hello, world
For many of my formative years I was a die-hard blogger. I had a livejournal, and I lived on it. It was cringe-y and embarrassing and I miss it so much now. At some point, probably when I got to college, people wanted me to have a "presence" online, so that I could get jobs, so that I could prove that I exist, so that I could build a reputation.
No one reads anything I write on there. Except maybe once, a utility company PR guy, and my mom, and the person whose book I reviewed after I tagged them in a tweet with a link to it. Not the same post, obviously.
I don't mind writing for those people. But I miss writing for myself. I miss writing for the people out there in the aether who want to share of themselves and among themselves. I miss the connections I made with people whose lives I had been invited into by their words.
I've been doing a lot of research into the indie web for the last 2 weeks. This is mostly because I keep saying (out loud, where people like my coworkers who Do Not Get It can hear me), "The future is here and it sucks."
I watch a lot of science fiction films. We push, relentlessly, into the future, and so many of the futures invented in these stories take place in the year "2020" or "2007" or whatever, and I've been there, and I saw the future we actually got, and let me tell you, it's been a let down almost every single time.
I didn't want the future where I buy everything from one mega-corporation and where the advertisements are beamed directly into my brain while I'm asleep. I don't want the world where wealthy nations run on "automated systems" that are actually controlled by "remote workers" or "cyber-migrants" in another country.
Nostalgia has me by the throat, I guess. I want to go back to the person I was when I was 16 (haha, tell me another one, being 16 is objectively terrible, even if my knees worked better), a person who lived in a world that still felt like it was promising something better, yet to come.
Hello, world. Are you still out there?