This page provides some background for how this digital garden project came about. For its technical and conceptual design principles, check out the [[colophon]] instead.
## 1990s: Heterogeneous foundations
I have been terminally online since 1993. Back then, the early internet was more than just "the web" (i.e., content served through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol); other protocols included FTP for file transfer, Gopher as an early alternative to HTTP, IRC for live chat, SMTP for email, Telnet for remote connection, Usenet for forum discussions, etc. Most of these protocols either died out or got subsumed under "the web".
During much of that decade, “surfing the web” was an expensive affair involving long-distance calls, the quaint [acoustic handshake](https://youtu.be/gsNaR6FRuO0) of dial-up modems, and domestic disputes over the availability of the residential phone line, before mobile devices untethered us for good.
More importantly, the 1990s marked the golden age of homepages: humble personal corners of the internet, rich in quirkiness, geeky trivia, blinking marquees, “under construction” banners, and links to likeminded personal websites, many of them hosted on providers such as Geocities (1994) and Angelfire (1996).
Back then, I crafted my very first personal website using a mix of HTML/CSS, PHP to parse metadata and contents from flat files (before Markdown existed), and the elegantly simple and underrated Server-Side Includes (SSI) to serve a consistent header and footer. I would then upload the files over FTP to my hosting provider.
I do have some nostalgia for that early web culture; not for its candid amateurism, but for its archipelagic topography of small, sovereign territories. Surfing the early web meant letting serendipity guide you through a boundless sea of idiosyncratic passion projects. Because the whole internet was so novel, there was no normative expectation for what a website *should* look like, and creators were truly free to experiment.
## 2000s: The great homogenization
In the following decade, I witnessed the splintering of web communities into broadly two factions.
On one side, the more independent-minded kept pouring their soul into *blogs*, which were the more ambitiously-structured spiritual successors of the static homepages. Low-code, semi-professional content management solutions such as WordPress and Drupal made building and maintaining a functional blog more accessible, but also more predictable in its aesthetics at the expense of originality. Furthermore, by abstracting away the *form*, these platforms made the *content* even more central to the experience. I suspect many a blog was abandoned after their authors started missing the fun of esoteric fun of HTML and CSS tinkering, and all that remained was the joyless pressure of having to sustain a regular throughput of content production over time.
The other faction gave up entirely on managing their own cozy corner of the internet, and joined MySpace, Facebook, and other similar walled gardens. What started out as a harmless, no-code way to push personal updates to a community of friends and relatives, subsequently morphed into an oligopoly of rigid platforms that sanitize all content into homogeneous feeds dark-patterned for ad clickthroughs.
I was part of the first faction, and eventually migrated my website to a more professional-looking blog powered by WordPress. It ended up getting hacked due to a vulnerable plugin, after which I decided to shut it down and revert to a flat-file CMS.
## 2010s: The great vulgarization
The following decade saw an acceleration toward the cheapening of content within that oligopoly of walled gardens. Mirroring the 160-character limit of SMS, Twitter popularized the 140-character format (plus 20 for commands and usernames). The combination of short-form text, emoji-based syntax, and wordless photo/video posts on every platform further obsoleted the legacy format of long-form homepages and blogs. The content also became less thoughtful as the fleeting nature of social media rewards emotional reflexivity over strategic patience.
At the same time, the rise of social media created a fertile ground for online PVP. Visibility algorithms combined with monetization incentivized content creators to rage bait their audience. Cambridge Analytica pioneered the non-consensual farming of Facebook data for political propaganda. Astroturfers everywhere covertly promoted corporate interests to unsuspecting users. These shifts all became symptomatic of the [[Enshittification|enshittification]] of online platforms.
## 2020s: The revival of the artisan web?
Perhaps in reaction to these trends, and coinciding with the self-care reprieve granted by the COVID-19 pandemic, a return to the concept of tending cozy personal corners of the internet was observed in the early 2020s. One such revival trend was that of *digital gardens*:
>*They're not following the conventions of the “personal blog,” as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis* (Appleton, 2020).
To be clear, I harbor no illusion that this micro-trend will become dominant or reverse the web's descent toward short-form, multimedia content designed for quick dopamine hits and concentrated in an oligopoly of walled gardens.
The characteristics that I consider defining in digital gardens are topological and temporal in nature, just like they would be for a physical garden defined by its layout and the effects of the seasons:
- A return to rich and bi-directional *[[Hypertext|hypertext]] linking* as the primary mechanism for exploring the content, where every link is a bridge between different parts of the garden. What results is a choose-your-own-adventure style of [[Ergodic literature|ergodic literature]] that requires some decisional effort from the reader in return for greater navigational freedom. Conversely, the implication is that this format is not suited for every reader, nor at all times for a given reader, given how some people might prefer the comfort of a more guided and linear experience.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
- An element of *serendipity* whereby the reader stumbles upon one concept after another without clear expectations or predictability, based solely on the selective interests of the digital gardener. Again, this may be a benefit or a nuisance, depending on whether one perceives the [[Navigation problem|navigation problem]] to be real (after all, [[Not all those who wander are lost|not all those who wander are lost]]). In the words of Caulfield (2015): "Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships".
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
- A lack of *directionality*. Topologically, and unlike a chronological blog or essay, a digital garden has no formal start nor end; it loops back on itself through meandering paths, like a [[Möbius strip]]. Entrances and maps of content (such as those in the **indices** folder in the top-left menu) are mere suggestions. A digital garden also lacks directionality in time. It is [[Mu|non-sensical to ask]] which of two linked notes came first, given that "they are related to one another in a relatively timeless way" (Caulfield, 2015). This, however, does not preclude assigning meaning to relational links in the form of [[Typed link|typed links]].
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
- A sense of *impermanence* as the content is constantly being either (positively) elaborated on or (negatively) pruned through the inherently iterative act of digital gardening. The result is reminiscent of the [[Ship of Theseus]] thought experiment, though not rigorously analogous: the garden remains even as its parts change, *and* no longer qualifies as a garden if its parts stop changing.
It is in this context that I decided to settle for a happy medium; no more hand-crafted static website or over-engineered blog, but a collection of tagged and hyperlinked atomic notes in Markdown format. While this site is first and foremost a personal instrument for better thinking, I hope it can serve as an inspiration for others to cut down on low-calorie, highly-processed web content, and instead grow their own organic digital food for thought.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">⁂</div>