This site is my first purchase in the frontier of digital space.
I have an Instagram, a Youtube channel… a long time ago I had a “Facebook page”. None of these spaces ever belonged to me.
The cyber-lords at Meta and Google, control the land, the building, the interior, the furniture, the fixtures, the appliances, the damn light switches.
In their space, I comport my behavior to the shape of the platform. The actions I can take, the forms I’m able to express, are predefined and not entirely in my own control. By inhabiting these sorts of digital spaces, I surrender my will to those who control it, people who may desire to exploit me, or simply don’t have my best interest at heart.
The purpose of this blog is for me to learn how to create my own digital space. I’m starting with this, a simple text blog, built using a cool open source site generator called Quartz.It enables you to turn a collection of markdown files into a neat site that you can publish on the web. It looks good, works well, and is simple to set up. I’m starting there because I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, and this had a tutorial, but this blog itself is really meant to be a documentation of my experiment building space from scratch, which you can find for now at kwhitman.me