another one bites the dust
inspired by this post on the k.mandla blog i discovered last year.
this blog has been around for over a decade and is one of those blogs being written purely by an individual documenting their own experiences and work with linux and technology in general. it’s the kind of blog that’s symbolic of the internet before the full commodification and capitalization of the system. a long lost era that, at least for myself and a lot of others, will forever be the golden era of the internet, the “early days” to us old farts (mainly genx and millenials, i think).
this post is the author letting everyone know that they’re going to be moving on from the blog. they spend a bit of time pondering on the passing of time and how the things continue to move towards less and less control over our technology and the loss (at least to my interpretation) of craftsmanship in software development and the tech culture as a whole.
it’s unfortunate to see these kinds of blogs die. i imagine over the coming decade (?) we’ll see more of these kinds of blogs die off as their maintainers either don’t see the point in continuing in an internet drowning in seo-optimized ai slop or just move onto other platforms for writing. while many of these blogs were always just passion projects and not attempting to monetize (and so weren’t forced to adapt to the current meta of revenue-generation on the web), the tech world has a way of wearing people down over time, killing their optimism and passion for the work. but i don’t think this is due to anything inherent in tech itself; it’s the natural consequence of any culture that is infected with the cancer of capital, which inevitably consumes and destroys culture in it’s is never-ending drive to maximize profits, which requires it to flatten all culture to meaninglessness in order to appeal to the widest audience possible.
maybe my generation, those that were around to see the tail end of the golden years and it’s descent into soulless, market-pleasing slop, will be the last bastions of that golden era that will keep it alive in it’s dying years. all we can do is make our own blogs and set up our own indie sites to live out there in the vast sea of the web, for anyone who comes across it. at least for now, this is a power we still possess. and while we have it, the best way we can protect it is to make sure that it’s so prevalent that it’s impossible to completely stamp out. do what you can to help. post your stuff. in the future we’re moving towards, it’ll be valuable if only for the fact that it’s the actual, genuine writings of a human being with real thoughts and feelings.
that may be more rare on the internet of the future than we can even imagine at this point.