Welcome to… whatever this is. A blog in 2024. That could work, right?
Funny thing is, it might. The Internet has become an increasingly fragmented place in these rotten years of Deep and Rapid Enshittification, and myself, like many others, have started embracing alternatives to the big corporate platforms.
The irony for me is that is also where I started. I’m not young. I’ve played video games since they existed. I wrote my first Basic program in 1983. I used dial-up modems and BBSes. I read Neuromancer when it was new. Etc.
There, credentials established. The point is I’ve seen the broad arc of online culture develop since before it was really a thing; from a bunch of weird social outcasts doing terrible things to phone lines, to the rise of the Web and nascent social media, to… whatever corporate dystopia we’re currently living in.
I’ve put in my time working in IT — front-end web development mostly — and saw it transform from a radical experiment to a money generating juggernaut. I lived through a couple of bubble bursts. As it became increasingly focused on outsourcing and sweat shop mentality, I grew miserable. The field I once loved had become a tool of manipulative rich assholes. I wanted out.
And I got out. By becoming a professional puppet builder. But that’s another story.
Since 2018 I’ve made my living from making physical art, and my love of tech was able to grow again, divorced from “the thing I need to do to survive” and becoming something I could engage with to enhance my life.
Increasingly sick of predatory corporate social spaces, I like many of you fled to The Fediverse, and there found what may be the last vestige of truly human-driven online life.
So here we are. Back there. Back putting out whatever falls into my head into the random flux of the web. Not to manipulate an algorithm or drive traffic, but just to be a person, with thoughts, sharing with other people.
Welcome. To the beginning and end of The Internet.
