I was born in the waning days of the Carter Administration. My “micro-generation,” Late AF Gen-X or Proto-Millennial, was birthed into an analog world and came of age in a digital one. I remember having a gigantic TV with rabbit ear antennas. I remember getting only a few over-the-air channels. I remember getting my first lesson in monopoly pricing as my step-dad fumed about the cost of this new thing called “cable.” I remember getting a Packard-Bell computer with a 386 processor, internal 14.4 kbps modem, and being one of the first kids in my friend group to be “online.”
My first forays onto the internet–the real internet, not AOL or Prodigy—were on Usenet. For those under thirty-five, Usenet or newsgroups were a decentralized precursor of the current internet. Essentially they were text-based, topic specific, discussion boards where nerds like me in the 90s gathered to discuss topics of interest. Newsgroups covered every subject imaginable and their titles, which fell into eight groups (or hierarchies) were descriptive of their focus: “rec” for recreational topics, “news” for current events discussions, “sci” for science, etc. Fifteen year-old Nate spent an unconscionable amount of time reading and posting on rec.sport.pro-wrestling and rec.sport.basketball.
The Web as it Was: As the web became more widely available, navigable, and better modems enabled faster data speeds, newsgroups largely withered and the web as we know and use it exploded in popularity. In short order, we entered the era of blogs. Blogs facilitated longer form writing and the expression of nuanced ideas in a way that has fallen out of favor in our 2020s social media era. Possibly the best online community I was ever a part of was the Horde, the name given to regular commenters on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic Magazine blog. It was reading these conversations on Coates' blog, often in response to his frequent “Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid” threads that I learned about CTE, which led to me falling out of love with the NFL. It is also where I learned about the Confederate Lost Cause narrative about the US Civil war and how to pick that argument to pieces: “Oh, the war was really about states’ rights? States' rights to do what?” It was also there that I really started to understand and tackle the brand of homophobia I had acquired from my church and time in the military.
What made the Horde special was that the forum was moderated with an iron fist. On the blog, if you unfurled an uninformed, nonsense, or reactionary hot take, it was deleted. If you did it twice, you were banned. One of the things that enrages me about our modern moment is that we have allowed a narrow faction of our politics to convince large portions of the populace that “standards,” “rules,” and “conduct expectations” within a given community are tantamount to state censorship. It’s disappointing how many people have fallen for this meme.
Blogs Made Even Matt Yglesias Tolerable: A strength of blogs, that is shared in some ways by podcasts, is the ability of someone to communicate about a complex issue, to address a topic with depth and nuance, and to address and refute counter-arguments from detractors (and haters). Blogs felt meritocratic. Writers with quality prose and insights grew their audiences and other writers would cite and link to their pieces. I even found myself reading people I vehemently disagreed with because I admired and appreciated their writing.
But in the mid tens (this is what we're calling the 2010s, yes?) blogs started to lose their audiences. Twitter largely killed them off. As everyone moved to “the Bird,” we all should have seen what was to come. Twitter branded itself as a “microblogging platform.” The micro was telling: fewer words, less civility, less nuance, less meaningful dialogue. We’ve been in this era for over a decade and the results have been disastrous. But it appears that era is sunsetting as a result of self-inflicted billionaire wounds.
I think this is a really long way of saying the following:
I am off Twitter and I am really glad about it;
I plan to write here more and hope you will read it;
I hope you’ll join me and write someplace because I’d rather read your thoughts, at length, rather than in 280 character bursts mitigated by a billionaire.