what now? thinking aloud about what I'm doing online and why
A couple of weeks ago, when the news leaked that WordPress was getting ready to sell its users' data to Midjourney and OpenAI, I deleted 15 years of blog posts. Everything I’d written about my work: gone, just like that. I was furious that this entity I’d been paying to host my work (please let’s not call it “data”) would think it was okay to sell that work as if it belonged to them. It didn’t, and it doesn’t, and it never will, and it is not okay.
“You saw the bullies coming,” said my mentor a few days later, “and you threw your lunch in the pond.” Yes. And when she said that, I was finally able to cry over my lost lunch.
The first place I read the news was 404 Media, but that’s not the first link I gave you. Because you have to sign up and become a member of their site to read the whole article, and that sort of thing makes me itch. It’s like everyone’s trying to build their own walled garden. Yuck :(
Even so, I noticed that their site is built with Ghost and I decided to check it out. And I am giving it a try (here and here if you’re curious) even though they encourage people to build walled gardens and monetize everything. It is easy to write there. Easy to share all the beautiful photos I’ve still got after throwing away my blog, and to say what I want to say about them. And if I need to say something a little tender about my work (as I sometimes do), it’ll be easy to put it behind a gate. And I really need something to be easy right now, when so many things are (as the Pain-Free-You guy has taught me to say) not as easy as I’d like.
But my intention is to mostly leave the Ghost blogs open. In spite of everything, I still just really want to share the things I’ve made. I want it to be possible for someone to stumble over my piles of rusting metal and wonky little drawings. I want the garden gate to be open, so people can come in and walk the labyrinth and smell the flowers.
And as much as I want a place to make a big shiny fuss over my sculptures and comics, I’ve quickly become fond of micro.blog. It’s a little more work to write here. It reminds me of hand-coding my very first website, almost 30 years ago, which makes me feel nostalgic. I like having a place online that’s less polished and more personal. I like that my gravatar has followed me here like a little ghost. I like that I can comment on a lot of other people’s posts without signing up for their special little walled gardens.
It all makes me kind of glad I threw away my WordPress sites.