Weaponising the Non-Commercial Web
A carefully orchestrated non-commercial Web could cause the tech industry giants an excruciating headache. But are small web publishers ready to start a revolution that exploits Big Brother's morbid fear: immutable technology?...
We don't need to build new browsers or operating systems. Old browsers and operating systems already exist, and present little threat as instruments of subjugation or surveillance. And we know they can serve perfectly well as a means of web-access, because we literally watched them do so in the past.
In 2022 I wrote a piece about Geminispace - a web-like protocol that presented itself as a fresh take on building a dedicated, non-commercial "indieweb". I was sceptical of the idea at the time, but have since become much more firmly opposed to it, with the realisation that it's probably just another of Google's many attempts to hijack public opposition and shepherd activity into an inert backwater.
Here was a Web-like protocol put forth by an anonymous developer who mysteriously vanished off the face of the Earth. How odd. The mouthpiecing was traceable to Silicon Valley. Yawn. And most tellingly of all, this supposedly independent initiative inexplicably assuaged Google's obsessive hankering for wall-to-wall HTTPS encryption. A pointless waste of computing resources for the public content pages that Gemini(space) was designed to create. But a very pressing desire for Google, whose HTTPS Everywhere drive cut the ISPs out of the on-site data market and gave the Mountain View Monolith a lucrative monopoly. Simultaneously, Google gains other key benefits from wall to wall encryption - such as a gatekeeping mechanism, and crucially, the sweeping power to kill off old browsers and operating systems simply by changing the encryption standard.
Gemini(space)'s mandatory HTTPS only made sense from Google's angle.
Having failed to make waves, Gemini then appeared to donate its name for frontline use with Google's rebranded rival to ChatGPT. Given Google's long track-record of stooging out fake revolutionism whilst hiding under the seats, the likelihood of Gemini/Geminispace having been a real independent effort is, I think we can now conclude, nil. Genuinely independent efforts never attain any visibility at all these days. It's probably fair to say that if something grassrootsy and esoteric drops in front of your eyes without you actively looking for it, it's just Google trying to play the indie card again.
If any sizeable departure from the stranglehold of "certificate authority" fascism were to spark in the small web underground, we would immediately witness a revival of old browsers and old operating systems, as decades-old hardware returned to frontline use on the WWW.
And the more you think about Gemini(space), the more obvious it seems that Google was indeed pulling the strings. The protocol's primary chant was "simplicity". Like "Hey look, this great new thing lets you make website-like projects whose page coding is incredibly simple." But this just regurgitates a sleight of hand for which Google has become underground-famous. It purports to solve a problem we don't have. We can already make Web pages with simple code. Virtually all Web pages were made that way in the 1990s.
The narrative that we need a shrouded tech-Houdini to reinvent something that already exists, when the original is more flexible, better supported and more rigorously proven than the reinvention, simply doesn't add up. So...
I believe that Gemini(space) was an almost delusionally hopeful Google bid to take the small web off the WWW altogether and compartmentalise it in its own little container, where it could not interfere with or threaten the violent charge of surveillance capitalism.
We need to exert resistance in the thick of the surveillance drive. Not in a little corner no one cares about.
THREATENING THE SURVEILLANCE MACHINE FOR REAL
We're so brainwashed by the notion that there has to be a new version of everything. There doesn't have to be a new version of anything that has proved itself capable of doing the job in the past. Return to using old versions and you cause mountainous problems for the surveillance industry, because the surveillance machine's reliance on a continuous stream of updates, as a muckspreader for its latest stalkerware regimes, instantly falls flat.
Let's hop, for a moment, into a Tardis and cast a quick glance across the once hallowed ramparts of Windows 95. Not much threat to our privacy there. The OS itself wasn't even designed to go on the Web. And it's small. Simple. In its original form it was a complete operating system with an installation size of fifty-odd megabytes. But it's completely unusable online today, right? Wrong.
It's the modern Web that's become unusable. Not 1990s operating systems - or indeed their period browsers. If site owners were to build and serve Web pages the way they were built and served in the late 1990s, Windows 95 would be just as capable now as it was in its day.
HTTPS encryption, and its deliberate backward-incompatibility, is singularly preventing 1990s webtech from accessing current websites. Without it, any old browser could access any current HTML-structured page.
Most interestingly, using an archetypal 'nineties browser - like Internet Explorer 3, which came as standard with the second release of Windows 95 - is in some ways akin to using a Gemini browser like Lagrange. In both cases:
- Any site admin catering for the browser must restrict themselves to simple page coding.
- There's no compatibility with the commercial Web.
- Conventional modern spyware suites such as Google Analytics and Hotjar do not work.
But there are also some key differences:
- Lagrange mandates HTTPS encryption (through TLS); IE3 allows either HTTPS (using SSL) or plain HTTP. This makes IE3 more suitable for a non-commercial environment, where no money or secret data is changing hands, and virtually every website is a straightforward public park. In that type of situation, there isn't anything for encryption to protect. All it does is allow surveillance-lords to gatekeep the landscape.
- As an HTML-based browser, IE3 offers vastly more potential for in-page creativity than the crippled, markdown-driven Lagrange.
- IE3 comes with an operating system we already know was not designed for surveillance. Windows 95 does not 'phone home', does not force updates, and even if a tech giant full-on breaks into it and wipes your drive (which is not a behaviour you can rule out from cyber-vandals like Google and Microsoft), you can just re-install the OS. That's the beauty of old-skool boxware. Doesn't matter what the preds try to destroy, you can just get the CD back out of the box and restore the original default.
Of course, the latter is something the tech giants know only too well, and morbidly fear. Said giants thrive on having the power to confiscate. But unless they literally send a gang round to burgle your home, they can never confiscate your 1990s operating systems.
So if society cottons onto the reality that all old, pre-surveillance tech is still usable and completely viable for non-commercial browsing, and the non-commercial Web re-asserts plain HTTP connections, the floodgates could open, and a new-age free Internet could once again emerge. I mean, it's not like the small web has anything to lose in disobeying Google's SEO directive of "ENCRYPT THY WEB PAGES OR SINK INTO THE REALM OF THE INVISIBLE!" Small web publishers are universally invisible on Google already.
Alone, Google's discovery that you are not a capitalist publisher destroys your search visibility. Until a few weeks ago, my Popzazzle blog had been getting a consistent volume of search referrals from Google. Then one of its posts hit big on Hacker News and began doing the rounds in the small web and privacy chat resources. Search referrals instantly crashed, and they've now stabilised at about half of what they were before.
None of my other Blogspot blogs were affected, and beyond the HN exposure, nothing else has happened with Popzazzle. I haven't touched the blog since 2023. So much for popularity signals improving search status. They evidently do the opposite when the applause is not coming from capitalists. Hey private enterprise, if you wanna sabotage a competitor's search ranking, just share all their posts on Hacker News!
So I think publishers will soon start joining the dots and tentatively re-establishing unencrypted connections. And outside of phone networks, a progressive reversion to plain HTTP is the single biggest realistic threat to Google's powerbase. The open Web that Google and chums have spent the past two decades bricking has not died. If any sizeable departure from the stranglehold of "certificate authority" fascism were to spark in the small web underground, we would immediately witness a revival of old browsers and old operating systems, as decades-old hardware returned to frontline use on the WWW.
KNOCK ONS
But is this really a problem for surveillance capitalism? I mean, your utility providers and your bank are not gonna ditch HTTPS, are they? And neither would you want them to.
That's true. But the commercial Web is at a crossroads as "AI" steadily eats away at its search engine visitor referrals. It too will soon be approaching the nothing-to-lose territory that small web publishers now occupy. Once the army of content-marketing operations begin to realise that there's no longer anything to be gained from obeying Google, they're going to chase another bandwagon. They'll head for the buzz. They always head for the buzz.
If a significant number of people are switching back to old operating systems and browsers that can only access unencrypted pages, capitalists are at the least going to put plain HTTP connections back onto the menu. That would change the game.
At that point, the surveillance industry really does have a problem. In pre-surveillance-age tech, the public have an escape route which is extremely difficult for the chasing monster to block. There's phenomenal power in the immutability of old software. A power that Big Brother can only fight with an artificial construct like HTTPS Everywhere and the mountain of brainwashing and straightforward blackmail that went with it.
HTTPS Everywhere was never about our privacy. True, with HTTPS Everywhere the ISPs can no longer mine your individual page views and stream the info off to the authorities. But if you think Google isn't selling that exact same data to the exact same authorities, you are beyond naive. Why d'you think Google blew bank vaults of cash shilling wall to wall encryption through its network of propagandists and accomplices, and even gave away the spectacularly expensive Let's Encrypt as a free service?
Because HTTPS Everywhere was really about control, and money. For Google.
We still have the power to take that control and money away. We're just too brainwashed by the propaganda machine to realise it.