Not counting this one, this year I have published a grand total of two posts so far. For a blog titled Too Many Things, that’s a bit sad. And don’t get me started on my YouTube channel; after my video on Lara Croft, it has essentially gone on indefinite hiatus. Maybe I should consider rebranding to Not Enough Things.
In my very first post, a good three years ago (I think), I said that this blog was born out of a need to write—as opposed to a wish to write—and hence, that I would only write whenever I felt that I should. I think that’s a more authentic way to write, or more generally produce content, than what a lot of creators do these days, namely churn out as much stuff as possible to stay visible, relevant, ahead of your kampietitors (you can’t get this reference, unless you worked where I used to, but I want it there anyway), and so on. Well, now I kind of feel the need to write. I just hope it sticks around for longer than a couple of posts.
I’ve had a rather shit year, for personal reasons I won’t go into and because—let’s face it—the world has been trying real hard to suck harder than a black hole in overdrive mode ever since the 2020s began. And so far, it has been spectacularly successful at it, to the point I’m afraid of 2023. Did you see that short comic strip floating around on the Internet, where a group of people is cowering around a corner at the end of 2021 and using a three-metre-long stick to open the door to 2022? They were right to cower, and God only knows what we might be in for next year.
Speaking of the Internet, this year my already visceral hatred for it and social media has only grown stronger. Which begs the very good question of what the hell I am doing with a blog and a YouTube channel, then. The thing is, creating content is fun. Wait, let me rephrase that: writing and making videos are fun. I detest the expression “creating content,” because it stinks of marketing a mile away, and you’ve guessed it—I hate marketing. What a little bundle of joy, I am!
As I was saying, writing and making videos are fun activities. And even though I hate money and the whole economic system (yes, the list of things I hate is a huge-arse one), there’s nothing wrong with making money out of those activities. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t wish I could do that. What is wrong with the Internet and social media is that they’ve turned everything into a commercial enterprise, and consequently, they turned most websites from the cosy, useful places they used to be into the load of annoying, stinking horseshit that they are today.
I’ve complained about this before, but I’ll never complain enough about it. I am sick and tired of having to close all the bloody popups trying to get me to subscribe to your newsletter, download your goddamned app (I won’t, get over it), or customise the fucking cookies. And if I ever get my hands on whomever invented autoplaying videos on mobile, God help them. That’s the reason I don’t go to the CNN’s website anymore (yes, fuck you and your stupid autoplaying videos while I’m trying to read awful news, CNN), and that is one of the reasons why mobile browsing is an absolutely awful experience, obviously designed from day one with a single purpose in mind—maximising reader misery.
I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but these days there’s a boatload of crap on your screens screaming for your attention as you are trying to read something, find information, or get shit done. Compare that to a late 90s-to-early-2010s website, where it was mostly you and the actual stuff that you actually wanted to read. In addition to being crammed with irrelevant crap, websites from all walks of the Internet have become corporatised in their looks. Take my home university’s website: when I was studying, it was a cosy, useful wiki-style website where you could easily find all the information you needed on courses, lectures, exams, and teachers’ office hours; you could download courses handouts, exercise sheets, and you didn’t need a bloody account to do so! In principle, anyone at all could have gone through the material of my entire Master’s degree without being a student or even having ever been anywhere near the country that the physical university building sits in. Do you know what the same website looks like now? It’s basically a vanity website like a ton of others, with unintuitive menus, sterile design, gigantic pictures of places and happy people, and sales pitches about why you should totally go and study there. Oh, and yes—trace amounts of useful information that you need to sweat to find.
By the way, I removed the Facebook and Twitter plugins from the sidebar of this blog. That is because I have done away with TMT’s Facebook page (Facebook pages are so last-century anyway) and I deleted my Twitter account well before Scrooge McSuck became dead set on killing it. By the looks of it, he seems to be succeeding, and I certainly hope so. In case you belong to the Twitter-gave-minorities-a-voice brigade or similar: #SucksToBeYou, sorry. (Also #SorryNotSorry.) I really think that Twitter and social media in general have done far more harm than good: they have fuelled extremisms across the political spectrum, allowed incredibly dangerous, batshit insane conspiracy theories to spread like wildfire, permitted malevolent actors to manipulate elections and political discourse, raised a whole generation of snowflakes engaged in a competition for the most outrage points, plunged people’s attention spans down the Marianas Trench, and overall have made it easier for people to vomit all of their hatred and bottled-up frustrations on whomever has the effrontery of disagreeing with them on the pettiest subjects. Yes, myself included. I’m by no means immune or better than anyone else.
So, yes, I do hope Twitter’s proverbial last nail in the coffin will be fully hammered in soon. And if a man is allowed to dream, there’s a teeny tiny chance Facebook might follow Twitter into the grave, if only their metaverse crap will ultimately prove to be the flop that it has apparently been so far. Granted, it’s possible that different social media might be better and perhaps even nice, pleasant places to be—for example, if they don’t use the same kind of godawful algorithms as Facebook and Twitter, designed to keep you glued to them as to a slot machine. I would have nothing against that, but I don’t feel any need for social media of any kind anyway.
That aside, I wonder what I should do with this blog and my channel. For months, I have been tempted by the Small Web, a loosely associated group of people with only one thing in common: their love for what the Internet used to be. The tacky, flashy, bare Internet of the early days, whose purpose was that of actually sharing information as opposed to selling you as much crap as humanly possible and tracking you down to the point that Google knows when you need to go number two before you do. Small-web lovers like building and maintaining simple, often retro-looking websites about themselves, their hobbies, their work, you name it. When I browse their websites, I really do have the lovely feeling of hearing only one voice, talking only about the topics that I came for; when I visit modern websites, I feel like in the middle of the most crowded market place you can imagine, where everyone is trying to get your attention like their lives depended on it. (And that’s because, to an extent, they do depend on it, which too sucks, but that’s a different can of worms entirely.) It’s noisy, annoying, stressful. It takes a toll on my ability to focus, to enjoy the Internet, and even on my mental health. (Do you have any idea of the kind of cortisol spikes I get every time I need to tap my way through a jungle of popups before I can get to the actual content? ‘Cause I do.)
Barring an advertising banner that you can remove only with a paid plan, I don’t think my WordPress blog is that annoying (not in terms of usability anyway), and yet, I’ve caressed the idea of migrating it to a static, handcrafted Small Web site, perhaps hosted on Neocities for the time being. Now, there would be pros and cons to that. The pros are simple: no extra crap, no ads, full flexibility, and no statistics, clunky dashboards, or overly complicated editors to stress me out. The cons are even simpler: nobody would know my blog even existed. As it is, TMT is far from being even vaguely popular; yet, from time to time, one of my posts gets a like, or a comment, and it’s nice to know that someone, somewhere, appreciates my efforts. I seem to be getting a handful of visits per day, despite the long time I have been inactive, and probably that happens mostly through WordPress itself. (Maybe they’re bots and crawlers, who knows.) If I left WordPress for an old-fashioned static website, and probably even if I switched to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation, I guess I would lose all of that. If Google can’t make a penny out of showing your website in search results, it will shove it to the very bottom (if it’ll even appear). This isn’t (entirely) about the dopamine boosts you get out of likes; it’s about the need to share, which can’t really be fulfilled unless you know for a fact that someone has read or seen what you’ve created. And the days when people would go through the trouble of dropping you an email to let you know they appreciated your website are long gone—as are the days when discovering a hobby website was easy because there weren’t that many around to begin with.
For now, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to migrate TMT anywhere anyway; I guess I’ll just try to streamline it as much as I can. As for new posts and videos, I need to find the time and energy to sit down and see if not posting anything isn’t just a habit that I can break. It’s quite possible that it won’t happen before December is over, so happy new year and all of that. I’ll see you in 2023; here’s to a year that hopefully won’t suck as much.
Too many things 