Gentrified Web on Chrizzle23.net

The Art Of The Clunk

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my opinion, the difference between a novice and an expert is that an expert has broken it before.

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

My self-hosting and homelab experience is slowly shifting from installing and configuring servers to writing my own configs and scripts to build DIY “infrastructure”. I use the term lightly because right now it’s [not well] managed chaos. It works most of the time. The workflow is: hack, crash, patch, repeat.

Digital Sovereignty of the Self

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a followup to my rant about the Nerd Reich

One of the uses for this site is to catalog things. Sometimes that’s snippets of code or Linux commands, but sometimes I catalog my thoughts.

I have been thinking and talking about this general idea that the Internet as I knew it in the late 90s doesn’t really exist anymore. At first, I likened it to the gentrification of a neighborhood, whereby wealthy people, and the corporations that follow them, raise the prices in a neighborhood and displace the people who already live there. Then I learned about techno-feudalism which is the idea that a few giant tech firms (Google, Facebook, Twitter) control the entire digital landscape (the land) and we the users (the serfs) generate value by using these platforms:

Twitter Blocks Signal

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Twitter Blocks Signal

I am never going to stop calling it Twitter. I don’t care if the world forgets. I will not.

Today on Gentrified Web Weekly: Twitter is blocking links to Signal. Which is most likely to do with whistle-blowers and the “Titler Youth”.

Broligarchy

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Listening to this week’s “The Intercept Briefing” titled “The Broligarchy” fired up my Gentrified Web neurons again. I have been venting my political energy on another site, but Elon Musk buying his way into the presidency gets close to something that I started writing about here, but never quite captured: feeling like my history has been stolen.

The Techo-counterculture

I have worked in tech for almost 30 years. I spent a couple of years out west at a startup company, where I learned about silicon valley and the brutality of venture capital. Most of my career has been spent fixing broken shit for normal people that barely understand what computers are.

Selfhosting as Liberation

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:30:47 -0400

In my last writing about The Gentrified Web, I conjured the image of the Soviet AK-47 as a symbol for self hosting. The rifle is a symbol of revolution, but also of liberation. Yeah, I know the Soviet Union sucked. But authoritarianism aside, commodity hardware in the hands of ordinary people can make a difference in people’s lives. By using commodity hardware to free yourself from the gentrified web, you can also begin thinking about other ways to free yourself from other forms of corporate control.

More on the Gentrified Web

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:57:57 -0400

In my last writing about The Gentrified Web I spent too much time establishing that I am old. The writing sounded like I was saying that the web was better when it resembled New York City in a Charles Bronson film. I also didn’t write that much about why web gentrification is bad.

The thing about gentrification in the real world is that it displaces existing communities (often low income communities) in order to create financial opportunities for investors. On the web, sites like Google and Facebook stifle diverse voices and keep the flow of information under corporate control. It’s the digital version of those dystopian fictions where everyone lives in coffin-capsules, wears identical jumpsuits, and eats protein tablets instead of actual food.

The Gentrified Web

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was there Gandalf. I was there 30 years ago…

In the days before the original DotCom bubble, the Internet was lawless and free. Like the Wild Wild West. It was a haven for the kind of things that decent people shouldn’t be exposed to. I spent those days honing my nascent Unix skills by defacing white supremacy websites. As investment and profit found its way into the Wild Wild Web, it became civilized.