The proliferation of AI makes me think a lot about how many longtime internet denizen come of age online. We started with crude tools that were slow, inefficient, and forced us to learn how to reverse engineer them to make them do what we wanted. Today, kids get apps and tools that have the problem solved. There’s still an element of figuring out how to make them do what you want, but it’s almost gamified.

The other challenge today is cost. Free internet CDs would at least give you a glimpse of online life and hacking was a time honored tradition helping people absorb more of the culture than perhaps their wallets (or parents credit cards, in a pre-debit world) would allow. Today? Every experience is financialized to the nth degree. Board games are having a revival, but less for family game nights and more for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s to relive childhood with extremely elaborate gaming experiences that cost a lot more than a board game you bought from the department store. Online games are rife with DLC, and while the time honored tradition of kids knowing more about being online than their parents still exists, it’s an ever present blight on childhood as we know it.

It’s made me reflect a lot on the ways that I communicate online. I went from the early days of pre-blogs and personal websites, eschewing social media until I forced to make it useful. I’ve always made friends online, but it’s seemingly harder than ever to connect with people because we’ve atrophied all of the findability of the web, in favor of something far more insidious. Profit. You’d almost be willing to tolerate bearing some of the costs of this chaos, if it actually delivered on its promises from time to time. But no, time and time again, the internet of today is a charred husk of its former self.

As I think about how to communicate my ideas, I realize how much over a decade of microblogging, coupled with a pandemic has done to my own social networks. This year, I’ve found myself being more intentional about making real-life plans with far-flung friends, and trying to contemplate how to communicate my varied ideas in places where I’ll be able to find them again in the future. Tweeting to an empty audience was downright jarring, and none of the alternatives have delivered on being anything other than a fascimile of an experience that used to be somewhat satisfying.

I’m not sure if this means that I’ll be blogging more. I have lots of unfinished drafts of half-completed ideas that might be best left to the drafts. But it occurred to me that there’s some value in sharing sometimes, even if I haven’t fulled conceived of what I want to say, just to record the ideas. I don’t find AI writing tools to be especially helpful sparing partners. I just know that recording ideas on platforms that don’t belong to me, where those ideas mostly go to die feels like a really bad way to catalog thoughts.

So i’m going to think through ways to do it better.