Metronomica.blog
it is time to blog, man
I am getting tired of the internet, and I know I am far from alone.
I’m tired specifically of what is has become over the past few years, or decade, or more — the insidious creep of something is not working here that hits us at different times in different ways.
Everything is clunky and bloated and paywalled. Search engines have been overrun with articles designed to appeal to search engines. If you forget your Instagram password, Meta will send a verification code to your WhatsApp, which you deleted off your phone years ago. Spotify pays its artists a pittance while increasing its prices thrice in a year.
I’m not breaking any new ground by griping about this. It’s bad, we hate it, enshittification, etc. But I’ve finally hit the point that plenty of other people have already hit. I’ll always rely on some of these services in some respect, but it’s time to actively move away from as many as I can.
Part of doing that is reclaiming the nostalgia-tinged internet of my youth. Everything was better in high school. (It wasn’t.) It feels that way sometimes, though. But back in the early 2000s I was having in-depth conversations about The Receiving End of Sirens on a popular message board dedicated to the band. I was updating my Xanga. I was learning just enough HTML and CSS to commit design crimes on Geocities pages.
And I was doing it just to do it, man. The only goals were messing around, and building communities, and having some fun. I made music in a cracked version of FL Studio (nee Fruity Loops) and promoted it to my three best friends.
As the internet changed, so did I. Everything became polished and so did I. Anything I did came from a brain-broke place of “how will I monetize this,” even if I didn’t say that out loud. How will I make money from my music. What is the goal of learning a new skill. How can I grow my audience. Always, how can I grow my audience. 1
It’s time to blog again, is what I’m saying, and blog without a goal. It will be for me, and for you if you’d like to read, but not for the M E T R I C S. I spend enough time with the metrics day at my day job, and they only hint at stories. I’d like to write my own stories here and find other blogs and read those stories, too.
This blog will be about making and listening to music. It will likely be about other things, too, like making candles or failing to learn to code for the hundredth time or tennis or what I ate for dinner, but those things can come naturally, because this is not a product to be sold, but a journal to be figured out, over time, in public. It will be an outboard brain, to again draw from enshittification’s nomenclator, and it will probably be nearly as fragmented as my own. Some posts will be well-constructed. Some posts will be placeholders, or lists, or nothing.
It will not be perfect, and it will not be much, but it will be a reclamation of my own slice of the internet, and I will be doing it just to do it, man.
I can only lay the blame on the internet to a certain degree, I admit. Some of this is hard-coded in me, and it’s incredibly difficult to rewire. Even choosing a platform to host this blog was a struggle. Should I go with a newsletter platform with analytics and monetization built in? You know, in case my niche blogs about making ambient music BLOW UP??↩︎
// tags: internet