trenchant.org

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I decided to start anew with this site because after 20 years some things didn’t make sense anymore, you know? Design by subtraction is a thing.

First, get rid of all the content.

Then, get rid of all the design.

And only then, slowly but deliberately, bring back only what is good.

So, there’s like, only this entry so far.

And honestly – not sure this one is good. Maybe they should all self-destruct after a few days. Embrace the ephemeral nature of this world and the Internet.

The personal web will no doubt have something of a moment now that Twitter (perhaps the last of the web 2.0’s that the diaspora of utopian web nerds stuck with) is under new management, but I had been meaning to do this anyway.

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Since I last updated this site my wife and I had our second child. Her big sister turned 3 recently.

Together with a shift to working from home, the balance of how I spend my time in 2022 is dramatically different than pre-pandemic 2019.

It’s not that I’ve abandoned the real Internet but it feels like I don’t have time sometimes. But I do – it’s just too often it is filled with junk-information activities (ie, social media like twitter.)

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Web communities have lifecycles. Those of us who have been doing this for a few decades feel it in our bones. Each cycle was exponentially larger than the last, as the population around the world gaining online access grew. So this cycle sometimes seemed like it would last forever – it was bigger, different!

No.

Twitter and the rest are no different than MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, LiveJournal, or anything else that came before. Communities evolve, economics change, the world continues to move.

The web is still here, that remains.

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It’s easy to be bummed out about the Internet changing, and seemingly all at once. The Internet is just another Heraclitus river - you can’t step in the same river twice. The Internet of the 90’s is gone, the 00’s is gone, and the twenty-tens are gone. There’s only the Internet of the now.

The best any of us can do is embrace that and make the most of it.