20 Years Later…
Maybe seven years ago, shortly after I left Fast Company, a local journalism student asked if we could grab coffee.
After being surprised I hadn’t gone to school for my trade she wanted to know how I got my start.
I told her: “Oh, I started blogging in 2006 for Nick Denton for $12 a post, and things sort of took off from there.”
Her response marks the first time in my life (but not the last) where I felt old.
“What’s a blog?” she asked.
I originally started blogging in 2005. At the time, I was living an ex-pat life in Ireland, working as a temp at a bank. I was 26, and despite the fact that I was “living the dream abroad,” more lonely and frustrated with my life than I wanted to admit. My first blog–the unfortunately christened Pimp Junta–was an outlet for those feelings… an attempt to reinvent myself digitally in the way I desperately wanted to be seen: as an Internet enfant terrible. I cringe when I look back at that era, because like many lonely men with something to prove, too much time on their hands and no healthy friendships to invest in, my sense of humor was mean-spirited and I often punched down. But my blog took off.
Suddenly, I had a professional writing career. A blog post I wrote (about an electric toothbrush, of all things) got noticed, and soon I was working full-time for the Gawker Network, contributing to various blogs like Gizmodo, Kotaku and Consumerist. From there, I went to Wired, then Boing Boing, then other places, until I ended up at Fast Company, at which point I had more or less ceased to be a blogger and accidentally become a journalist. And I’m not even a journalist anymore. For the last eight years, I have helped companies reach customers as an editorial strategist. Some of those projects have been incredibly meaningful to me: Folks, the site I created for PillPack, is perhaps the least cynical project I’ve ever done, treating its writers fairly and putting measurable amounts of good into the world. (No wonder Amazon killed it.) But none of them were for me.
It’s funny starting a personal blog again after nearly twenty years. The landscape has changed significantly. In 2005, before social media gave everyone’s opinions a platform, there was something counter-cultural about blogging. For the first time, a dude typing in his underwear could have the same media reach of influence as someone standing at the top of the traditional media ecosystem. It gave us early bloggers an outsized sense that our opinions were uniquely vital and important, which just seems so quaint and hubristic in an age where everyone from your MAGA uncle to your tweenage neighbor has a social megaphone at their disposal, and no one’s opinions seem particularly vital or unique at all anymore.
And I’ve changed too. I’m no longer trying to prove something to the world or to myself, which are really the same thing. I write because I’m a writer, not because I desire an audience. And so this blog is running on Blot.im, a no-frills web app that turns standard text files on your computer into blog posts. I don’t care about having a platform anymore, and the last thing I want to do is spend time fiddling with yet another CMS. I just want a place to write.