About siu2lh

Introduction
I first started blogging around 2016. It was at the encouragement of a great mentor of mine, who felt that writing out my ideas would help me formulate those ideas better. Since then, I have gone through periods of lesser and greater blogging (though I have steadily increased the amount I write over time). Around the time I began my PhD, I tried blogging everyday, and could do it for a while. In fact, it was quite interesting to see how much of an impact daily blogging on a platform such as Medium had, in terms of readership. I imagine if I could have maintained that consistency, on a platform such as Substack, I could probably make quite a success of it. The death of a million blogs is not necessarily a lack of quality, but a lack of quantity as writers become disinterested over time.

For myself, since 2016 I have maintained a blog in one way or another. I ended the daily blogging experiment after around a month, as I ultimately felt the quality of my writing was declining; that my writing was increasingly in reaction to current events rather than demonstrative of more reflective, long-term thinking; and that, ultimatley, I was no longer doing it for myself, but to chase readership figures and the serotonin which comes from a notifications button lighting up. I slowed down, switched platforms, slowed down some more. And now I am here.

I want this post to do two things. Firstly, why I have decided to reject the likes of Medium, Substack, and others, and with them, reject the modern incentives people have to blog. Secondly, to explain why I have started siu2lh. Much of what I will write here can also be found in this post, which I originally wrote for my Substack but have rewritten for siu2lh.

Some (not all) problems with 'off the shelf' blogs
If all I wanted to do was to start a new blog, I could have gone to any number of blogging services. siu2lh is thus not so much fulfilling a desire for a new blog, but a desire to reject the current platform infrastructure of the internet. I want to write for quite selfish reasons. I have little anticipation that people actually read what I write; am I not so arrogant to think that just because I have put words out into the world that the latter must now change. I write primarily for the joy of writing. To see the words on the page, and in the process, to work out what it is that I think, that I believe, that I doubt, and so on. Much of what I have blogged about in the past has, in time, evolved into something which has been published as a journal article (the somewhat questionable gold standard for an academic). I write in part to remove ideas from my head, and to catalogue my ideas such that I may move onto more interesting, more pressing matters, but without losing ideas in the process. This is a useful exercise, not insofar as someone neurotic like me actually gains cognitive headroom (I'm not sure it works that way), but insofar as I have a record of what I used to think, and how I used to think it, which forces me to confront my own growth on subject matters. It is that exercise, in my opinion, which makes me a better writer and thinker.

While 'off the shelf' blogging services do not necessarily discourage these motivations to write, they quite proactively encourage one to write for reasons which, personally, I find to generally be harmful to oneself and one's writing. We could begin quite simply with features such as notification buttons and readership stats--things which place the extrinsic motivation of attention over the intrinsic motivation of writing (for all the selfish reasons listed above). Then there are affordances which build 'connections' between one's writing and one's readership. As a rule, I hate writing with an audience in mind. Maybe my writing is worse without one, maybe it is better. But I find that when the audience is at the centre of my writing efforts, my words do not come to reflect me quite as much as I would like. The pressure of the audience, or more the fear of no audience, is in no small part a reason why I have, in recent years, blogged much less. The abandonment of an audience, conversely, I think has improved my writing, and my attitude towards writing. 'Off the shelf' platforms place the audience above the writing, even if they do not say this, and even if the writer does not consciously think this. Throw in incentivses for monetisation, as Medium and Substack do, and you have a recipe for shit writing, shit blogs, and a shit mental state.

My dissatisfactions are compounded by the fact that I see many people I respect starting up these blogs, monetising them and pushing them on social media channels, only to discover that no one is listening. This reality doesn't matter too much if the joy is in the writing itself, but it can be quite upsetting for someone who is deriving value from the exercise of blogging via the reception their blog receives. Most people, I think, think that they should be heard. Most academics--whom I generally hang around with--suffer from this complex more than others because they have been institutionalised to believe that they somehow excel above others (typically, they don't). And so, when an academic starts up a blog or a Substack, I think there is a default mode of thinking that what they're writing is really important, and that things will be very successful. Some, of course, are. Most... not so much. And that is what I find sad: when people write with the belief that someone is listening. The 'off the shelf' platforms compound this problem by nurturing these expectations.

I am not necessarily alone in holding these sentiments. Others have offered the term the 'Indieweb' and sought to develop tools to support a more autonomous (or semi-autonomous) way of being online. I do not think that my motivations always align with the motivations of others (e.g., here, here, and here), but there are also parallels, which I think reflect concern and criticism of the modern internet; longing for an older internet; and hope for a better internet.

Seizing the means of computation (or something like that)
My desire to blog has changed over the years, influenced much more by external factors than by any doubts about my intrinsic motivations to write. Even now, as I write this entry, I wonder whether my time would be better spent working on some academic paper. When a blog idea comes to mind, I wonder whether it would be better to pitch it to some larger outlet, who do sometimes publish my work. And sometimes, the crushing feeling that 'no one is listening' does take hold, and the intrinsic reasons for writing succumb to the extrinsic desires to be noticed, to be paid, to be told that one is smart and good and clever and special. These factors have existed for as long as I've been blogging, and yet I still stuck with 'off the shelf' approaches. So, we must consider alternative reasons for starting siu2lh.

There are two big, related reasons. As above, much of the argument can be found this post I previously wrote on Substack, and rewrote for siu2lh. The sweeping argument is as follows. The internet is bad, and its getting worse, and I think a big part of that is because those who actually use and contribute to the internet have very little control over the infrastructure of the online world, and in some ways have been belittled to be further disempowered. Before web2 platforms like Facebook, it was not uncommon for people to have their own websites, blogs, and so on. There was some platformisation (geocities, blogger, etc.) but also scope for personalisation and more fundamental personal expression online. Naturely, some played around with HTML, or used simple UI configurations to implement someone else's HTML feature. The internet was fragmented, and in some instances dangerous. It was, in the words of Farrell and Berjon (and also, apparently, Naughton), a wild place.

This wildness made the internet kind of pokey, an uncertain space which simultaneously made it alive to endless possibility, and constrained in terms of its wider adoption. (Note: I am not trying to romanticise the 'old' internet, which in some ways risks getting into some of the less tasteful ideological parts of the original 'dead internet theory'. I am more trying to emphasis the attitudinal perspective which was alive on the old internet--an attitude that one could do anything, for better or ill). Then the platforms came along. They facilitated the internet's final breakthrough into something that is seamless within all our lives. While platformisation has brought with it new social ills (as above, some mental health implications, for instance), it also (perhaps only temporarily) created an element of certainty online. Certainty, both in terms of what was posted (e.g., greater censorship of NSFW content and enforcement of corporate moralism, as seen famously in cases like Tumblr and most recently in cases such as Etsy), and in terms of how activity online happened. The notion of 'liking' and 'sharing' became transformed, crystallised into code. Of course, people had always 'liked' stuff online, and always 'shared' stuff. But now liking, rather than being a personal, internal action, was a procedural, external action--clicking a button. Sharing, rather than being reflected in citations, inspirations, and other '-ions', now meant literally attaching someone else's online actions to oneself. Twitter had limited characters, Instagram was only images, Facebook was only .edu emails. In some instances, these restrictions have lessened; in others, they have not. My point, however, is that a restricted internet became the norm. For instance, personalisation switched from being whatever one could programme in HTML, to whatever one chose from someone else's dropdown menu.

It is in this climate that the conditions for something like Substack or Medium arises. This happens in two ways. Firstly, there is a changing expectation of the online space, from one that we build to one that we simply interact in. This shapes our imaginations, and leaves us vulnerable to the whims of those who control these platforms, as many people realised when Musk bought Twitter, but which had been emphasised for years prior, often by marginalised groups such as sex workers (again, see the case of Tumblr, but also see things like debanking). Secondly, there is a change in our expectations of the online space, from one where we contribute for the intrinsic benefits of doing so, to one where we are more motivated by the extrinsic benefits platforms create for us. I have already discussed this, above.

The result of this evolution of the online space is that--for what I would dare say is a growing number of people--the internet is dying, and needs saving. Again, we could look at rewilding as a stratey. I generally like it, though have some criticisms (Namely, we have to become more proactive netizens, reseizing the means of computation, to rob a line from Cory Doctorow. We can't just start living in new, 'cooler' platforms). Certainly, we must arrive at some strategy, less we descend into a worse place. The so-called 'dark forest theory' of the internet was put forth to describe how the internet is increasingly a series of closed off, sometimes paywalled subnetworks or fora. One interesting example is Nebula, a streaming service created by popular YouTube contributors who dislike their lack of control over the YouTube recommendation algorithm and monetisation policy. They have built their own platform, but unlike YouTube, it is paywalled. With the recent rise of generative AI, Maggie Appleton has suggested the dark forest of the internet is likely to grow, as such quarantined spaces can prevent a flood of AI content, and offer some assurances that one is actually interacting with 'real people'. These forests, in my mind, represent people trying to resist changes to the structure and use of the internet which they disagree with, but which they have limited power to resist (this is a common theme in what we might call the 'political economy of the internet', as can be seen in my own writing on Facebook, available here).

But the end result is a fragmented internet; an internet that is dependent on platforms and thus easier for platforms to dominate. For instance, I have believed for the past two years the most successful AI company will be whichever can create and market anti-AI protection. Companies like Facebook or Google would love nothing more than to sell you access to their exclusive, 'safe' networks (safe from AI content, amongst other 'undesireable' content), as they would control everything. It is why we must always resist calls to create a 'second internet.' The 'second internet' will always be built by those with the money and the expertise to privatise and profit from it. The dark forest tendency is, ultimately, a well-meaning tendency towards this final destruction of the online space.

What we need is a combination of things. We need to create the conditions for online rewilding, certainly, and I think some of Doctorow's demands for more state intervention to tackle online monopolies is central in this point. But we need more. We need to empower people. For instance, dark forests emerge as people try to resist other aspects of the internet. This is to say, because they lack control of the online infrastructure that they actually use. The trade-off for this control is disconnection. But we can achieve some greater control without disconnection if we rejected the notion that the online space is a place we interact with, and embrace the older idea that it is a place we build. This will require things like learning how the internet works, learning to code, figuring out how to share and control web hosting, and so on. Stuff that is not easy, that does not meet with the 'social contract' imbued within the average netizen today. But these will, in the long-run, be worthwhile efforts.

Why start siu2lh?
I have started siu2lh because I want control over everything on this blog, and I want to explicitly reject modern aspects of the platformed internet, while also leaving everything open to connection. In starting siu2lh, I have had to learn a lot about coding, how the internet works, and so on. I have even had to think about online design, which is much harder than I thought it would be. This project is not wholly to my satisfaction--currently, the site is reliant on GitHub for hosting and Namecheap for domain registration. In time, I would like to operate siu2lh as independently as possible. But I have never done this before. I have never had to. The platformed internet has deskilled me as a netizen; allowed me to experience the internet, but under the rules and instructions of people I do not know, did not elect, and cannot remove.

siu2lh is motivated by my intrinsic desires, to learn, to write, to contribute to a vision for a better internet. The lack of a 'like' or a 'share' or a 'subscribe' button is a design feature. Someone who likes my writing likes it in their own way; they will share it in their own way; and they will return, or not, in their own time and fashion. I do not need to know how many people read this blog--the number will always be close to zero--because I have already benefited from this project in various ways.

It is my hope that, as the platformed internet dies, the internet that emerges will be wilder, more dangerous (in a manner of speaking), and more interesting. I do not believe that an egotistic academic blogging is going to cause this. siu2lh will not change the internet. It will probably not even be read. But that is exists despite being read it partially my point, partially the point of siu2lh.