your presence counts
There’s this idea online sometimes that sharing your thoughts and life online is noise. Garbage. Narcissism. Adding unnecessarily to terabytes of data somewhere. It’s a waste of time, unproductive, and “who would wanna read this anyway?”. “You’re just one in a billion, nothing you say is original anyway.”
While I did see some of this by people who simply choose not to post much aside from discussions in anonymous forums, I think many more actually level this stuff against themselves. When others share, it’s okay, but when they themselves would do it, it’s cringe. They think their thoughts are worthless or need to be overly profound and new to be worth taking up space. Others, again, only see value in their thoughts if they are actually read or generate money.
I think right now, blogging holds tremendous value, and will continue to grow in value, no matter who you are or what you have to say. Maybe not financially, but culturally.
It’s special to be here and share despite the possibility of humiliation, the potential of making mistakes. It’s good to be passionately active when it is so much easier to lurk and passively rot on other platforms. It’s amazing to contribute to the recording of current culture. It’s important to stay and offer a view of the web that is free of ads, tracking, likes, follows, and bots.
You bring life to the ‘dead internet’1. Your art, your poems, your funny stories, your opinions, your routines, your quirks, your rants are more important than ever in the midst of AI slop. While AI can flood the net with perfect images and sanitized corporate texts, it cannot capture life the way you do. Your signs of life online let us escape from a “We Happy Few”2-esque pretension seen elsewhere.
In times of inhumanity, the best you can bring is your humanity.
community echo
Published 08 Jan, 2025