When it comes to the internet, I've always been a bit of an early adopter. Not early enough to make a lot of money, mind you, but early enough. I was introduced to "the world wide web" in 1993, age 11, at my uncle's house; when I got my first PC, I would go over to his house and download all the latest shareware games my box of floppies could hold (and quite a few pirated ones too; thanks to my uncle, I got to enjoy Doom, Master of Orion, and Duke Nukem 2 gratis). When dial-up internet was finally available at my house, my mom was one of the first to join the local ISP, and dragged me to one of their "netiquette" meetings, so I could learn the finer points of behavior on the great big Internet in 1995, which at that time wasn't just the world wide web; it was also Usenet, and Gopher, and Finger, and probably half a dozen other protocols I've never heard of. I learned how to become a flame war participant on alt.games.computer.strategy before most people knew what a modem was.

I was a dork in junior high and high school, so I was in early on all the latest ways to communicate. I had an ICQ number, six digits even. I knew my way around IRC, and was granted K-line power (serverwide banning) before I had a driver's license. I was on MSN Messenger before it became mainstream at my school, like some sort of very annoying, very not-cool digital hipster.

This useless personal trend continued unabated into the Twitter (2007), MySpace (2005?), and Facebook (2006) eras; I was early on those sites too. And an enthusiastic one, at that; ever since my Usenet days, I was a prolific poster, so barfing out every thought I ever had onto these "social media" sites was second nature to me, and allowed me to connect with all sorts of people. It was a useful skill to have, well before anyone else knew what a social network was.

Anyways, that was before everything went to shit.

In August of 2020, during the pandemic, I realized I was inflicting psychic damage to myself every time I logged into Facebook; it turns out a lot of people I went to high school with collectively decided basic scientific progress was, in fact, The Devil, and they learned "facts" about how vaccines eat your brains on Facebook and Youtube. People posted endless amount of clickbaity articles about things that were obviously untrue, lazy political memes that shouldn't have fooled anyone with an IQ above room temp, and had untold numbers of arguments in threads underneath these very same posts.

And I couldn't help myself.

Someone being wrong on the internet is like a personal wound to me, something I must attend to as soon as possible. It's like getting a piece of steak stuck in your teeth and you keep flicking at it with your tongue for 3 hours trying to dislodge it. Well, that's what I do anyways; I assume more rational people just grab a toothpick. Anyway, personal wounds need personal attention, and so I would don my finest flame-proof pants and wade into these political discussions (even though I promised myself I wouldn't) to point out factual inaccuracies, to "be helpful". I would jump into Facebook Groups and post rebuttal links on bad information, "to be helpful". And I would post "corrections" on my friends' memes, trying to steer them back to reality. "To be helpful".

Yeah, well, we all know this doesn't work. All it does it cause people to dig in, close their minds, and then we're back to yelling at each other more, over dumber stuff.

So after 15-some years of Facebook posting, a site which got me graphic design work and an evening behind the stage at Jimmy Kimmel, a site which got me invites to my friends for my wedding, a site which got me invites to other people's weddings, a site which got me a somewhat profitable career as a portrait photographer, I finally had enough, and deleted my account. Poof, gone; according to Facebook's algorithm, I ceased to exist (well, sort of; I kept my Instagram as an outlet to continue to post cats, food, and any street photography I was doing).

It was not without some personal cost; I was no longer so easy to invite to events, so friends in my hometown eventually forgot to keep texting me separately to keep me invited. Because my photography side hustle was inextricably tied into Facebook's algorithms, business fell off a cliff. And my local hobbyist groups became inaccessible.

It was perhaps not the best timing for my mental health to do this, as I was already feeling incredibly socially isolated (having recently moved to a new city, and, well, the PANDEMIC), but I needed to pull the plug. It was becoming too much.

Social Media, in the last half of the 2010s, became something much less Social, and much more Media. Remember when you were able to just see your friend's latest posts at the top of the screen, in a chronological timeline? I mean, you might not; Facebook and Twitter and Instagram have all tried VERY hard to get you to forget that option ever existed; and even if it's technically still possible to do so on these sites, they don't make it easy. Instead, these sites rely on what we vaguely call The Algorithm (all hail The Algorithm); a way for these sites to figure out, on a reptilian brain level, what you respond to, by tracking everything you do on these sites (and beyond, if they run ad networks, which they of course do; that's how they make money) and pumping it into a personal math problem, made just for you, that spits out a feedback loop that you, personally, will respond to in some way.

Now were this a Disney movie, the "some way" might be unerringly positive reactions; maybe The Algorithm (all hail The Algorithm) optimizes for laughs in the heartwarming comedy about two computer viruses who fall in love. But late 2010s society was not a Disney Movie, so instead The Algorithm (all hail the.... you get the point) optimized for ALL base human behaviors; fear, anger, humor, lust, hunger.

Did you stare a bit too long at that bikini model's selfie? Congratulations, your feed is now full of "Suggested Posts" showing content (not posts anymore, but Content - stuff crafted to get you to react) jam packed with hot bikini models, IN YOUR AREA even.

Did you watch some weird chef sprinkle salt down his forearm a few times? Congratulations, your social media "feed" (not a timeline anymore, because sorting by time is not optimal for advertising or Content, so you instead get to peruse your personal Feed, like a farm animal being led to a trough, to use a heavy handed metaphor) is now bursting with food hacks and fancy restaurants and travel "influencers" telling you to go to Dubai and eat this four thousand dollar steak if you want to truly, truly, be happy.

The Algorithm, or more accurately the very complex math behind it, the secret sauce that these companies run on, is able to tune itself, to evolve into more and more effective versions that tap into your personal base instincts more efficiently, and it does so to sell you more stuff, via more ads created just for you in a fraction of a second, so you watch more Content on your Feed, so it can watch what you do, and tune itself more, to sell you more stuff, via more ads created just for you in a fraction of a second.

Even if you're aware of how this stuff works, it is pernicious in its ability to prod at the shrieking caveman bits of your brain. To wit: I like cats. A lot. Maybe too much? Anyway, Instagram is lousy with cat accounts. There are, it turns out, a lot of photogenic cats and adorable kittens out there, and it's easy enough to follow the ones I find the cutest. But when I do, Instagram, starved of any other information about me aside from my occasional posting about my own cats or the blurry photo of half-cooked pasta, suddenly decides that I am a capital-letter Cat Fancier and shows me nothing but cat photos, cat videos, advertisements about litter boxes, auto-generated videos of other people's cat videos (Content), suggested posts (Content) about cat toys (Ads), and so on. Interacting with any of these items on one's timeline reinforces The Algorithm to show you even more.

Incidentally, this is also why your strangely aggressive uncle suddenly believes people are eating pets in small towns across America, and why your Gen Z cousin thinks it's funny to disrespect women; they fell into an algorithmic funnel that, because they might have clicked the heart button on this stuff at the wrong time, is fed nothing BUT that sort of Content, on their own personal Feed. Their social media experience is entirely divorced from yours, and from their friends, and from their family.

We're all given our own versions of reality to consume. And, maybe occasionally, contribute to. After all, social media still pretends to be "social", so it has to throw you a bone and show you your college roommate's new baby and grandma's blurry family photos occasionally, woven between Content and Ads. But not all of it, and certainly not in a chronological manner. And The Algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, will occasionally simply never show you a friend's posts anymore; and because you don't notice (because your Feed is filled with lots of other stuff, stuff that's designed explicitly to get you to react), you never see them again until you suddenly snap out of it and wonder what your old coworker Linda is up to (cancer, it turns out), or whatever happened to that nice couple whose wedding you photographed in 2014 (divorced, it turns out), or why you never hear from your neighbor Jason (overdosed in 2019, it turns out).

Now that it's 2024, I realized that, once again, social media was eating my brain. And after a certain, uh, date in November, I became acutely aware that I was stuck in more social media bubbles that were severely misinforming me of the state of the world. So I cleaned house, again, (later Twitter, later BlueSky, later original Mastodon account with my real name) and that included my Instagram account; the last vestige of my "social media" habit that connected me to my family and friends. If they need to get a hold of me, they should probably get my phone number.

But I still gotta post. I still have that bad habit. The internet needs, NEEDS, to hear my deep thoughts. So here we are, typing into the void on my own damn website.

This is running Ghost, a CMS that seems fairly easy to use (and crucially isn't Wordpress, which is a crufty mess piled high with security holes and is a juicy target, and whose community is currently enjoying a circular firing squad kind of drama I don't really want to find more about), and it's a CMS that lets me type quickly and efficiently, and I'm sure has all sorts of doohickeys to let me Make Content Better. But that's for later.

For now, this is my new home, and it comes with several bonuses: I'm not writing to break through on some algorithm (although that means I am writing to myself, mostly); I'm able to write VERY long posts of poorly edited nonsense (I'm topping 2000 words and my hands are starting to cramp); and perhaps most importantly, I control ALL of it. It's my domain name. It's my linode box. It's my site design. You gotta find it by searching for it explicitly or me telling you about it, explicitly.

Of course, compared to signing up to a social media account with your email address, this is all a huge pain in the ass requiring knowledge of DNS records, and linux commands, and security certificates, and administration accounts, and root access, and containers, and all the other stuff that the modern internet needs to function. There are easier ways to do this though, if you don't mind handing off some levels of control (ghost, for instance, hosts blogs for you for a monthly fee, if you want, on their own servers).

And I think it's important that we all start considering these self-hosted, self-published sites again. Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter, and all of their smaller competitors, are becoming overrun with Content; the Algorithms are starting to eat themselves, and collide; and even worse, now we're starting to see floods of AI-generated garbage that, at least on Facebook, seems to have started to affect algorithms to the point that AI-generated posts are posting to AI-generated facebook groups populated with fake accounts posting AI-generated responses to one another - and, somehow, real humans don't seem to notice that most of this stuff is happening when they stumble upon it. It's all close enough to the algorithm-fed noise we've all grown accustomed to, so what's one more comment saying "amen, so true, pray emoji" on a random post about soldiers exploding in a hurricane or whatever that was served up to you so you buy a commemorative flag coin?

I'm becoming an old man as I type this, withering into a dusty husk, shaking my fist at da yoofs. But I'm telling you, getting your own slice of the internet (such as it is; even the internet itself is starting to break down into atomized chunks of garbage content mills now) is going to become a needed tool of self expression, and crucially one that isn't controlled by an enormous corporation siphoning off your data for pennies.

We're entering a weird period of massive disinformation, self censorship, fragmented media habits, and broken technology, so it's important to know where your words live, and where your towel is at. So get a damn blog already.