In Search of a Place to Call Home

This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for July 2024

Just a couple of years back, hispachan.org shut down forever. Hispachan was a Spanish-speaking image board, akin to what 4chan is in the English-speaking Internet. Just like Spanish Wikipedia, the fewer number of moderators compared to that of their English counterpart made the overall experience a lot wilder. So, while in 4chan it was rare to engage in constructive discussion, in Hispachan it was downright impossible. And still, Hispachan was the website in which I spent most of my time during lockdown, back in 2020 and all the way until its closure in 2022. The main aspect that dragged me back there was what I call “tercermundismo”, or third-worldism, situations that can only occur in a country in which people are used to constant human rights violations and lack of trust in social institutions, where some sort of organized wild-west mentality predominates and people have to live their day-to-day lives using a mix of wit and cynicism. The emotions that emerge from the exposure to these experiences range from hilarity to downright admiration.

As such, I felt right at home when browsing Hispachan. I did even post in there; I was an active member of that community. Not that I was any less toxic than the other users. There was some sort of curse that fell upon us that urged us to behave like savages, to fall victim of our instincts. As a consequence, the emotions that predominated the minds and souls of us, Hispachan users, were mostly those of rage and lust. So when I first heard that the site was going to close down, the main thing I felt was liberation, the notion that I no longer had to engage in the vicious cycle of reading other people’s enticing, rage-inducing, comments or, as they are known in the image board space, baits; there was no longer a sea in which I could fall prey to them.

However, with Hispachan now closed I was left without an Internet place to call home. I then started to look for any other place that could satisfy my Internet browsing needs. I wandered around other Spanish speaking image boards, Facebook groups and ended up in a place called Agora Road, a web forum that appeals to nostalgia holders and schizo-posters in equal parts. Yet I wasn’t unaffected by Hispachan’s overall toxicity. I could even say that I was scarred for life by it. In any place I visited I could feel the threatening aura of those terminally online, and could feel reminiscences of my time in the darkest places on the web. I, an image board veteran, had had my fair share of nightmare inducing content, some of which I can still remember to this day and that I have had a hard time trying to forget.

All of this led me to wonder if there was any place left on the Internet where one could safely browse, whatever that means. Hey, maybe I just became too sensitive akin to those social justice warriors that see offensive content anywhere and that I dreaded so much back then. But honestly, and a lot of my peers in the Agora Road seem to agree, the Internet has simply became much worse lately. It seems that the innocence that once was the norm is now but a forgotten relic of the past. I particularly want to blame the notion of “content”. Every piece of communication shared on the Internet has now become content, that is, material that can be shared across multiple platforms and can return in exchange money or Internet fame. One of the web platforms where this phenomenon is the most notorious is in Reddit, the infant terrible of the Internet for normies, or Internet casuals, and just another cringe website for terminally online peers. Reddit is the perfect example on what happens when you start paying, even if via a virtual currency, your “content creators”: everything becomes cynical, everything lacks authenticity, everything reads like a lie prefabricated to generate engagement. About that I can only quote what the blog Fuck You, Tiger says about Julio Cortázar’s short stories: “Hasta en los mejores cuentos de Cortázar uno puede ‘verlo’ tendiendo los hilos, armando las trampas, calibrando la impresión crítica…”¹ This lack of genuineness makes the overall experience of the web browser like walking on a field filled with bear-traps, as if every form of interaction was tailor made for you to rage-reply.

While this has helped (a little) in reducing my general screen time, it has also led me to wonder if there ever was a moment in Internet history where people were civil and educated or if, to the contrary, I was just observing the past with rose-tinted glasses. After all, after serious considerations, it seems that the angriness that dominates the Internet today has always been there and I was just not on the receiving end of that agglomerated rage. I’ve been particularly drawn to consider the latter after reading some articles on the Wired magazine. Whether for better or worse, Wired is at the forefront of Internet innovation, and that regard encompasses the societal and behavioral changes that trend across the globe. The most recent one? The notion that the Internet, whose access to is considered an universal right, should be a place where one could feel safe. Me and other Internet veterans might quickly agree to this, however, as Filthy Frank (now Joji) once put it, the only way to achieve this was to hate and attack each other without regard to race, religion, sexual orientation and whatnot. Internet has never been, as far as I can remember, a place where one could wander around without receiving a couple of hits for any reason being. This was just the nature of an anonymous community.

And maybe that’s the thing that has changed. The Internet is no longer full of anonymous users with anime avatars or, as some user puts it either on Twitter (now X), 4chan or Facebook, the “indigenous peoples of the Internet”; it is filled now with real people with real names and pictures and real lives, who do not consider the Internet an alternate reality but rather an extension of their meatspace personas. In a place as such, being hateful or even inconsiderate is clearly deemed as less than acceptable. That might be the reason why I’ve become more sensitive towards Internet’s hateful content (there’s that word again), because when it is targeted towards me, even though it is aimed at just another random face in the sea of people from the perspective of the offender, it is directed towards me, no longer an avatar, in the original sense of the word, but a representation of my real individuality.

So, where should we all go if we want to feel comfortable on the Internet? In my time on it, I’ve observed many exoduses, from Facebook, Twitter, even Instagram, all the way down to some sites that only my Latin American friends will find familiar: Fotolog, Metroflog and Hi5, exoduses that happened for a wide variety of reasons. However they all shared, just like their analog counterpart, the same core behind them: they were looking for a new place to call home. Nowadays I have my own personal website (part of a wider movement that aims to bring the personal web back), I run my own Mastodon instance where I post my photos and occasional thoughts, I have my own Discord server, just recently I came back to Instagram, because I wanted my pictures to have a wider audience, and scroll trough some web forums and image boards without really clicking with any of them. I am no longer an Internet citizen, I am an Internet refugee, or nomad, depending on how proud I am feeling in any particular day. There might no longer be a place which I could call home, but that doesn’t stop me from looking. In the meantime, I occasionally like to log off, grab a physical book and read it with a hot cup of coffee by the side, the way generations of our ancestors did, and that before the Internet, the radio and telephone was the only way to feel part of a bigger community. Books like House of Leaves make me feel like there is room for hypertextuality even among paper books. And who knows, maybe the next social network will no longer require the use of a computer to log into it.