A return to the present
This entire post is AI generated, but it is in my voice and what I want to actually put out there. I really did want to write this entirely myself but it is too late at night, after I spent the entire day trying to build the blog, and I really do not want to go to sleep without putting up a post showing my intentions behind it. Hypocritical, I agree, and it feels weird to me. The cognitive dissonance hurts. The humour is real though, a blog that I want to use to bring out the human in all of us having its first post be generated by AI is uncanny, and maybe even intentional.
I miss old internet, the one where we used to spend days modifying our myspace/orkut pages.
There were custom backgrounds, songs that began playing before you had decided whether you wanted them to, words moving across the screen in marquees, and text in colours chosen more for their force than their readability. No two pages failed in quite the same way.
It is easy to remember all of that as bad design. Much of it was. But when I think about those pages now, what I remember is the person behind each one.
Someone had spent time picking that background. They had chosen that song from all the others they could have chosen. They had found a piece of HTML, changed it, broken it, and changed it again. They had decided which words should move and which colour they should be. The result might have been loud, awkward, or almost impossible to read, but it was theirs.
Everything meant something.
Even a typo meant that a person had been there. It had passed from a thought, through their hands, and onto the page. The rough edges were evidence of authorship. You could look at a profile and imagine the hours that had gone into making it feel right,not right according to a design system, but right to the person whose little part of the internet it was.
I do not miss waiting for pages to load, or music appearing from nowhere, or trying to read red text against a tiled photograph. I miss the intention behind it. I miss opening a page and finding an expression of a person.
The internet feels different now. More of what we read and see is becoming the product of language models rather than the product of people. The words are complete. The layouts are clean. The colours agree with one another. Everything is correct, and yet it can be difficult to find anyone inside it.
A page once pointed toward the person who made it. Increasingly, a page points toward the model that generated it. The phrasing, the structure, and the design tell you more about the tooling than about the name attached to the work. One site begins to feel like another, not because people have become less different, but because their differences have been removed before the work reaches us.
The loss is not imperfection for its own sake. A careless page is not made meaningful by being careless. What is missing is the trail of decisions: why this word and not another, why this colour, why this image, why anything is here at all. When those decisions are handed away, the result may still be useful or beautiful, but it no longer carries the same sense of a person having meant it.
This site is my attempt to make a small place where things can mean something again.
It is a notebook for thinking. A post might be an essay, an unfinished idea, a practical note, or a single quotation I want to remember. A thought does not have to be enlarged into content before it deserves a place. It does not have to arrive at a conclusion. It only has to be worth putting down.
The site will remain simple, but simplicity is not the point by itself. The point is to be able to see the choices. Every word can be here because I wanted it here. Every colour can be one I picked. If there is a mistake, it can at least be my mistake.
This is a return to an older idea of the internet: a collection of places made by people, each carrying some evidence of the life behind it. But I do not think of that as retreating into the past. Attention can only be given in the present. To choose a word, to follow a thought, and to make even a small page one's own is to be here for it.
So this is a return to the past, and in doing so, a return to the present.