This site is every bit as much a protest as it is a portfolio.
I’m trying to quit social media, which everyone by know should know is killing all of us. It is Huxley’s Soma, doled out by Orwell’s Big Brother.
This site is what the internet looked like when it wore diapers, as some of you may remember. Personal sites, we called them, well before anyone came up with the word “Weblog,” which was eventually shortened to “Blog.”
It seemed like everyone had one. And communities of like-minded folks began networking, linking to each other’s sites to boost their comrades and share their contributions.
I’m looking around, and almost none of those sites exist, or they lie fallow, or have become something else entirely. The Fray, run by Derek Powazek, was a cool storytelling site. Powazek wrote a book, then ran away to Oregon, bought a farm where he grows hemp, and sells CBD tinctures. Fray.com still exists, but there’s no new content. Derek has packaged up the old material into books he sells through the site. Sigh.
Ratbastard.org, was run by a cool guy from D.C. who is now studying to be a clergyman, as I understand it. He was a like-minded fella. We lost touch several years ago. His domain, now owned by someone in New York, is for sale at an unreasonable sum.
About the only site I know of that has continuously published is kottke.org, run by Jason Kottke. If you haven’t been to his site, do yourself a favor. That guy has been pushing out good stuff for, like, 30 years. I don’t know how he does it. But big ups for him.
I’ve not decided what I’m going to write about here just yet. I’ve been loaning out my voice to the highest bidder for so long, I’m not sure what it sounds like solo.
What I do know is that the internet used to be made up of words, mainly because it was developed by those of us who grew up in a print-centric world, who existed in the times of newsprint-stained fingers and high school research papers and hose water, before the screens took over. As a cranky, old white man, I harken for the days when powering up the interwebs meant discovering something new. When it meant reading about a new idea, published by someone far away who shouted it into the void out of sheer compulsion to be heard.
My intent is to bring a little of that back. How I get there, I don’t know. I’ll figure that out as I go along.