As you might be aware, I've been writing a blog of some kind online since about 2006. In 2023, as you might also be aware, I scrubbed most of it from the internet.
For a bunch of reasons, writing on the public internet doesn't feel like a lot of fun any more. In 2006, the internet kind of felt like a frontier. You'd stake your claim, and either work on expanding it or just revel in having a corner that was just yours. Being publicly online felt like it might be worth something. The rewards were high and the risks were low.
In 2024, it feels like less of a frontier and more of a wilderness. Or maybe a wasteland. Every bit of territory you claim becomes a section of border to watch, and there are things lurking beyond the walls. Hordes of marauding trolls. Con artists and thieves. Crawling, mining robots. Unpredictable incursions, from unknown places and times. And so we retreat behind the walls of private profiles, huddling around encrypted group chats for warmth, venturing out to scavenge and gather, but never with the illusion that there's any ground out there you can claim for your own.
It's time to try something a bit different.