As I write this, digital publishing is really going through it. One of the publications that I read the most, gal—dem magazine, closed down. Buzzfeed closed their news division. Vice just declared bankruptcy. Some of the places that are struggling are small qtpoc run digital spaces and others are these huge conglomerates that have raised money from Warren Buffet. When Buzzfeed closed down, one of its leaders said that there just isn’t a way to make digital publishing profitable ever since Facebook changed their algorithm.
When I was growing up, I had a livejournal. I would write really long posts on that livejournal despite having really only two friends. When I built this website, I was thinking mostly of livejournal. I bring the same energy here as I brought to LJ back then.
I don’t know. When you search for things about blogging, you get questions about whether people even read blogs anymore. Digital publications have an increasingly retro feeling. Even big seeming names like The New Inquiry or The Onion are selling tote bags or t-shirts to try to stay alive. We just don’t read and share links in the same way anymore. Most of our time online is spent on social media and these platforms have structured things in a way that makes most people stay in the app instead of leaving for another website.
If you were to look at things pragmatically, then a website like this one is pretty useless. If publications run by teams of writers and editors can barely make it, then a blog run by one person doesn’t really stand a chance. Small publications can’t even compete with the platforms that have swallowed up our digital spaces. Most large publications are actually owned by Rupert Murdoch. There’s just no way in hell that one person can produce content competitively and how often you produce content does matter because search engines track how active your website is compared to other websites.
But I kind of don’t care about whether this website is relevant or not. If you think about it, there are still plenty of filmmakers who use film instead of digital video. Film is much more expensive than digital and harder to edit too. It’s trickier and less convenient.
It’s funny seeing a form that you grew up with—long form independent publishing of one writer’s voice, otherwise known as blogging—become nostalgic. I’m a Cancer Moon. I can run very well on nostalgia and for a long time too. Honestly, blogging was already dead when I started this website in 2018. It was a nostalgic project from the outset.
Sometimes, I look around and wonder how long it will be until changes in the internet will kill the weird little spaces that make it human. Google is already trying out an AI run search engine and this means that, instead of directing people to any websites at all, a lot of people will just converse with some kind of bot that regurgitates content from creators. One thing I’m definitely not doing this for is to contribute to some algorithm that some corporation owns and I worry that not being able to see information in its context will make people less critical. Then, I remember that actual people just can’t be as vapid as capitalism wants to imagine us being.
Most people don’t use the internet because we’re interested in the big new thing. That would be like saying that the only worthwhile thoughts are the new ones. If the internet is akin at all to a psyche, then it’s aliveness is in its archives.
The place I visit the most on the internet is Archive of Our Own. AO3 is an archive. It doesn’t advertise. It’s funded only by user donations and run only by fan labor. It has one of the best categorization systems known to man. When you use AO3, you’re not looking for the next viral sensation. You’re not chatting with a bot that thinks it knows you better than you know yourself. You’re not navigating a curated space. You’re often looking at writing that was produced years and years ago.
There is memory on the internet and, so, there is nostalgia as well. An internet where we couldn’t find things from ten years from the past wouldn’t be interesting at all. An internet where we have to constantly be new isn’t really that interesting either.
This website is a sort of out of time relic. The writing is new. It’s made by me and in the current day but the format is out of time and out of touch. If this website were nothing but a business, it would fail. But maybe it’s alright for this website to have other goals.
