weird things and the slow, weird death of web 2.0

Every day, the web with which we grew up feels a little more broken. What happens when it finally passes the point of no return?

Back about two or three once-in-a-lifetime global crises ago, I sat on my couch and read the grim news of the global collapse of the real estate market. A once roaring economy was in deeper shit than the floor of a fertilizer warehouse, and plentiful jobs, both full time and freelance, were going to be increasingly sparse. After a few ongoing contracts were completed, there was a real question of what came next. It had been a rough year and it was only going to get rougher. So, with nothing to lose, and having a little experience writing a few bits for a business magazine, I decided to start a blog, as a lot of people were doing at the time.

My first little experiment was an attempt at tech news but I deleted it two weeks later, realizing that if I’m going to commit to this thing and make something worth reading and engaging with, it should be about things I like. Things that I’m passionate about. Things that are fun. Maybe not fun for everybody because, as a Russian idiom says, there is no friend for taste and color, but fun to me. A weirdo. Who’s going to write about weird things. Because we live in a very weird world. A world of weird things, if you will, or WoWT for short. Perfect. That’s it. That’s the name.

The first few months were a little touch and go, but I knew what to do. Make sure all my header markup was right. Find interesting images to add splashes of color. Make sure to register for every blogroll and aggregator. Submit to search engines. Submit to DMOZ. Get backlinks. Submit to Digg and StumbleUpon. (Yeah, that’s right, we just went that far back.) And then it started to click. Some posts started going viral. Work with other bloggers, commenting, and Reddit were bringing in more and more readers and tracking counters started exploding. Within half a year, WoWT’s typical month saw over 100,000 visitors.

One of the aggregators reached out to me. They owed me money for syndication impressions and wanted to know where to send the check. There was even a short partnership with True/Slant, which was later bought out by Fortune. And then I took some time to myself to get my comp sci career back on track. When I returned, a lot of things changed and not for the better. If the decade in which WoWT was born saw the web flourish and inspiring new ideas take flight, finally free of gatekeepers whose tastes were very much the opposite of bold and eclectic, the next one would see all those promises shrivel and deteriorate into cadaverous wraiths.

All the familiar names, platforms, and mediums are there but somehow broken and twisted, their flesh rotting away as runaway greed hollowed them out and turned them on its users in a process writer Cory Doctorow called enshittification, coining the hot new term of the year. Since the early aughts, Web 2.0 gave its users more value than we could accurately count. Perhaps enough to justify the data mining and relentless personalized ads that made the whole thing possible. Now, the value has been sucked dry and the platforms are ready to grab their users by the throats and ankles and give them a good, hard twist to see what else will come out of their pockets. Or souls.

By the mid-2010s organized skepticism began its long, slow, messy decline for a wide variety of reasons. Google started its slide into a nightmare tangle of ads, aggregator links, scraped content boxes, and a pronounced preference for dead simple headlines that answered direct questions rather than pitched ideas, or engaged users beyond a click within 30 seconds. SEO tools optimized for its new algorithm screamed bloody murder should the complexity of the content itself exceed a 2nd grade reading level. In many ways, its laser focus on value extraction from its search results has dumbed down vast swaths of the internet and savaged blogs and blogging platforms.

And now, with new AI tools, the once vibrant web is rapidly deteriorating into its end form: a bland, metadata heavy verbal slurry and product placement, a content farm where you’re nothing more than a necessary evil. Meanwhile, social media platforms which started with so much promise and played critical roles in both documenting and propelling major, world-changing events are dying, along with a galaxy of publications they parasitized into shells of their former selves at best, and bankruptcy at worst by rewarding them for partisan outrage and fake news.

Facebook is where the olds go to share conspiracy theories. Twitter is swarming with incel trolls and neo-Nazis boosted on a daily basis by its new, capricious owner. And almost no one reads blogs anymore. They listen to podcasts. Or read newsletters. At the same time, most legitimate news outlets that do real journalism are being hidden behind paywalls, which means that you need a dozen different subscriptions to stay informed with actual, vetted facts more often than not. The lies and conspiracies? Oh, those are free and always will be. Promise and potential has turned into a boring and dispiriting dystopia, and now we need to figure out how to move forward.

I mean, for the sake of Chuthulu’s used jock strap, we’re cheering for Zuck again — yes, the same guy who redpilled your grandma into thinking blue haired non-binary Antifa super-solders were coming to demolish her house with COVID if she didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 — since he fostered a Twitter killer. (Oh, and by the way, here’s my profile on Threads, stop on by.) And the only reason we’re doing that is because the pretentious pseudo-intellectual right wing insurgency of Twitter hates it after being preemptively called out as purveyors of bullshit when they joined, a holdover from their Instagram reputations, and something on which Zuck immediately backtracked.

For now, we’re going to have Threads as the fun-loving counterpart of the dark, angry Twitter. We’re going to listen to our blogs in the form of podcasts, or read them in our emails as newsletters because Google has made them impossible to find otherwise. We’ll watch our fun videos on TikTok because YouTube is overran by alt right and incel manifesto recommendations. And we’re going to continue to avoid Facebook because we’re not old enough to move to Florida to play golf in a reality-proof bubble. And we’d send a Snapchat but that’s being stripped for parts by other platforms right now.

In short, we figured out that a big, open public square will eventually be overran with miserable people whose only joy in life is making others as angry and miserable as them, and so, the future of social media and content is going to avoid them the best it can. What we’re still not sure of is how we’ll do that. What we are sure of is that we’re going to keep retreating to more private, customized spaces where we can find that feeling of community, and we’ll have to figure out how we can sustainably pay for our fun to keep good journalism in business and stop relying on platforms that really have no choice but to exploit our personal data because handling a few billion requests per month isn’t cheap and that money has to come from somewhere.

Which brings me right back to WoWT. Since October 2008, I’ve written almost 2,200 articles which have collectively been read by around 5 million people. I’ve also done five years of weekly radio segments across Canada about a few hundred of those. But ever since that first hiatus, it seemed almost impossible to get back in my groove, and after a very long time of spinning my wheels, I decided that it’s time for a fresh start. To try new tools and new approaches instead of trying to beat the existing zombie of Web 2.0. Threads is a child of an amoral evil, but at least its new and has a chance to do new things. Substack is not without its PR challenges, but at least it works, and presents a new, active ecosystem for writers.

And in the spirit of trying new things, rather than simply import those few thousand posts, I’m going for a relatively fresh start. This blog/newsletter isn’t going to begin exactly from scratch, I took the liberty of moving over some articles representative of my style and the kind of topics I like to write and talk about — please do check them out — but those are it. Everything else will be brand new and focus on those weird things I had so much fun writing about. Transhumanism from a skeptical angle. Sci-fi. Space. AI and bleeding edge technology. Weird physics. Aliens. Crazy conspiracy theories about aliens and mind control. The future. Things you normally never think about but can’t stop when someone brought them up.

So, as all the cool kids say these day, please like and subscribe for fresh, regular, and hopefully thought-provoking weirdness accompanied by really cool images direct to your inbox. If this iteration takes off, there will be fun add-ons, projects, and extras coming your way. But first, let’s take that first step through the portal, get weird, and see where we can go from there…