Happy New Year Xbox

This is my self-hosted blog. I don't know if self-hosting is trendy, because there are a lot of subcultures creating a lot of trends, but it feels trendy considering the people I'm around. Nostalgia for the turn of the millennium invokes a kind of world in which a "Pirate Part" could make sense. One of my friends in grad school referenced the old Anarchist point that, with the attempts by the US government to capture stolen revenue that results from illegal downloading of media, many things seem to fall under Smithian rentierdom. Twenty years after that point, we hear about techno-feudalism. Now, our techno-serfs desire to be techno-peasants, thinking that it constitutes a return to the "old web." But I don't know if there is any going back.

There is a lot of imagination surrounding the "old web," which really feels like an amalgamation of gaudy Y2K fantasies coming out of resentment against sites like Twitter/X, Tumblr, etc, which are constantly boycotted but never abandoned. There's a romantic revival of '90s cyberutopianism, where the internet is a place where you can express an identity removed from your body. Maybe this was authentic in the '90s, but now even the revival of that conceit seems cycnical and more geared towards "cultivating a brand" in a post-social-media landscape where everything is your brand. Neocities sites tend to already look antiquated, like the sites are designed for a viewer to marvel at their performative authenticity before the site gets crawled by the Wayback Machine, prematurely archived instead of actually used.

I use Tumblr to maintain a niche blog but I haven't used Twitter/X since the 2020 George Floyd/BLM protests. Most of my online time is spent in Discord/Matrix clients. I make a blog now to keep my thoughts organized and to avoid forgetting things I once thought about. Hopefully as I do creative things, those can also go here. To run a blog requires misplaced confidence that someone will read what you write.