I’ve been spending a few hours working on a constrained network, and it’s reminded me with great force how much the Internet sucks.
I wanted to write this entry using my normal (online) tools… and the network has noped that for me. It’s doable, if I’m willing to endure constant waiting.
I can't even load some websites effectively; I wanted to "like" a Substack post about a particular bass guitar model, and doing that took nearly a minute and a half.
We're designing our information infrastructure for the very blessed. I consider myself lucky to have good, consistent network access - and apparently I should. If I had to work under the conditions under which I write this on a regular basis, I don't know if I'd be able to have my current job. Even a git pull would take an hour.
I'm writing this from a position of frustration, of course, and the reality is that we have all these bells and whistles on the network because we actually want them - my blog doesn't have to load google fonts for the title text (which involves loading a Javascript file, plus the font itself, unless it's cached properly and currently), or any of the other niceties it has. Yet it has them because I thought it would be neat, or appropriate.
As I type this, fuming at how long it takes for simple communiques to go across the wire, I'm thinking that we're getting something wrong: we're amplifying the method of the messages we write over the messages themselves.
In the end, it's more important that we have something worth writing - and reading - and that we make our worthy words able to be read. We're going to regret isolating the context of the human race behind whether you have 20MB/s access some day.
Consider: only two thirds of humanity has access. At all. That's 2.6 billion people who have no way to see any of this. A remarkable number of those online have good access - but the median desktop page is 2.5 megabytes of data. if someone's accessing the internet over a phone, or a less-than-stable connection, we're building very very pretty but effectively insurmountable walls around the words we value so much and publish without consideration.
So what can we do?
A lot, as it turns out, but we might not like it.
One of the burdens of this website is Wordpress. It's very handy, very easy to deploy, very common, very easy to support, but if I'm being honest I haven't applied a lot of discipline to how it represents information. I've considered this website as a sort of test ground, so I've added plugins (and depended on them) without careful consideration, and it shows.
I am pretty image-light, but that's an accident; I'm not a visual thinker, so I tend to ignore image generation as a rule, and when I do use images, they tend to be hand-drawn (and thus low-resolution and color-poor, which makes them small) or - alternatively - AI-generated, and the prompts I use for AI generation tend to encourage images that can be compressed well.
For web developers, there are options, too: scripts have deferral strategies, we can use localized CDNs to improve responsiveness, and if we're careful, we can actually use testing and deployment pipelines to verify that we're creating content that the less-advantaged among us can access.
There are advantages to taking the time to do all of this, of course.
For one thing, lower access costs - in terms of time - increase reach to less prosperous areas or people. We want the world to improve; we can do that, even as individuals, by sharing what insight we might have and communicating with others with different contexts than we might have.
In addition to increasing reach, we save on resource cost as well, because every megabyte we store and transmit consumes energy. We might not notice the effect of shrinking a 5MB page to 20K… but if 90% of the 5MB pages out there shrank to 300K, we'd save a lot of energy, enough to notice.
The Website Carbon Calculator estimates that shrinking a 2 MB page to 200 kB for 10 k monthly views saves ~9 kg CO₂ per year-the same as driving a gasoline car ~25 mi.
Moving On?
Making information reachable is quiet advocacy: it invites new voices, reduces environmental load, and shows professional pride in craft. No sermon required-just lean code and empathy. I think these are things worth considering.
And thus I'm considering once again revising my blog to use simple, straightforward HTML generated by a static content generator - to help prevent me from giving in to the desire to add all those bells and whistles - and to make whatever I write accessible to anyone who wants to bother reading it.