One of these days I’m going to settle on the official disclaimer text here. Let’s just say that this entire piece is *opinion*, and yours may differ. You can consider it a “conversation starter”, but I’m not really coming into this with facts. Got it? Good.
That’s it. That’s the post.
No, there’s more to it than that. Every now and then, I stop and wonder to myself “Why do I still do this?” I really do. I think that, at one time, blogging was a means to an end. Sure, I’ve made a lot of good friends in this scene, but it was also considered as a way to have some doors opened for you. You blogged because you wanted something more. You wanted to be taken seriously as a Writer™. You wanted to make connections with powerful muckety mucks. Or you just wanted free stuff. Honestly, I think I fell more into that last category. The idea of comps was always attractive, but I can tell you that in my 22 years of blogging, I’ve only received one review copy of a major release, and I never even wrote the review for it. So, I guess I didn’t want it badly enough. Still, if you did want it, it could happen.
It wasn’t that long ago that blogging and social media were breeding grounds for Hollywood deals. Remember when the Shit My Dad Says Twitter account ended up being adapted as a William Shatner-starring CBS sitcom? That was a real thing that happened. Hell, A24’s 2020 film Zola was adapted from a viral Twitter thread. Any random social media thread could be your ticket to stardom. Or so we thought. All those kinds of deals? GONE. Hollywood was quick to jump on the ideas, but you could hardly say they yielded success. Shit lasted one season, while Zola only made $5.2M on a budget of $5M.
The forced pivot to video didn’t help things, as a lot of us have Blogger Faces and not Influencer Faces. However, if you were charismatic and knew your shit, maybe G4 would come a-calling. Or the Too Cool for School staff over at Comics Alliance might ask you to pull up a chair to their exclusive lunch table. G4 and Comics Alliance? GONE. Bofe ovum.
If you’ve been paying attention, none of this is really that surprising, but it sure happened fast. Twitter still “mattered” pre-Covid. However, the mere fact that every news article now refers to it as “X, formerly Twitter” shows that its new identity isn’t really working out. It was just five years ago, however, when it was still our social lifeline while the world was shut down. Now, it’s a place to go when you want to find “Alpha”, “high value male” Republicans paying a monthly fee for a blue checkmark on an account with 27 followers. Like the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Twitter Blue Checkmark means nothing anymore.
Recently, however, it has become painfully apparent that this…is IT. There’s nowhere else to go. The social networks bury your links unless you pay them (Which, I understand, as they’re a business), yet there aren’t really pathways for that “where the people are”. For example, you’d do better to just light some cash on fire than to pay for advertising on X. Those people only want talking Donald Trump clocks and coupon codes for VPNs. And you can’t buy ads on Bluesky at the moment, but when that becomes available, you’d better make sure you’ve got your pronouns and alt text on there. There’s nowhere to grow, either. If anything, you’re really just trying to hold onto any readers and supporters you’ve amassed along the way. It’s no longer about growth, but rather retention, and that’s harder than it sounds.
I know about ten people online who should be doing WAY more than being quippy for free. I’m talking “This person is a comedic genius and why haven’t they been hired yet?” levels of talent. One of them got a book deal when the gettin’ was good, but the rest of them? Who’s gonna hire them? All the major blogs have been acquired by some multinational corporation, which merely bought the name and the back catalog. At the end of the day, who really benefitted from being a “Blogger”? Almost immediately, I’d say Perez Hilton. I say that because he was one of the first to hit it big as a gossip blogger. To become a household name. But what does he do now? Seriously, how does Perez pay his bills in 2025? Does he have a podcast? I mean, everyone’s got a podcast (Hell, I’ve got TWO. They were having a sale…), but these kids today don’t know who Perez Hilton is.
Next on my list of Fallen Greats? Ana Marie Cox, best known as Wonkette. When I was a young professional in the DC area, everyone was raving over Wonkette, which was this Washington insiders blog that always had the “hot goss”. At the time, we didn’t know who ran the site, which added to its allure. It was like if Gossip Girl gave a shit about what old men were eating in the congressional dining room. For some reason, however, we ate it up. Wonkette‘s biggest claim to fame, however, was breaking the Washingtonienne Scandal, where congressional staffer Jessica Cutler blogged about the many trysts in which she had been involved, where she had also been paid for sex. Cutler justified it by saying there was no other way someone could live in the city on $25K/year. Just like Wonkette, Cutler’s identity was also a secret, simply blogging as Washingtonienne – until Wonkette outed her. Cutler proceeded to ride the fame (as one does), where she posed for Playboy and wrote a novel about her experiences. In 2008, however, she married an attorney, and they now live a quiet life with their daughter, in New York City. Meanwhile, Cox was revealed as the writer behind Wonkette, and she would step down in 2006 in order to promote her book (she also got a book deal), Dog Days. The book would flop, but she would go on to bounce around to Time.com, Playboy, Air America Media, and more. Well, my whole thought process around this post was kicked off when I recently got a podcast clip in my Instagram feed, as Cox cohosts a show about how hard it has been for her to find a job, and how demoralizing the process has been. Twenty years ago – back when The Internet still mattered – this woman was Cock of the Walk. And now we’re both in the job market?
It’s over. The dream that The Internet promised us is dead. It doesn’t have to be this way, but I don’t see anyone making any strides to return it to what it was. And, on paper, that probably wasn’t a good thing anyway. There were websites with a lot of inflated valuation, and no evidence to back it up. Smaller blogs just hoping for a cash infusion or a buyout from someone bigger. Facebook figured out a way to make money, but it was by manipulating your elderly relatives. I’ve been cleaning out my mom’s house, and I found some old email forwards from some of her church friends. Remember email forwards? You know the stuff: it’s either racist and/or threatening, but veiled as a “joke”. For a brief minute, I mourned the passing of that era, but quickly remembered it’s merely been replaced by AI Facebook posts of Joe Biden giving Kamala a vampire neck bite. You can also probably buy the t-shirt on Teepublic, with the optional “Let’s Flow Brandon” written in blood.
The Internet is merely a conveyance for corporations now. It allows them to bring their mediocre streaming content into our homes. It allows us to pay them for services rendered. They also pressure us into signing up for Auto Pay, so that they can screw up every few months by pulling money twice, causing you to end up with overdraft fees. It is no longer a place of wonder, of discovery. It’s just another resource, like fossil fuels, causing more problems than solutions.
Meanwhile, the other social media sites failed because they couldn’t figure out how to monetize. Elon has sunk his companies and his own reputation trying to monetize X, and the best thing he could think of was charging members for the ability to have him see their posts. Seriously, that’s one of the “perks” of the blue checkmark now: priority replies, and there’s a chance he might point to ya from up on stage!
The Internet is no longer a land of possibility. It isn’t the Information Superhighway anymore. All the information is paywalled, and all the free stuff is garbage. Everything is controlled about about 6 companies, and they’re currently scheming ways to get control of the parts they don’t already have. That potential is now wielded as a weapon, as the “enshittifcation” of the online experience isn’t exactly designed to promote Hope™. Every app is a delivery service of the worst humanity has to offer. “You’ve got to curate your feed better.” Yeah, that doesn’t work when there’s a cool toy collector who also seems to really love to share his doomscrolling finds.
What are we doing here? Why are we doing here? I don’t know anymore. For a bit, I think I fooled myself into thinking I was “providing a service”: Folks don’t have time to read Entertainment Weekly, TVLine, and The Hollywood Reporter every week, so I’ll compile the most important headlines, and also give my two cents. But nobody really wants that either. I’ve got a friend who’s like “I skim it every week”. Then, he’ll proceed to ask my opinion on some recent thing that I’ve already discussed at length on the site. “I must be a few weeks behind”. I went through an arrogant period for years, where folks would ask me pop culture-centric questions, and I’d reply “I already wrote about that in West Week Ever”, like it was some sort of destination site for them. I mainly felt that way because, at one point, it WAS. Blogging, however, never recovered from the death of Google Reader. Sure, other RSS readers came along, but they weren’t central to our lives anymore, as part of the Google ecosystem. Also, a lot of bloggers took an “I’ll post when I feel like it” approach to their websites, which was probably great for their mental health, but not great for establishing consistency. The marketplace killed our world, but we didn’t exactly scramble to save what was left of it.
So, why am I here? Mainly because I don’t know how to quit anything. No. I’m here because I still enjoy it. I realize that makes me the guy who studies Latin for pleasure, and not because he thinks it’ll help him on the English portion of the SAT. I still believe in what we were doing all those years ago, even if I’m too stubborn to admit that time has passed. I feel like I’m tending a small garden in the middle of a desert. It’s small, but it I like it, and I want to share it. Still, ain’t nobody visiting a desert to see flowers. So, here I am. I stopped checking site stats roughly two years ago. Wasn’t worth it, and I wasn’t moving the needle. So, if you have enjoyed the site so far, be sure to let me know. Otherwise, I think I’m just yelling into the void. Maybe I am. After all, The Internet is over. It’s just that not everyone is willing to admit it. Yet.