Around 2001 I stumbled across a book in my school's small library, where I would usually spend time reading Tintin issues I didn't happen to have at home. This book, which was in all likelyhood titled something as uninspired as "how to build a website," did, nevertheless, instruct me on the basic steps of html learning and website hosting.

On GeoCities, I built a website for a card game which I (an avid Magic: the Gathering player, at the time) had invented myself. No trace of this website survives. I recall being particularly proud of being able to place the welcome image in the main page between two animated gifs of sword-wielding knights.

In the library's computer lab, I toyed with my website, and shared this knowledge with a friend. His website was, as far as I can remember, a multipurpose webpage, which hosted art, notes on an invented language, digitally rendered alien landscapes... It is, like my own website, gone.

Why make a website today?

Or better yet, why make a website in the same way - that is, by typing it out, with no recourse to automatic website generators such as Squarespaces, Wix, or even Blogspot?

The Political Argument contextualises website making within the larger context of the new web as an extension of surveillance capitalism. In social media,

Another arm of the political argument concerns the ability of all devices to display properly the more complex website which today have become the norm - filled to exhaustion with scripts, videos, .

In a sense, and as far as we can understand it today, the political argument becomes inexorably intertwined with a therapeutic one, which claims to show that social media is a fertile ground (and knowingly so) for depression, loneliness, alienation, hostility. One does not need to go so far as to tie the therapeutic argument back into the political, underlining what many would describe as perfidious colaborationism between the tech corporations and corporation-kind governments. One does not need because anyone can see the effect that social media platforms have on not civil discourse, on the masquerading of politics as polemics.

There is also a Philosophical Argument, to which I am more inclined.