I sometimes realize that I can exploit the fact that my blog has so few regular readers to passive-aggressively rant about the world around me, up to and including my own family and neighbors (most of whom can’t be bothered to realize that the internet is bigger than facebook). I can be “open” and eerily transparent without actually having any reputational skin in the social-media game.
The fact that this blog is nominally public just lends certain frisson, a sensation of “living dangerously,” to the whole enterprise.
None of this is new to me, of course. I’ve gone off in this direction before, but then I go through other phases where I feel more cautious, and practice some self-restraint for a few years.
Anyway, I’m feeling inclined to experiment with allowing myself to be more open about my politics and general ideological eccentricities than I have been over the last few years. It’s not like I’m going to be running for political office or something, where having my beliefs and feelings out there in the public record actually matters.
And to the extent that the major social media and web search empires are so thoroughly “enshittifying” (as the contemporary parlance puts it), my blog’s “discoverability” isn’t what it used to be, five or ten years ago, either. When I was living in Korea, it wasn’t uncommon for strangers to find my blog and engage with it, with substantive comments on posts and such. That kind of thing never happens anymore – the search engines simply don’t see my blog, and don’t offer links to it.
It’s interesting. People are so worried about privacy online, but perhaps the best way to be private online is to self-host your own completely public blog, and refuse to play the SEO game – no one will see it, I can almost guarantee!
At the rate things are going, this blog is really not much more public than my going around and putting up ranty post-its on random trees in my rural Alaskan neighborhood. Which, come to think of it, might be an amusing thing to do.
Shouting into the abyss has never been easier.
If you start putting ranty post-its on trees, please upload photos of them to your blog. Or, you could put virtual post-its on some of the thousands of tree photos you’ve already posted, but you would need to let your two loyal readers know that you’ve done this, so we can go back and read them.
I have also notice that Google searches no longer yield the useful information I used to obtain, especially when what I’m looking for is free (like public domain music scores online). It’s a travesty–enshittified, indeed.