That title makes it sound like I stopped writing in long form intentionally. Oh, wait, I wrote that title. This is my website. I could make it say something less clickbaity...
Okay, well, obviously this is about Tumblr and a possible causal link between it and the downfall of my willingness to write in long form. The fact is, I used to write long-form on Tumblr. I was on Blogger before Tumblr, and I wrote long-form there, as well. It wasn't a very good blog-- lots of emo teenager things that are better left forgotten-- but it was largely long-form writing. See, I used to be really full of myself. I had taken two semesters of philosophy and I really wanted to be a philosopher, too. I would get random thoughts and expound upon them for paragraphs at a time, letting one thought lead into another, and I started making posts that were so impossibly complicated that I had to save them as drafts and pick up on them later. The problem with that was, I never picked them back up once I set them down. My brain wasn't in that space anymore, so everything I wrote seemed completely foreign, like trying to read a translation of Spinoza. It was allegedly in English, but you'd never be able to tell reading it aloud. Eventually, I decided that most of my long-form posts were ending up in drafts and that it was easier to just reblog Paul Blart memes and add stupid comments to people's posts.
So, is Tumblr responsible for my long-form writing drought? No. The fault, if there was one, was my own. I decided the annoyance of thought was too much for someone who was just trying to maintain a shred of sanity, scrolling through posts, hoping to discover a video of a puppy doing something cute; so, I gave in. I quit writing long posts. Occasionally, something would happen that would warrant my writing paragraphs, but it wasn't common. I had thought, at one point, that I wanted to actually be a writer for a living, but as it became harder and harder for me to write more than 3 sentences at a time, I gave it up. I still have certain aspirations of being a screenwriter, but the WGA is on strike right now, and improvements in AI writing seem to be on track to keep them on strike permanently.
So, why restart now? Why bother writing long-form again? The solution is, quite simply, a matter of decluttering one's existence. I'm watching the internet I used to know shoot itself in the nuts on a daily basis, with RESTRICT, and Metaverse, and the mockery Elon Musk is making of Twitter, and new online far-right strongholds cropping up every hour; and I realise, I need to do something about that. I'm not going to be able to affect any far-reaching change, but all of that rubbish I just listed is all a result of the New Web. Social media, huge corporations taking over great swathes of the internet, people getting rich off their users' data. The only way I have to combat any of that is to ignore it. When I was a kid, I always wanted my own website, but free web hosts simply did not exist back in the '90s-- and, even if they did, I wouldn't have known what to do with one if I had it. No one around me knew anything about HTML or WYSIWYG web editors. So I made do mocking up websites in Microsoft Publisher 2000. But now, I have the ability to write HTML from nothing, as I am doing now in Notepad; and Neocities has taken over the role of Tripod and Lycos as a free web host to the masses. While the Old Web I knew is gone and can't be brought back (most of that had to do with Nintendo 64 and The Sims), I can still write a webpage like it's 2002 and put it online for tens of people to enjoy.
Even on Tumblr, I'm trying to get over my fear of long-form writing, even though I know no one will read it. It's Tumblr! The people who decided they didn't want to be on Elon's Twitter all migrated there! These aren't intellectuals who are going to read a 13,000 word essay on why the corporate feudal state is bad. They won't even read a 3-paragraph post about why AI art is so popular right now. But I'm going to write long posts anyway, and maybe, just maybe, someone will actually read it before clicking "Like" and forgetting about it.
--5 May 2023--