To Blog, or Not to Blog, that Is the Question

For some time now I’ve been dealing with my evolving view of the Web and in particular its benefit to mankind. What began as a wonderful way to freely put out and find information, it looked like one of humanity’s greatest inventions, perhaps even something that would bring the world together.

Alas, it has turned out to do the opposite more often than not.

Division, mental illness, perversions, narcissism, intolerance, bigotry, and general “othering” of anybody not conforming to one’s self identified peer group has proven that the World Wide Web is indeed a sticky death trap. After we, the users, became the product, things changed to it primarily existing for our lives to be sucked dry of data by the spiders of big business and government until only the hollow angry shells are left.

Where did it all go wrong?

The birth of the Web 2.0, aka social media, and its accompanying hardware the ever present smart phones. Information became reduced past the absurdist level into a brave new world of superficial selfies, drive by twitter political rants, snapshots of food, and endless cute animal videos. Even the bane of Usenet, flame wars ceased being epic arguments, instead devolved into short, snide attacks that violate every norm of civil behavior, spelling, and grammar. Thinking things out before typing turned into thumb twitching hot takes removing all intellect and relying purely on emotional… I was going to type “arguments”, but that isn’t accurate. Perhaps, “spewing” is the word required.

The worst part of it is how the behavior has spread into every aspect of society, leaving it hopelessly divided, hostile, and ever more misanthropic. This has lead to growing censorship rather than freedom of speech with a severe political bias to the left informing the censors actions. That is a wonderful way to successfully build up resentment, thereby fueling the cycle of anger that appears to have achieved perpetual motion today.

Sigh.

As the years have gone by, I have ended up rarely use social media, preferring to blog where complete thoughts can be communicated coherently. In fact, Facebook is only kept for occasional or emergency contact. Even a casual glance at the wall there makes me wish to never return again, since there is nothing intellectually or spiritually inspiring in the superficial. I really do not care what you are eating right now.

With the left side of the political spectrum dominating the tech companies, a very distorted view of the world is being promulgated on an international scale with little tolerance for any opposing or critical view. The great irony of it is that people on the left themselves are becoming a target of their own destructive side when simply allowing all ideas to be presented fairly would be of benefit to them in protecting their freedom of speech.

So what does this have to do with the title of the post?

With growing censorship and intolerance, the possibility that this blog might be taken down for something innocuous grows simply because I’m not a leftist. Automated bots and self aggrandizing human censors can and do take down sites unfairly these days. While the latter source is maddening, the former is more likely with algorithms being, shall we say, less than reliable at discerning intent, much less what constitutes hate speech (which never should be censored, even if it is real hate speech – better to know who is an idiot than kept wondering), an ever changing list based on conformism that often eats its own.

For some reason, the risk of having the blog taken down and permanently erased at the whim of an automated script or social crusader makes me question the merit of continuing to post. The ridiculous DMCA take downs on the Squid Girl reviews that had been up six years was a wake up call to me that things are only going to get worse across the board.

Being a nobody with no future, no way of leaving even a small mark on the world, and no posterity this blog is one of the few things around that even shows I ever existed. It would be nice if it continued to exist just as a grave marker, but my motivation to keep posting has taken another hit. Not being a narcissist, it takes actual effort to put things up – in fact the declining rate of posts is a direct indicator of how much I desire to throw things up on the Web.

Having other blog based projects focused on people other than myself in mind for the future, I really don’t know how much or if I’ll post more on this blog.