There's a trail that takes you along the ridge of a hill behind a residence building on my campus. Fifth floor, seven from the left, light radiates from the window through the night. I used to live there. Now, someone else does. Someone else has always lived there; the building fills up with new students every year. For all the ink I've spilled in the time since I had to leave, trying to cope with that loss, I still can't claim to have moved on. Maybe I'll carry it with me forever. Maybe there's something to learn from that.

Academiology II: Residency

At the time I was probably hosting my website on Codeberg Pages, in Berlin. Eventually, Codeberg Pages wasn't enough for what I was looking for so I set up a VPS with Hetzner in Oregon. Having it closer to home felt good, but Oregon is still quite a ways away. In my first apartment, trying to mess with my landlord's router would have been risky business, so in Oregon it stayed. A year later I moved into another place where my roommates and I paid the Internet bill ourselves. They were at least willing to tolerate my antics, so I tried to keep as much of my Internet stuff as possible hosted on a computer in our living room. Eventually, the politics happening in the United States started getting difficult to ignore, so I imaged my VPS and relocated it to Nuremberg, in a distant country I presume isn't itself facing a resurgent wave of neo-fascist reactionism.¹

Having a physical server twenty feet from my bedroom helped offset the cope of round-tripping to Germany for everything else. But once I moved back on campus that stopped being viable. Officially, anyway.² After having to wait painfully long to download my image-heavy website one time to many I decided to move my stuff off Hetzner and onto a new VPS I rent from a Victoria-based company called Free Range Cloud, in a data centre in Vancouver. And that's good enough. It's nice to know my website is served from the same bioregion I live in.

In the footer of my website I have a land acknowledgement. Part of the reason why is because I'm virtue-signalling liberal woke antifa, but I don't think that's the main reason. Not unlike the economy of permanent housing insecurity I lovingly call Canada, the web serves to dislocate people from space. It is an anti-geography machine. It takes things that exist in a place and makes them exist nowhere and everywhere at the same time.³

Once you've been forced to sit with this it becomes hard to avoid. Or at least, it has for me. One way you can deal with it is to do what I've done, and to try and force your website back into the spatial context from which it's served. I used to dream of a constellation of cooperative, bioregional data centres that served their own communities as a part of a larger global network of Internet infrastructure:

Help me build a different kind of platform cooperative

I met some lovely people in the process but it didn't really go anywhere. I thought maybe this was the moment for it, but now I'm less sure. I'm even less sure I'm the right person to spearhead it.

The thing is, the web doesn't naturally lend itself well to geography. Sure, this website exists in a place, but where is that? Is it Vancouver? Is it on my couch? Is it in your computer? Is it the cables and radiation that moves it between places? Is it all of them? It depends how you look at it. In any case, these answers tell you little meaningful information about the website itself, because the web abstracts away its geography. You're not supposed to think about the geography of a website anymore than its top-level domain, and that's if it uses a country code like mine.

But just because websites don't have an inherent geography, doesn't mean they don't have to have any geography. As I wrote last month, high technology presents endless possibilities, which includes endless combinations of constraints we can voluntarily adopt:

Studying computer science in a world of infinite possibility

These are the constructed geographies of the web.

"Who is my (pixel) neighbor?" (joelchrono.xyz)

Recently Joel wrote about a project called Pixel Area which defines a 100 by 100 grid of pixels, each of which can link to a website. It defines an entirely arbitrary geography and invites people to opt into it. I'll let Joel explain it more than that but I do really like this idea in principle. One thing that makes relating websites by Earth-geography difficult is that websites don't really obey Tobler's first law of geography: namely, that near things tend to be more related than distant things. When people explicitly opt into being "near" to one another in something like Pixel Area, that's probably because they are somehow related, be that socially or just qualitatively.

I do think you could take this idea further, though. One idea I've toyed with a few times was trying to represent the spatial relationship between websites using a space-filling curve that covered the space of IPv4 addresses. The thing with IPv4 addresses though is that they still don't satisfy the first law of geography. More so than Earth-geography, but still not enough to be very interesting.

A more obvious way to relate websites spatially is with networks of hyperlinks. I think Gemini still has a strong culture of cultivating networks of links, but less so for the web. You see more of it on the indie web but like, it feels like we're mostly just syndicating content to social media. If I'm being honest it's been a while since I really dove into a web ring. Speaking for myself, though. I think there's more to be explored in this area.

Maybe what I'm looking for is an opt-in small web directory that spatially positions websites using a network of hyperlinks. I've got to get on that. After… I get on everything else I need to do.

Footnotes

¹ I'm tempted to say that if you're wedded to Hetzner and you don't want to host your Internet services in a country succumbing to fascism under the weight of the end of history, your best bet would be their new data centre in Singapore, but who am I kidding. I don't know anything about Singapore. Maybe you should just try to stop being wedded to Hetzner. I know it's hard; I'm still trying.
² Did you know many universities assign every device connected to their networks public IPv4 addresses? How about the fact that many don't bother firewalling incoming connections? Actually though I wouldn't abuse this fact because my right to live on this campus is already tenuous enough without testing the patience of IT, but it is a fact that continues to haunt me nonetheless.
³ Okay, then why not just say Vancouver? Well, without getting to into the nature of land acknowledgements, which is not really my wheelhouse as a white person, I do feel like there's something similar going on with settler names in colonial nations. Vancouver is "Vancouver" because the the federal government of Canada has devolved power to the provincial government of British Columbia, which has devolved power to the municipal government of Vancouver to make "Vancouver," Vancouver. Due to Aboriginal Title, reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada, there's a compelling argument to be made that these governments lack the authority to do this.

Settlers in Canada today often like to think that there was some epic battle in the distant past that lead Indigenous peoples to transfer sovereignty to the settler government of Canada, but this isn't really what happened. This is especially true of British Columbia which has (basically) no treaties with Indigenous nations. British Columbia didn't really annex the lands of British Columbia; it's more like an institution that emerged parallel to existing Indigenous governments. Again, because of Aboriginal Title, proclaimed by the Crown and reaffirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, BC lacks the authority to annex BC. Of course, there is reasonable hesitation among Indigenous governments to really push the sovereignty line because from a realpolitik standpoint Canada clearly maintains the monopoly on violence, but I'm trying to not get too sidetracked.

Can it be said that settler governments serve to dislocate people from land under the inherent jurisdiction of Indigenous nations in a way similar to the web? Maybe.

I wrote a paper on this the other year for school but I am not a historian or a scholar of treaty rights and I'm kind of just speaking out of my ass here. If you're interested in this topic a lot has been written about the role of Aboriginal Title in Canadian law.

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