I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a blog for long enough by now that originally this post would have been titled with the year 2023. I wanted to start with why I chose this medium. I think the explanation is necessary because blogs feel so antiquated. Why not simply go to a social media platform? The platforms have a built-in infrastructure to house your content and an audience ready to be captured. Comparatively, a personal URL feels isolated and clunky. It no longer seems possible for individuals, people without a budget, to operate at the domain level. Users ‘staking their claims on the frontier’ is stuff of bygone techno-optimism. By now the people who wrote those myths are the very same ones trying to tame the information flowing through their platforms. It might seem futile to do this now, but I still feel the urge. Why? The supposed benefits of those platforms are a large part of my choice to abandon them.

Publishing on the Internet

Let’s start with the format. By self-hosting, I can use the web as something closer to a blank canvas. When I worked in print publishing, I had rich conversations with my colleagues about the form and affordances of the physical materials. Operating within the framework of a platform precludes most of these questions. I’ve been in a creative rut for a good while now. I keep trying to get motivated to create… content. I want to start asking those questions again.

Social media posts also start to decay the second they appear. What’s the point of putting so much effort into a fleeting image? By breaking free of that existing infrastructure, I can more completely investigate the internet and take my work more seriously.

Against Gaming

Along with greater formal possibilities, moving off-platform removes pressures to create certain types of work. The Like mechanic provides a dopamine feedback loop – make a certain post type, get a reward, and repeat ad nauseam. Platforms have so thoroughly gamified engagement metrics that it’s hard to understand a web in which they are not the goal. Talk to any regular social media user and they will have their own folk beliefs about how a particular site’s algorithm works. These are transmitted between users and spread until they form a site’s Most Effective Tactics Available (META). Platforms also develop their own etiquette and user types that condition people to behave in certain ways (‘I don’t want to post like that kind of person’). I want to work more intentionally, and that means diminishing the urge to perform.

Consume Less; Produce More

I also noticed at a certain point that I stopped making things. I’ve had the mantra “consume less, produce more” for some time now. I used to believe that I could fix things by finding the right inspiration. If I just consumed the right media and had the right ideas, I would be compelled to create the work that I always knew I’d been capable of. When I was in art school, I was introduced to the idea of moodboarding through FFFFound and Tumblr. I started to collect obsessively. At some point along the way, I hit a point of diminishing returns, but by then I had sold myself the story that I had feeds to keep up with and I couldn’t afford to miss a content cycle and fall behind. There is value in developing a critical eye and understanding currents, but if you aren’t putting them to use sooner or later then what’s the point?

I Miss The Old Internet

Perhaps I’m generalizing my own dissatisfaction when I say that content on the internet has gotten worse. Perhaps its a bit of nostalgia for ‘The Old Internet’. Still, I do think that there is something fundamental that has changed about the way that people make things now. Part of the magic of the early participatory web was the separation between URL and IRL. Content today is made by people who are very online to be consumed by people who are equally online. By throwing out the primacy of the real world, content highlights its own ephemeral nature. When blogs were about things happening offline, they left, or at least appeared to leave, a physical trace. Digital content continues to speed up in its own unsettling, frictionless world. This may be a somewhat delicate task, but I want to make my online presence less… capital O-Online.

So there we have it. This might wind up being too navel gaze-y or whatever, but I think I have to try. Yes it’s weird writing to no audience – or maybe to write as if there is no audience – or maybe to write to an audience as if there is no audience… I just want to leave a record. Maybe it’s for me to read later. Maybe it’s for someone to stumble upon accidentally and wonder how this got here. Maybe it’s just for the practice of making something and reading isn’t actually part of the equation. Maybe I’ll figure all of that out as I go.