An Escape Attempt
My beloved Olympia Monica typewriter, which has served my desk well for the last decade. Well, not my typewriter exactly, but the same model and color. I couldn’t be bothered to take and cut out a photo of my actual typewriter.
So it’s come to this.
(I mean, not really.)
I’ve been on social media for a very long time. Decades, in fact. And the one common denominator is that each year, year after year, it gets progressively worse. It’s kinda wild to tell young people about the old social media era of MySpace or early Facebook, where the product existed to seemingly serve and enhance the experiences of its users rather than becoming an endless stream of AI drivel, propaganda, and advertisement gathering in order to better sell you products. It was part of that whole Web 1.0 thing where we all had so much optimism about the future and what the internet might do to connect us. And in some ways, that definitely happened. We are better connected than we’ve ever been at any point in history. But the tradeoff is that these corporations are getting progressively more unscrupulous about how they treat us and our information, leading to the sorry state of today, where every interaction is monetized and scrutinized in order to better sell you skincare products or crappy threadbare tees. I started feeling a little unusual about it when Meta rolled out their ‘fake people’ AI platforms last week and immediately attempted to pretend to be marginalized voices in order to make money. Then this week, Zuckerberg doubles down on removing all fact checking and donates money to perhaps the highest profile liar in American culture? The whole thing feels untenable, and I don’t need it.
As such, I’m attempting to make a clean break from the whole thing — exiting the world of broad social media, and instead dumping the occasional thought here. As I do, let me tell you my expectations for this blog:
It will probably be updated infrequently. I think the benefit of social media is that it’s terribly easy to use and update, whereas an actual website’s blogging function requires a little bit of work. I’m not sure if the random throwaway jokes that I would traditionally post will make it here, because each post will require a little more effort on my part.
The vast majority of my social media friends will not make the journey here, and if they do, a wide percentage won’t be back after a handful of initial visits. That’s understandable; I’m throwing up a road block on your information superhighway by going to an individual site, so you’d have to be really interested in what I have to say in order to make a special trip here to check on me. As such, there are no hard feelings if you don’t become a regular or permanent reader. I will value those of you who stick around, however, which I’ll attempt to incentivize by turning on comments.
Comments will be turned on for one week after blog publication for each new blog entry. I don’t know how registration or leaving a comment works — that part will be for you to figure out. But if you want to snark at me in the comments about something I’ve said or done, it should give you the avenue to do so. Of course, you could always just use the contact form and do the same thing, but this feels more communal, so maybe it’s the better option. Who knows.
At any rate, I appreciate you reading. I’m going to give an honest go of this whole thing and turn this into an actual, for-realsies blog if I can. I hope you’ll consider checking in every now and again.
In the meantime, if you’d like to stay in touch, I’ve set up a dedicated page to do that. Click here to go there and give me alllllll your personal information.
[Edit: By popular demand and for ease of use, I’ve been asked to shitpost on Bluesky, so if you’re on Bluesky, I guess you can stalk me there too.]