Remember Xanga?
Do you remember xanga.com? As a 13-year-old just entering high school back in 2004, xanga.com was my first taste of social media (unless you want to count AOL chat rooms!). Man… what a time to be a teenager. The internet was just starting to open up to me, and all of a sudden I had this thing… this blog… where I could write about every-day-teenager-in-the-suburbs bullshit and people would read it! Well, they probably didn’t, but you get the point.
I mean, look at this.
It was an absolute shitshow! Back then there was no consideration to the aesthetics of the screen, no thought behind user experience… there were few rules to adhere to. It was a mess, but goddamn… it was magical.
I’ll only speak for myself, but there was something so liberating about being able to write for the sake of writing, and having a platform to share it with the world. I didn’t worry about how cohesive my posts were, or about how appealing they were to others. I didn’t care about how sloppy my page looked or how the fonts and colors I used were too illegible. I just created whatever I thought was cool and posted it.
I forgot my Xanga screen name, but knowing me it probably had something to do with Dragonball Z. I’ll never forget my first post where I described the story of me going to a New Jersey Nets game at the Continental Airlines Arena for an after-school trip. It happened during my first couple of months of freshman year. In the post, I described exploring the building with a couple of friends (I specifically remember referring to one of them as “my man” haha!). We snuck into the lower level seats, security guards kicked us out of the area, we got Jay-Z to acknowledge us from far away, and most of all we shared a bunch of laughs together.
I lied. I sat on the bus by myself, listening to my iPod Mini while I watched everyone else talk and laugh with one another. I sat in a crowd of what must’ve been 50 high school students who collectively screamed at Jay-Z until he waved in our direction. I walked behind these two kids around the arena when they decided to go exploring. They were next to me and I so desperately wanted to make a friend, so I followed them. They didn’t exactly shoo me away, but they didn’t talk to me either. I was a new kid in a new school and I only had a single friend there at the time (of course he wasn’t at the game). At that time, it was the loneliest night of my life.
Xanga gave me a chance to change that story. I could make that night whatever I wanted it to be, so I did. Nobody knew who I was, so I knew nobody would ever read it. It wasn’t depressing. It was fucking freedom. Nothing mattered except writing. It was pure, raw, and it had integrity.
I created this Substack after finding a job posting for it. I had no clue what a “Substack” was, so I researched the company and viola, here I am.
What is the point of this post? It’s my way of saying… I’m sad. I’m also pretty fucking scared. Substack is a great place and is a slam dunk as my 2nd favorite social media site behind Reddit, but what is it really? Substack is essentially a blog, and if you strip it of its bells and whistles, at its core, it’s just a clean Xanga. Facebook is just a clean MySpace. Instagram is just Facebook for cool people. So on and so forth. We are moving in a direction that places a HEAVY emphasis on quantitative, not qualitative metrics. Instead of just writing cool stuff on Xanga, I doubt myself on Substack because I only have like 2 subscribers (1 is my mother and the other is my wife. Thanks guys! Love you both! 😀). Instead of posting whatever I liked on MySpace, I AGONIZED over how many “likes” my pictures got on Facebook and Instagram (I deleted that cesspool of an app many years ago). I mean sure, these things existed on Xanga and Myspace too, but the EMPHASIS wasn’t there. Maybe that’s why they died.
Now, corporations are too smart to make the same mistakes. They make sure whatever product that is pushed onto the public is as addictive and as conducive to revenue generation as possible. The term “engagement” has been bastardized to prioritize how many people click buttons on your “content.” It’s not about what you post, it’s about your subscriber totals, your impression (what the fuck is that, anyway?!) totals, or your “like” totals. The goal is to automate and optimize as many processes as possible to maximize profit margins.
Now enter AI. These fucking things write stories, produce artwork, and even create their own programs. My favorite podcaster openly admitted to using an AI tool to create the illustrations for his children’s book because it was dramatically cheaper. I want to write my own novel one day, but now I have to compete with machines that are capable of producing what takes me YEARS in the span of seconds… Think about what this means.
Instead of human book editors scouring thousands of submissions to determine which novels to publish, AI could do the same job in minutes or less. That can apply in pretty much any industry. What happens when AI gets better at making art? What happens when AI-generated art is indistinguishable from what is produced by humans?
Technology used to simply be a tool to help make our lives better, but now it’s something else entirely. It is beginning to rob us of our integrity as people. Who are we if we cannot or will not create? Who are we if we cannot or will not express ourselves through art?
The goal used to be to just touch someone’s life in a small, insignificant way. Maybe you made someone chuckle by posting about the senior prank which resulted in the school golf cart winding up on the roof of the building (this actually happened). Or you made another person smile when they saw a photo of yourself and some friends at the mall. Or maybe you just liked sharing your photography or writing. The goal used to be art.
I’m aware I sound like the stereotypical boomer waxing poetic about the “good ol’ days” but I genuinely feel like our originality, our ability to create, our ability to feel… is all deteriorating so rapidly. I don’t think things have to be this way, but it requires a group effort. People need to decide that art is worth saving. People need to decide that money isn’t the most important factor and that there is beauty in imperfection.
Over here, in my tiny, infinitesimally miniscule corner of the internet, I will try to recapture the spirit of Xanga page. I will post about whatever I find interesting, and I will do so with honesty, transparency, and integrity. We’re still here, practically 40 years removed from the release of The Terminator (1984, how profound…). SkyNet is not self-aware just yet…