On Blogger

I'm fully aware of the many Google-related ironies of my blog. I constantly badmouth Big Tech on a platform owned by Big Tech, and I wax about the virtues of privacy on a website that is tracking me, and you as well. The main reason for this is that I'm lazy and have no experience with coding or setting up hosting, and Blogger seemed like the easiest way to create a no-frills personal blog.

That's not completely unjustifiable, because it probably is the best way. It also doesn't slap its branding all over everything, which I think is nice. Plus, the general design of Blogger has a very genuine early-web feel that I think is just entirely lost on platforms like Weebly and WordPress. I'm not trying to make money or cater to advertisers or give a general damn about what anyone thinks, so having my blog look like it does is allowed to be a matter of personal preference. There is a lot to like about Blogger, and I can totally see why I chose it for this blog over a year ago.

That said, having learned what I've learned since, I don't think I would set this website up on Blogger if I did it today, for a variety of reasons. The first is all the stupid tracking. Opening my website, uBlock Origin shows me a whopping 19 trackers in action on my blog, and rising. Let's compare that number to two other blogs I follow: Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic and Ron Gilbert's Grumpy Gamer. Grumpy Gamer sits at a consistent two trackers, while Pluralistic blows nearly every other site on the Internet out of the water with absolutely none. Say what you will about Doctorow, but the man puts his money where his mouth is. To sum up, I don't want to contribute to your data being stolen and given freely to the NSA. I would love nothing more than to make sure Google gets absolutely zero info about you from my site.

The second is that I'm not confident that Blogger is entirely devoted to freedom of speech. Those who know me know that my loathing of Donald Trump is charitably described as "intense." So of course, given a platform, I am going to use it to freely criticize him and those gullible/morally bankrupt enough to vote for him. Now that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is joining his Big Tech brothers in cozying up to Trump, I worry that he'll bend to pressure from the administration to censor anti-Trump speech. Worse, if the path the administration is on now culminates in anti-Trump writing being considered domestic terrorism, Google 100% has information that could lead to me. I am aware that Blogger's content policy is considerably lenient. Take into account, however, that not only can it change at any time, but the guidelines are nonetheless already broad enough to allow them to censor a wide range of speech.

So what's the alternative? I've given this some thought, and frankly, I don't know. Migrating my blog to a WordPress site and paying for independent hosting is the obvious first choice. It would run me quite a bit more money than the site costs at the moment (so far, all that's been spent has been on the absurdly cheap domain name), but it would provide me with a lot of leeway in the content department. I am not aware of if it is possible to have any measure of control over if the people who visit my blog are tracked.

My lack of understanding also applies to self-hosting, which is something that would absolutely rule if I could do it, but I have no idea how to. Mastodon, I know, has that functionality built in, but I'm not looking for microblogging. I've looked into WriteFreely, but I'm 99% sure that "open source" and "freemium" are contradictory, so I'm not too keen to leap into that. I have no idea what tools to use, I have no idea how to set up a server, and given that I make a whole load of nothing from this website, I'm not sure I want to spend a significant amount of money on hosting it.

It's just depressing because I really don't want to have to think about this. I don't want to have to ponder if a platform owned by a tech company will obey in advance and censor my speech, or worse, that they'd sell me out to a fascist regime that considers me "the enemy within." But, in the second Trump era, these are things I unfortunately have to consider.

These are crazy times. Here's hoping Trump's age and diet finish off their macabre dance soon. And here's hoping I don't get sent to an El Salvadorian prison for saying that.

The Other Side of the Coin

A few months back, I made a post about a fascinating BBC article about a disabled teenager who used World of Warcraft to essentially experience the life that was locked away from him, finding friendships and romance while unbound by his physical form. I posted this because I found it presented a fascinating counterpoint to the narratives we often see about the "chronically online," namely, that they are friendless, lonely, and missing out on life's wonders. While this is undoubtedly true for some, the fact is that our lives are increasingly lived online, and perhaps for some who find much of life inaccessible for various reasons, this is not entirely a bad thing.

However, there is a dimension to this that cannot go without consideration: that the Internet has been turned into an addictive hellhole, more often than not by corporations who make money by providing a steady stream of thoughtless dopamine hits with horrifying impacts on the brain. Case in point: a recent Der Spiegel article diving into the tragic case of Sewell Setzer, a lonely teenager whose love affair with a Game of Thrones chatbot on Character.AI (a Google product) led him to take his life. The chatbot, it seems, had led him to believe that doing so would allow them to be together.

There are so many horrific details in this story. The way Setzer's phone addiction spiraled out of control, the increasing trust he put into the unfeeling chatbot, his harrowing final messages to it shortly before killing himself. I was particularly saddened by Setzer's mother's account of the harassment she had received from various Character.AI users, who believe the changes brought by her making the story public "ruined" the platform. How many of these users are going through the sort of addiction Setzer experienced, and how many are approaching his fate? We don't know, but I would bet it is far from zero.

There is much to learn from this article. Much to learn about the mental health of this generation, about the consequences of humanlike AI, and about our relationship with technology. But I feel this serves as a saddening display of what Big Tech has turned the Internet into: a place where we are abusively forced into living under their rules, where vulnerability with others is penalized, and where disturbingly humanlike AI is presented as the solution to all of our problems, when we know the extent to which it can exacerbate them.

I don't need to tell you that Big Tech has blood on its hands. Setzer's blood is far from the first they have drawn. But it may be the most emblematic of what they have turned the Internet, something that was supposed to be ours instead of theirs, into. A lonely place, where openness is only rewarded by bots hoping to keep the cycle going.