The Concept of Claire

Consider me Clarity Anne Mayhew, or Claire for short. Yes, that’s clearly an alias. I’m sure you understand, though? When I was a dumb kid, a (fiction! educational!) book in my school library’s paltry technology section warned me against giving out my “real” name online. I’m reasonably sure most millennials received similar warnings, either at home or school. On social media nowadays, people ignore that advice, but I’m sticking with it here. Hence, an alias.

My daring escape into the internet started with America Online's WYSIWYG website builder in at age eleven. This was a way of making your own site on America Online, of course. In case you never saw that, it was quite a fun experience for a kid. It had the ability to add pictures (however small) of dachshunds. Inspired by mindlessly clicking around the WYSIWYG interface and adding pictures, my first site focused on small dogs and how awesome they are.

In sixth grade, I made a geography-themed webpage for a class project using some kind of WYSIWYG editor known as Claris Home Page. We weren’t allowed to add dachshunds to our schoolwork pages. I devoured what was available in that little technology section alongside the books about internet safety, and learned about HTML. In 1999, I created a couple detailed, yet messy fansites for my favorite characters, including La Femme Nikita and Alex Kryceck of The X-files.

Many of my earliest sites used linkware graphics provided by an artist (well, she preferred the term artiste) named Moyra of Moyra.com. Moyra eventually disappeared. She continued to own that domain, which just had a stylized photo, for a decade or two after closing her linkware site. Her work, being full of metaphor, and based on borderless-tables, is a mess by modern standards of course, but her aesthetics, unwillingness to compromise on quality, and sheer drive inspired me for years to come.

I launched a small, goofy blog a couple years later, at age fifteen. This was, ironically, hosted on Geocities, but using Blogger, back in the brief moment when that was a possibility. I followed a “how to make a blog” guide written by one of the Digital Divas, a women’s technology group. Like Moyra, they were mostly creators of linkware graphics and other online resources for websites. It was hard not to look up to the Digital Divas at the time. Their sites were beautiful works of complicated and colorful art. These sites were ridiculous by modern standards, but so, so beautiful at the time. Plus, they once fought Microsoft over their domain name (and won!), something we can all be proud of on any day.

On my sixteenth birthday, I received a precious gift: my very first domain name and some hosting space for a year. With sudden access to things like PHP in a stable environment, I shifted to using content management systems. These included Greymatter, MovableType, and eventually WordPress over the next few years, gradually growing apart from the coding aspect itself in favor of content management systems like those. They offered such convenience and were easy to install at the time.

Soon, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others would replace even those blogging platforms. Those apps allowed us all to carry the internet, as well as any friends we made there, in our pocket anywhere we went. It seemed lovely at the time, but they slowly crept deeper into the center of our lives. The apps, and the corporations that control them, slowly began to curate our experiences in strange ways that went beyond the mere presence of an algorithm (which was weird enough).

Now, we’re seeing those social media sites slowly decline. It turns out that people respond poorly to that kind of blatant manufacturing of consent. Much later than some of my friends, I realized I was being manipulated. Growing increasingly disenchanted with social media and the state of the modern internet, I’m drawn to the indie web and its culture nowadays. I have no expectation that the so-called “small web” of today will have more than a superficial cultural resemblance to the past. I also don't expect I'll "get good" at coding, but I want to try my hand at learning what I can again.

I know it’s a complicated, yet subtle thing to allow yourself nostalgia. I try to avoid what I call “Golden Age” thinking. I really can’t help but miss the internet as it was. I also tend to wonder about what it might’ve been had things played out differently over the past twenty years.

This site, which launched on April 20th, 2024, is an attempt at finding my own way forward in this confusing digital world. I know that not everyone is an “internet” person. Not everyone swims this deeply in the World Wide Web. But even the most offline of people must’ve noticed how the internet has changed our entire civilization, and not always for the better. Still, we’ll find a way forward, because we have no choice, and the future remains up for grabs. If you’re reading this, I would wager you’re likely to be the sort of person who understands that. At least, probably.

Am active on Mastodon as @clarity@sunny.garden and am trying to build a proper feed there. Give me a follow if you'd like to connect. If need be, you can contact me on Discord under the name @ClarityAnne, or, of course, using the contact form on this site. My email is clarity (at fabled.day, of course). so you might contact me there, too…