The internet used to be a library. RSS is your library card.

Brace yourselves, I’m feeling salty about this.

There’s a great quote going around the socials right now, about how the internet used to be a library, and now it’s a store.

This hits me like the loss of the Library of Alexandria. Because it’s true. The internet used to be this giant repository of pretty much everything you ever wanted to know. I’m pretty sure it’s obvious to our readers that I am one of those nerds who read the Encyclopedia Britannica while eating breakfast every morning. It was a sheer source of delight for me, knowing that I could open the pages and facts would spill out into my brain. The world was fascinating and complex and rich with ideas and knowledge and people wanting to explore.

Fast forward a bit to the existence of smartphones. Holy cats, all that knowledge, but in my pocket!!!!!!! The sheer amazingness of having access to whatever I needed to know, without having to head to the library and dig through the stacks, or waiting for interlibrary loan. Boom, it was just… there.

Then came greed. OK, greed largely in the form of algorithms.

The original algorithms were step-by-step instructions we wrote down to help computers help us. Ada Lovelace wrote what is now widely considered the first one, back in 1843, for a machine that never even got built. To me, though, everything really went wrong in 1998, when Google published PageRank, the formula behind its search engine. It wasn’t the first ranking algorithm, but it’s the one that took over the world. Someone had decided what counted as “important,” and that call decided what you saw first (and what you never saw at all). Your access to information was now steered by a corporation, and it all went downhill on greased rails from there.

I mean, there’s more to it, I’m oversimplifying a bit because we all have stuff to do with our day.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication (the name came a few years in, after some drama), was also built in 1999, although it didn’t really get its legs under it until like 2005-ish. Built by a bunch of heckin’ smart people including the late great and hugely lamented Aaron Swartz (who helped write RSS 1.0 at fourteen, which is a flex), it went through all the normal tech wrangles, with different organizations claiming ownership of the creation of different bits of the backend. The RSS Wikipedia page is great, if you want more details.

The really cool thing about RSS is, it’s, well, really simple.

Yes. Read away to your heart’s content, without ads except any inline ads your creators choose. Without some corporation watching over your shoulder to see who and what you’re reading, and using it to manipulate you. Without comment sections, unless your creators have them hosted on their own blog sites. Without being psychologically manipulated so you keep scrolling long after you should.

You get the information you select. You curate your feeds for high quality and thoughtfulness, instead of likes and follows and subscribes and whatever else social media tells us matters. And you get to use actual words, instead of funny made-up words about really serious stuff out of fear the algorithm will suppress you (looking at you, “unalive”).

One of the things I love best about using RSS is that you have the option of selecting individual sources outside “your bubble,” and reading them, without it generating a torrent of more content like it. You can read diverse points of view, without also ending up with a feed full of bobbleheads that the algorithm chooses for you when it senses you like something that you don’t. Stay informed, without the algorithm deciding it’s your whole personality.

Using RSS means taking a pull, rather than push, approach to your information (you go get it, instead of having it shoved at you). We’ve all gotten super used to popping open our social media of choice, and assuming it will give us everything. Or, some things. Maybe. Or perhaps the algorithm thought it detected you slowing your scroll over an ad for gutter cleaning, and now your whole feed is gutters. Because feeds are monetized, content creators get money from your eyeballs and your clicks.

RSS means none of that happens, so you have to be more intentional in supporting the content creators you enjoy. Never was the phrase “if you aren’t paying, you’re the product” more true than in the content world. So if you’re going to move to RSS as a way of life (and a way of cutting out all the hideous downsides of manipulation at the hand of tech oligarchs), please also have a plan for chipping in, so your creators can keep creating.

It turns out, social media is simply a layer of nonsense on top of an old internet that still exists, but is a lot less about self-aggrandizement. We can have the old library internet back. We just have to choose to spend our time there, instead of staring at the bright, whirly, commercially and politically manipulative version of the internet.

Won’t you join me there?

Of course this newsletter has a feed. It’s here: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/2z0aUwSTAK.xml

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