I used to have a desire to be heard, or read. From my twenties up to my forties I couldn’t get my voice out there loudly enough. Back when blogs became popular, I moved my loud, shitty opinions online and the dialogue flowed. Now this is a monologue and how boring is that?
Inside of my early fifties, that eagerness to be read has waned in recent years. Lately I am more prone to shutting the hell up. It is definitely the internet and my own maturing that has changed since then. I definitely feel less of a desire to stay hyperconnected to culture as I age, but social media and the WWW has been enshittified over the last few years that has rendered it unusable. What was once a customizable feed of organized information is now a firehose of algorithmic crap.
Taking two steps back, even for a brief moment, you realize that none of this matters. It has no value to the individual. It is static noise.
Maybe it’s the wisdom of aging and the self-awareness of time, but I cannot be arsed with all of that anymore. The time spent trying to consume and to be heard has taken away the will to create.
The 1980’s war game computer Joshua declared that “the only winning move is not to play.“
Not to be misunderstood, I still have a lot to say. I still have a lot of opinions, sarcastic wit and valid arguments. But at the end of my day, it is time to move on with my day.
With the perspective of time and an ever-changing culture, I cannot keep up. This forced perspective has me looking inward. Eventually this website will be shuttered and the archives imported into the Denbow Operating System as well as the Denbow Decimal System. The audience total will be exactly one. Also eventually, it all may come back out again in the form of an archived website, used only as a reference.
Perhaps, my child will want to look back through it to fill in the missing gaps and know her father a little more. Perhaps that is just vanity and wishful thinking that there would ever be an interest.
I’ll keep the domain name and the custom e-mail address it is attached to for as long as needed. They are mine. It is a stake in an ever-increasing growing World Wide Web after all. This website may just be turned into a home page displaying only a portrait of myself and my minimal contact information.
Until then, I will be migrating and archiving all of the site’s content to my local server. Enjoy the silence.
