Roads, as we know them today, are common necessities. These manicured paths we traverse day-in and day-out have become public infrastructure that allow societies and culture to grow and thrive throughout the world.

While trade routes and migratory paths existed as early as 5000 BC, the Romans are credited for dramatically improving road technology. In order to move armies quickly and efficiently in their conquest of the known world, Roman roads were made from deep beds of layered crushed stone to ensure smooth and dry wheeled chariot travel.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Roads now guide us as we travel around the world. It’s become second nature for us. Roads lead us to knowledge institutions like museums and libraries. They lead us to business ventures and recreational activities alike. Their benefits are analogous to a real-world internet that facilitates analog connections between people and places. Roads, alongside the advent paper, have perhaps done more to support the democratization and dissemination of ideas throughout physical space than any other technological development in history.

In a practical sense, roads are awesome. We wouldn’t be where we are as a global culture without them. Metaphorically, however, and in the context of the modern technology landscape, I think the concept a road or a predetermined path that connects point A and point B deserves some examination.

Computer scientist Bran Ferren is noted for saying:

Technology is the stuff that doesn’t work yet.

I love this quote. Scaling Ferren’s thesis out a bit, we can infer that technologists are the beating hearts that take the stuff that doesn’t work yet to a place of functional distinction. Through passion, obsession and an inherent need to make, technologists dedicate their lives to building things that impact our lives. Software and hardware often get the glory, but let us not forget that human spirit and ingenuity have tread the ground leading to these palaces of pixels.

As Ferren’s quote implies, the most compelling technology projects solve new problems, often in surprising and exquisitely considered ways. Creative technologists regularly need to be transported to a place existing roads won’t take them.

When it comes to true innovation, there is no city grid. Google Maps won’t help you. Macadam turns to asphalt turns to gravel turns to dirt turns to lush old growth. Instead of following existing roadmaps, we are required to forge new paths. We reverse engineer our future. And as our feet fall from common trails, we press our soles into the new fresh earth. Quicksand and jagger bushes be damned.

Turn off your GPS. Disable location services. Carry a machete. Take a step. Then take another. And then one more.

We make the road by walking.

The internet is intentionally pervasive. His far-reaching tentacles evolved through Darwinian-like design. The internet is also persistent. He is ubiquitous, pwned by no one. He is everywhere. All the time.

The network will not apologize. The network is proud of this persistence. This ubiquity. He’s earned it.

These traits are what make the web beautiful. By and large, they’re why pixel workers like us do what we do, day in, day out. We carry meaning forward through ones and zeros to communities at scale. Seven billion potential participants interacting with the things we make. All the world’s knowledge, democratized and in our pockets.

But in the face of all the internet’s promise and charm, do you ever dream about giving it all up? Walking away for good? Finally and forever, severing the digital tether?

I do.

Every single day.

Some people dream about winning the lottery. Putting cash money in the bank. Others long for a perpetual vacation on a tropical island. Sand between their toes. An umbrella delicately placed in their cocktail.

Not me.

I daydream of awkward silences and unbroken eye contact. I dream of focus and undivided attention. My thoughts fix on being unreachable and independent, and fully in the moment with the people I’m with.

However, the network commands constant attention. He pings, we check.

I want less real-time, more real time. I want to be here. Right now.

I want to make things with my hands, things that last and have a tactile presence in the world. Things with physicality. Things that take up space. Does it ever bother you that so much of what we labor so hard to make in the digital space is so fleeting, swept away like sand under the waves of browser updates, new operating systems, and software versioning?

The network is proud of this progression and is unforgiving. As he consumes his previous self to sustain his future iterations, we’re left with one choice: Jump on or get left behind run over.

Sometimes I dream of letting go and allowing him to crush me under the weight of his pixels.

In this fantasy, I’m standing still and alone in a swirling digital vortex. I am in the eye and I am calm. Around me swirls the madness of our omnipresent digital fabric. Hexidecimals, source code, selfies, ping, emoji, uploads, likes, ping, navigation menus, status updates, browser widths, ping, downloads, emails, WiFi connections, analytics, ping, retina screens, ping, that goddamn watch, ping, tweets, git push, ping. Faster, louder, swirling all around my still frame. Eyes closed, teeth clenched. Faster, louder. I am still. Swirling. Dizzy. Disorienting. I am still. Ballooning with every rotation until one final pixelated, glitchy gasp.

Ping.

And there I stand. Still. Calm. Enveloped in silence. I am alone in the quiet calm of the disconnected dawn. No longer a statue. No longer paralyzed by persistence, I take a step.

I am finally and forever untethered.

I’ve been so busy at work and home that I completely forgot to post about a cool project we shipped at the museum last week. We hacked an Amiga 1000 and are letting visitors use it to explore some of Warhol’s digital experiments created with the device in the 1980s.

Me, over on the museum blog:

The shell and innards have been modified to allow for constant, ongoing usage, but all the 1980s details remain. The mouse is jumpy and doesn’t track tightly, and the files open much slower than we’re accustomed to these days, but the authenticity of the operating experience goes a long way in conveying the blunt, primitive nature of the digital tools available for artists at the time.

This was such a cool project to work on.

Earlier this week at work, we published (and effectively open-sourced) a digital strategy that will guide us for the next several years. I wrote about it on the museum’s blog and if you’re into this kind of nerdy stuff, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shortly after we made the strategy public, I stumbled upon a tweet by the brilliant Seb Chan:

I get sad when museums talk about all their stuff as ‘content’. — Seb Chan (@sebchan) March 31, 2015

I’ve never liked the word ‘content’ and I always feel a bit icky when I hear marketers fling it about. Seb is completely right. The word doesn’t do museum missions justice and it cheapens the integrity of our subject matter. Sure enough though, there it was littered throughout sections of our strategy used to describe the museum’s varied objects and narratives.

Since the strategy was open-sourced on Github, I promptly filed an issue ticket and started discussing language alterations with my team. Everyone agreed that an edit was appropriate. A few minutes later, I pushed an update to the repo. We now refer to our objects, media and ephemera with more meaningful language.

This is a really great example of how operating openly and transparently can positively impact institutional philosophy. This minor modification made our approach much stronger. I hope we push more changes like this in the future and when I look back on the versioned repo a few years from now, I’ll be able to see a comprehensive record of how our approach evolved over time.

I got my first taste of publishing to the web in November 1996. I was a first-semester undergrad, still wet behind the ears. It was a life-altering experience.

For the life of me I can’t remember the URL of that first Geocities node. A damn shame though, because if I had it today, I would Wayback Machine the hell out of that little turd pile of HTML. Alas, that first URL is a victim of my memory and the site is off somewhere lost in the binary.

The ability to craft feeling and emotion from pixels was seductive to me as a teenager. Still is. Learning how a seemingly random string of unicode text could output color and aesthetic became my obsession. My first sites were an exploration in markup and imagery. In retrospect, they were not good – hideous in fact – but the idea that I could upload openly to a server that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, blew my mind.

I began publishing my writing online shortly after I figured out the nuts, bolts and protocol of the web. Blogs weren’t a thing yet, so inline styles served as post formatting and table wrappers made the sidebar. A new post meant appending the top of the journal.html file with some new, often idealistic, text. Much simpler days.

Shortly after my first foray into online journaling, a virtual tag cloud’s worth of blogging platforms emerged. Millions of people (myself included) entered the world of platform-based reverse chronology and the big business of blogs was subsequently born. By 2004, blogs were all the rage and a personal URL was the social accessory of choice. Independent weblogs enjoyed their time in the sun for a hot second before something happened.

Facebook happened. Twitter happened. And then the social dominos started falling until they covered over independent websites. Now when someone publishes, they tweet. Or post on Facebook. Or publish an essay on Medium.

So why, if it’s become so easy to publish via 3rd party services, do I and others like me continue to publish sites like these, on unique URLs, free-standing in their platform-agnostic glory? It’s simple really. We subscribe to the Craft Indie philosophy, meaning we take extreme pride and are borderline-obsessed with hand-crafting our own little corners of the web.

Writer and designer Craig Mod says it better than I ever could in his amazing essay All You Need is Publish: Considering the Indie in Indie Web:

Craft Indie is calculated indie. Laborious indie. Tie-your-brain-in-a-knot indie. No easier than it’s ever been. I’m talking about breathing your bits — really possessing, sculpting, caressing, caring for, caring after your bits. Knowing. Takes buckets of effort. And buckets be heavy…Craft Indie is lose your afternoon to RSS 2.0 vs Atom specifications indie. Craft Indie is .htaccessing the perfect URL indie. Craft Indie is cool your eyes don’t change indie. Craft Indie is pixel tweaking line-heights, margins, padding … of the copyright in the footer indie. Craft Indie is #efefe7 not #efefef indie. Craft Indie is fatiguing indie, you-gotta-love-it indie, you-gotta-get-off-on-this-mania indie.

Outside of our obsessive-compulsive code tweaking, independent websites remain extremely important for reasons of sustainability, portability and legacy. Relying on dedicated platforms to support the carrying of messages places the majority of power in the camp of the platform, not the publisher. Brent Simmonds writes:

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

Using 3rd party services is great, however I’m more interested in using them to share content than publish content. This is a subtle, but all-to-important difference. In recent years web publishing has become consolidated and homogeneous. We rely on too few platforms as the pillars of this web we love. We need more distribution. We need refragmentation.

Frank Chimero explores this concept in a recent essay:

The lack of an tag led to Pinterest. No method to connect people created Facebook. RSS’s confusing interfaces contributed to Twitter’s success. Any gargantuan web company’s core value is a response to limitations of the protocol (connection), markup spec (description), or browsers (interface). Without proper connective tissue, consolidation becomes necessary to address these unmet needs. That, of course, leads to too much power in too few places. The door opens to potential exploitation, invasive surveillance, and a fragility that undermines the entire ethos of the internet.

So how do we stimulate a refragmentation of the web that isn’t just usable, but more useable than Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest? How can we achieve the dream of tech companies becoming field research that informs the underlying protocol Chimero proposes in the closing to his wonderful post? I don’t have the answer and I’m not sure a definitive one currently exists. But I believe we’ll get there.

This is just the beginning.

Until then, you know where to find me. I’ll be here in perpetuity tweaking my margins, fine-tuning my palette and publishing my pipe dreams long into the digital dawn…Craft Indie-style.