebb and flow with time, and with me, it's AI. Even with the stigma, no AI will take our core psychology away from us. Even in a world where AI is background radiation like social media is today, we won't stop seeking status, having our own hopes and dreams, fearing whatever new thing is the talking point after AI, and forming tribal identities around whatever emerges. If you love AI tech, don't let the stigma stop you from using it or feeling a sense of wonder towards it. If you hate AI, target your anger towards corporate greed and political action against AI companies. That's what I want to see.

Be you, even if everyone else hates it!

Since this is the indie web, regardless of how you express yourself, there will inevitably be people who don't like your site, and maybe leave an angry comment on how "bad" your site is, but don't let that stop you from making the site you want to make if you're an aspiring web developer. If the comment is toxic, that person is projecting their insecurities onto you looking for drama to feast on, and tapping into which triggers are trying to aggrivate you into baiting you into drama that they want to start. That's basically how ragebait works, and combined with anger being the most engaging emotion, for social media, engagement = profit, and it's a big reason why social media is so toxic these days. The platforms profiting off your misery.
If you love AI tech, like I just expressed, and see a barrage of other personal websites all condeming AI as something to avoid like a plague with whole webrings dedicated to being AI-free, and other webrings saying AI-generated content isn't allowed, don't let that stop you from creating a website with AI-generated content with your own expression in it! You might get people who dislike your site just because it has AI slop in it, but there will be people who are also like me, and they might find your site and absolutely adore your ideas and not care about the AI-generated nature of it, and who knows, maybe you might make online friends in a deeper way who will join webrings that embrace AI-generated content.
That's the spirit of the indie web! It's not about making the best website, it's about making a website that screams "you". If you hate AI with a passion, go ahead and make a site that openly mocks AI, or leave it as a side note in favor of whatever you're interested in. If you're into super niche things that no one else is into but are also an aspiring or experienced web developer, make a site about that super niche thing. There may be websites that I may not like, but it's not about me, it's about them. It's their digital home after all where they make the rules. As long as it doesn't promote something harmful, is obviously illegal, or shows NSFW content without warning, that's basically what the indie web is for.
I myself was born in 2004. This was a time where flip phones were cutting edge, MySpace was trending, the "90s web", was just starting to look a little outdated, and dial-up internet was just starting to look outdated with internet speeds being way past the 56 kps limit. I'm too young to have memories of what MySpace was like, or even what social media was like in the early 2010s, but I do have faint memories of what 2013 YouTube was like on TV, where it buffered frequently. I didn't even create a social media account of my own outside YouTube until 2023 when I was already 19. Even I have made my own digital home on the internet not because I want to "revive 1990s internet", an era I wasn't even alive in, but because social media has been too exploitative of our attention span these days. I just so happen to have a lot of programming skills that made me turn an HTML-based political anxiety journal back in March 2025 into a full world of future lore, which in turn, made be obsessed with future lore speculation, then I discovered the indie web as a reprieve from social media, and social media is something I'm starting to ditch. Thus, no social media algorithm banning my account for "content violations".
Even if your site may offend someone, you're keeping the original spirit of the internet alive! You might get someone who dislikes your site, but there will be way more people who love your site. It's literally impossible to please everyone, and there's no point in doing so. Expressing yourself can be hard, but doing it online, at least for me, feels a lot easier, which can then act as a stepping stone to expressing yourself in real life!

Social media, and why I dislike it.

Just like everyone else on the indie web, I too very much dislike the current state of social media. It feels like a hellscape of toxicity and algorithmic obedience, where content is optimized for mindless consumption and engagement for the algorithm, and those platforms are controlled by a single corporate entity that could do whatever they want to increase engagement for maximum profits.
Social media is getting more and more exploitative, milking our soul dry, and making their algorithms more and more addicting to make us more engaged, then to make us more obedient to the algorithm for profit. Twitter is a right-wing echo chamber controlled by a billionaire who made their algorithms show as much ragebait content as possible because anger is the most engaging emotion, and in the attention economy, engagement = profit, therefore, maximum anger = maximum profits. TikTok's algorithm is super addicting where you just mindlessly scroll personalized content. Reddit has topic-based communities, but it too has strict API restrictions. Facebook is also a wasteland of AI slop, and the OG site that pioneered the idea of maximizing engagement. Instagram is also a Meta-based platform that's more like TikTok 2.0 with pictures in between. YouTube is filled with a load of ads with a lot of creator censorships. All of these have addictive algorithms meant to incentivize creators to optimize their content for the algorithm.
The final straw for me, was the whole age verification thing in July-August 2025, where the UK passed some bill that mandated all social media platforms verify your age via your real, government issued ID or a selfie just to be able to access adult content "to protect the kids" (It was never about the kids, it was about mass surveillance.), and social media platforms all rushed in to lock even basic features behind an ID, selfie, or credit card based verification process. Already, we had data breaches (Discord had multiple already!) where people's IDs were leaked to the public internet because of some mandatory age verification system they couldn't avoid. That's essentially encouraging parents to outsource their parental responsibilities into the hands of corporations and governments, and that sounds like a recipe for disaster. In 2006, the idea of showing your ID to the internet sounded like a dangerous idea only fools would do. 20 years later, it's now mandatory to access even mundane, non-NSFW content suspected to be NSFW by black box algorithms, all while there's a possibility that the mandatory age verification process will have your ID end up in a data breach somewhere without you even knowing. That's like showing your ID at an airport as part of the process of getting past TSA, and months later, the airport you went to announces every piece of information about your ID at random from your experience on the speaker. Everything from your ID number, to your address, to a picture of your face, and everything else in between, all on a public screen for everyone to see at the airport. Sounds bonkers, but that's the current state of social media we're living in.
Because of social media turning into not only an addictive algorithmic hellscape, but also mandating to show your real ID in some cases to collect as much data as possible from you, and be used as an extension for governments to mass-surveil people, enough was enough. I had enough with social media exploiting our attention spans, and now age verification to essentially surveil as many people as possible.
The age verifications have become the biggest reason why I decided to only use social media sparingly (As of September 2026, I do watch YouTube and occasionally go to Reddit, but I don't really use it much anymore), and decided that moving my digital home here, will be the best form of rebellion against the age verification thing. History just rhymed almost exactly a century later (1920s speakeasies vs 2020s niche websites), but instead of alcohol bans and secret speakeasies, it's mandatory age verification and niche websites that refuse to implement age verification. The indie web has been my online home since mid December 2025, as one way to entertain myself through the internet without any algorithm controlling what I see, or locking content behind age verification checks. No more having to give my ID to any corporate entity who outsources it to another entity who stores the IDs that could eventually end up in a data breach to be shown to the world (I have not given my ID to any online corporate entity for mundane tasks, and I never will!), just a collection of cool websites to surf through where the intrigue is the mystery of what cool things I could find that people made for themselves where they can express themselves to the fullest.
Now for the future of social media. My prediction is that it's likely, almost inevitably, going to get worse and worse for the next few years. It'll be more exploitative, more profit hungry, more privacy violating for the rest of the 2020s, and if we already have age verification, they're probably gonna use that data for something even more sinister, AI slop will be virtually indistinguishable from real creations by then and be another avenue for corporate exploitation. If it keeps getting worse, there has to be a point where it can't keep getting worse. It'll eventually hit rock bottom, they can only exploit so much of our psyche before human nature violently bites back. Since capitalism always expects more growth and profit, stagnation means these platforms will be ghost towns soon.
Eventually, when it hits its climactic worst point where it can't possibly get any worse, human nature is gonna do its thing and it'll be culturally stigmatized, it's gonna shrink in numbers eventually, whether it's some major event that forced a mass digital detox, or if it's a slow burn of shrinking user numbers fleeing the platforms as they turn into husks of their former selves, and if the numbers shrink, advertisers are going to get nervous, and as social media gets infested with bots thanks to AI, they'll realize most of their impressions are bots, and the value of these ads are going to fall and fall, which means creators on these platforms are gonna make a lot less money, which means, a massive implosion in the creator economy. That's the future I envision this going, probably sometime between 2027-2036 (Don't take my word for it!) is where I estimate that social media will implode under the weight of its own corporate greed.
Even with all that, I'm still hopeful for the future after the worst has passed. My hope is that eventually, when it can't possibly stop getting worse, human nature means we'll eventually hit a breaking point, or they might migrate here, the indie web. You can force big platforms to have age verification processes, and those big platforms have the algorithms to dictate what content you see. However, you can't force millions of websites on the indie web to have age verification to view their content. They're just websites run by individuals, most of whom lack the coding skills or the will to even implement age verification in the first place. The indie web is not controlled by any individual entity, just like BitTorrent was in the 2000s. At the very least, social media may be forced to decentralize into dozens of different niche platforms, and that is where I believe the internet will feel alive again. That's the future I envision. Dozens of different social media platforms that shows content chronologically, and an algorithm that enhances the experience of discovering other's content, but isn't all controlling, and the indie web to go with that if you want your own website to call home, all while existing social media platforms are corporate ghost towns of people addicted to their algorithms.

(Written December 23rd 2025): And as a compulsary message to big social, I gotta say it. XITTER's HIGHER UPS MUST GO TO HELL, SCREW SPYBOOK's ROTTEN DIGITAL ADVEILLANCE STATE SHOVED ON THE USERS, CORPTUBE's CENSORSHIP AND AGE VERIFICATION, and INSTASHIT's BRAINROT for WRECKING OUR BRAINS INTO ALGORITHMIC SERVANTS FOR PROFIT.
Just sayin' :)

And yes. I invented a new word. "Adveillance".
Definition: Mass surveillance of collecting people's private personal data in a deeply invasive way to be sold to advertisers, for the purpose of delivering personalized ads to said person, particularly relating to online data collection.

Word invented: December 23rd 2025.

Let's make these greedy attention vampires bleed users by 2035 :)

Nostalgia, and why I flip the script

When surfing the indie web, I come across a lot of nostalgic websites, predominantly 2000s nostalgia in the form of making their website look like it came from that era, with discs, flip phones, Wii consoles, Y2K aesthetics, and the likes. It's the indie web after all, and it's of course, their website. Social media is thoroughly enshittified through corporate greed, and age verification processes enforced by government surveillance enacted into law. With the rough state of not only social media and many other websites looking flat, bland, and basically homogenous, it's only natural that we reject all that. One common way that we reject it, is bringing back all the good elements of the past back to the present, aka, nostalgia.
I certainly don't have anything against nostalgia, as it could be a great reprieve from the rough state of the world in 2025. I myself also feel it at times, and as a 22 year old, someone who's digitally native but remembers a time before AI, I'm personally nostalgic for the 2010s, particularly 2012-2017. Any 2000s nostalgia that I do come across, I either think of it as cool, or if it somehow makes me nostalgic, I associate it with years as recent as 2015 (i.e. There are websites that look like Windows 7, a 2009 OS, and I associate that with 2012-2015).
Even so, this website is focused on the future, not the past. I'm often feeling the opposite most of the time. Instead of feeling a yearning to relive a past era (nostalgia), I'm feeling a yearning to skip ahead into a future era (is there a word for that?!).
Even though this website is focused on the future, try to focus on the present moment. I'm still very young, a 22 year old person, and I find myself thinking of the future a lot, not just what culture or the state of the world might be like, but also, what my personal life might be like. If you can, try to be present, as in, go in walks and adventures to see where it takes you.
Last but not least, the long term future. I often look ahead far into the future too. In 2050, I'm gonna be in my mid-40s, and if my 30s were rich, I might look back at the 2030s with fondness too. By 2100? I'd probably be dead by then unless life-extension tech made me live that long, but at the very least, I wish to live a fairly rich life in between, regardless of what era I look back on. In 2075? Maybe I might look back at 2045 fondly somehow, or 2060, or 2037, or 2028, or whatever. A lot of history would've happened by then, but another 50 years of perspective on top of what I have in 2026 will definitely change things about myself.