But first, some music.

I'm thinking Blues, but I'm always thinking Blues. Let's see what I can find on the shelves.

Alright, I'm spinning a shockingly clean copy of The Original American Folk Blues festival (if you've never heard it, do yourself a favor), drinking a cup of coffee (Decaf! The Horror!) and thinking about the #internet, the #web, #gopher, #usenet, The American Media Oligopoly, #copyright, #DIYMedia and the #PublicDomain.

It's been stormy. My head is cloudy, my bones ache, and I'm honestly terrified to my core of the future.

So this should be fun!

Sometime between 10 years ago and 5 years ago, @Ethancdavenport suggested to me that it'd be really cool if we could get a bunch of little intranets connected to one another all over the country/planet, and rebuild the internet.

This was honestly probably in the wake of the first brush with SOPA/PIPA?

God that seems like it was ancient history.

And it was probably before that, and just came up again in the wake of SOPA/PIPA.

Either way, the idea struck a chord with me.

The exact genesis of the idea isn't super important.

The point is that I started thinking about networking without/outside the internet.

As time has worn on, this idea has moved closer and closer to the forefront of my mind.

I've done various experiments with BBS style systems, and shared servers.

I spent too much time reading about the history of Usenet, and watching documentaries about BBSs, and just *thinking*  about what a national or a global non-internet would look like.

This idea comes up any time anything bad happens to the internet (Like, you know, the Net Neutrality rollback, or the pending European copyright clusterfuck)

I've written some blog posts about it. When I talk about it on Mastodon I usually use the hashtag #mBBS or #alternet although I sometimes forget to do this.

I've written a lot, in other places about how the modern web is a trashfire. I'm not going to re-hash all those ideas here, but I'll sum up:

- Massive downloads for no reason
- Arbitrary code execution
- Tracking you constantly (advertising)
- Increasingly silo'd
- Tracking you constantly (NSA Panopticon)
- Bad Laws (we'll discuss this at length.)
- EME/DRM in browsers