🔗 Take control Re - Garbage for humans

Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines:

As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens.

Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside.

You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph.

Machines get the clean version.

Source: Garbage for humans

I don’t mean to pick on this author. At the end of the day, it’s their opinion, and you know what, more power to them. They also seem to think that browsers not supporting markdown natively seems to be a conspiracy of sorts. It isn’t.

However, in the off chance that they read this, I’d like to offer some help to them. One is advice - of the take-it-or-leave-it kind. I will follow that up with tips on how to regain control of the web using their user-agent.

The advice

HTML and Javascript are neutral technologies. Some use it to make incredibly delightful pages. Some use it to maintain their presence on the web like you and I. Some use it to build a business. Some of those businesses were (mis)guided by SEO and choose anti-human designs.

All of them use HTML and Javascript. They are neutral technologies.

At the end of the day, we’ve organically grown machine and human readable languages and most people who invented these languages weren’t inventing them to create the caca that some websites are developed to be.

What you feel is frustration over sites that you choose to visit.

I come to this conclusion over and over - the world will not get better if one I exert my values on to others. It’s a losing battle and one that’ll hit walls of frustration in every corner.

The locus of control can only be scoped to my own life and my choices.

Bonus points if I can also accept that other people will have different choices.

Which leads me to part II - Take control.

Some tips

I also don’t like cookie popups and ugly banners and the abuse of autoplay on the web. The good thing about technologies on the web is that they are mostly neutral.¹ The web is wonderful because you can make it what you want.

I choose to browse with an ungoogled-chromium variant - Helium. Remember that these choices also have consequences. I don’t have history / or sync / or a password manager. Those were all wonderful niceties that one has to give up to have the level of control one needs.

You can go even further - they can turn off javascript / make it available ONLY on sites they’d like. In chromium based browsers it’s chrome://settings/content/javascript

You can turn off sound: chrome://settings/content/sound and completely turn off autoplay: I wrote my own autoplay-block extension.

The point being - you can make the web what you want. Take control.

I just finished reading another article that helped me further cement my point of view:

Slop is not merely a genre of media, it is an attitude of production, a cynical operating posture… it is an ethos of resigned instrumentality that disgusts us with its intentional satisficing and lack of effort the way kitsch disgusted some art critics, a refusal of responsibility to authenticity, situatedness, and the risks associated with individualistic expression. A practical nihilism that threatens to engulf our own more sparse yet genuine attempts at production. From this perspective, the act of denial makes slop more like a spiritual threat than a type of content.

“Slop” is a spiritual threat spanning from Hallmark movies to the opioid crisis. While these problems have immensely different severity, the ecology is the same. All the incentives are telling us to participate in a corrupt system, and we slop when we succumb to the devil on our shoulder. The only way to reject it is to reject nihilism at every level of participation:

• change the incentives for producing and consuming slop
• change the distribution structure
• produce content intentionally
• consume content intentionally
• be mindful of the entire ecology, rather than a single symptom

If you want to combat a spiritual threat, make everything sacred. If slop is optimized in a way that feels meaningless, we have to reconsider our optimization and make the world feel meaningful. This is a battle for the human soul.

Source: slop ecology - by Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd

Reject nihilism. Make everything sacred. Take control.

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