I dream of quieter computing

I’m thinking of quieter computing. Everything these days is glass and refresh rates, is clouds and cloud-shapes, is brought to you in feeds and in troughs. It’s hard not to pine for a forested internet, an imagined one of searching and finding, of patient and aimless wandering.

I think of raising the torch overhead to read long-form, personal updates from anons I somehow feel I know, following their links into the underbrush, marking the path with #551A8B streaks. The rin gong resonance that rises when I let my cursor drift along the edges of a hand-made and hand-honed webring.

We can’t “go back” — we’re remembering it wrong anyway. Too high grows the risk of dashing ourselves upon the rocky river rapids of the future when we’re all eyes set on bygone ages.

I dream instead of building something new: as we march with sure and strong limbs into the future of computing, I dream of sentences written with the express purpose of making readers crinkle their eyes up or grin knowingly, of handmade websites viewed on hackable hardware, of personal computers made personal once more.

An internet made for its denizens and dwellers by its admirers — ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. What dreams may come, indeed.