Status report 1
It has been a week since I published “Yet Another Web Eulogy” as a first earnest attempt at working creatively with AI. I’d been working on this site, in some form or another, for about a month. The experience of finishing something that substantial, and then actually putting it out into the world this way, is still settling with me.
I don’t know what I expected. Silence, maybe. But many of you read it. Some of you wrote back. I added a few of those responses to the margins of that piece, which felt like the right way to capture them (as part of an ongoing conversation).
Analytics
I’ve maintained a fairly low-footprint presence across social media for the last six years or so, and in that time the platforms have changed a lot in how they distribute web content. Twitter (now X) has basically disappeared as a channel for independent publishers. LinkedIn is surprisingly more viable (I suppose because I’ve been working a day job for some time now) and I wonder what that opens up. LinkedIn is full of AI slop, career-hacking junk food, and shameless networking — perhaps bringing real content there would do well? At any rate, I’m realizing I have my work cut out for me to get any meaningful channel re-established to let people know about new things I’ve released.
%% palette: terracotta, sage, navy, ochre, coral, slate %%
pie
title First 7d traffic sources
"Instagram" : 42
"Direct" : 30
"LinkedIn" : 15
"Twitter/X.com" : 9
"Google" : 3
"Threads" : 1I’m somewhat surprised at how effectively Instagram has maintained their Stories algorithm; it really nails the “deliver intermittent updates to personal friends” use case, and I suppose that’s not super surprising. But then again, I wonder what that means in the grand scheme of things — and especially, I wonder if Meta owning that space says anything about their failure to get people to engage with their LLMs.
I’m including these percentages mostly as a reminder to track this breakdown into the future … there are other things I could do (email you a link, update an RSS feed, or, god forbid, send a text) and until I figure out something that works, I will be relying on friends to pass this around the old fashioned way.
Theme switching
You can now toggle between light and dark mode by pressing T on your keyboard. Your preference should persist across visits (in localStorage), and, if you haven’t made a choice, the site will respect your device’s dark mode settings. This is one of those features that sounded trivial, and was very easy to explain to the AI, but trying to implement it properly as a designer got pretty complex: I’m using Mermaid charts to render SVGs from plain text data, which means that color theme switching gets gnarly; and building scss color tokens that are (in the end) mode-agnostic and semantic can quickly get out of hand, even for a small project like this. It took longer than I’d like to admit, and will likely still harbor a few bugs. Let me know.
Mobile layout
The overall experience should be dramatically improved on phones, especially in in-app browsers that behave unpredictably, like the kind found on social apps: better typography, charts scale more legibly, and there’s now a fixed navigational footer with some useful shortcuts.
Image attachments
Images are now served via an industrial-strength Cloudflare content delivery network that I really had no business setting up. I will likely be squandering its true power for months to come, but it keeps large media binaries out of my git repo, so I figured best to do that sort of thing early. I didn’t really need this system last week, but this week I’m adding more content that requires it.
Reproductions
I’ve decided to archive my older stuff here, too — essays, bits and pieces, memories, etc. — and so I’ve set up a little system to do that easily. Let me know if you have any requests. Until then …
TOUGH LUCK
Today I’m re-publishing “Tough Luck,” a piece I wrote for DIS Magazine in November 2016 — literally days before the first Trump election. Reading it now is a strange experience. The essay is about coming to terms with rigged systems: surveillance, platform algorithms, the slow realization that the institutions we’d trusted were, at best, performing competence. It was written in that particular pre-Trump moment when liberal America was still certain that his candidacy was a joke, an impossibility, and that the subsequent eight years in the United States would be led (as if by fate) by Hillary Clinton. Feels like three lifetimes ago. At least.
The piece ends with a line I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:
”… we’ll remain just a little relieved that the chaos and violence isn’t worse than we privately imagine it could be.”
I meant it then, and I think I still mean it now — though the “privately imagine” part has gotten harder to keep cooped up. It’s leaked out — everyone is talking about civil war, “a national divorce”, and the greater geopolitical situation seems to reflect our domestic crisis of identity.
I grew up in Minnesota, and, at the time of this letter, the frozen streets there are wild with kinetic conflict between residents and a militarized immigration police. For now, let me just say that to watch from afar — both physically, and somewhat spiritually, as I’ve taken a certain leave from following street conflicts as closely as I once did — is harder than I expected.
The world seems so different from the Autumn of 2016. And yet … the core of what I was trying to say in that piece still feels true. The instability we’re living through isn’t the worst version of what instability can (and could just as easily) resemble. History is full of examples that make our current moment seem almost manageable by comparison. That’s not an argument for complacency — it’s the opposite. It’s a reminder that the space between “bad” and “worse” is where the interesting work happens. We’re still in that space. And if there is one thing that is clear to me from history, it’s that a real conflict never ends.
This, to me, feels very much like a real conflict. And therefore, I hope that we can do what we can to prepare to live with it for a very long time. I hope that means finding common paths toward de-escalation, but I’m really in no place to say as much. I also don’t know if re-reading Tough Luck will feel prescient or naïve. Probably both. The essay is a time capsule from a moment when everything felt to me like it was about to break, and then it did.
The systems are still rigged. The platforms still extract. The violence still simmers. And we’re still here, trying to make sense of it — if I’m being honest, a little relieved that it isn’t worse.
More soon.
— Tyler