The World That's Coming

I’m off schedule.

This might already be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to when posts usually appear here, with the traditional Monday-Wednesday-Friday rhythm disrupted for the past few weeks; I’m not even getting around to writing this until Saturday morning, after all, which is a sign for quite how bad things have gotten.

Of course, “bad” is an over-dramatic way of looking at it — it’s not as if some great disaster has befallen me to make me slip out of the schedule I’ve been keeping up all this time. Nothing has gone wrong, per se; it’s simply that life has taken a turn.

I suspect that my irregular working schedule plays no small part in throwing me off. Back when I was doing roughly the same thing week in and week out, I could roughly predict what every day of the week looked like: what I’d be up to on Monday, Tuesday, and so on. It was that environment in which I started doing this blog again in earnest, during the divorce, to ground and rediscover myself in something just for me. The schedule made sense, then, because I could already imagine the spaces I’d carve out to write the posts in.

These days, everything is far less steady. Yesterday was working on one freelance post for Outlet A, proofing and corresponding on another for Outlet B, being a second set of eyes for Chloe on something she was working on, and having a strange, surreal conversation that I suspect closed down a work opportunity for Outlet C. My focus was scattered (more so when you factor in the multiple animals to look after during the day), and I didn’t even remember this blog until late afternoon, when I didn’t have anymore words in me.

Consider this an apology, then, for the slip — but also an internal acknowledgment that things are more complicated and less certain, but that writing here remains something important for me, nonetheless. I’m still discovering myself here, even now.

Something I almost tweeted the other day, but didn’t: “In a year of win-some, lose-some, I feel like I’ve been given far too many of the latter and not enough of the former.”

I didn’t tweet it not because of its sour grapes quality, nor because it sounds a little too much like whining — I have no problem with either, I have to admit — but because I was waiting for another shoe to drop before surrendering to my pessimism so fully. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, maybe I could get something unexpected good happening that would balance out so much of the bad this year! Better not tempt fate by saying anything bad just yet!

You know where this is going, of course. While I’ve not had a final no on the dangling shoe in question just yet, I’ve had a fairly definitive “yeah, probably not unless something dramatic changes,” so… yeah. Let’s all start playing Aimee Mann’s “I Should’ve Known” and start dancing for a brief moment of self-shadenfreude. (Is there such a thing? Maybe not, given how confused spellcheck seems about the concept.)

I remember, back when 2021 was getting underway, that a couple of smart people said something to me along the lines of, “I bet this year is going to be worse than 2020,” the very idea of which seemed near-impossible to me. Why, we’d had a pandemic break out and multiple industries — including the one I worked in — had shuddered to a halt as a result. By January of this year, though, we’d all created a new normal that meant that there were plans and contingencies, and surely everything would get better from that point onwards?

Dear reader, how innocent and naive I was. It took less than a month of 2021 to reveal that it was going to be a harder year, and the numerous bait-and-switches of potential good fortune and welcome opportunities have only underscored that sad fact. We’re a month and change away from the end of the year, and while I hope it means an end to this trend, I’m far too cynical to truly believe that at this minute.

I was reading something the other day that suggested that, because of things like cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the metaverse, the “internet of today” was not a particularly fun place to be. Putting aside the obvious common sense factor that, yes, all of those things are terrible — I can’t deny that part of me sometimes thinks, oh, what if I could make a fortune on NFTs before the grift collapses, before immediately coming to my senses — the thing that sticks with me about this idea is the notion of the internet of today, as compared with internets of different periods of history.

Part of this is, I suspect, because the internet isn’t something that I’ve had in my life for even half of my life. (I’m old.) The idea that the internet has history is difficult for me to fully comprehend, because part of me is still of the opinion that the whole thing just got started a handful of years ago and everything has a novel sheen to it to this day.

I know that’s not actually true, of course; if nothing else, parts of the internet feel just the opposite, as if they’ve always existed. Haven’t I always been on Twitter, leaving it open as an endless newsfeed as I get through my work day? (Apparently not; I actually wrote about the utopian dream that was Twitter back in 2008 or 2009, brand new and fresh faced about the whole thing.) How did I exist before Gmail? Did I ever actually write letters? Really?

(And let’s not get into the streaming services and how they’ve changed the world, including my own personal world. I’ve heard a rumor that YouTube didn’t even get started until after I’d moved to the U.S., but that just seems extraordinary to consider.)

Despite all of this, I understand the concept of the “internet of today.” I think of all these things like crypto and NFTs and Web3 and everything as something beyond my ken, something for audiences younger and smarter than me. In many ways, the internet of today isn’t for me, but to actually consider that for even a minute leaves me adrift: if I don’t belong in the internet of today, does that mean I’m forever stuck in the past?

Going from a career based around permalancing — where you’re basically on staff for an outlet or multiple outlets, only without the benefits and with a lesser expectation of output per month, more or less — to fully freelancing this year has been, to be blunt, a learning experience. There’s certainly a skill to simply keeping track of the multiple outlets and deadlines and relationships necessary to keep yourself active and successful as a freelancer, and it’s been a pretty heavy learning curve for me, especially in an environment such as the past year or so, when so many publishers have been cutting back so dramatically when it comes to freelance budget across the board.

Even inside that larger learning experience, though, there has been an additional lesson that’s been a tough one to swallow: repeatedly getting stories that you just know would be worthwhile — or, at the very least, successful, which is far from the same thing, but perhaps no less important — turned down, because they’re not worth taking the risk of paying for even by editors who are otherwise in favor of them.

Part of this is genuinely the result of being spoiled by permalancing in the past, I know; pitching stories that editors perhaps weren’t entirely convinced by, but knew that it wasn’t going to cost them anything extra because I was paid per month, not per story — and, as a result, getting to do some pretty niche stuff that went over well as a result. That kind of thing just isn’t possible when every single story has to be paid for, and that money has to be justified to other people less willing to be forgiving for some of the random things I suggest.

I’m writing this now, salty, having (unsuccessfully) pitched variations on an idea to three different outlets and being told, essentially, that could be fun, but I couldn’t justify it each time. It’s frustrating, and depressing, to see in real time just how conservative (small c) online journalism has become, for entirely practical reasons. Alas.

For reasons that escape me, I’ve been reading extended runs of comics lately — running through collected editions of writers’ stays on titles (and, occasionally, artists’ stays as well, if the industry allows) that span years in just a couple of evenings. It’s not something that I necessarily intended to do, per se, as much as something that just happened — a re-read of one comic led to another, then another, then another.

It’s a surprisingly satisfying approach to late-night reading, I’ve found; in theory, I guess it’s “binging,” but it’s really just an attempt to recreate the experience of reading a prose novel, I suspect — reading a story that has a beginning, middle, and end and isn’t indefinitely continued until an undetermined point in the future. There’s a comfort in knowing where you are, in terms of the story — I’m on collected edition six, and there’s ten overall, so I’m basically at the halfway point — and also no small amount of comfort in being able to appreciate (and recognize) the recurring themes and intent behind the stories being told more easily, because I’m not waiting roughly four weeks between chapters.

(Of course, many mainstream comics don’t really have intentional recurring themes or an intent beyond Make Comic Get Paid, but that’s another story.)

The upshot of all of this, beyond something as base as “Immortal Hulk is good, but it dips in the middle and I’m not sure it lands the ending properly,” or “Man, the Five Years Later era of Legion of Super-Heroes is an utter mess, I can’t believe someone didn’t step in to tighten it up earlier,” is this: sitting down to invest the time and attention into an extended run on one set of characters and story has proven to be so rewarding as to feel as if I’ve managed to start reading for pleasure again, as opposed to work research or simply trying to keep on top of everything that’s out there because I’m supposed to.

Enjoying a leisure activity before I fall asleep at night! Will wonders never cease.

I’ve been thinking about explanatory journalism lately, for a number of reasons — in part, the one remaining Mystery Project I would mention, obliquely, in the first half of this year (something that remains unresolved but which, I worry, has gone the way of so many promising moments from 2021 that ended up vanishing into the ether before too long), and in part because of something else ongoing right now that may or may not turn into A Thing further down the line.

(Given my experience so far this year, I’m leaning towards “may not,” but I’m willing to be proven wrong on this particular subject.)

It’s also a subject that has been in my head because of the Washington Post massive story on what happened January 6, which goes substantially in-depth and breaks down the story into three sections: before the coup attempt, during it, and afterwards. It’s an impressive piece of work, and somewhat immersive to read due to the amount of research and reporting that clearly went into it, and it’s had me thinking: is this something that I could be doing? Or, really: what are the other ways I can present the stories that I’m working on, to make them more interesting to the reader?

It’s funny; I feel as if I’m dealing with these theoretical issues even though I have no outlet to experiment with right now. (True story: at the start of the year, I fully intended to start my own comics site. And then real life took over, and I had no time to do that. I even bought the domain and hosting!) And yet, I keep thinking about it — finding a way to present massive amounts of information to newcomers without it feeling too mechanical or un-personal, and making it interesting and understandable at the same time.

I’ve been watching For All Mankind lately, and there’s a line in an early episode where one of the engineers says that math is like music — sometimes, that’s how I feel about writing. As if there’s a song I just need to properly remember and then I’ll have the key to whatever problem I’m dealing with.

Not that this was a lead-in for a “key” pun, I hasten to add.

Written for somewhere that rejected it, so I posted it here. 

Founder’s Letter, 2021 (First Draft)

We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too. 

A wise man once said that the next chapter isn’t the end of our company, or even the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning, which makes it still the beginning, so if you think about it, this is the beginning of the beginning of the future for our company, which is the most exciting place for us all to be. The most exciting place is one that doesn’t exist yet. 

In recent decades, technology has changed the way that we as people connect and express ourselves. Before I started Facebook, people could only communicate face-to-face, or by letters, or using the telephone, or texting which is kind of like using the telephone I guess if you don’t like talking, or using telegrams, or smoke signals, or asking their friends to talk to you. Sometimes I guess you could get on television and people would watch you, if you were famous enough. My point stands: before I started Facebook, it was as if we were cavemen waiting for me to invent fire. We couldn’t do anything. 

But then I invented Facebook, for all mankind despite what The Social Network says. When I did that, technology got so much better. We didn’t just type text, we got phones that could take photographs, so we could suddenly see pictures. Connections got faster, allowing us all to pivot to video. The potential to share misinformation with impacts ranging from trivial to life-threatening just kept growing. And that’s just the beginning. The beginning of the beginning.

The next platform will be even more immersive — an internet just like the holodeck on Star Trek, but one that relies on products that we manufacture and own the rights to. A holodeck that we can profit from as we move into the future. We call this the metaverse. Don’t worry, the name will grow on you.

In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do anything you can imagine — chat with friends, shop online, work, learn, masturbate to multiple flavors of pornography — as well as multiple activities that we have imagined and monetized already for you. Experiences that you don’t fit with how you might think about computers or technology today, but which do require expensive hardware such as VR headsets manufactured by Oculus, one of the subsidiaries of meta. We were going to make a film that explores how you might use the metaverse, but realized we could just recommend watching Videodrome and The Lawnmower Man simultaneously instead.

In this future, you’ll be able to use the metaverse like you use the internet right now, but you’ll have a cartoon avatar and can pretend to be a hologram like Tupac. Imagine if you never had to leave your house, but your cartoon avatar hologram could go everywhere for you instead. You’d still have to work and pay bills but you can do so from the comfort of the extensive virtual reality set-up in your own home and without ever having to be near another human being ever again. This is the future. It’s very exciting. It’s very meta.

The metaverse will not be built by just one company. Thankfully, we are a lot of companies and you’re already using many of them. Even if you’ve abandoned Facebook, you’re probably still on Instagram, or chatting to friends on WhatsApp. Maybe you own an Oculus headset. We’re thinking about buying a grocery store like Jeff Bezos. You’d use that too. 

We take this responsibility lightly. In the past five years, I’ve been criticized a lot — I think everyone would agree too much — for not listening to users enough or listening to people inside my own company warning that Facebook is a threat to democracy and anyone that isn’t cis and white. In the metaverse, things will be different, in part because we can simply stop complaining holograms from being heard altogether. It will take a lot of work, but if there’s one thing I know about the people who work to make the internet happen, it’s that you can always give them more work. 

We’re going to make some important changes in order to build the metaverse. Not enough people are talking about NFTs and cryptocurrency, and that’s something we’re working to change. Few understand how cool holograms are, and that’s something I’m personally dedicating myself to change. Some people still think that Pinkerton is the best album that Weezer recorded, but Maladroit is really underrated and it’s not the kind of thing that people really give enough credit to. All of the company is going to be working to change that, too.

As we embark on this next chapter, this beginning of the beginning, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity. 

Today we’re seen as a social media company. An evil social media company that has undoubtedly done its part to make the internet worse for every single user. It’s an iconic social media brand. But we can be more. We can make more worse than just the internet. We can be better — no, we can be betta. We can be Meta. Do you see what I did there?

Our new name Meta embodies everything I want our company to be moving forward — seemingly profound but ultimately meaningless, inexplicable, and just irritating enough to provoke a negative gut reaction at the very thought of it. It’s the future I want to see, and I hope it’s the future that you want to see as well. This next chapter will be the beginning of a beginning of a future beyond anything we can imagine. Well, anything you can imagine. To paraphrase my own personal hero, I already imagined it 35 minutes ago. 

All the best! Let’s be hologram buddies!

— Mark Zuckerberg