The Wordsmith and the Web

Those of us who have been writing and putting out our work online by way of blogs, self-published books and other such material have been watching the return on effort invested get worse for a long, long time. For the blogger, and self-published author, the situation circa 2010 was far from great, indeed by any reasonable standard depressing--and what kept many going was the hope that things would get better. However, as I can say with the hindsight of a decade and a half it was actually as good as they ever got. Since then the chances of "discovery" by people actually ready to do a bit of reading, who if they like what they see might possibly share it with others who might look at it, has plummeted. Some of this was a matter of the way the web just went on getting more crowded (with the onslaught of AI slop not helping). But much of it was also the way in which the grifting scum of Big Tech and assorted, equally vile, vested interests of similar type, from search engine algorithm changes designed to force you to look at more advertising by deliberately making it harder for you to find what you want, to publishers making war on the e-book, to the Establishment war on alternative media in the name of fighting "fake news" as they sought to make sure that unapproved "realfacts" never undermined the credulity of the public in their "goodfacts," fought an exterminationist war against anything and everything that would democratize the means of communication.

Those prone to soften the facts into the "optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view" offered the frustrated writer false reassurances that quality work would surely find its way to an audience come what may, and enjoinments to adapt to the new milieu. Thus those who wanted to share an opinion online were directed to, rather than hoping to be discovered, go where the people were--in Reddit fora and on X and so on--and speak their opinions there; to if they had something to say about a book, say it in the Customer Reviews section of a book retailer's site. Or better still, say what they had to say in a video on YouTube.

Of course, to abandon one's own blog in favor of Reddit or Customer Reviews meant that rather than a writer having their little corner of the web they were expected to have their say in some Big Tech fora policed by corporate enforcers; to trade their essay-writing for trying to start conversations with strangers all too likely to prove to be rancorous or even bullying idiots given that this is who you so often meet should you talk to strangers online; to give up the hope of a living from their writing that a little corner of the web represented to many an author to creating content, and value, for those Big Tech companies that would reap the profit instead. At its most light-minded it is "Let them eat cake," and where more knowing, a call to cheerfully acquiesce in the ruin of small producers as the Big drive everyone else to the wall.

If anything the enjoinment to give up the written word altogether in favor of becoming video producers is worse. After all, never mind the higher resource outlay required, or the plain and simple fact that many a person comfortable with blogging would be uncomfortable speaking in front of a camera, what could be said in the first medium could as easily be said in another (you try turning a dense two thousand word essay into a video)--for what little it would have been worth given the finiteness of the audience they would now be trying so much harder to chase. (Even those who are barely numerate should be able to see that turning six hundred millions blogs into six hundred million vlogs will see the vast, vast majority of would-be Youtube stars end up with absolutely nothing for their trouble as the ranks of vloggers explode in a world where there is no more demand for their offering than there was before.)

It would have been much less like the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view, but much more honest and intelligent for these purveyors of advice to tell the writers in question that in today's web there was just that much less room for what they had to offer; that this was a systemic matter that in their case left the individual with a paucity of good options, the way systemic changes so consistently do in our time; and that this was the proper starting point for anyone asking the old question "What is to be done?"