In December of 2021, three of us got together and connected our houses together in what we now call The Promised LAN. The idea is simple—fill the hole we feel is gone from our lives. Build our own always-on 24/7 nonstop LAN party. Build a space that is intrinsically social, even though we’re doing technical things. We can freely host insecure game servers or one-off side projects without worrying about what someone will do with it.

I've had a similar experience to this guy in some ways. I remember the weird intersection of hyper-social and hyper-tech. I never really thought about bringing it back; the default thing to drop into is to assume that all that stuff we did was in service of what we now have, in vastly improved form, instead of being for its own sake.

Sometimes, metaphorically, the barn-raising is for the act of shared work, and the fellowship and interdependence, not because you want a barn so bad. It was easy to miss that. It's still easy to miss.

Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors–completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy, with the real content hidden at the bottom bracketed by deceptive ads served by companies that definitely know which new coffee shop I went to last month.
This is wrong, and those who have seen what was know it.

Everyone who sees this knows how wrong it is. It’s the purest example of algocracy and unchecked consumerism.

I sympathized with the idea even though I have no plans to carry it out. What matters is the core of this manifesto: freedom.