HTTPoetics Week 1

This post documents my first week of the Summer 2025 HTTPoetics course at SFPC taught by Todd Anderson and Tyler Yin.

We're all handmade children at heart

Class kicked off with everyone sharing a website that they loved. It immediately felt like I was back in Boulder, CO. That summer I was 14, and I first learned to make websites at ID Tech Camps with my cousin and brother. We would huddle around computers at the lab or in my cousin's basement and show each other websites we found fun. Homestar Runner and Addictinggames stand out from the era. We used to share the internet with each other. The computer back then was much more than personal, it was a shared portal to be experienced next to company. I grew up taking turns with technology, showing each other what we loved. Blowing each other's minds. Laughing and cringing together. Sometimes out loud, sometimes in secret.

From my first memories discovering video games, digital encyclopedias, search engines, porn, and so much more. My childhood is chock full of moments like these. It wasn't until this first class that I realized that I had lost an important part of my relationship to computers and the internet, and my friends when the era of smartphones and competitive social rolled around. Adding to the chaos, this shift aligned with my transition out of High School, and Puerto Rico, into college in New Englad.

At Brown, I became engrossed and fascinated with computers. From the logic and philosophy behind them, to the different levels of programming language abstraction. I didn't notice that being introduced to Reddit late one night at the CIT and enjoying Pusheen gifs was going to be one of the last times I would share a loving memory of a new exciting website side-to-side with a friend. After that, computers became all about what I was going to do with them, and how I was going to make money, than about what fun, exciting, and even mysterious possibilities I could share with people I cared about.

Until now. As people shared their nostalgic love for Geocities, Neopets, Gaiaonline, and a Google without ads – and as I learned about awesome websites that people have been putting outthere, from 17776 to The HTML Review, from eelslap to traumagotchi, I felt the same as I did when I first learned to customize mouse cursors from a good middle school friend, hearing the word "javascript" for the first time, in the frigid cold of my Puerto Rican Catholic School's computer lab.

Something new this time around, however, is a deep desire to connect my intrigue with the net with a deeper appreciation for my heritage. There's something about computers, perhaps their shared dark history with the American military-industrial-complex, and the ways in which social media, cryptocurrency, and machine learning are increasingly weaponized for authoritarian control and war, that makes my Puerto Rican heart averse to spending too much time on a screen. But here I knew I was surrounded by the right kind of people. There was a recognition that we all continued to spend an innordinate amount of our time plugged in and online - but as anxious consumers and not creative contributors.

There's a rich tradition of artisinal crafting in Puerto Rico. We describe something as "Hecho a Mano" or "Handmade" with a deep sense of cultural pride. Artisans selling handmade woodwork, paintings, clothing, cookware, and musical instruments are a staple in all cultural events. The first Puerto Rican trans woman to get gender affirming surgery, Soraya, titled her memoir "Hecho a Mano" to allude to pride of making herself whole. The term elicits an awareness and appreciation for who Puerto Ricans are as a people, as a nation, and our relationship and reverence to the environment we call home.

Reading the first class assignment, J.R. Carpenter's essay The Handmade Web, I realized that this machine in which I'm typing my thoughts thir very momeny, is the raw material that I am most comfortable with. Yes, there might be something inherently colonial about computers, but the truth is that a core part of my cultural memory with my peers in Ponce and all over the island has been mediated by digital realities. There's an untapped potential for me, and for Puerto Ricans like myself, to reappariase our relationship with computers and ask ourselves what kind of artisinal, culturally rich experiences we want to create with them for ourselves and for each other.