It's time to rebuild

If you’re reading this in your inbox, hi! It’s been a while. I was about to say ‘I hope you are well’ but given the state of… everything, I will instead say ‘I hope your support system is strong’, because these are the times we live in. If you’ve landed here on my website from elsewhere, welcome! 

Over the past few months I’ve been giving a lot of thought to online life. I’m still figuring things out, but one of the things I remembered in this fallow, reflective period was the fact that I used to blog to help myself work things out. 

Somewhere along the line I stopped doing that. Now I am making a commitment to rediscover that process in the hope that I can reclaim what social media took from me. 

Before I get into this, for those of you who subscribe for news, The Vengeance is out in early May, I’ll share pre-order links when all formats are available for pre-order, as it's only the paperback right now. 

It may be rather dramatic to say that social media ‘took’ anything, but hear me out. I remember when we all used to blog (and lo, there is the GIF of old man Simpson shouting at clouds playing in my head) and people used to comment on each other’s blogs and then you’d follow the link to their blog from their comment and read their stuff. (Before you say ‘But people are still blogging!’ let me finish.) Back then, you’d actively encourage people to go to other places, because you liked them. No algorithms were involved!

Back then, I used to get up in the morning and be excited about seeing whether anyone had commented on my latest post or piece of flash fiction! I used to feel like I was walking down a virtual street and saying ‘good morning’ to people when I saw familiar names in the comments and replied to them. It feels like another lifetime. Another world. Now I fire up my computer like someone checking on a strange noise coming from downstairs. It will probably all be fine, but sometimes, there's someone horrible right there. And even when there aren't, there are horrible people screaming through the windows while I chuckle at wholesome Star Trek: TNG memes.

At the risk of being an old nostalgic gen Xer, the internet was enjoyable for me back then. And then… then we started posting the links to our blogs on Twitter and Facebook. And for a time, it was good. We had that ‘virtual water-cooler’ thing going on. New people found our blogs. We found new blogs too.

Then, the Fire Nation attacked.

No, no, what I meant to say is, then the algorithm wars began. We didn’t even know a war had been started, because it was one of those quiet invasions and the battle was for not only our attention, but everything that was good about being online. The Oatmeal did a great comic about this. It sums up that period of time when we all got sucked into using ‘hubs’ like Facebook to reach more people, then when they’d corralled everyone into their space, they closed the gates behind us.

"I think we lost something in the rush towards ease and speed and convenience."

It’s the oldest game in the book. Tempt everyone in, because it's so easy and so convenient, wait until the competition has atrophied, buy out or cut off the remaining competition, then make it worse for all the people trapped in your ecosystem. So much worse. Now these platforms decide what we see, in whatever order maximises their profits, regardless of whether we want it or not. Feeds are full of AI slop. We’re being deliberately shown stuff designed to make us angry and upset to increase ‘engagement’. So many people are desperately trying to find connection, and it’s getting harder and harder to do so. Many of us are addicted to scrolling these awful feeds, desperately seeking the feeling we used to get, left with nothing but a lingering sense of loneliness and dissatisfaction.

And you know what I’m ashamed of? That I just… let it happen. I wasn’t one of the people who kept up their blog, even though I had a site that could handle that. I shifted into newsletters, but even then I just… stopped… sending them. 

At some point, I became a lurker in my own online life. 

I deleted my Twitter account a few months ago after moth-balling it when that awful man bought it, and moved to Bluesky and Mastodon. The latter I barely use now. I never post on Instagram, I just scroll. I do share stuff on Bluesky occasionally, but I don’t hang out there like I used to on Twitter, probably because I am fully expecting it to turn into something awful at some point.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped really taking part, but I didn’t stop scrolling.

For a while, I thought it was because I was just too damn jaded. I’m in my late forties. I’ve seen this cycle of enshittification so many times now, I just don’t have the energy to go through it all over again. The brilliant Cat Valente wrote a stellar post about this.

After Zuckerberg’s recent declaration of fealty (I’d say it was like a bloody Scooby-Doo villain unmasking, but I can’t bring myself to find even a fatalistic mirth in any of this), the need to remove myself from his places shifted from a vague desire to free my brain from addictive behaviour to a suddenly urgent need to stop my attention making him richer. But then I realised how deep the claws had sunk in. Some of my people are only on Facebook. If I delete my account, I will lose touch with them. How will I know what’s going on in my LARP circles? How will I learn stuff from the niche interest groups I’m part of?

But then a new question floated up. Am I really connecting with those people? I want to! But is reading sporadic updates and rarely commenting really being in each other’s lives? I’ve been mistaking addiction to a terrible social media platform for connection, and it has to stop. 

But I’m worrying about what I’ll lose by deleting social media accounts, even when they do not nourish my life. It feels like I’ve been doing the digital equivalent of just eating at one junk food chain, because I’m too tired to cook, only to suddenly realise that there are no other food outlets in town. They all went out of business, because everyone was at the junk food place. I feel like crap because I’ve only been eating crap and what I need to do is actually learn how to cook and invite people over to dinner again, to strain the metaphor.

Well I know who I’d like to go out of business now. I’m still tired, and not used to writing blog posts (this is probably too long, damn it) and I’m not really feeling safe online anymore but I have to do something.

It starts with this blog post. I feel like I am waking up from being in a state of numb passivity. We can take back what they took from us. I need to put the effort in again, and take responsibility for letting myself get sucked into all that rubbish. It’s going to take work, to restore this ecosystem, but we need to do it.  

If you’re a subscriber, you’ll hear from me a bit more often (but probably only once a month or so as I have a LOT of stuff going on) as I plan to send out these blog posts as my newsletters. I’m hoping they will be a bit more enjoyable than just me popping up twice a year to throw a bunch of news at you and then run off into the sunset! 

How are you feeling about your online life? Does what I've said resonate with you? Or have you managed to keep your own oasis in this sad desert I've been stumbling through? Let me know, and tell me about your blog if you have one.

As for whether you're debating whether to subscribe, I plan to write about all sorts of things, just like I used to. There will be stuff about writing, and all the nerdy stuff I love and blimey, so much more! And it will be here, not in a thread on someone else's site. Let’s make the internet what we need it to be again.