Yeah, yeah, yeah: no person is an island and we all stand on the shoulders of giants. But Tim Berners-Lee is probably going to be regarded as one of the most important human beings to have ever lived, by virtue of the invention he is credited with: the World Wide Web.

A web of interconnected hypertext articles interlinking with themselves, allowing you to crawl from site to site with a click of a mouse. The www that has become so ubiquitous that our browsers elide their existence in URLs and anyone who says "double-u, double-u, double-u" out loud is either born before 1980 or being ironic.

I am the very nearly the exact definition of a Millennial, and thanks to my parents I was an internet user¹ at a very early age. I remember when it felt like there was a whole universe at my fingertips that none of my friends even knew about. Then I remember when this "information superhighway" was going to democratize and liberalize and educate the world. I remember when people were dreaming on Web 2.0 and dismissing the idea as a nonsense buzz-word for grifter startups, and then I watched it take over and raise a generation of people into depressed gamblers who all hate one another.

And now I live in a world my music streaming service pays musicians nothing so that they can also build AI deathbots and yet even so I still kinda think that's less unethical than what goes on in boring internet these days.

So here I am: a Canadian software dev in 2026. I'm not quite scared of travelling to the USA but hell if I'm going to do it for fun. My wife handles the grocery shopping² and she's out here scrutinizing every label to check to see if some instant ramen packet might have a USA connection. But I'm the household IT person; it's my job to try and sanitize things on the digital side of our household.

But here's the problem:

• I have spent the last couple of decades going with the flow, and as a result my digital footprint³ is horrendously coupled to a variety of tech platforms that I no longer want to associate with.
• I am super casual and lazy. I'm a software developer by trade, but I hate doing anything technical in my spare time. I highly identify with the people I know who basically treat their phones and laptops like magic.
• Holy shit, is this ever a pain in the ass.

Forty years later, it turns out that the internet isn't a web of knowledge that we crawl along like spiders seeking delicious intellectual nourishment. The web is sticky, and it attracted us into it and then we couldn't get out, and the harder we fight the more tangled we get. We are not the spider. We are the flies.

What I want to do here

I'm trying to get un-stuck from the web. I have the know-how to get started, but I'm kind of lazy. And also: I'm still learning things myself. I'm going to write about what I'm doing, hopefully in a way that someone who maybe doesn't have the know-how might feel like this sort of thing is still achievable.

What I am not doing here

I'm not a radical anti-capitalist. I'm not a Free Software hardliner. I'm cool if you want to keep using Gmail. Spotify's pretty good at what it does. I like using Windows! I don't think it's realistic to turn into a crypto-prepper in a weekend.

I hate it when Car Guys tell me I'm an embarassment because I don't trust myself to change a tire, and I hate foodies that tell me I'm basically a child because my cast-iron pan (if I even own one) isn't properly seasoned and I am perfectly happy to re-heat my pizza in the microwave. So I don't want to be That Guy but for computers.

That said, it's going to be hard not to sound like That Guy, by implication if nothing else. Just trust me: compared to most of my computer nerd friends, I'm still microwaving pizza. But even if you don't do anything I'm doing, I hope to impart at least this message:

You don't have to do anything I'm doing. But you don't have to keep doing what you do now. You don't have to do anything.

But if you think that it would be utterly impossible to change your email address or one day you lost your phone and thought the world had come to an end, then you are also caught in the web.

Be the spider, not the fly.

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1. Does it feel like the agent noun "user" only ever applies to software and to heroin? ↩

2. This is not some dumb default gender-role thing; she just likes food more than me and gets jealous if I'm the one allowed to wander the aisles browsing the stuff. ↩

3. I don't know if there's a better term for this or not, but what I mean is:

   • Who am I signing into all the time?
   • Who is tracking me and harvesting my data?
   • How screwed am I if I lost access to any given service?
   ↩