Whoa, has it really been 4 years since I last wrote anything?
If we are to go off the last article I wrote on Medium, it would appear so. I signed off on the platform with my last article talking about the COVID-19 Pandemic and my hopes that it could serve as a opportunity for society to re-calibrate its care and preservation of each other. In spite of the obviously wrong assumption I had about Americans being able to unite for the common good of each other, that wasn’t what lead to long-standing absence from publishing.
Neither was it the goofballs who spent the entire Pandemic shoving bleach in unmentionable regions, eating horse paste, or blaming an insufferable billionaire predator for giving them Magnetic 5G Wifi, or whatever the fuck they were on about. Though believe me, I found myself scratching my head with the wonder of how Humanity got to the top of the food chain like this, regardless.
No, what took me offline was something a bit more subtle that I think a lot of us have been experiencing over the last few years. Indeed, every user of the web has had some degree of exposure to this phenomenon that has been slow-creeping into everything we do in our digital (and more often real) lives. I’m talking of course, about the enshitification of the internet at large.
“Enshitification?! Zigg, what’s that?! I feel like I’ve heard about it!” – Why yes, I am sure you have… And most importantly, you have also experienced enshitifcation in your daily life. The term itself, coined by writer Cory Doctorow in late 2022, was used to describe what he observed as a growing quality degradation on products and services, specifically in the online realm. Enshitification is exactly why I stopped writing like I had in the past.
Namely, it started with the platform I had written on for a number of years by that point – Medium. When I wrote my first post on Medium in 2016, it was a campy, small, communal blogging and publishing site that was available to anyone, both writers themselves and casual readers looking for new takes. I had many great articles pop on Medium from 2016 to 2019. In fact, a few were picked up by other larger publishers on the platform and cross-posted, increasing my exposure.
I was never a quantity writer, feeling that my mind drags on too long and my points of interest offer too little space to occupy weekly articles. Instead, I would wait until something going on around me tickled me a certain way and I would log in and start rapidly beating up my keyboard until I was content with the ramblings of my inner monologue as they appeared on a website. This usually meant it was tech related or at least inspired by things occurring around privacy and encryption, which were also popular writings at their time. But then it happened…
What, exactly? Well, Medium began its quest down the road of enshitification that has become even more prolific with services over the years. I am not exactly sure if it started prior to 2020 or if I had just not noticed it right away, but when I was publishing my last article on the platform, I was attempting to cross-reference other works when I got stopped with the now-common “You have reached your maximum number of views” paywall. I stared, confused, for a moment thinking I must have clicked something wrong. After all, the platform I had been writing to since 2016 had different types of paid content, but most of the content published by other writers was free to that point. But no, Medium was now a premium membership service at its core with a $60 a year paywall blocking even its more casual articles. I wrapped up my article…. Clicked publish… and logged off.
Since then, enshitification has encrouched on almost all walks of my life. Every service I used regularly fell, like dominoes, to some sort of corporate greed fuckery. In its best cases, it meant that services I enjoyed were adopting increasingly crappy EULA and privacy policies that were openly hostile to me. In many cases, services would lock me out of things I enjoyed until I agreed to their terms, and left me with opt-outs that required me to physically mail paperwork to their legal departments. Others fully paywalled many features that had existed for free and then bumped costs over and over.
During that same time, Netflix saw 5 price hikes, Disney pulled all their libraries from the service, as, too, did NBC/Universal. One by one, each platform started advertising their own dog ass streaming service, a little $9 here, a $13 there, another $19 there… Before you knew it, I was looking at having 4 streaming subscriptions that were all decentralized from each other, all with different interfaces, and all with different price points. I was paying somewhere around $60 a month for the annoyance, too, which put my entertainment budget right back in line with Cable, which I had opposed my whole life. After all, paying to watch commercials is something I just wont do. And yet, now years later services like Netflix and Hulu do exactly that – Offer subscription tiers with commercial breaks and lower quality. Enshitification came for the very thing that took us off cable, and, ultimately turned it into a somehow worse, somehow shittier experience of the same. I cancelled everything.
For a couple years I just lived with a detachment from media. After all, I had revoked my last social media account sometime in late 2018, realizing most people are dipshits who have nothing I want to read, anyway. So the break was good, especially post-pandemic when going out and touching grass had a renewed appeal to it. But in 2022 I realized sometimes it is nice to have some comfort food TV shows, especially as I work from home and the experience can often be isolating.
I was looking for an alternative, and that was around the time that further enshitification hit other platforms I liked. One by one, service providers were updating TOS agreements with horrible privacy policies, disclosures of plans to snoop, reduced features, and lower storage space. The cancer was spreading. I was watching the whole “cloud” internet (lets not call it that, lets call it borrowed internet instead) that we had given our lives to start to unravel and come after us for a check finally. Ironically, it was something I had long felt was going to happen. There was only going to be so much possible revenue that could be milked out of turning us into products before they also needed to charge the product a sub fee, as well.
That was when I broke and decided it was time to go back to what I did at the turn of the Millennium: Pirate and self host. Ironically, the services that turned me into a legit customer back in the days of Oinks Pink Palace and Demonoid would be the ones that would launch me back into my old ways. And so it began.
In October 2022, I deployed my first TrueNAS Scale server at home, spent [even more] time learning Docker and Kubernetes, and started self-hosting just about every-damn-thing I could. I got everything I could ask for up and running and spent the last year refining my environment and plotting its future, rather than relying on cloud providers who have continued to strip and fuck up everything they make in the name of the Almighty Dollar and the Saint Shareholder. I dusted off my old pirate hat from 2009 and boarded the Forbidden Ship… And set sail again.
All of this to say, the reason I stopped publishing was because the current powers over the internet spent as much time as they could stripping down the early, fun, federated Web many of us in the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s grew up on and replacing it with their version of centralized services. Services that were algorithmically designed to maximize engagement and prompt a near drug-addicted response in users. Once enough of us were hooked, they started changing the rules to milk the product (us) even more. I couldn’t handle it, so I had to sign off to find out what my next move was.
As my first post back, this is more a rant than a solid article… But I felt I had to write about what drove me out the writers space for a while and why I waited so long to really resurface. I am going to start publishing more here, and exclusively here. Just like 2001, I’ll be on my own little “geocities” slice of the web right here, ranting at the sky. You’ll either find it…. Or you won’t….
Think of it like Middle-Age AngelFire page. A little older, a little wiser, a little more stable…. But still mine…