What's up, Sumers? So it is my firm belief that every person who matters on the internet, that includes you, should have their own personal website. Now why do I say that? In the past couple of years, actually 2018 was probably the worst year ever for the internet. In fact it's been getting worse and worse with every passing year and it's been getting worse because of these things called social media sites. Now I've talked about upcoming before. I've talked about the psychological effects of social media sites but I'm not talking about that here. What I mean by that is, actually let me nostalgia for a second. Use Sumers might not remember it but back in the old days of the internet, the internet was truly a magical place. Anyone could just put whatever on it. They still can but nowadays the internet is dominated by these huge sites and everyone goes to them. But in the past this is something beautiful that many of you guys don't remember. Back in the 90s, mid-early 90s, something like that, all sites were sort of equal. There was no Twitter, there was no Facebook of course. Every HTML page which all had horrible formatting, they were all something special. They were all full of folklore and magic and gifts of flying UFOs and all this kind of stuff. Anyone, there was a kind of equal footing. There was a kind of, I don't like the word democracy, not a big fan of that stuff but there was a kind of democratic aspect of the internet back then. You put everything in the proper perspective. It's not like you see this big foot site and you believe everything they say but everything was sort of put in the right proportion. That is opposed to network news or something like that. Network news, they have all these fancy graphics, they have all these people who are talking in straight faces and really it's just a psychological trick to say things matter effectively so you believe them. That is what the internet is like nowadays. Nowadays we have fact checkers. Fact checker Twitter will tell you what is right by putting up what story you're supposed to believe in the trending area. Facebook does the same thing, all these social media sites. Now these social media sites exist for a reason. They didn't, I mean it's not just an error they exist. They did something, they provided something good. Sorry, I'm like walking on a log. I apologize if I fall. The social media sites did provide something good. That is the internet per se is a little difficult to use. It can be a sort of hard process to set up a email server, a web server, an IRC server. I don't know maybe even an RSS feed, things like this. So social media sites make that process easy and that's what they did at the beginning. If you don't want to make you run a website, hey come to my space. We will create a page for you that you can customize. And weirdly enough, you've actually since my space used to be very customizable. Nowadays you have Facebook, no you can't really customize anything. But you know, what social media sites provided is they made the process of making a website even though it wasn't really yours, easier. Now what has happened of course is that now that all of the eggs are in that one basket, you suddenly realize oh social media sites can go bad. They can do bad things. They can use the extreme amounts of power in bad ways. And that's been especially evident in the past couple of years because, especially in 2016, people realized oh, me magic is real. Like the internet can affect real life. They can actually become a threat to the powers that be. So the powers that be have to do something about it. They have to make the internet like network news. They have to use social media sites not just to give people platforms, but also to decide who gets to be a real person and who isn't. If Facebook, if all these services are using Facebook and Facebook now has a kind of a fishyality to it, well we can now keep you from existing by banning you from Facebook. Now of course, I guess I don't exist because I don't have a Facebook I never really had. Actually I did for a brief period. Someone made me one but I deleted it. Now that people think in these narrow terms of specific websites, it sort of causes a lot of trouble for the internet. Now again, as I said, I think that all people, the ideal for the internet is for every person who has something to say should have their own website. That's why in a couple of weeks, maybe in a couple of days, I'm going to be doing a series on how to set up your own web server, server and all the stuff you need to know. If you don't know anything about starting up a website, I'm going to do a series on it. So, but of course there were resources out there. Now one of the problems, again, social media sites made this kind of process easy or it's not really a process because you're not actually getting a website out of it. But social media sites made that stuff easy. And I think in order to go forward, let's put it this way, a lot of people ask me about alternate social media sites. What do I think about, I don't know, mastodon. What do I think about, I don't know, is there some Facebook alternate, I don't know, all these alternative sites. And for me, the alternative site is just the internet. The internet has a chat protocol. It has email messaging, messaging protocol. It has RSS feeds. It has all the things that social media sites have. It's just an issue of making it accessible to people and making it so normal people can actually use it. That to me is the problem. So for me, I'm not in the mood to rely on a social media platform. I'm not going to rely on their consent to exist on the internet. It's just not going to happen. I don't even bother. I mean, YouTube is the closest thing I come to. And every day I think about, what am I going to do when I ban from YouTube? That's just the thought that basically everyone has to think about nowadays because you never know where the strikes are going to be coming from. So anyway, that's pretty much all I had to say. Again, the internet, it's not supposed to be the way it is. There's a magic to a decentralized internet where everyone has their own crappy sites and people are less reliant on these big ones. So that is what I encourage you to do. Invest in creating your own website. Invest in having your own independent existence on the internet. And you will not have to worry about all this stuff continually happening because although they can, oh, they can do this or that, they can try and get your registrar to get rid of you. But when it comes down to it, people who get banned on these sites who have no, who just have a Twitter, just one example. So a couple of years ago, Milo, remember that guy? Milo got banned from Twitter and he didn't have anything besides a Twitter. So when he got banned from Twitter, he basically stopped existing. Okay, his life was over. Compare that to recently, Alex Jones was banned. Alex Jones, he had his own site that he had curated for decades. He had all the infrastructure worked out. And although Alex Jones took a big hit when he was banned, he still exists. People still consume his content. It's probably less than when he was on YouTube, but he still exists. So you can be a peer already, a spy, a relearned and say, oh, they're going to come for me eventually. No, well, that's not an excuse for at least having contingency. So start your own website, start your own independent web existence. And I'll help you with my coming series or you can just look for another series online. But anyway, that's all I had to say in this video. I'll see you guys next time.