And welcome, once again to my blog, the last seven years of which seem dominated by me talking about the technical aspects of keeping my blog up to date. As I sat back and watched Claude migrate my Blogger and Wordpress content from a bitrotted Hugo template to one with an apparent present, it occurred to me that this most recent migration provides a pretty good excuse to explore what works about the Internet in 2026, and what doesn’t.
blogs are dead. mine has died five times already.
I mostly blogged in the ’teens as an exercise in writing, and in talking about the things that interested me as a pseudoacademic, and that I thought might interest others in or adjacent to my field, and to be generally annoyed at the direction politics seemed to be trending1. While I stopped blogging in 2019 as a classic instance of Academic Disappears Into Chocolate Factory, blogging in the form I practiced it was mostly already dead by then anyway. Indeed, this blog’s first post, recovered from My Ridiculously Circuitous Plan, originally intended as a chronicle of my emigration, dates to 2008, which is considered to be after the end of the original golden age of blogging; most of the content dates to a time when decentralized blogging had mostly been replaced by Twitter clips and Facebook screeds.
Indeed, where I did have an audience of people I didn’t already know well, they mainly found my writing because I posted links on Twitter, where I had a nonzero if negligible following. Twitter is gone now2, or might as well be, lurching about in Xombie form, the next RSS if you will; none of its potential successors seem likely to become what Twitter once was. The closest equivalent among my professional circle would be LinkedIn, but, given that my last interaction on that platform was a DM reply to a joke from a friend expressing doubt that intentional humor was allowed on LinkedIn… no.
So, if you’re reading this, and you’re not a bot driven by an LLM or otherwise, congratulations! You have achieved something improbable. Go buy a lottery ticket?
The arc of my on-again, off-again blog is a faint reflection of what has happened to small publishers of the written word on the Web over the past two decades, although since I’m mainly writing for myself, and never for money, I’ve never really cared enough about who was reading to be too worried about any of the various traffic apocalypses: the death of Google Reader and therefore RSS as a discovery layer, the rise of the social media it-site du jour as “the Internet”, and the subsequent scramble for cash and eyeballs as neither ad revenue nor investor storytime panned out as a sustainable business model.
As it turns out, intrinsic motivation is always the most sustainable business model, even if it doesn’t pay for itself.
the singularity has always been a black hole of slop (that you can briefly escape).
While doing some background research for this post, which was eventually going to be much longer before I decided to break it into a probably-trilogy, I asked Claude (Sonnet 4.6) what killed the open web, and when, and it came up with this gem:
The open web never died from a single wound; it was exsanguinated across fifteen years by a succession of intermediaries that each found that the most profitable thing they could do was consume it.
This is nothing new; indeed, the Web is first and foremost a media technology, and all media technologies follow a version of the same arc, where they are mostly shaped by four groups of people in rough succession:
Technologists: Every new media technology is first and foremost a new technology. The first people to use the Web were the software and systems people who knew how to stand up a web server and keep it running, a century after the first people to use radio en masse were the electronics geeks who knew to build a radio. Different technologies require different amounts of capital to get started, for sure, and have different dependency trees you have to master first: to build a radio you needed a source of suitable components and some way to power it, to set up a Web server you first need to invent the Internet. The technologist phase is often dominated by one-to-one and decentralized many-to-many communications limited only by the physics of the technology in question.
Artists: Very shortly after the technologists come the artists. Sometimes they show up in parallel; indeed, sometimes they’re the same people. The first artists are often those who had a vision complemented by the technology in question before it was even invented, and see its potential immediately. While the technologists show the rest of us how, at a low level, to use the media, the artists show us what it can be used for.
Capitalists: What it can be used for is… usually advertising. I’m not a giant fan of the term “enshittification”, though Cory Doctorow has thought much more deeply about these topics than I will ever grant myself the time to, but it does generally capture what happens when you take any system, simple or complex, and hand it to someone whose primary motivation is to figure out how to extract rent from it3. Sometimes (as with the web) this is post-hoc, and it can even start off as a (perhaps-naive) form of virtue4.
Everybody Else: The first three groups shape the arc of a technology’s development for the first generation of its existence. After the children who have never been aware of a world without the new technology grow up, that technology is part of the culture, and the culture will decide what happens to it. Some technologies phase out with the first (broadcast television) or second (radio) generation that grew up with them. Some (newspapers) last much longer. Many don’t.
Artists and technologists often5 build things out of intrinsic motivation. Capitalists build things to extract rent. Even when framed in terms of covering costs, this extraction always diverts at least some effort from productive to nonproductive use, and therefore inherently results in a reduction in intrinsic value of the end product. This is, incidentally, why I needed to retemplate my blog: the Hugo Academic template turned into a thing called Wowchemy, which followed the freemium model in an attempt to convert people who had already sunk a lot of effort into their blogs into paying customers.
The next big thing always excites futurists, and media is no different: surely now technology will accelerate beyond the limits of its surrounding economics and culture and Everything Will Be Perfect6; then the singularity’s event horizon catches up with the situation and we all fall down again.
One of the consequences of this dynamic is that new media technologies present a way to outrun the event horizon of slop7 that becomes more prevalent as a medium matures and becomes better capitalized. Indeed, I’d posit that this is the primary attraction for new media for most early adopters: free from the constraints of the past and the need to extract rent to have made it all worth it, it gives us a place to be human again.
(1): if only past me had known that 2016 would be at least a local high-water mark for civilizational progress in the Anglosphere, but that’s the subject of another post.
(2): the victim of one lonely man’s search for either validation or a path to a six-month shadow presidency of the United States, with the data theft and deregulatory benefits that come along with it; depending on how conspiratorially inclined you are.
(3): this is not isolated to media technologies. However, since the scarce commodity in media is attention, attention can often be captured without massive upfront capital expenditure, and rent-seeking as a business model is inherently lazy (derogatory), making media the easiest industry to observe this phenomenon in."
(4): Google’s initial business model was built around its mission, to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Advertising revenue subsidized other societal infrastructure in the information space that would be difficult or impossible to make as useful if it had to turn a profit or support its own infrastructure and development cost.
(5): the only reason I’m qualifying a statement with an often is that this post is long and convoluted enough without also having to consider universal basic income.
(6): For an excellent example of this applied to the advent of the telegraph, a late 19th century technology, see Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, which is hopefully available at your local independent bookstore. If you’re interested enough to be reading this footnote and you haven’t read it yet, well, now you pretty much have to.
(7): Slop may be recognized as a new coinage, but it is not a new phenomenon. I’m a giant fan of Charlie Stross’s observation that we’ve been living with most of what we’re afraid of about the (at the time, still future) boom in AI since the founding of the first joint stock corporation.