Social media is responsible for many terrible things (every keyboard warrior, Andrew Tate, me thinking I can do DIY) but the worst, in my opinion, is the death of blogging.
And by blogging, I mean the real stuff. Before Substack, I was on Wordpress. Before that, Livejournal. Before that, I built my own sites in Dreamweaver and Photoshop and shared them with people on message boards. I connected my dial-up by hiking four miles uphill in the snow, barefoot, and I thanked my parents for the privilege.
(I actually didn’t — we didn’t have the internet at home until I was at university, so I had to use the computer lab to gain access to Buffy fanfic and instant messaging, and thus had no time to actually go to class. Yes, this is me soft-launching my own neurodivergence. Buckle up.)
I loved blogs. I loved reading about people in other places, with other lives. I loved discovering what strangers thought and felt and did. It was real, and personal, and messy.
But at some point in the last decade or so, long-form content and storytelling could no longer compete with the apps, and those messy, personal, rambling blogs became how-tos. Listicles. 10 Ways To Smash Your Morning Routine. I Walked 20,000 Steps for 30 Days and This Is What Happened. How To Do 75 Hard the Harder Way.
Harder better faster stronger.
Over the same period, social media stopped being the place where we shared what we were up to with the people we cared about, and became an exercise in digital masking — a frantic scramble to look as good as everyone else does, for fear that someone might notice that we’re all damp, carbon-based sacks of feelings and not Pinterest boards.
Everyone is now aspirational, rather than relatable.
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In the late ‘oughts, you could friend someone on Facebook and their profile picture would be a panda-eyed selfie in a dive-bar bathroom, and you’d know that they’d taken that photo while waiting to discover if they were about to touch up their mascara or throw up on the floor, and you’d think, ah, she’s just like me.
Now you meet a cool school mum, but when you check out her Instagram before inviting her (I mean, her kid) over for a playdate, you inevitably discover she has a white couch that none of her children have ever wiped pizza fingers on, wears lipstick on hikes and makes pottery for rescue animals.
How can you compete with that? How can the state of your baseboards and your selection of mediocre supermarket tea ever live up to her grid aesthetic?
They can’t, that’s how.
If you push through, you’ll eventually find out she’s highly medicated, has a husband who only eats steak, and is self conscious about her teeth — but the first instinct is always inferiority. To see the perfectly composed and edited version of someone else’s life and think ah, she’s so much better than me. I could never be like that.
I’ve watched the people whose blogs I used to read spend the last two decades whittling their experiences and stories down into tweets and carousels and captions (and ‘stories’). I’ve done that myself. A funny story became a funny status became a funny sentence became a picture and the melting-face emoji.
No wonder we can’t hold nuance. No wonder we spend our lives restlessly asking the algorithm to feed us: nothing it provides satisfies for more than a second, and all of it feels fake, forced… basic.
Harder better faster stronger.
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Now I can opt myself out of experiencing the lives of those I love — I can read about their trials and tribulations on-screen, asynchronously and virtually, and leave a little hug emoji to let them know my index finger took the time to care.
I can check in with friends anytime by tapping on their stories, so it seems silly to haul my bones and meat across town to meet in three dimensions. We’d have to find parking and brush our hair.
Instead I tap the little heart and feel a soft glow.
Besides, I can see by your socials that you’re doing great — if we were to actually meet up, I’d need to tell you that I’ve lost my job or my kid’s being bullied or I feel like perimenopause has taken a stick blender to my brain. And then I’d have to hear about how your kid’s not doing great at school and you’re considering a trial separation and there’s a suspicious damp patch on your bathroom ceiling.
And then I’d feel really bad about maintaining our relationship via Facebook reactions for the last three years.
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We trimmed our lived human experience into a series of tiny yellow faces, and now we can outsource it completely.
LLMs mean we can all say a lot again, one em-dash and tripartite sentence at a time (and as someone who loves em-dashes and tripartite sentences: fuck you, AI). And then we can ask AI to summarise the AI so we don’t have to read the words we didn’t write.
Ouroboros.
Maybe it’s my bottom-up, ravenous brain that consumes information like a whale shark feeding, but all the AI content is also… not actually saying much? If an LLM can say it, it’s been said before. It’s trained on a generic mashup of human industry to spit out a generic mashup of quasi-human summary. It’s the most basic bitch there is, and it does what bored students have done since writing began: use a lot of words to say the same things in different ways, in the hope that you won’t notice that there’s frequently no there there.
We all look the same, and now we all sound the same.
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So here’s me, putting myself out there and saying… also not much. I still don’t have a morning routine. I tried 75 Medium and gave up within a week. I’m running a business and writing a book but I also haven’t had a shower today and my kids are eating dinner in front of TV and wiping their fingers on the couch.
I don’t have any answers for anyone, and I wouldn’t be qualified to share them with you even if I did. What I do have is a spicy brain and some spicy kids, and the ability to amuse myself by assembling sentences and publishing them on the internet.
I want to share those assembled sentences here to connect. To relate. If I’m lucky, to entertain. I don’t have any particular topic or niche in mind, mostly because my particular brand of neurodivergence means that by the time I know enough about anything to write about it, I’m probably already bored of it.
Maybe that’s my niche.
AI would never.