About Crabnet
Established 1998. Continuously operational since, in one form or another.
Crabnet is a website about carcinization: the observed tendency of crustacean lineages to independently evolve, over and over, into something crab-shaped. It has happened at least five separate times in the fossil record. Nobody asked it to. It simply keeps happening.
We started Crabnet because we noticed the same thing happening to the internet. Every website, given enough time, converges on the same shape. A feed. A search box. A rectangle of other people’s opinions. The specifics vary. The silhouette does not.
So we built a homepage that admits it. On Crabnet, the convergence is not a metaphor and it is not gradual-in-the-abstract — it is a scheduled process you can watch happen to your own words. Sign the guestbook and your message begins molting the moment you post it.
Our mission
To document, accelerate, and — where appropriate — celebrate the conversion of all things into crabs.
We do not take a position on whether this is good. We take the position that it is happening, and that somebody ought to be keeping a guestbook about it.
The staff
M. Kustes
Founder, Webmaster, Head of Carcinization
Registered the domain in a fit of enthusiasm. Has not slept since.
Deborah
Director of Tidepool Operations
Was hired to reorganise the filing cabinet. Is a crab now. Still reorganises the filing cabinet.
The Pentium II
Infrastructure
Lives under the desk. Runs warm. Has never been turned off, on principle.
The server room
The server room is a desk. Under the desk is a Pentium II. It has 64 MB of RAM, which was an extravagance at the time and remains one now, given what we ask of it.
We have been advised repeatedly to move Crabnet to “the cloud.” We have reviewed the proposal. The cloud is a rectangle of other people’s computers, which is to say it is crab-shaped, which is to say we will end up there eventually regardless and see no reason to rush.
Update, later: we are in the cloud. It happened while we were writing the previous paragraph. We would like to note for the record that we were correct.
About the tagline
Several visitors have written in to inform us that “evolves in to crabs” should be “evolves into crabs.” We are aware.
The tagline was set in 1998 by a person who is no longer with the company, in a typeface we no longer have, on a machine that no longer boots. Correcting it would require changing the logo, and the logo is the only thing on this website that has not yet turned into a crab. We are leaving it alone. It has earned that.