I’ve been letting this site languish and rather than any false pretense of revamping it, I think it’s safe to say I’m hanging up my spurs.

I’ve been posting crap on here at least since I first set up and switched to Octopress in 2009. I’ve had a few posts I meant to finish, a few posts I wrote and never published, and a select few that I removed. There was some motivation I guess to profess my values to others from the comfort of my own sandbox, but even in 2009 the idea of having your own site had started transforming into a rented parking lot at one of the walled garden estates. Having your own irc channel or Teamspeak/Mumble server turned into having “your” Discord server. Like real life, Internet life has become one of renting and not of owning, and you can be evicted on a whim at any moment, no squatter’s rights exist online.

I really don’t see much getting better about the Internet until the problems of monopoly and monopsony are addressed at a fundamental level. The stochastic parrot economy is going to make this even worse, since your landlord probably already sold your intellectual works (known depressingly today as “content”) or else had it taken out from under them while they were busy monetizing with ad tech.

The idea of “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” has sort of come to describe how I see the world, except “offline behavior imitates online behavior” with Twitter tantrums and the celebration of narcissism. I do find the whole Twitter/X thing ironic, as I can recall reluctantly having to cut a check to x.com 22 years ago because they had fucked up the Paypal/eBay payment processing. Maybe because some giant idiot had a shiny toy they wanted to show off, who knows?

I’ll be leaving this blog as is up as long as I still maintain my site, but I doubt I’ll be writing any more here.

So long, and thanks for all the fish