Starting with an aside, I’ll just note that it drove me nuts when the company that makes and runs that dystopian social network—you know the one—decided to call itself meta. Many wager that they stole the term from Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Snow Crash which itself was a fiction-shaped social commentary on the explosive expansion of technology into our lives and his “metaverse” was, at least in my opinion, an analogy for the navel-gazing narcissistic amplifications that would inevitably extrude from every pore of an increasing entrenchment of virtual spaces into human lives. Zuckerbot probably just thought it would be a cool name, so now when anyone uses the word “meta” —which simply and properly in English just means something along the lines of “self-referencing”— one can’t help but seem like they are talking about that perverse social network, and not say, being reflective and talking about one’s own work and platform—which is where I was going with this…
For years when I blogged I used to routinely use the term “meta Mondays” as an excuse to plant a flag in the ‘state of the blog’ and write about what I was working on in and around it, or more often write down excuses about why I wasn’t writing more or building it bigger and better. Meta Monday. Alliterative and clever and whatever.
I apologize if you are a reader and were expecting a sudden explosion of new and insightful content about my random musings. I apologize if you have stumbled here from my old urls and are now wondering why those more focused brand-idents are a guy blogging about his weekends and his fitness. My energies have been focused on other stuff. Who knows how long that will last. I have put a lot of those energies into a couple project about which I may or may not ever share—professional stuff, ahem, you know how it goes—and when I’m spending six to eight hours at a keyboard doing that stuff, finding time to be expressive and philosophical here is a slipping luxury.
And those damn social networks, amiright?
The wasted human potential that has been sunk via billions of human life hours every day into this fuzzy digital existence. Gah!
I was always a bit of an optimist.
Do you know why I started blogging?
It was the afterglow of the science fiction idealism of the eighties and nineties. Authors would create this abstract setting where virtual spaces were pure and engaged. A place where truth was challenged, sure, but where rational thought and big ideas prevailed. People would write and share and create and build and make incredible things.
What did we get?
We got the shitty shadow. The Internet. Influencers selling their souls for clicks, deep fake images and video, AI slop, hate, rage, unfiltered racism, the masses looking at reality but then jabbing their own fingers in their eyes to avoid seeing it.
If you can’t express your idea in an eight second video clip no one cares.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of attention goes to zero point one percent of the voices and creators. We haven’t broken celebrity, we’ve amplified it and commodified it.
Long form expression is all but dead.
Why write a post if no is going to read it?
Why write a novel if an AI is going to steal it?
Why host a blog if search engines will bury it?
Why engage in a discussion if the brain at the other end of the connection is unwilling to consider it?
What I used to hope for was a kind of online world where everyone has a place to write and share and create, at least a little something worth reading, but that was always a kind of long shot idealism—I will admit—and I honestly never even considered that it would go this badly for us online. In the last year or two my hope for a lovely digital future has faded to a kind of dystopia of necessity, of me eventually eluding escape for but a single reason: that ceding even one more byte to the darkness would be a betrayal of my life’s work. The internet is deeply broken for good and all that is left is a commercial platform run for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash out of the fibres before the whole thing burns to the ground, and worse.
How’s that for a not-Monday morning thought?
I guess what I’m saying is that my optimism is on life support. Objective reality is apparently broken. The internet is a bully platform. The nerds built it and then the rest of the tribe saw merely another space that could be used to induce hate and pain and hurt—and for every one of us there and ninety-nine of them, and now they are shifting algorithms to amplify the ninety-nine to ninety-nine millions. I am drowning in a sea of digital stupid and I sometimes feel as though I am on the precipice of a post-internet phase of my life.
And yet, here I am still writing.
