The Muskrat, my new personal blog, is my escape from the responsibility of influence
I have, for some inexplicable reason, acquired influence.
This has caused me no end of grief; in the times before, I took pride and joy in writing whatever crap came to mind, be it a long post outlining an obscure abandoned game or a weird little food blogs. I’ve never been one for thinking things through. But now I have to. And it sucks.
So starting today, I’m relaunching The Muskrat as my own personal blog and home for pieces that don’t fit my other projects. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write without worrying about audience — if nobody knows it exists, my only responsibility is to myself.
“Build it and they will come.” is a crock.
Fusion.net (now Fusion.tv) was a new digital publication, the sibling of Univision’s first english-language television channel, Fusion. Launched in 2013, it was staffed with some of the then-biggest names in writing. It was built, from the ground up, as a diverse site with a mandate to tell important stories.
By 2015, there were more people working at Fusion than reading it at any given time.
Univision resorted to buying up the assets of the late Gawker Media empire, and borging Fusion.net into it, resulting in the Golden Era of the Gizmodo Media Group.
It was expensive. All told, the Fusion.net experiment had cost Univision over 200 million. In the end, Univision separated Fusion.net from GMG, sold GMG, and is still failing to attract visitors to Fusion.net, despite having one of the best investigative documentary teams world-wide. Fusion currently exists as a vanity TV channel on cable, something that fewer and fewer people have. (in 2016, 810,000 folks dropped cable)
They built it, and nobody came.
I’m used to writing pieces for niche audiences — mostly, for a handful of my friends, who will literally read anything I put in front of them.
(Some of which turned out to be pretty good, which I’m slowly reposting as Elsewhere Cafe Classics here on The Muskrat. The first of which is already up: Cold Air, Warm Hearts — A Winter of VNs and Reality.)
But my inexplicable influence from my… portfolio project? hobby? performance art piece? weirdo bespoke blog, Squinter Media, has started to grind on me.
My audience is no longer just me and my handful of friends, but journalists, lawyers, doctors, and me and my friends. Squinter’s twitter posts routinely reach some 30,000 people in the extended twitterverse.
More reach, more worries.
It has become almost impossible for me to write; I get bogged down asking if what I’m typing is informative, timely, and a worthy use of my platform. I used to bash out three or four posts per day. Now, I’m lucky if I average one per day.
There are a lot of important stories to tell them — about the protests in Chile and the people squashed by the structures of Chilean hypercapitalism, about the struggle of the Wet’suwet’en against encroaching illegal occupation by oil-hungry colonialists, about the deep anti-democratic structures powering the right-wing in Canada and internationally.
I have a responsibility to tell them.
And I will, in time.
