Why Blogging?

I keep a pretty light presence on social media. Facebook is reserved for sharing pics of the kids with the extended family, keeping up on groups and events for said children, and the occasional political post when I get sufficiently pissed off and want to cause a ruckus. 

Twitter is for pretending I am on the same level as my betters, snark, and keeping up with a handful of old forum friends. 

Everything else, if it exists, is a digital graveyard. 

Why blog? Because I control it. I control the comments, I control the content. I control horizontal and the vertical... wait that is the Outer Limits. I am not limited to a specific character limit. I am not limited to what an algorithm is showing my fans (all none of them). I am subject to the whims of Google at the moment, but that is true of pretty much all of the Internet. 

We are in the endgame of media consolidation, provider consolidation, network consolidation. This is the point where we need to start pushing back to the fringes, because the center will not hold. I use a blog with my name on it, because I can write it on a business card or put it in a tweet. I can link everything I am working on here and it can be a hub rather than an endpoint. 

We are losing ourselves in the churn... the constant flow of mindless consumption and temporal creation. Ideas that we should dwell upon, fall ever downward in our feeds replaced by master propaganda that "probably won't get one share". Caging us in with guilt, patriotism, religion, squee, or any of a million things that bypass our bullshit detectors and go right to the lizard brain. 

Not to go all generational, but I am in the oldest cohort of millennials. I saw the Internet when it was text and a few pictures. The madhouse where anyone could be anyone. Timecubes, anti-militia militia, AOL, Geocities, livejournal, pokey the penguin. The place was carnage and carnal delights deliveries via dialup. 

And then the world came online. Then we all pivoted to where the people were social media. And then they monetized us. And then things got progressively shittier. 

So I am blogging now. 

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