why start a blog at all?

put simply, the internet isn’t as fun as it used to be. allowing three or four or five massive corporations (usually spearheaded by a severely out-of-touch numbskull CEO) to unilaterally dictate our experience in cyberspace goes against everything i believe in.

i’m not alone in this– far from it. take the dark forest internet theory: a lovely article with frequent references to the eponymous second installment of the three-body problem trilogy.

[!] " The dark forest theory of the internet is about the tragedy of communication, its compulsion, necessity, futility, and risk. It’s an experiment with “hardboiled survivalist hyper-nihilism”, with metaphysical sci-fi, rather than cyberpunk, as a model for the cyberspace. Where Mark Fisher wanted to distil the internet’s uniqueness, I aim to describe its genericity on a cosmic level. I want to grasp the brutality of our situation: communication is a compulsion and yet it is also the source of conflict."

another example is something i’ve just picked up, the [post internet] blog, which was incidentally written before the shit really hit the fan, back in 2009.

that’s depressing. what about your blog?

i’m getting there. for around twenty years, the chronically online were decentralized nodes all linking to one another. copying html source from one page to cannibalize it on another; setting ugly .gifs as the background, erecting an epileptic mosaic of dancing pixels for their audience; having fun on the internet. when social media crops up– i mean, really crops up– the flocking populace of these new communities kind of hedge out the old websites. i think it’s important to remember our roots, especially when misinformation runs rampant, ads colonize even more screen space, and evil billionaires run your favorite place to doomscroll.