I couldn’t help but wonder... when did sharing our thoughts online become an unpaid sales job?
Lately, it feels like the universal prescription for having an opinion is to start a Substack. Everyone is doing it. You click a link expecting a quick read, and before you can even scan the first paragraph, a giant modal pops up demanding your email address, your attention, and eventually, ten dollars a month. Suddenly, you aren’t just a person sharing a thought; you’re a "publication" with a subscriber goal, a content pipeline, and a metric dashboard.
But what if you don't want a newsletter? What if you just want a room of your own?
The current pressure in the digital air right now to turn every interest into a transaction is exhausting. We are told to build "perceived social capital," to chase "empty followers," and to feed the machine. And to make it worse, the internet is suddenly flooded with the slick, unmistakable sheen of AI-generated prose, lots of paragraphs that are perfectly structured, and completely devoid of human blood. It is noise. Not even good noise. Just optimised echo chambers designed to make us look busy.
I find myself deeply nostalgic for the old blog format. The one that didn't ask you to subscribe to anything.
Remember when a personal website was just a space on the net? It didn't have a database, it didn't track your scroll depth, and it certainly didn't send push notifications to someone's phone at dinner. It was just a static page, a couple of custom styles, and a few thoughts typed up late at night.
Kathleen Kelly is sitting at her cosy wooden desk, staring at a boxy 90s monitor, wondering if anyone on the other side of the dial-up connection is actually reading.
I don't want to rent a space inside someone else’s walled garden, constantly worried that a platform’s shifting algorithm or sudden bankruptcy might delete my entire digital footprint overnight. There is an existential peace in paying a few pounds a year for your own domain, finding a cheap, lightweight way to host it, and letting it exist independently. Maybe that’s the real luxury of the modern web: the freedom to write into the nothingness. To build a space that is under-optimised, completely quiet, and entirely yours.
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