When we were young
do you remember when the internet was fun
I started using the internet before there was a World Wide Web. I am that old, and that doesn’t bother me, but kids these days don’t believe it used to be somewhat challenging to use the internet. Mostly we would connect, over phone lines, to people’s “bulletin boards” and post messages on the bulletin board. Sometimes we would finger people and look at their .plan files where there would sometimes be messages, updates on their life, or little jokes, or in one famous case, a kind of blog about the video games he was working on.
You would sometimes meet one of these guys, the maintainer of a BBS, and he always looked exactly like you would imagine a guy who spent a lot of his free time maintaining a BBS would look, bless him.1 The stakes were mostly pretty low. We were all just goofing around, talking to friends, making ASCII “art.” While your messages were often “public” on a bulletin board, they could only theoretically be seen by “the entire world” — people had to dial in to that specific bulletin board to see them. So, little communities formed on bulletin boards, and there was very little leakage of what you said and did there into the larger world. You were operating within a context that was known and understood by the participants. Or, that’s how it felt to me.
Later, along came the Web and browsers and AOL and whatnot, and things began to change, but slowly at first. I blogged on several different platforms at different times, becoming a “mommy blogger” around the same time I became a mommy. At that time I was using a platform called Vox (not the yellow journalism site). Vox had its own ways of building up community within the platform, such as by asking a “question of the day” thus making it easy to find new blogs who answered the question by that tag. I quickly made friends there, some of whom I remain internet friends with even today. We frequently wrote simple posts about what we had spent our day doing, and we commented on each other’s blogs, and we knew a lot about each other, in the ways that friends learn about each other; our chatting was asynchronous, worked in around our busy schedules taking care of houses and young children and jobs, but it was chatting very similar to what you would do with a group of friends in real life.2
Gradually, it was discovered that bloggers could make money. If you were good at being a mommy blogger, you could become Dooce, maybe. If you were good at being a food blogger, maybe you could become Orangette or Smitten Kitchen. I am sure there were similar phenomena among blogs focused on topics men find interesting, whatever those might be. Becoming Dooce or Smitten Kitchen takes a certain amount of commitment; it isn’t easy to build up that kind of following and reputation. You need to post regularly; you need to up your photo game. If you are a political blogger or the like, you have to be willing to argue with commenters. It is a job.
Freddie deBoer has written that if you want to make it as a writer, you have to be weird. He means by this that you have to have a perspective that no one else has, or at least few other people, if you want to make money being a writer.3 He says, “I think being unclassifiable and difficult and fractious are desirable qualities for a writer in and of themselves.” I agree; this is certainly what I would like to read, but it is very hard to build up an audience that way. People want to know what to expect before they start handing over money.
To find an audience, you might need to have a unique perspective, but to get them to pay and to keep them, you will need to become at least a little bit predictable. Often, people who want to be successful at doing something online will become caricatures of themselves. There aren’t very many writers I read regularly whose takes don’t become predictable over time. Sam Kriss comes to mind, and sometimes I think his things don’t quite work out, but I always admire the attempt.
On Twitter, when someone had a “big account” — more than 10,000 or so followers — you could see the self-caricature begin. People could feel themselves becoming influential, having a voice that people listened to, and it felt good, I guess, to them. So their tweets became more predictable. You would see fewer surprising things from them, fewer weird things, fewer off-the-cuff thoughts, less character development. Things have become much worse on Twitter in this regard since people started getting money, not just dopamine, for generating “engagement.”
When you have this kind of audience, and you know they came to you for your “weird” opinions on X, you have a tendency to play to that audience. You know how to give yourself that high by blogging or tweeting what you know they want. And you know that if you tweet something that might be a really unpopular opinion or political take with that audience, or you suddenly break character in some weird way, some of them — maybe many — will leave you, and it will cost you. As the man said, if you give the people what they want, they wants it all the time.
And then, of course, it wasn’t just blogs but also YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, and everything started getting worse and worse. Not long ago, my husband saw a cute Instagram video of a guy whose cow was aggressively trying to eat his dinner, and he liked it. Then he realized that this guy makes basically this same video every single day, and that’s his job. He (my husband, not the cow guy) wrote, “It's never enough just to make a product, you have to live it as your life.”
Eventually these things all converge. Does it need to be a cow eating your dinner? No, you could make an Instagram account just as well where it’s an emu or a potbellied pig trying to eat your food each evening, and it could be a smash hit. And then if you have enough followers, they will call on you to take a public stance on the political issue of the day, and you will take the safe one, so that you can go back to making your hyperspecific content, the same as every other day. You’re going to tweet your support for the downtrodden of the world from your brand trip with a high-end hair products company. It’s fine, because this is how everyone is now, so there’s no shame. It’s gotten to the point where if a person on Twitter tweets their opinion about front-end developers or reading YA novels, I can probably tell you their opinions about basically everything else: feminism, climate change, men crying, who they voted for.
I felt it starting in myself when I was selling a successful book and had reached over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and I hated it. I don’t come to the Internet to perform some version of myself for money. It was the one place where I was promised I could be real and not have to keep up social facades4, and yet now the entire Web is people afraid to break character because they might lose followers. Every day they have to churn out some content, to keep their followers engaged, to keep the ad money coming in and the books selling. We used to talk about advertising companies being “evil” but now we are all advertising companies, and we are advertising ourselves and our own precious unique perspectives.5
When I felt it start happening to me, I did the loser thing and quit my main Twitter account, maintaining only a private account where I talk to a few of my friends. This is the mindset of someone who is never going to be invited on brand trips or to do paid promos. I often feel like this is the mindset of someone who isn’t going to be successful, despite being good at things. Success takes so much more than being good at something. You’ll hear people criticize the soulless corporate job where you have to play office politics and defer to bosses you actually secretly dislike, but this role of “content creator” on the Internet now is much the same. You’ll have to put some parts of yourself on full public display and hide others.
I started this “newsletter” — not a blog! we’ve moved past blogs! — on the premise of not going to the grocery store for a year, and I’ve talked a lot here about how we live and eat such that not going to the grocery store makes sense. And I’m writing a book on this topic, on the moral life of the kitchen. But I’m not a food blogger. I have talked about my kids here, some, but I’m not a mommy blogger or a homeschool blogger. I like to talk about books, but I do not want to become a “BookTok” person.
Worse than all this compartmentalization and conformity, there is now also the problem that what you say can and does escape its context quite readily. You might be a small person on the Web, not famous, and you think you are just talking to your friends, and whatever thing you’re saying is something your friends will understand and sympathize with or joke with you about. Then someone Internet-famous — or, at least, someone who is monetizing their platform and is good at engagement farming — finds your video and upbraids you in front of a large audience, people who don’t know you or the context in which you posted. They’re doing it, of course, for the money that your video will bring them in the form of large numbers of their followers being mad at you, too. Often, if you are a woman, this takes the form of a man who is explicitly making money based on engagement numbers accusing you of doing whatever little thing you did “for attention.” It’s easy work, I guess, if you can get it.
I want to go back to that old-school feeling on the Internet in which people truly were weird, because they were themselves instead of characters. I want to find things out together, learn from each other, laugh at ourselves, be wrong sometimes. We used to, so I know the medium suffices for these purposes. All it would take is for people to remember.
I have had comments turned off here because I have had the unfortunate experience a few times of making the front page of Hacker News, which draws some nasty, nasty comments from men who don’t think women should be allowed to use computers. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. But I don’t want to be so closed off anymore. So, if you ever find this, I’d be happy to meet you.
There were undoubtedly female sysadmins, but I didn’t know any. Of course, I also didn’t let on that I was a woman on the internet at the time. It was just a lot better not to. If you were on the BBS, and you didn’t tell anyone otherwise, they would assume you were a dude and just be cool, but if they knew you were a woman, it sucked.
This is why all the “this is what I had for lunch today” kinds of FB/Insta/Twitter posts don’t bother me at all. If you were my friend and you told me what you had for lunch today while we were chatting, I would like that, so why wouldn’t I like it online? There is a type of person who thinks writing on the internet should only be informative or combative or something and … no. It can also just be like real life.
I don’t think this is especially true for recipe bloggers. Most people looking on the internet for recipes do not want weird; they want practical dinner ideas their kids will eat. There are some food bloggers who are not recipe bloggers, and I think they have more leeway to be weird in this way.
Other than the facade that I wasn’t a woman.
It might not surprise you at this point to learn that I have been the editor and publisher of not one but two photocopied “punk” zines.
I really appreciated this article. As someone starting out on Substack (but blogged in a previous life and failed because I fell for the idea that I had to do what others wanted me to do (or rather, what I thought they wanted me to do)), this article was extremely insightful of all the pitfalls in my human nature to be wary of.
It's also a great reminder to myself that the people I follow most intently -- online and in real life -- are the ones that I have deemed to be the most genuine. Which is almost never the person who repeats their content ad-nauseum, but is always trying to grow -- which necessitates expansion, branching out.