A little failed experiment

Hello, dear reader. Allow me to tell you about a failed experiment of mine. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes if you felt inclined towards starting a similar project.

I thought it would be a fun idea to make a new site. My favorite thing! A new site, a new place to write! A new theme to cry over! I got a domain, I came up with a cool name, and then I poured hours into it. I would guess at least over a hundred hours. I finally learned how Hugo worked, too, and I ended up moving this site over to Hugo from how much easier it is to write with.

The premise of the site was this: almost all tech companies are evil or are used for evil. If someone writes about it, they either explain what is wrong with the companies or introduce less technically inclined people to alternatives. I say “or” because my experience has been that people tend to not do both. Either someone walks away confused as to why this matters, or someone is angry and has no clear action to take. They must find the bridge themselves. This is a waste of time for all involved, and I believed I could simplify it by having both in the same place and finally making it clear why the transition to open source and less exploitative tools matters in the first place.

If you want to do this, I beg you to take my idea. Please do, because I can’t do it! And it was for a stupid reason, too. I have lost almost all faith in tech, which is what motivated me to even try doing this in the first place. Half of the site was writing about the bad side of it, but I don’t care about the negative anymore. I try to avoid this side of tech now, but I couldn’t write much for it without having ten tabs pulled up in the next screen over, trying to put together the pieces. It was too damn depressing to write, and I just didn’t care to keep up with the topic in enough detail to write it. I’ve proved to myself that most of tech is full of evil already.

Every time I tried to write for it, I burned some of my soul. I tried writing the more actionable pieces, but I saw it as somewhat useless without proving why it was important. And then I felt obligated to write for the site at all, meaning that I felt too guilty to write anything else, since I knew I should have been working on that instead.

It’s hard for me to write about a topic I don’t believe in. I don’t even care for the alternatives more and more as time goes on, because the better alternative is to not engage at all and to go outside. The solution to social media is to go outside. The solution to doom-scrolling is fueling the need for gossip with your friends. The solution to Microsoft ruining all your favorite games ever is to get a new hobby off the computer. Everyone knows what the real alternative is, but it’s so difficult to get to it that it is easier to present options for morally acceptable computer time. And I don’t want to write about them, because it requires even more computer time and Internet engagement. I don’t think it was worth the amount of morally inacceptable computer time that it would result in me having.

I wanted to post what I wrote for it here, but I’m a little shy about the whole thing still, so I won’t just yet. But I will! Eventually! And after that, I won’t call this too much of a loss at all. This site is in a much better state than it was before (you should peek at the changelog). I just had to run in the wrong direction to understand what the right direction was.