It’s always good to go home for the holidays for a reminder on how the normcorps live. Where all the holiday games were Facebook posts gone ‘viral’. Where the gifts are whatever’s trending on Amazon. Where the #cottagecore or #mariekondo or whatever else was popular on Instagram finally filtered through to the teeming masses. Sportsball is everything, parents get sucked into coaching and kids into playing and it’s not a minor commitment — you really get sucked into it back at home.

I wasn’t around before white flight sent all the norms to the suburbs, or even if that’s how it happened, but we can all agree the suburbs become the center of banality, and farther out in the small towns there was some character and a lot of land and space so people could be very interesting in their own space. The crazy coots in their farms could get weld old machine parts into sculpture or put half buried cars in their lawns as art. The suburbs had HOAs and laws to keep things looking the same and improving their land value.

And in my lifetime, this is where counterculture was ripe. The suburbs were banal, and seemed preoccupied with how much your home was worth or how perfect your lawn was. And I imagine if you’re surrounded by that, you might fall into that. The city, by this point, was like a ruin pub — abandoned yet full of people in spaces that activated something other, something not banal, a fertile ground for something new.

I find most of online is just as sleepy, except the enshittification part comes off stronger every time. The internet has its own HOAs in the form of Nielson Norman, Jony Ive and every UX professional everywhere. Make everything the same — the actual directive from Jakob Nielson — so people immediately know what to do. Sounds great on paper — but it’s actually highly limiting and suggesting that the best we can do is what we have currently.

I just recently had a little spat with a new ED for a client we created their site 8 years back. She decided that her Wix site was somehow better than the custom site built for the organization, and when I clarified why it’s a bad idea, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was an idiot. And by the standards of normalization and banalification I certainly am. If you somehow sell more weddings with a haphazard site by the famed worst site builder ever to exist, well I’m lost in the woods.

But now that everything is so homogenized and so enshittified, isn’t now the best time for a counterculture? I think it is. And I’m seeing other people starting to have some hope. Indie web (and smallweb) practices, hand-crafted experiences, sites that make you think and give you a place, not unlike old Tumblr or really old Twitter. AT and Mastodon protocols are really interesting and the Flipboard creator is creating something that mixes AT and RSS feeds, which is where things could get interesting.