Hello, World!

Or: Why Now?

A "Hello, World!" program is usually a simple computer program that emits (or displays) to the screen (often the console) a message similar to "Hello, World!". A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language's basic syntax. Such a program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language, but it can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.

-"Hello, World!" program, Wikipedia, accessed 9/30/2025

Two contradictory things are true right now: One, our collective relationship with "tech" is the worst its ever been in my lifetime, and two, it has never been easier to join the World Wide Web with your own site (and I mean yours, not just a blog on somebody else's site that can kick you out on a whim).

The contradiction lies in the fact that, for most people, their internet experience is getting gradually worse, even as good people are spending lots of collective effort to improve things: abandon toxic social media like Twitter and Threads, own your algorithm in the Fediverse! Use these tools to own your posts, but also share them across other sites! Break up the oppressive tech monopolies! And still, the tools and features we use every day keep getting worse and worse.

I know that's a lot of links, and no, this isn't a well-researched graduate thesis with a revelation... I just want to drive home the point that you (if I may be so presumptive) and I are not the only people who are feeling this way: lots of people smarter than us have been worried about the direction things have been going for a long time.

And that's why it has become more important than ever for me to finally start a blog – an ancient tradition from 1997 – on a personal website that looks like it was designed by a colorblind person who thinks Powerpoint templates are high art.

Why Me?

I work in tech, as a middling-quality software engineer working for big dumb companies who care very much about "dashboards" and "KPIs". I grew up with a PC, had internet access relatively early, and started my career near the tech explosion that was smartphones. I have soldered my own NES cartridge and read articles about JavaScript on purpose. I prefer LF line endings and am thrilled that "tabs vs spaces" is a solved problem. I consider electronics and computing technology a vital part of my life and identity.

Despite this, I have never felt like a "techie", like one of those people who really enjoys gadgets and hardware and wirepunk and CES shows: I was the last of my coworkers to finally get a smartphone; I have never and will never have a smart house; I never made a Twitter or Bluesky account (and have indeed abandoned social media entirely). I would consider myself a "last adopter": if I'm getting into something, it's either charmingly niche (I have an ocarina that I currently play at a middle-school level), or it's finally ubiquitous (did you know cars come with backup cameras now? Have you heard about this?)

As a teen, I did not know anyone who had their own website; more and more people were getting computers at home, but nobody was opening them up to visitors. Part of that, obviously, is that many technologies to help you host your own server simply did not exist yet – we wouldn't get Apache and PHP until 1995, and nginx in 2004 – but also, most people around me saw the internet as a tool, or just another piece of software, something you used to get rare or special things you couldn't get from your local library or Wal-Mart. It was easy to read from the web, but quite a hassle to join it as a writer, so few people did; personal websites remained the domain of geeks and savvy businesspeople.

What all of my friends did have was a GeoCities or Angelfire page, or a LiveJournal or DeadJournal page, or later, a MySpace account; everybody was writing and designing and linking and sharing and carving out their own little URLs where they could say "Look, we exist!", using free tools and copied JavaScript, making beautiful interconnected diaries where they could share inside jokes and concert photos, and link to all their friends' pages so you could see them too.

It was wonderful, and I did not participate in any of it, mostly because I believed that I had nothing worth sharing online.

If you know me (and you undoubtedly must, to have found this page), you know that I am a somewhat private person (for reasons I won't explain here, [see what I did there]). I am starting to notice the atrophy of my ability to even talk about myself, which is becoming awkward at dinner parties and job interviews. The trouble with having thoughts is that they are, often, personal, and in sharing them you really can't avoid sharing a piece of yourself; if you tell others something you believe, you're also telling others that you believe something.

In my life, I have encountered people who were, intellectually, brick walls: they had all the answers they would ever need, and would never bend in response to new evidence. You may hear this as a pejorative; you may be imagining conspiracy theorists, or trust fund bubble kids, or religious zealots; but these people were often quite normal and kind: they were simply "done" with learning now. I found – and still do find – these people fascinating to listen to, because the price you pay for never being wrong is that your worldview has to contort itself into bizarre shapes to accommodate you, and you end up with a bespoke perspective on life that I collect like a fabric scrap and add to my ever-growing patchwork quilt of human understanding.

At first, I envied these people, brimming with self-confidence and facts, and I felt so small next to them. Their conviction alone made their stories much more exciting than mine; them, always the tragic hero, against such villains as "my Uber driver" and "the PTA", nameless entities who had committed some sin (clearly with malice aforethought) against them. There was never nuance, never "more to the story", just a perfect narrative where the evildoer was thwarted (or at least chastised) and the storyteller got to continue being the hero they always knew they were. I could never tell stories like that, simply because I always found too much of my own situations unknowable, and couldn't commit to framing myself as a righteous champion. Sure, the cop pulled me over for a bullshit ticket, but why? Was this speed trap his idea, or is he just going through the motions of his assignments? Is there a quota to hit, or is he just on a power trip? There are never pedestrians on that road anyways, but maybe there are no pedestrians because traffic is too dangerous? Maybe... I was indeed wrong to have been speeding there?

As I got further into life, I began to see these people's stories for what they are: fanfiction about reality, making narratives like all humans do, trying to gain a modicum of control over all the random chance of life. The stories began to lose their appeal, but I started to be able to watch the storyteller themself, finding all the implicit assumptions their stories held, and following along with the sharp curves in their stories as they proudly put facts that couldn't possibly be true as the keystone of their tale. I was a very good listener; and it made me withdraw even further. I could spot the weak link in people's stories, and tell them exactly where they were bending the truth, even when they didn't know they were doing it. And I was no great mentalist, I was just some guy! What could other people learn about me if I tried to share a story about myself? They'd spot my hedging instantly, rip my story apart, and fill my insecurity with their own false certainty – so I thought. This is clearly an unhealthy perspective on how the average person approaches conversation, but hey, like I said, "reasons I won't explain here".

It turns out there is a perfect, non-interactive medium where you can tell your story, and the listener can't interrupt you: longform writing! I never disliked writing assignments in school, though I never felt I was a particularly strong writer – I'd describe my style as more "fluffy and flowery" than "sharp and clear" or "evocative and poetic". I cannot write particularly quickly, at least not if you want a cohesive chain of sentences; thank goodness for word processors that let me shift entire paragraphs around, otherwise my writing would read as jumbled as a murder mystery whose pages were sorted alphabetically by first letter. But long essays mitigate most of these issues; I can take breaks and edit as much as I need, there is no time pressure to contend with, and I can also assume (if my wife is any indication) that readers will simply skip over paragraphs that get a bit too rambling.

In short, it took me 30 years, but I finally figured out how to communicate with other humans, and that it's actually quite important to do so.

Why This?

Why should I bother hosting a website? Why go through all the trouble if all I want to do is write long essays nobody will read? Medium already exists!

I won't deny it, setting up this website – though simpler than you think! – was more effort than it would have been to "Sign up with Google" at Medium. I'd still have my own URL I could share with people, and I'd get a nice little packet of tools to let people comment directly to my writing (and give me little claps!). Why do extra work to end up with something that's not as good? You should just use this tool somebody else built, and they'll manage all the tricky parts so you can just focus on writing, and... oh, shit, the website is full of Nazis now.

If you haven't actively developed software in your life, it can be genuinely hard to tell the difference between software tools and software services, or why you'd even care that there is a difference. A pithy primer is that if a tool breaks, it doesn't destroy anything it helped build; Macromedia Flash has been dead for over a decade, but you can still watch every Homestar Runner video thanks to the wonderful developers of Ruffle. If a service breaks, however, you are prevented from doing anything until that service comes back. I use a Chromecast to easily stream movies from my PC to my TV, which you think would be pretty straightforward, but once support ends for my discontinued device, my device will become a brick because the services it requires to function will be offline, and I'll be back to plugging my wife's laptop into the TV with an HDMI cable. Tools are frequently standardized and can be replaced, usually pretty easily: if my HDMI cord breaks, I junk it and replace it with a 5 dollar one from Amazon. Services are nearly always private and opaque, with no easy way to substitute them without reverse engineering a bunch of protocols and hacking a bunch of hardware.

It's not as easy as you'd think to tell the difference! What if, just hypothetically, you have a job where you depend on some machine, like how a farmer needs a tractor for plowing, or a NYC delivery girl needs a bike to get around: you're committed to this job for the long haul, and expect to use this machine for years, and you want full exclusive access to it at all times. Would you want this machine to be a tool, something you own and manage yourself, or a service, where you are dependent on another party? There's a fine discussion to be had here, but based on, you know, what actually happens in real life, most people would choose a tool, so they can have certainty over this vital piece of technology, and not be subject to the whims of whatever company would provide a tractor-as-a-service. Because that would be silly, right? If you could only rent tractors, and not buy them? If the tractor company could say "we don't support your tractor anymore, we've stopped it from running, you need to buy a newer model"? If, I dunno, the tractor company put computers in their tractors so they work like home printers and lock you out if you ever repair it without "official" parts, and since code is copyrightable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal to circumvent the lockout code, so farmers end up with broken tractors that could easily be repaired by local mechanics, but end up waiting months for an appointment with an official repair shop (sometimes missing critical planting deadlines), where they'll pay higher prices because the tractor company has a monopoly on repairs?

Tractors as a service would be silly, right?

As tempting as it is, this is not the post to get into critiques of enshittification or late-stage capitalism; I have simply reached my limit on how much I am willing to trust services, especially technology services. Anybody who knows a professional graphic designer has surely heard them bitch about how you use to simply buy Photoshop, but now Adobe will only let you rent it year-to-year: turning a tool into a service. It's surprisingly rare to be able to buy a new video game on physical media and be able to play it without an active internet connection, either because it's an online-only game, or it needs do download and install patches to be playable, or it has obnoxious DRM; video game companies would love for you to just sign up for subscriptions instead, where you get access to certain games a month, then they get taken away: turning a tool into a service. Heck, my child received a fancy alarm clock/nightlight as a gift, and we don't get access to all the alarms without a subscription! I swear it is only a matter of time before they sell stand mixers that need a subscription to enable the dough hook attachment.

Shamefully, I have worked in this industry for over a decade, and when you make mobile apps, you really get to see some of the evil ways companies will try to squeeze extra money out of people who already bought their product: spam marketing emails, of course, but what about spying on your location? Sending push notifications if the user hasn't engaged in a while? Using UX dark patterns to make it easy to sign up and nightmarish to cancel? I will never claim that software development was ever an angelic pursuit, but it really feels like this decade has been my industry's heel turn, where we are actively preying on people knowing they can't do anything about it, and it hurts to watch.

I built this website with tools; the tools certainly did most of the work, but if the Raspberry Pi Foundation turned evil tomorrow and started, I dunno, selling AI washing machines, they couldn't do anything to my Raspberry Pi that's holding this site. It's mine, and the only way to shut it down for good requires actual political force, and not merely flipping a switch somewhere that says I can't post anymore until I send somebody $7.99.

The Last Straw

I have a single example that perfectly sums up where my head is right now.

Recently, Google announced that app developers will need to register their state ID and pay Google money in order for your Android apps to be installed on "certified" Android devices (read: any phone that people can actually buy). Before this change, you could make an app at home, put the app file on a website, and anybody could download and install it on their phone. This is, actually, nearly exactly as safe as getting the app from the official Play Store! Getting an app from the Play Store doesn't protect you nearly as much as Google pretends it does. It's certainly true that it's easier to put malware in rogue apps outside of app stores, but that doesn't mean the inverse is true! A safe app from a store is the exact same safe app if you get it from a website, due to longstanding security measures that are put in place on every app when it's created.

So how does this new policy help protect consumers? Well... if you get scammed by a malicious app from outside the Play Store, now you'll know which shell corporation took your money! All Google asks in return is that in order to let your app be installed, you give them your government ID or business certification. Disappointingly, it feels lately like giving a third party a stored copy of your ID – not just a one-time check, like for age-restricted goods at the store, but an actual stored copy of your ID data – is just a perfectly normal thing to do, and not a security and privacy nightmare, but this is horrifying to me. In order to share a piece of software I made with friends, I have to send money and my ID to the people who... made their phone OS?

Oh, wait, good news! They will have a "free developer account type" that can distribute to "a limited number of devices" without an ID. Okay, one, remember this means that Google is recording all the apps you ever install on your phone, even if you get them from a non-Google source, and that's how it's counting the "limited number" of allowed devices. Two, if security were really the reason for this change, then this carveout is just saying "malware is allowed, as long as too many other people don't get it too". Three, I have absolutely no reason to trust Google that this option will continue to be available 6 months later, after the pot has gotten just a little hotter and the frogs have acclimated to it.

I can't go full tin-foil-hat and point to a specific reason why this change is happening now, but I can tell you that there are developers with legitimate reasons why they won't (or can't) make their apps available through "official" app channels. I'm certainly not an expert in this space, but some free open-source software (or FOSS) is done psuedo-anonymously to avoid legal or political retribution; and yes, this does include people who make apps to just run YouTube and Spotify without ads and trackers! These apps seem to be the primary victims of this policy change, since they can no longer be installed unless somebody is willing to give up their ID to Google to get the secret handshake (not literally) to let their app be part of the "cool kids club". I certainly won't begrudge your own opinion on apps that let users bypass ads and privacy trackers, but I will say that I have no problem with them whatsoever, and while they certainly violate the ToS of the product they modify, it's kinda insane that your phone OS gets a veto on what software you can run!

Nothing else in life works this way. There is no sensible physical-world analogy that accurately describes what this change does. You can start with similar looking things – maybe this is like car dealerships and lemon laws? Or maybe food inspection? – but they quickly break down because of how weird this all is. You have a thing – it may be harmful to you, but not to bystanders – but you also have to choose to seek it out; this isn't protecting against malware that autoinstalls itself (I think we universally agree "dat bad"). This is also not a transaction, so if the app simply doesn't do what you want, you just delete it and move on; you're not any worse off. Oh, if the app was simply negligently malicious, you just have to deal with that, this policy doesn't change anything about those situations. So what's a real-world example of an optional, free creation that requires you to register with a corporation before you can show it to somebody? This is, literally, like asking Samsung for permission to watch your friend's home videos on your TV, which should sound laughable. Do you remember 10 years ago when Keurig added DRM to its coffee pods, and people said "Fuck that", and we got them to undo that nonsense?

And do you know what the even crazier thing is? This is how Apple development has always worked since the beginning! The reason this isn't a bigger deal today is because most of the tech community already shrugged their collective shoulders 15 years ago and said, "meh." All the privacy nuts switched to Android, the only other option in our smartphone duopoly, and now that overlord is also saying "Actually, we'd like to know everything about you, too".

Historically, it has been very easy to say "who cares?" about most of this; I (we?) live in the US, where you could generally do whatever you wanted on the internet without any real concern of repercussion as long as you genuinely weren't "doing anything wrong" (and frequently, even if you were doing terrible things, you could get away with it!). So what if Google knows I am the ashamed programmer of Seagull Nuggets 2? How could that possibly affect me? And that's probably true, I'd feel comfortable saying that 99% of developers will feel no impact from this policy.

This time.

Because Apple and Google have long histories of breaking the rules every time they can get away with it, and a few times when they got caught and little changed. Meta gave all your data away, paid some cash, and found out consequences aren't real. I'm not even going to get started on Amazon, AI, and IP law in this entry. Every day is, for some reason, a war between the tech industry and people who are required to use tech to interact with society. You can't opt out, you can't say "no", and you've got no other choice.

It's exhausting.

The Way Out

Because of all the centralization of tech, where 5 companies now run everything you do each day, it's very easy to forget what the internet is. If you ask the average person what the internet is, I expect many people would start listing websites and services... stuff like "It's Facebook and Amazon and TikTok", or "You type what you want in the Chrome search bar, and then Google gives you links to stuff". Some people who want to sound smart may talk about infrastructure, about the cables and servers and satellites that invisibly hold all the cat gifs we love, and... sure, they're not wrong, but it's kinda like describing a tres leches cake as "ground wheat mixed with refined sugarcane and fatty water".

The internet is a collection of protocols, which is fancy-tech speak for "a coded language we all agree on."; Pig Latin could be a protocol, if all your friends agree on what to do with vowel-starting words. The internet does not need HTML, or JavaScript, or AWS; any two devices that speak the (multiple) languages of Internet Protocol (IP) can form their own tiny internet together in a box somewhere, passing empty packets back and forth like a Dada-ist game of "Catch". From there, sure, you can add new languages on top like HTTP to transfer files, or UDP to stream media, but those aren't the internet; they run on the internet.

The beauty of the internet is that it is a shared language, and you cannot prevent somebody from speaking a language they know. As of this moment, and hopefully long into the future, the US ISPs that connect to the global internet allow all conversations to flow through the cables and servers and satellites, without checking who is doing the speaker and who is listening. This is the essence of Net Neutrality, another important concept that we will probably have to fight for in a few years: if you found an ISP willing to let you speak, and you can speak IP, then you get to be part of the internet. There can certainly be real-world logistics issues with finding ISPs in rural locations, or in places with only one ISP available and they suck, or if your government doesn't enforce it... ugh, c'mon, positive thoughts!

The point is, if you think the internet sucks, then good news: You can make it better! I'm gonna link it again, but you can drop $30 on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and cables, spend $15 to rent a URL for a year, and have your website be online within an hour of setup. It really is that easy now! The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic computer that has the bare minimum a computer needs so the price stays low, but it's still 10 times as powerful as those old iMacs. Domain URLs can't be bought outright, and have to be rented for a few bucks each year, but Njalla is painless and requires no registration other than an email address. And yeah, I won't lie, Apache Server can be overwhelming if this is your first time editing a config file, but Mira's walkthrough is excellent, and the software is so ubiquitous that you're very likely to be able to find answers to any problems you encounter. Or hey, if you're reading this, you can probably call me, and I'll come set it up with you!

Over the last few years, I noticed a shift starting to happen: some of the best opinions and posts people were linking to were coming from personal websites, operated by individuals. This was a pleasant change for me, as companies had started locking down their access to anonymous users, and I was becoming unable to view people's Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Discord posts without creating an account; but I could always visit personal sites, and even better, I could read everything their owners had ever posted. There were no ads, no restrictions on content, no "calls to action", just... interesting, insightful, and funny thoughts from really smart (or at least well-written) people. The sites were clean and fast. The writing was longform, with room to breath, sometimes with incredible depth, as if the writer knew that I chose to be here and didn't mind if they rambled for a few paragraphs.

Honestly, I had never created my own website. Sure, I absolutely played around with a simple Angelfire site that is best forgotten, but while it had my words, it wasn't really my site; I was letting some other entity say my words for me, and in exchange it also got to say some banner ads. I was intimidated by a friend in high school who was building an online real-time battle game in PHP (he called it Warwolf, after the siege engine), and thought that I couldn't be smart enough to build anything that cool, and that I didn't know enough JavaScript or enough CSS or enough MySQL to make an actual good website, by metrics of 9th graders who loved eBaum's World. But seeing these websites reminded me that... none of that really matters. As much as I like reading the works of people who write much better than me, their content isn't really what I cared about either... I just really loved the idea that these people were writing, sometimes thousands of words, and were doing it just in case people wanted to listen. And people did listen.

And it made me want to write back.

Why Now?

This sounds hyperbolic, but I believe the internet can die; I don't think it will, but I have to acknowledge it can. The apocalyptic theory is that powerful political forces align to throttle ISPs and start restricting the free flow of communication; the far more realistic theory is that people simply stop speaking the internet's language.

There will always be Facebook, and Amazon, and Google, or whatever face they will wear after all the mergers and acquisitions are settled, but we can't forget that they're not the internet; they can gobble up all the infrastructure and data centers and even the very fiber in the ground, but they'll never be the internet. Even today, I'll admit that Instagram is a much easier way to share a photo with a thousand people than hosting it on your own website, but don't start thinking that Instagram is what makes sharing photos possible.

You don't need to be a privacy nut or tech whiz or graphic designer to have your own website: all you need is something to say. Even if it seems like nobody is listening, keep speaking the language. Don't let it die out. Remind people that we don't require gatekeepers and valets to get us online, and when they start abusing us, we should leave them. We can do it all ourselves, but only if we can remember and teach others how.

I've gone most of my life without really saying much, afraid that nobody would want to listen to what I have to say; it turns out that was a little bit backwards, and what I truly fear is what happens when I have nothing left to say. I don't need to have a blog full of "thought leadership", with a thousand readers subscribed to my email list and waiting for the next post in their RSS feed; I can do a lot by just continuing to talk, and keeping the language alive, and helping new speakers learn.

It's... an understatement to say that we live in "interesting times". It seemed more important, now than ever, to say "I am here, I am real, and I am talking." I won't pretend that the things I say will be of interest to everybody, but I sincerely hope that some of the things I say will be of interest to somebody, someday. I am screaming into the Void, but one of the few good things about the Void is that there are other people in it, too, and we can speak the same language.

Hello, World!

In software development, it was once customary to have your first project in a new programming language be "Hello, World!", a (hopefully!) short piece of code that made the words "Hello, World!" appear... somewhere relevant. The purpose of this project is twofold: first, build the smallest, stablest foundation of working code from which to stand on, and second, produce a visible response from the dead box before you. The exclamation point is mandatory, as it is a sincerely impressive achievement that you have convinced a hunk of metal to etch a message – your message – on a digital screen (or not a screen!). The purpose of the "Hello, World!" program is to congratulate you, the human, for learning enough of the computer's language that you can teach it to speak your own.

I am Ben, and thanks to the help of many others, I can now speak the language of the internet; and now I say, to any and everyone who wants to listen:

Hello, World!