What are we doing here?
A while ago, I made a substack account because I wanted to motivate myself to write more, and to share that writing with more people. I did a little bit of writing on it, and am mostly pleased with what I made. It was a good spread of different things, mostly music reviews and some reflections on my life. I’m not here to tell you that it was a failure or msiguided, I’m still happy with what it was. When I started it, I wrote a short piece about why I wanted to have a blog and what my goals were.
Long before that I tried making a website using the skills and tools I had learned watching tutorials on how to use HTML and CSS. It was fairly basic and not aesthetically stunning, but it was a good learning experience. That was a more professionally minded project, I’d wanted something I could put my CV on, as well as some graphic design chops. There was a few clever things in there that I’m proud of, but I stopped working on it, and eventually let the whole thing fall by the way side.
Today I had a conversation with someone about the internet, which seems to be a solid 40% of my conversations these days. I had been rambling about all of my thoughts on the internet, particularly where I see it going in the future with things like ChatGPT, AI Art, and platforms. We ended up talking about alternate possible futures for the internet and I found myself thinking about what a better internet might look like, and reflecting on the period of time when blogs were more popular, and we were less mediated by things like platforms. I think a better, more authentic internet would be one where we all have our own little blogs that link among one another, rather than all existing on one platform. I have friends who have such blogs and I find them immensely energizing and inspiring, I think the idea of creating your own space online, that is as much for yourself as it is for anyone else is very compelling. In such a space you could construct an oeuvre of writing, reading and reflection that would be more useful and constructive than anything you could do on a social media platform. That is what I think I was trying to do with both of those website/blog projects, and what I’m trying to bring together in this website. This is an updated version of that original piece where I mused on what my goals would be for the Substack.
I would like to continue writing, but I want to bring it into conversation with more things, with the hope of eventually drawing more and more activities away from social media and into one space that is my own. Things like music reviews, books I’m reading, thoughts on social trends or cultural moments, my CV, and more can all live together, and I think enrich one another.
I will admit that a WordPress website is hardly some revolutionary new media, but I appreciate having more control and isolation for the purposes of this. I also simply don’t understand more advanced website creation methods, and am a bit more focused on other projects at the moment, but maybe that will be something to work on in the future.
Thanks for reading, maybe eventually I will be re-writing this post for another website, and laughing at the futility of it all.