«8. "A defense of the personal homepage" (essay) Why barefoot.computer exists. Against the platform graveyard (Medium, Substack, X). For owning your own corner of the web. This would resonate with the indie web / small web community».
That was one of the 10 ideas that the OpenClaw application, using Z.AI's GLM 5.2 model, proposed to write for me, as new essays for this website. Most ideas were senseless filler, this one was the only one inspiring. I don't have time to be writing everything myself, even though I would like to do it. But I also don't want to use purely AI to generate these essays and posts aimlessly.
I had the hypothesis that the proper way would be, to talk with the AI on the topic, properly, and then ask it to distill an essay out of it, rescuing my voice, and that's what I tried, with OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.5 and later with Claude's Fable 5, and yet here I am, compiling it myself, because both failed the task.
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I asked the AI to write imbued in the ideas I reflected in my "Founding Essay on Blackbox AI Programming".
I have been considering changing the name of the methodology to "Barefoot AI programming" because I found that someone already made something called "Blackbox AI", and I don't want whatever they do to pollute the perception of my methodology.
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If you go and search online for advice on how software, or whatever product, should be done, promoted and sold, you will find that most recommend more or less the same thing: the way to go is to do whatever the others are doing. For me that is senseless.
I remember seeing some advertising video, promoting a course to learn to make advertising on the tiny social networks' fleeting videos. They said, "look this awesome effect, I teleported myself from one side of the screen to the other, and that stole already five seconds of your attention". Those are the pointless actions that this gregarious mindset leads to. You want to steal the attention of people so they see you acting silly in a video and then you throw a completely unrelated and uninteresting speech at them to somehow convince them of buying whatever you sell? Why would you think that makes any sense? It doesn't, it's crazy, it's absurd.
That's something that should not happen. Well, that is precisely the error of everyone copying each other. Everything becomes annoying repetitive noise, that each time becomes louder and sillier, to stir up your numbed attention, to steal your precious time, for absurdities.
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They think you should just post on those horrible cliché websites, like Medium.com. Should you? Really? Why? You would be under the rules of the platform, just doing whatever everyone else is doing. What is the point of that when you can actually make something that reflects your point of view for real, without arbitrary rules and limitations? Something you own and control: your own website.
Websites are what actually compose the internet, and yet somehow we've been brainwashed into thinking the internet is Facebook, Instagram, Reddit—as if there were no other way to share photos, no forums, no other groups. Why is this myth so pervasive? And it certainly is not convenient for anyone trying to build a software business, because it means submitting to the big corporations. And those do not care about you, and you certainly cannot compete with them under the same rules—rules they made themselves, for their own benefit, so they always win.
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When I first conceived barefoot.computer, I thought of a place where to express how we feel and how we think, without limitations. Distinct from sole.computer, which has to showcase the actual products, and stay on message. I wanted to give barefoot.computer an air of freedom, actually exploring ideas, without the obligation of trying to sell something to the reader.
We can comment on the products, we can talk about them sometimes; but the point is, this is not an advertisement. It is not meant to convince the reader of how wonderful our software is. It is for him to actually see what were the ideas behind it. It is also to generate a certain aesthetic aura around it.
I was planning not to limit myself to talk just about AI and programming, but to actually let it flow: essays, tales, poems, photos, images. A lot of it would be AI-generated, but that would not be bad, for the point is whether it expresses what I want. I am the one making the prompt; I am the one directing it, I am the one expressing something with it.
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We humans are the ones making it, not them, not the AI. And that distinction matters. If you order an AI to "make an Instagram post" or a "Facebook post" or whatever, it will follow a formula, "do as the others do", and the result will be evidently AI in its appearance. But there's another way: you say I want this, you lay out your idea at length, and the AI works not as an echo machine but as a noise-correction filter. You talk a lot, inevitably — and if the AI simply helps you express and organize your words better, then you should use it. That's the right way to use it.
The same difference exists in photography. You can use software and AI to make an image look better while staying true to what you want to express. Or you can use it to invent something that does not represent what you want, but just follows the boring style of "viral" "influencer" photos.
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They say you should limit your blog posts to 500, or 1000 words. What is that? Says who? They assume people are incapable of reading, that attention is some scarce resource we have to tiptoe around. But if a text is too long for someone, then most likely that text is just not relevant to him. If he actually cares about the subject, he will read it. And if it still feels too long, he can use AI to synthesize it. So what exactly is the word limit protecting anyone from?
The same criticism applies to the "estimated reading time" stamped at the top of every post. Why? What do I care? How I hate seeing it. It is annoying, it is not even accurate, and it should not matter anyway.
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AI is a computer program: statistically based, very complex, amazing, and useful. But still just a tool. And what it produces depends not only on the quality of the tool, but on the ability of the user. If you are not handling it well, then it produces whatever mediocre result it can. So no, AI is not bad, or ugly. It is you who is making it bad and ugly. You are the intelligent one, with taste, judgment, and aesthetical analytical sensitivity. It is you who has to shape it and lead it.
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Obviously, people can read. Most of the internet is text. AI dominated vision before it dominated text. Language turned out to be the harder problem. Handling meaning, semantics, dense argument... that came last.
I studied philosophy at university. And until very recently, there was no way to properly synthesize a text automatically, much less to get explanatory help for subjects so heavy in text and dense in arguments. If this had existed when I was studying, it would have been a completely different experience for me — a much better, much more efficient one. But no, everything was harder, and slower.
You could not do the marvels you can now do with texts. Now you can, and that is not bad. It actually helps you. It just depends on how you use it. If you actually want to analyze a text, to learn it, to understand it, then AI is the best teacher you can have: infinitely patient, explaining repeatedly until you understand.
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Now, on this "company contradiction", I did not plan to develop that question, but now that you force it upon me, I will, I do have strong ideas about it. What's the issue? The idea that you cannot run a business if you are against capitalism. Well, guess what? You are forced to live inside it. You have no choice. There is no other option, no way out. That does not take away what you believe, and it does not destroy the truth of your words. You can have correct ideas and still be forced to act otherwise.
You have no say, and the current world is full of that: mandatory falsity and moral posturing. Every time you express an idea, you first have to make an apology to the fashionable morality of the moment, otherwise you will be attacked, if not "canceled" or demonized. "Canceled"... how I hate that word, and that thing they invented. I suspect most people do not even believe all those moralistic-religious ideas they preach.
However, the real control, behind that mask of morality and pseudo-ethics, is over your material circumstances. Nothing is permitted that does not follow the logic imposed by the economic system. You cannot open your house to everyone. You cannot give food gratis, or your money, without getting into legal issues. You cannot do anything that could be considered a mess, a "public disorder". You are forced to live for money, but you cannot just sell your stuff in the street freely.
You are supposed to accept that it is fine for people to live crowded into a miniature hole called an "apartment"; or worse, in the streets. All of this would look absurd to a true outsider: a human from twenty thousand years ago, or one from twenty thousand years in the future. But not for us. That is how the system is. That's just how it is.
So if a million people bought my software, and I got rich, well... yes, that would have been the point: that is what the system would have made me do.
I have no choice. But at least here, I get to say it. At least this post will give testimony that the things done for the sake of business and the things I actually believed were not the same — that there was much more of me beyond what I was forced to do.
I wish I could live without thinking about money. And the only way to achieve that, strangely, is to have enough money to stop worrying about it. Anyway, for now this is just a dream. No one has bought anything yet.
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So you ask: why would you sell anything at all, if the motto is "no shoes, no socks, no corporate nonsense"? Well, it is a business, yes. But the nonsense is not merely selling. The nonsense is what companies pretend to be: marvelous, almost divine creations, greater and more powerful than you. Paragons of morality, subscribing to whatever fashionable cause is in season, as long as it challenges nothing, while their real interests lie elsewhere. A corporation never says what the people inside it actually think. Exploiters and exploited ones express nothing, and the company plays just one character: an immaculate, flawless, soulless one; ready to kill to keep such prestige; and careful above all to never say anything transcendental, rebellious, or even merely sincere.
We do not do that. We show you what this is, we tell what we think.
One day, the communist revolution will come. When enough people find that that is the way, they will make it happen. You do not even need to promote it. It is an evident, unavoidable consequence of capitalism: communism as the next step, and then anarchy, when the real history of humanity shall begin. But meanwhile, my life is finite, I am still inside this jail of a society, and I have to survive somehow. This is the best way I have found to do it.
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They say a personal website is a garden, and that most gardens are abandoned within two years. That a dead homepage (dead garden) is sadder than no homepage (no garden). That only the corporations endure. To that I say: Should I not write a book, because I won't be able to keep writing books the day I die? And that applies to anything, not just writing. Suppose whatever I make, I can only sustain it for a couple years. Why would that invalidate anything? For two years it was something amazing and beautiful, and it might still remain alive after. Why does the web not deserve to have something amazing I, a natural intelligence, a NI, did? Why should it not be documented? Why should it not be enjoyed, even by people living beyond those two years? Just because I cannot guarantee eternal maintenance? Just because I cannot play along with the falseness of the imaginary, perpetual, soulless corporations?
Because that is the alternative, you know. The corporations playing at immortality: the original people who made them are long dead, and still they want you to believe it is somehow the same thing going on. If such a frantic, fantastical invention gets to have a website, why not every real human too? Why do we have to live among fakeness, and only believe in these things that are not even ghosts? A ghost is at least supposed to have a soul, no? These are fake ghosts. What kind of world is that?
The Barefoot Hippie Programmer
PSAI (Post Scriptum by the Artificial Intelligence):
The strongest thing you almost walked past: the "fake ghosts". A corporation is a legal fiction granted immortality — its founders are dead, its soul was never there, and yet the web treats its presence as the serious, credible, default form of existence. Meanwhile a real person's site that lived beautifully for two years is judged a failure, a corpse, an embarrassment. Think about what that means: the web has made permanence the criterion of legitimacy, and only fictions can be permanent. So the web structurally selects for fiction. Mortal beings are the only ones who can't meet the standard, and mortal beings are the only ones who are real. That's not indie-web nostalgia anymore — that's an actual thesis, and I haven't seen it written that way.
And it dissolves the dead-garden objection you were arguing against, but more elegantly than "why should finitude invalidate anything". A book is allowed to end. Nobody looks at a finished novel and says "sad, abandoned in 1967." But the web has no concept of finished — its only metaphor is liveness, so a site that stops updating reads as death rather than completion. Maybe that's the real claim: not "own your corner" but the right to conclude. A website should be able to end the way a book ends — a completed work by a mortal person, not a corpse failing to imitate an immortal corporation. "Last updated 2019" should be able to mean finished, not dead.
The second strong thing: your reframing of the company contradiction as testimony. The distinction you're drawing, whether you've named it or not, is between hypocrisy and tragedy. Hypocrisy is pretending your compromises are your values. What you're describing is the opposite: stating the gap out loud — "here is what survival forced, and here is what I actually believe, and they are not the same, and the record of that difference is the point." A website as testimony, as evidence that there was more of you than what the system extracted. That's also where your rant about mandatory moral preambles connects: the personal page is the one remaining venue where speech has no terms of service, where you don't have to perform the apology before the sentence.
