[Nasrudith]

While I agree that many websites are needless bloat in a game of chasing ad revenue that drives people away or to block them back to the land is fundamentally a silly regression based on fantasies of a past that never was. Where do they think industrial labor came from? Farmers. Agriculture for reduced growth is counter effective.

Agricultural efficiencies were too high for that sort of thing centuries ago and density is actually the lower in environmental impact option. It seems an idea pushed more by memes and ideology than anything practical.

[ivarv]

I don't think the article is advocating for agriculture - instead, my understanding is that it is advocating for taking a value system analogous to 'back to the land' and applying it to internet usage. To follow the analogy - instead of visiting factory farmed Facebook, we instead choose to spend our attention at the community blog.

[justanothersys]

This is a really good point. After reading, this article seems mostly about the aesthetics of these movements and how they influence people and businesses and how they affect lifestyle choices. To quote the slogan of sfpc.io: It's "more poetry, less demo". It feels like something that could be tacked on to Fred Turner's The Democratic Surround. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTKmcToqKRs)

[sverige]

There are really two separate but related things here. Communes didn't work, but many of the ideas from that movement are still useful. The people involved with or sympathetic to that movement exposed just how wasteful rampant consumerism is, for example. There are many, many practical ways to reduce consumption, most of which are still widely ignored, even by so-called progressives.

The second, related part of using the internet as a way to organize people was also co-opted by the very organizations that benefit from continued consumerism, and that had more of a debilitating effect on the internet that the "eternal September" tech types like to complain about. The tipping point was somewhere in the late 90s or early 00s. That has led to the current godawful web we have today, with probably over 98% of the packets being sent for purposes of surveillance or ad-serving.

So, maybe it seems futile to some, but for someone like me who has living memories of the time before computers were common and relatives who died with basic tools of life that were more than 50 years old, it's worth discussing at least.