Mission Statement

I think the problem started with ‘blogger as a job’. Not that it specifically was the problem, but rather the tipping point where recreationally posting online made someone pause and think, “That’s pretty good, you should get paid for that.” Yes, people should get paid for their time and efforts, but it set us down the road towards profit, which led us (as it always does) towards optimization, which led us towards revenue at all costs, and we get left with the husk of where we started: nearly two decades of sanding away the soul, stuck with empty-calorie experiences that feel more like an attempt to offer sacrifice to the faceless God of the Algorithm than scratch the creative itch of the would-be writer somewhere inside all of us.

Hey, cool blog you’ve got there! You should start titling things more simply to make it rank higher in SEO. You should find a way to increase time on page. You should lower bounce rate. You should check your analytics. You should have affiliate links. You should have promo codes. You should get it sponsored. You should build your brand. You should be an influencer. You should post those thoughts on X so more people can see. You should do a podcast instead so you don’t even have to think about what you’re saying before you say it. You should film that podcast so you can make clips. You should post your clips on Instagram. You should post your clips on YouTube. You should post your clips on TikTok. You should actually turn the whole thing into a short video so that people can get the gist of it in 30 seconds and immediately forget it.

I remember feeling embarrassed when I told a therapist I was struggling with the fact that Twitter had become unusable and many of the people I’d grown close with had stopped using it. Not only did I like posting and seeing thoughts about baseball and news in real time, I had made great friends on there, gotten jobs—hell, I can trace my son’s life back to a series of tweets and posts from a dozen years ago that led me to meeting my wife thanks to the site. It actually made sense to mourn that! And yet, I’m lucky enough to remember that the internet existed before Twitter was the only place anyone went. We had blogs and websites and comment sections and link dumps and Google Reader and RSS feeds, and I didn’t have to read a total stranger I’d never asked to learn existed arguing with another total stranger that may or may not be a language model trained on angering as many people as possible.

I have watched some of my favourite writers become Mixed Media Content Creators, using their beautiful, eclectic, creative, wonderful minds to make 30-second vertical videos with their bodies green-screened over the news. And I’m not convinced they, or anyone else for that matter, really want to be doing it or watching it. No offence, my friends, no ethical consumption or creation under capitalism and all that. To be clear, professionally I am no better and the only thing this rock I’m throwing can do is bounce off my glass house’s wall and give me a concussion.

I digress. What I’m trying to say is: I’m building this website to give myself somewhere to be, and somewhere to explore, and something new that is something old.

I’m not trying to be online less, I’m trying to be online like I used to be.