The Personal Web

There is something scary about digital life right now and how it's mirroring meatspace. Language has popped up to address this phenomenon–at least from my perspective:

• "Chronically online" people "live" on their platforms of choice. Those who actively create content for their preferred platforms even see verbal shifts in their identities, for example, becoming "Tiktokkers" and "Youtubers" the way someone who lives and works in New York or Chicago is a "New Yorker" or "Chicagoan."
• When Tiktok was under attack from the United States government, Tiktokkers became known as "Tiktok refugees" and they "migrated" to apps like Lemon8 and Xiaohongshu.
• And who can forget when longtime members of the Twitterati, disgusted with their god-king's antics, left the platform in the "mass Twitter exodus" and "found a home" on Bluesky and Threads?
• Even in terms of non-social media, people "migrate" their data, or say that certain files "live" on the desktop or in the cloud.

With that being said, platform-owners and governments have followed suit and seek to make it so that our digital lives are beholden to the same laws that govern analogue space. Why does everything have to be so controlled?

While I'm inclined to write more, perfection is the enemy of action, so I'll push this post out and tag it as "thoughts" or something. I'll definitely follow up on it with another post. Probably. The same way I did with the Unnamed Chicken Game (which I am still technically working on...ish.)

But! I do want to point out a funny coincidence. This post has literally been sitting as a draft for about a year. This is what it would have looked like if I didn't choose to end it where I'm ending it.

Like I said, it's been a year. So, I went to check the TechTea page I had linked and the literal first words of the post are:

Is everyone who thinks about the personal web and inclined to write about it doomed to let it sit in the draft box?