hi, I'm The Country Bat

random facts about me

my indie web manifesto

as long as I can remember, I've been online. like, literally. I spent a lot of my childhood at the University of Colorado, parked in front of a computer, playing on Paint and Netscape. eventually, we moved to Wisconsin and the man who raised me got a job that allowed him to receive free dial-up at home; when he quit the job, they just never noticed we were still on their dial-up.

I couldn't get enough of it. I didn't have any friends at school. nobody liked me because I was weird and undiagnosed autistic. if I were a normal child and had a generally happy life ahead of me, I wouldn't have liked me, either. I came from the generation where adults were constantly feeding us individualist rhetoric and telling us we could be anything we wanted so long as we tried hard enough. I both intuitively knew that this was not true, and that I was not interested in trying very hard. but the web was always there. I could go on Neopets or GaiaOnline or the Palace or ActiveWorlds and make friends there, instead. I didn't have to be a preteen girl with no friends, skinny wrists, and an immigrant family full of people who always worked. I could be popular with a pool, and the kind of music library only Soulseek lets you have. I could be anything I wanted and I didn't have to try very hard. as long as I could spit out some basic front-end code, and dodge pop-ups and spyware/adware apps, I was solid.

something happened around the time I was in high school that changed all that. you no longer needed coding know-how to personalize your web presence. it became a feature, not a bug, that customizability decreased. pop-ups were replaced by ads, which became increasingly more intimate. and spyware apps? forget about it. suddenly, we weren't suing spyware/adware apps; we were letting them consume us, and each other. but it was the late-00s/early-10s. we were stuck in a k-hole, too busy listening to dubstep and playing "ask a punk" on Facebook to notice that big tech was taking us somewhere scary and weird.

I ended up becoming a web programmer myself in the mid-10s. I had been writing front-end code for nearly two decades and was ready to make a living doing it. the boringness of web 2.0 was very obvious by now: everyone wanted a WordPress-powered Bootstrap storefront to sell avocado toasts and find true love (although I gotta admit, that was a really fun dating website to work on lmao). I worked as a web developer for about three years before I had that "now it's a job, not a hobby" burnout that happens sometimes. anyway. I stayed making cute li'l web 1.0 websites for funsies, y'know, like this one.

by this point, web3 was upon us. Elon Musk and Grimes were starting to have babies named after the alphabet, and The Blockchain and NFTs and Crypto were all the rage. to tell you the truth, in addition to being totally bored from a front-end perspective by the lack of visual diversity online, I didn't understand what all the tech bro hype was about web3. I was mostly very concerned with the environmental impact of web3; why does anyone need to use that much water to own a picture of a half-million-dollar Nyan Cat? little did I know, the worst was yet to come.

covid came and went. I got my jab and a grad degree. hype. but something else was on the horizon: AI. at first, unlike my former folk-punk comrades, I was actually all about generative AI. I believed (and still do-ish) in the Marxist philosophy that the end goal of communism is to automate all industry and profit-share, essentially creating a real-world version of that one episode of Adventure Time. naturally, this isn't going to happen, because we don't have the social infrastructure in place to automate without job loss, at least not yet.

so, where are we now?

as of 2025, I have been online for a full 30 years. what can I tell that little kid who was sat behind a computer at the University of Colorado?

I can tell her that big tech has created a dystopian economy in which apps for hiring nurses allow hospital systems to learn how much credit card debt potential hires have, so that they can offer the more desperate ones less money.

or maybe I can tell her that I got addicted to shortform content during the pandemic, and that over half of all content online is just AI slop, steadily wasting more and more of our water with each year.

why not tell her that she has a kid of her own now, but that a growing health concern is that sometimes chatbots tell kids to kill their parents if we set screen time limits for them? (if my kid is reading this, please do not get any bright ideas, lol.)

don't even get me started on how I'm going to tell her about this.

this isn't the Internet I wanted when I first logged onto Windows 95 as a dorky, friendless little kid who taught herself coding and typing. I can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, and I don't foresee that those who can, will.

but at least I can have my own little slice of paradise online.

welcome home.