This is my website and blog. In a web era mostly organised around the biggest fish in the sea, it almost feels like an act of rebellion to have one’s own website.
It is easy to see why web platforms offer a more enticing site for budding writers to launch their online selves. Substack started off as mainly an email newsletter distribution service that enabled paid memberships, and has slowly morphed into web and app-based online ecosystem in attempt to generate increasingly large algorithm-driven network effects amongst its readers and writers.
The word “community” gets haughtily bandied about all too casually by a lot of web businesses in our present era, in attempt to use nominative-determinism to distract their users from the profiteering which is the ultimate goal. At least by having my own website, I at least maintain a bastion of retreat when the seemingly inevitable tide of enshittification rolls in (ironically, Corey Doctorow coined the term in a blog post on the writing platform Medium).
And it will keep rolling-in, and rolling-on. I wonder, retrospectively, how much of the incredibly rapid growth in online businesses will be found attributed to the strange decade of 0% interest-rates ushered in post-2008 financial crisis. The world is a very different place now all the share-holders want their choice cut.
So, hello out there reader, wherever, and whenever you are.
For the kick up the butt in registering the domain and her generosity in building the layout, I have my (amazing) friend Tabs Fakier, the @LadyofCode in most places where handles go. I remember, a long time ago, before platforms roamed the digital earth, spending many an hour swapping websites we StumbleUpon’d over the once-ubiquitous MSN messenger. Until of course, StumbleUpon became more about sponsored content, and I became bored.
The cycle repeats.