Yesterday Andrew and I were taking part in that late 2022 discussion of “where are we going to go after Twitter dies/gets overrun by Nazis?” We briefly debated Mastodon vs. Hive vs. Post and eventually landed on Tumblr and/or Actual Blogging being the better options.
And then today Whet said something similar in response to a tweet referencing a Substack post referencing a Scalzi blog post which started as a tweet and…I dunno: what if the Internet we wanted to go back to was with / inside us all along?
Everybody’s like “where should we go now that this place is closing?” like we’re at a 2am bar that has gone full shitshow and have once again forgotten our only options are places worse than this one.
Good luck at Mastodon, the Tai’s Til 4 of the Internet.*
I’m Tumblr-curious again. Visiting my dashboard now is a bit like going to a bar or club I used to frequent when the interior has changed and the menu is different, but it still sort of smells the same. To extend the metaphor, I haven’t ordered a drink yet but I’m looking over the menu.
(After I wrote the above, I realized I wrote a whole “Why I’m quitting Tumblr” thing which is just hilarious and quaint. Especially the update at the bottom.)
Last month, I started messing around with this site again, but purposely walled it off. These “public notebook” posts don’t show up on the main page and aren’t search engine-able. (But I think they show up in the RSS feed?) Not impossible to find, but not easy. Maybe I occasionally post a link back here via Twitter or Instagram something. It’s a pirate radio station from a long-dormant satellite that only people who are still occasionally checking the frequency can hear. It’s less important to me now that a lot of people see this and more important that it’s like that Joel Hogsdon quote about Mystery Science Theater 3000: “the right people will get it.”
It’s public, but it’s somewhat in shadow. A Dark Public space, maybe.
Some of this is particular to me, but I think it’s also reflective of what social media became.
Part of my desire for a Dark Public space is what happens when you exist online now.
For all the hosannas Gawker received when it folded, few of us reckoned with how it was a stake through the heart of Being Weird Online. Their approach meant everyone with any kind of public self was fair game for attack. The “Gawker Stalker” approach made quick leaps from Lindsay Lohan to Julia Allison to random people on the street. One tweet suffering from context collapse gets signal boosted onto a Gawker offshoot and you lose your livelihood, your life, and your name becomes a shockwave of think pieces and cautionary tales.
Like Ronson, I was once a believer in the idea that the field of battle was waged in an online marketplace of ideas. But at some point we have to reckon with the fact that Twitter is maybe 10 percent of real life. If you want to fix shit, you have to go offline and wrestle with the very complicated notion that ideas are nice, but unless you can reckon with the world as it is you’ll never make them a reality.
L’affaire de Justine is perhaps a too-fraught example. But that’s the gist. I know I’m not the only one of my Web 2.0 era who longs for … a quieter web? But also the one that was supposed to be about nuance, complexity, and the voices that often were drowned out by power.
I remain very much Team Consequences for Your Actions, but not Team Horrific Consequences if Your Actions Affected No One. Or Team Matching Consquences To Actions. We haven’t figured that out yet. Especially when the alleged harm is claimed by those who haven’t experienced it. Or how bad-faith actors leverage the incentives of social discourse to obscure and eradicate the real harm.
Back in 2008, I remember thinking an internet that was fueled by primary sources who could speak directly to the audience was Going To Be Good. At the time, gatekeepers were watering down the message, allowing power structures to dictate the discourse, and keeping minority opinions, voices, and people at the back. In its best form, the idea was to stand for a broader coalition that could become the best of our ideals. It was a very Gen X mindset if we consider Gen X as the weird geeks and dweebs in the class and not the sportos and dickheads we were sitting next to.
That all worked out terribly because now we have Nazis again. And anti-vaxxers. We forgot the very American way the pendulum swings back against any progress. Start with Reconstruction, make a quick stop at the rise of American fascism in the 1940s as a response to FDR, and watch history rhyme rather than repeat. (Thankfully, Gen Z is building on what the geeks and dweebs started.)
Anyway, that all happened.
I spent a good portion of 2004-2014 writing online with a lot of anxiety but not a lot of fear. Some of it evolved into occasional live storytelling, offline organizing, and even a professional gig that felt like the perfect combination of writing and action, for a time.
Much of it was aimed at improving civic life (or aspired to be). And then I got a gig that was all about that. Though I haven’t completely left behind the persona of someone who weaves together Chicago, humor, and social critique, it still looks different these days.
All the incentives for leaving a digital trail seemed bad. I started deleting tweets in 2018. I took a year off of Twitter in 2019 (remind me to tell you that story sometime) and this site has (like the platforms of many of my Web 2.0 cohorts) become a bit of an abandoned mining town.
I’d stake out some territory through the occasional essay, but mostly I’ve spent the last decade or so trying to figure out my “why” of writing online. And the what. For obvious reasons, Chicago civic life is not a thing I can easily opine on when I’m in the middle of it. I’ve chosen a life aimed at the inside game, rather than an outside one. No regrets about that, but I miss writing with impact.
(Also there’s parenting. And partnering.)
A couple years ago a bunch of us thought newsletters were going to be the answer to getting back to a Dark Public web. And then wouldn’t ya know, the Substack guys turned out to be sportos and dickheads, too.
I thought I had a new approach to writing online in 2020. It was an experiment, for me, in a different type of writing and I found it just wasn’t my thing. Substack throwing money at certain types of folks and pretending that didn’t make them publishers? It was a factor too.
That’s a lot about me, but based on conversations I’ve been having with others lately, I think we all have a version of this.
With Venture Capital Lyle Lanley buying Twitter, it seems like the last place to still experiment online is disappearing, but it’s not. Like the Web 1.0, when you encounter an error you route around it. Tumblr still exists. Blogs still exist. RSS is still there.
All the bad incentives are still out there but we can route around it. It starts with getting away from something “doing numbers.” Scale is for suckers. Quality of audience beats quantity every time. Twitter was the best when it was you and 50 people you “knew.”
Go back into the warehouse where you’ve kept the old machine under a tarp and start it up again.
Just don’t tell anybody about it.
Or just tell the right people.
* Yes, this is me re-using a tweet but honestly this just confirms the above thesis. Both in terms of blogging again but also returning to 2008-era-mindsets.