I’ve hit a good few of the standard highlights of the Art of Blog, including the death of the pet and the lengthy hiatus. This is another one, the noisy exit. Activities suspended until further notice. Not open for business. I quit.
It’s very easy to be taken in by the allure of instant, “free” pseudopublication, and ignore for a long time the nature of the beast, which is you contributing to an amorphous mass of text and someone else profiting by it. Of course, creative types getting the short end from business is hardly a new and interesting theme, but there is something a little bit special about the number of people who have now been convinced to do it for nothing while remaining convinced that they are getting something for free.
Well, here is a small insight from a tired and cynical little drone buzzing around in a very large and chaotic machine: Google is not running Blogger out of charity or some affection for the creative spirit of the masses. Google is running Blogger because the massive popularity of Moveable Type, LiveJournal, etc. convinced them that it would be profitable to acquire a major position in this market. A quick review of your AdSense account and Google’s stock price should clarify the nature of this relationship.
And that’s fine: my intent is really not to shake my puny fists at the bastions of Evil Corporatism. People like blogging, adding their stellar insights to the somewhere between 4 and 10 million similar examples out there gives them a warm fuzzy, and that is fine by me. My bottom line, this side of Black Friday, 2005, is that it isn’t doing anything more for me than when I used to keep a handwritten journal in a series of blank books, a process which was considerably less expensive since I didn’t have to maintain an internet connection or a relatively modern computer. And I didn’t feel guilty if I didn’t write for a week, like I was letting down one of my 6 regular readers.
So to hell with it. I just don’t have enough time to flog this horse’s corpse any more.
If you are one of those 6 people, my apologies if this comes as a disappointment. You know how it is. If you are one of the dozen people who actually went so far as to give me some money, you can expect to continue to receive little oddments, scraps of text, and music in the mail throughout the coming year, as some small thanks. I hope these modest entertainments have amused. If you were invested in the pentagon/files story line, well, its fate remains to be seen. There is about one and a half again as much of that as has already been put online already written, but the story is not yet completed and I’m not sure how invested I am in wrapping it up. It may find its way out into the world yet, and if you were a patron you can rest assured to get it for free if it does so.
I’m not sure what’s next. I have some things in progress and I’m feeling ambivalent about them. If anything happens with any of it I feel comfortable saying that anyone who is reading this and actually cares will hear about it from me directly. I am an exceptionally easy person to find online, my email is in the profile, so I’m not going to fret about losing touch.
I had a conversation a while ago in which I opined that for the vast and overwhelming majority of aspiring writers, the internet was currently a dead end: that even the most modest hopes of viability remained firmly entrenched in conventional publishing. My own investigation convinces me that this is an accurate assessment. I’m certainly open to the possibility that this might change, but if so I doubt very much that access to whatever fantabulous new markets emerge will come through remaining on this particular bandwagon. If I do put text online again, one thing I am certain of is that it will be under a domain I own and administer, supported by bandwidth I arrange and properly pay for, and thereby control. For quite a while I set aside my misgivings about the fact that, in publishing through a medium like Blogger, I was effectively giving control of a creative enterprise over to a corporation. Like so many others, I justified this because blogging through the Google machine was so “easy.” Considering two thousand years’ worth of warning about the relative merits and pitfalls of the broad versus the narrow path, its a bit shameful that I was still so susceptible to this argument. In the end I had to ask: if I insist it be easy, just how invested am I in it anyway?
And this is the answer.
In the meantime: there is no need to come back here. Nothing new will appear in these pages, or on any of the other five blogspot addresses I have been maintaining. If I create something new I will promulgate it by other methods.
In the upper right hand corner of this page, you will find a little button, labeled “NEXT BLOG.” Clicking it will carry you to some random example of the medium: it is a process that can be repeated indefinitely. I recommend it if you are looking for something to read.
Yours very sincerely,
Scrivener
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do - namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”
Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street, Herman Melville
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