‘do you ever cycle through the same 4 apps on your phone over and over again and feel like a tiger pacing its cage at the zoo’ (tweet from whitegirlblog, Dec 26, 2018)
The Spring of 2025 marks my slightly off-kilter anniversary in the world of blogging: 13 years! 13 years of tortuous puns and enthusiastic book reviews. I took a few sabbaticals in that time, to have a baby and attempt to write a novel, and I’m slightly nervous to mention that making an entirely new human being took less mental effort, and less time, than writing the book. The wisdom of the body is unmatched. (There is, of course a poem for this: The Spirit is Too Blunt an Instrument by Anne Stevenson)
Blogging has always been a tremendously uncool thing to do, but in recent years, as social media platforms have descended from annoying and distracting to… actually tearing apart the fabric of society, I have discovered there are a lot of people online celebrating the homemade web: the blogs and strange individual websites, the oddities and fringe-interest collections. I am so pleased with all of this. If you keep ploughing on with your uncool hobby for long enough, and just make sure you’re having a good time doing it, eventually someone will give it a thumbs up.
I ditched Twitter aeons ago and recently deleted Instagram, and I’m gradually accepting that Facebook must be the next to go in the bin (and honestly, even Zuckerberg seems to get it: Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over | The New Yorker). I could write a whole slog of a blog about the why of deleting social media, but I don’t really feel this is necessary. I think anyone with a brain can see that social media is not great Bob. Instead, I’d like to err on the side of hope, and look at what you gain when you move on to the homegrown web.
Part of my preparation for quitting the big platforms was to read some of Jaron Lanier’s books (https://www.jaronlanier.com/), firstly You Are Not a Gadget. He is one of my favourite thinkers, and this book was a revelation, a call for courage and open-mindedness in the way that we live and experience the world. He speaks of mystery as something to be welcomed and explored, however difficult this may feel (it sometimes seems there is scant tolerance for mystery or nuance on the internet). He writes of alternatives to the status quo, and the parts of technology, like files, or links, which we are starting to forget were a choice. He writes of human forgetfulness, as we grow used to the web as it is, and forget all the other myriad ways it could have been. It is a pro-human approach to the problems with the technologies we have invented. In this book, and his more immediate and polemical 10 Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, he lays out, with precision and clarity, the many ways that social media platforms degrade our lives. He offers actions that are available to anyone who wants a different kind of internet, and these two stayed with me:
Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that wanted to come out.
The more people do this, the more we regain a sense of respect for each other’s attention and time, and the more nuanced and complex our postings will be. I’d been writing blog posts long before I read You Are Not a Gadget, but it motivated me to think of the blog as something to treasure and maintain. It has been immensely rewarding to allow myself the time to sort out my thoughts before posting them, to make my posts as entertaining and enjoyable as I can, and then to leave them up here as a little testament to the work of an actual human being. Most of all, blogging resurrects the idea that the internet can be fun. I know almost nobody reads this blog but it has been a reliable source of enjoyment for all of these 13 years. Some of my blogs have been utterly silly, but some I still remember the glow, the deep satisfaction, of writing them: ‘Banned Books, Pseudonyms and a Secret Magazine’ and ‘Things I Didn’t Know I Loved’ are probably my favourites.
From inner to outer space: I’ve been trying to seek out internet content with as much care and thoughtfulness as I write blog posts. My day job is in the fields of politics and research which means I am obliged to keep up with the news, so in my own time I try to make an effort to swim away from all that. I’ve been rewiring my online habits by pursing the small, unfamiliar and fascinating. Here are some of the snaking paths I have followed through the wilderness. I hope you find an interesting spot to tarry a while:
Messy Nessy’s Cabinet of Curiosities
If you’re looking for a curated array of the most fascinating things humans do (and did), it is here. From architecture to unsung artists, forgotten places to vintage sugar cube packaging, there’s always some new remarkable rarity showcased on Nessy’s blog. Her long running ‘Things I Found on the Internet’ series is one I check all the time, for evidence that humans, when left in peace, mostly like to have fun and make things. https://www.messynessychic.com/.
The Syllabus Project
It was on one of Messy Nessy’s blog posts that I found ‘Take an Internet Walk,’ on the website Syllabus Project: ‘Instead of traversing the congested highways of the web, we invite you to try alternative routes: take a scroll down local streets and wandering paths, try out someone else’s commute, rediscover the favorites of your neighborhood, and gather the friends you love in your favorite spots, quiet and comforting.’ https://syllabusproject.org/syllabus-for-taking-an-internet-walk/#:~:text=Instead%20of%20traversing%20the%20congested,favorite%20spots%2C%20quiet%20and%20comforting..
Does this seem more professional?
It was in the above syllabus that I followed a link to the website of the artist Molly Soda, which is giving early Myspace vibes, mixed with a fever dream about the 1998 world wide web: does this seem more professional?. Oh, it’s just perfect.
The Public Domain Review
A more orderly place to spend some time is the Public Domain Review, a place dedicated to the ‘exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.’ I really could lose hours here, just looking at old book covers, each a work of art: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-book-covers-1820-1914/.
The Golden Sardine newsletter
I was completely drawn in to Robin Sloan’s description of his attempt to create a new kind of social space, and what went into its creation and maintenance (spoiler: maintaining a space on the internet where the public can share their views is… hard work). From there I found his Golden Sardine newsletter, a delightful correspondence which pops into the inbox every so often with an update on things he has enjoyed (most recently, Star Trek and essays on tariffs). Another curated collection of interesting things, delivered fuss-free, for your perusal.
You can have the internet you want. The bars of your cage are not real. Happy travels x
Amy Jardine 
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