Scared Stoked's Blog

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So why your own website? Why the "indie web"?

Putting aside my fixation growing up on computers, ESPECIALLY old tech (which I probably found an interest in back in 2017 or so when I was 12), I—and many others my age—are becoming increasingly frustrated with the spot in our lives that social media fills, and with that, the normalization of corporations, advertising, and tracking that has cozied itself up into our daily routine. Especially with the advancement of generative AI (I'm not knocking learning algorithms or artifical intelligence used in science or the like, AI like this definitely deserves to be a part of our society), SPECIFICALLY generative AI, I have never felt more encouraged to just leave. Art has—since birth—been an integral force in my life and plays a massive role within my identity, and to watch the normalization of the corruption of the fundamentals of humanity (the arts! what no other animal species can create and pass on to kin) just feels... perverse to me. And if given the choice to leave and take my browsing data and information with me (what social media CEOs are after), I see no reason to decline. Don't get me wrong; I have not left social media in its entirety. I am still Gen Z. I definitely have some kind of addiction to scrolling endlessly. But any effort to step away from the internet that the greedy corporate world has thrust upon us benefits me.

Few people that recognize the harm that generative AI (to be called G. AI for the remainder of this paragraph for brevity's sake). Expanding on the importance of the arts and how it links to being human, we have to look at what seperates us from other animals. People often say things like love and empathy make us different, when plenty of animals mate for life and can care for their young, or others in their pack. Art is what makes us human, and the few examples we have of animals doing art are purely due to human involvement. Humans are the only animals that will seek out creation for the sake of creation. And this urge to create is innate. How we paint and write is how, since the dawn of humans, we have processed emotions, retold stories, and passed on knowledge. Our ability draw something up from the heart or the brain and to send it off into the world is a borderline divine act, and to place G. AI on the same level of the wholly human act of creation is not only an insult to creatives, but is a perversion of what is, truly, a sacred act. To steal content and to feed it to an unthinking, uncaring, and unfeeling beast, to turn around and shovel up its shit and present it to the world as a valid piece of art, or to claim that you made it, is immoral. The machine that is G. AI benefits no one, except for lazy grifters who want to escape the effort and work that creation takes, and corporations who will do anything to spend less money and make more, and to line their insatiable gullet with more, and more money. To sit by and do nothing and say nothing in the face of this beast is nothing short of a disgrace to human history. Art is the one thing that makes us us, and when we sell the fundamental baseline of what it means to be for a shallow, soulless mimicry, we lose touch with what it means to be us. And that is something I could never sit with. G. AI is a moral failing at best, and a short trip down the stairs to turning each individual in America into a profit-dripping udder for the proverbial businessman to milk and bruise, and nothing more.

Going back to my fixation on old tech, it's very fun to do things in "unconventional" ways. I enjoy listening to music on my iPod rather than Spotify. I like my main source of game-related entertainment being my 3DS rather than my phone. And good lord is it fun taking pictures on my old Sony Cybershot. And with the state of America right now, I definitely do believe that it, in some part, is a form of escapism. Trendy or not, the amount of young adults obsessing over how "frutiger aero" something looks definitely gives creedence to the idea that this is a form of escapism. Young adults vie to return to a simplier time; whether they actually got a taste of what they want to return to as a child or teen, or if their birth just barely scraped the deadline to be able to experience living in the times that they glorify. Besides this though, teens have always been complaining that they were "born in the wrong generation". In fact, the first recorded mention of teens believing that they were born in the wrong generation was by cave-teen Ugg, where she chiseled "me born wrong time" on her stone slab while looking at old cave paintings of velociraptors. Scientists also refer to this as the first recorded evidence of otherkin existing.

Jokes aside, another appeal of old tech is the deliberation required to complete tasks. Modern phones are an all-in-one device. The need for a home computer has really been erased, aside from some educational and office work. Your average Joe would easily be able to live off of just a phone nowadays. I won't negate the benefits of this—only having to buy one device, being able to have access to an entire wealth of information at all times, or the convienience of being able to do anything that you used to either have to be at your house for or own six seperate devices for. But these benefits are exactly why some people are stepping away (putting aside just the idea of social media, have you heard of the dumbphone revolution!?). There are times where I will open up my phone to check the weather or to put Spotify before I drive home from work, my thumb will find its way over to the Instagram app, and then I'll look up from my phone and suddenly 20 minutes will have passed and I still haven't completed the task I picked up my phone for. Hence the deliberation necessary for using a lot of older tech. If I pick up my iPod to put on a playlist, then I can put on that playlist and set it down. It has successfully fulfilled its one use. Even if I wanted, I am safe from the magnetic pull of Instagram reels here. Same goes for my camera—I can guarantee I won't spend any time other than doing the one thing I picked up my device for, as that is its one use. In this sense, single-use devices work as an excellent horse-blinder for my dopamine seeking behavior that my phone loves to fulfill.

Continuing off of the appeal that single-use devices have to a lot of young adults, there is a major environmental benefit that continuing to use old devices has. I feel like the normalization of technology within our lives and culture has really worked to standardize the idea that technology is disposable. Not in the sense that I swipe once on my phone and then throw it away and get a new one, but in the sense that capitalist culture compels us to want the new shiny thing all of the time. People want the newest phone. The newest car. The newest computer hardware. (This doesn't end with technology. Just turn your head a little to the left to look at the clothing industry.) And when ads and influencers don't do enough with their propoganda to convince you to ditch your two-year-old iPhone for the newest one, planned obsolescense steps in to purposefully slow and cripple our existing devices. Corporations need us to want more, because that's how they make more money. And we are walking wallets. It is powerful and righteous act to continue to navigate life with what technology has already been afforded to us, or has already been created. The technology I use in my daily life reflects this; it is very, very possible to continue with what you have now.

In addition to my main devices, I have a slew of other acessories like keyboards, speakers, et cetera, that have all been purchased from thrift stores and off of eBay. My life has not been impeded in any way by continuing to use what I have, or by choosing to think green and buy second-hand to continue the use of something that already exists. In fact, my wallet is quite happy having saved what money I would have spent buying and then re-buying new devices every few years. And the Earth is happy that I didn't make the choice to throw perfectly working tech into some dump (only so many parts in electronics can be recycled. Treat recycling as a last-ditch effort). But also, I just prefer the look of older tech. An old clunky silver Dell laptop is a thousand times sexier than whatever Microsoft is pushing out now (for lack of a better term :P ).

We cannot forget that we have power, both as individuals and as a group. We can fight phone addiction, we can say no to AI, we can refuse to give our information to companies, and we can make greener choices and buy second-hand. Don't fall for the people saying "You're only one person, you can't make a difference." Even a small change for the better is still for the better.

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Page last edited on April 3rd, 2025.