How blogging saved my life

Art school was a bust.

I taught myself to build websites instead.

I was a little too late to cash in on the “dot-com boom”, but not too late to ride the coattails of the cultural change as the waves crested and crashed over the landscape that was continually changing below.

The coastline of concretions: at one point, my pages were way up past 10,000.

I never got rich from blogging, but I was at least a subsistence keyword farmer.

This was back when territories had not yet been carved out—and carved up. If you were the first to write about something, you basically owned it.

This was back when if you embedded and then loaded six YouTube windows onto a web page, you would probably crash your computer—or at least slow down the sensation of life so much that you felt like you were standing still waiting for it all to catch up.

And then it did.

This was the era of content-scraping. People writing algorithms to scan blogs for keyword clusters, and then selectively replicating those blocks of text onto strange spam websites with URLs that made no sense. The era of paid links, of Google flexing its muscles against alternative ad paradigms and, overnight, chopping the legs out from under content producers who had been living high on the hog before that.

I was never that high on the hog. But I always had enough to get by.

And somehow, through blogging, the world opened up to me and me to it. It wasn’t just about ad revenue — but somehow that could have been an expression of the earnesty of it, or at least the countless hours at “normal” jobs spent shirking official duties (or just “getting my homework done quickly” depending how you look at it) so I could post about arcane B.S., through which I somehow navigated my own road to truth.

That road lead through Seattle, circa winter of 2006, I believe. I was a paranormal blogger, you could say. Though there was more to it than that.

I may have been part of the first wave, or at least one of the first few waves.

Of people who re-arranged their physical presence location to reflect their digital proximity patterns. Their on-line friends.

Some people have job friends, I had blog friends.

Though they lived across the country, they were in some sense closer to me than some of the people around me.

And I’d never met them.

It sounds quaint now.

Seemed like a big deal at the time.

I took a regular Amtrak car from Pittsburgh to Chicago, and splurged on a sleeper car all the way out west.

Somewhere around Whitefish, I think the light began to change. Crossing the Cascades, you could almost smell the green.

Of course I’d watched it all in one weekend before moving out there. Back before “binge-watching” was “a thing”. Back before “things” being “a thing” was even a thing.* If you can remember back even that far…

(*This makes me sound ‘old,’ but fortunately the Medium typeface makes it look new new new…)

Maybe “saved my life” isn’t the right way to phrase this. Maybe it’s more “made my life,” that is—it gave me the outlet to just be unabashedly myself before Facebook, MySpace or even Friendster existed. It was just me and my mumblings, fumblings and bumblings—just trying to find some miracles embedded in the ordinary that wouldn’t crash my browser. Or that would.

Eventually, those 10,000 pages of thinware became their own un-doing. Or rather I became theirs. How long could I hold onto every stupid little thought I’d ever had, cataloged and entered into the digital ledger? Eventually, I got into pushing back the spambots, the scrapers, the algorithms, the unseen non-human audiences following patterns eddying out from our spontaneous online human interactions.

Eventually, the algorithms won. It’s like alcoholism. The pure essence of the chemical is more powerful than the laid-bare physical psychological realities of the merely human. And so arose the warehouses of attention; the internet falling in line under their shadows. The giants and their algorithms, a surreal ingression.

I can honestly say, I lived the ‘blogger’ life and was lucky for it. I went to strange meetings. I tried to track and interpret the signs. I was just me, and that was good enough. I guess you could say, in the end, that this is what saved me.