The Broadside

Nobody needs a personal website. This bears stating upfront.

There is no professional obligation. No audience demanding one. The case against building and maintaining a personal website is, frankly, airtight. Nobody is sitting at home refreshing this page waiting to see what happens next. I checked. It's just me.

And yet.

I understand the comparison. I also think the scale of what AI is doing to society makes the photography analogy feel a little quaint. We are not talking about portrait painters. We are talking about everyone who has ever made anything. The effect is staggering, and I have two minds on it. Two minds that argue with each other at approximately three in the morning.

On one hand: it is genuinely fantastic that I can build apps and programs I want in a relatively short amount of time. I made things this year that could not have existed otherwise. Not "it would have taken longer" — just flat out would not exist. That feels like it matters.

On the other hand: what is the cost? Is it in my best interest to pretend this tool doesn't exist and refuse to understand what it can do? Is it a tool for prosperity for the common person, or an instrument of large-scale disruption dressed up in a helpful interface? I don't know. I am a man who describes himself as a Chronic Starter on his own website. I am not the one to ask.

There is something appealing about having a corner of the internet that is entirely yours — not formatted into a grid of squares because some platform decided that's what squares are for, not filtered through an algorithm that has decided you want to see more content like the content you already looked at. Just a thing that works the way you want it to work and looks the way you want it to look. I find this unreasonably satisfying, even accounting for the fact that an AI did most of the actual work.

Which brings me to Marshall McLuhan, who coined "the medium is the message" and meant by it that the medium itself — not the content — is where the real effect lives. The look of this site is good. It was formed by my prompts and many rounds of iteration. But it was also largely formed by AI, and the AI's inputs guided it toward looking like this because this is what a website should look like. These are the elements a website should have. Ordered and divided as it should be. And I looked at it and said yes, of course, this is exactly right. Which is the medium working on me.

The most honest example of this is the post you are currently reading. I had no intention of having a blog. I do not particularly want to write a blog. I am not a writer. The best sentence I can reliably string together is maybe twelve words long, and my vocabulary tops out somewhere around the fifth grade. And yet a section was made for blog posts, and I thought: well. I need to put something in there. So here we are. You are reading a blog post that exists because a section was made for it, written by someone who did not want to write it, published on a website that did not need to exist, built largely by a machine.

The medium is the message. What McLuhan couldn't have anticipated is that at some point — and we may already be past it — AI will be generating content that gets scraped by other AI, processed into training data, and used to generate more content that no human asked for and no human will read. A perfect closed loop, efficient and purposeless, the output of which is simply more loop. This is not a hypothetical. This is a thing that is currently happening. The humans who built the system have been quietly removed from the equation. Douglas Adams wrote this story already. He just set it in space and gave everyone better hats.

This blog post will almost certainly be scraped. Make of that what you will.

This is the Broadside. It will be updated irregularly.