Hello 2023!
If there’s one lesson to take away from the descent of Twitter into one billionaire man-child’s personal hate speech platform, it’s that ordinary people need to take more charge of their online lives. The rise of Mastodon and the awareness that social media doesn’t *have* to be an algorithm-driven machine designed to keep you doomscrolling in order to feed you more ads, has made myself and a lot of folks start to take a more proactive approach.
So yes. Blogging. You may have heard of it. It’s where people, just people, write about stuff. Whatever they like. Sometimes it’s professional work, sometimes personal thoughts, hobbies, a joke, whatever. Just people, being people. To that end I’ve applied to join Bring Back Blogs!, which is attempting to form a network of active bloggers in order to promote this somewhat neglected form of content.
There is, of course, a bit of a barrier to entry. Blogs in general tend to be longer form, and we’ve all been trained to have extremely short attention spans. It’s a habit, and a bad one. I urge you to fight it. Take a breath. Enjoy words that have real people behind them.
I’m going to try and blog every day, time permitting. I’m about to get *very* busy building puppets but of course that only means I’ll have more to blog about! I’m also expanding the remit of this blog a bit, to include more than just strict puppet building. As regulars know, I and other members of the Operation: Puppet family make all kinds of “content” (still a ghastly word) and this blog will be a place to reflect and talk about that.
So welcome, 2023. I hope you’ll join me in clawing back some of our digital autonomy from billionaires and corporations. The Internet is and always has been built on the work of ordinary people, and it’s time we put a hand on the rudder and steered it ourselves.