He hardly realised that he was going down, falling, the green water rocking him and the sharp edges of the rocks had already torn him apart. Fossil lances.
I AM THE BROTHER OF XX, Fleur Jaeggy trans. Gini Alhadeff
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
I stopped “advertising” this site on social media years ago. Even disabled the machine that syndicated posts out to social – I imagine that doesn’t even work any more anyway, with all the changes in social media over the last year. I was reading a piece on thejaymo earlier that confirmed what I’d been hearing – that social media doesn’t create “growth” any more. Discovery is broken, largely by design. On the newsletter a few weeks back, I called it “social media winter.” The piece I read suggested that someone with two million followers on TikTok could only lure 400 of them to their long form YouTube channel. That’s a crazy level of broken machinery. I said in the newsletter that if you use social to keep up with your friends, then get them to move to new channels with you and keep them close. For the rest of us: well, we are all digital notebooks now. Writing just for ourselves and whoever finds their way to our caves to look over our shoulders as we scribble thoughts down in public and daub pictures on the walls.
This is not, I think, a bad thing. Shit might get weird and experimental out here in the Isles of Blogging again. I’ve lived through all the different versions of digital publishing, and none of them are coming back. But maybe there’s still space to do something new out here, in the places where no-one is looking.
This isn’t it, of course. Blogging about blogging used to be a Crime – although Robin Sloan has recently pointed out that it was also super generative. Perhaps talking about it again will get people thinking about it again, and that’s a good (re)start.
(I wrote this in IA Writer, something else that seems to play poorly with WordPress after all)