I used to have a blog. It was called We Made a Blog. If that name sounds very 2009, that’s because it was. It lasted a few years, and after that, I didn’t think about it too often. But lately, as posting platform after posting platform disappoints us, it’s on my mind a lot. Especially now, with the news that Tumblr and WordPress are about to sell user data to OpenAI and Midjourney to train AI tools. My dead blog will be turned into an AI zombie and I’m grappling with how I feel about it while also mourning the loss of a vibrant, collective internet. Much has been made lately about the death of the internet, particularly the places we all posted. Facebook was long ago lost to political rantings and conspiracy theorists. Instagram is a feed of no one you asked to follow. X has been taken over by Nazis, and because Substack also welcomed Nazis, people have fled there too. As if that wasn’t bad enough, now every word of Reddit will be used to train AI.
“There is a sense that I’ll just be yelling into a void. There are no places online that connect us all anymore.”
One thing that has not died, though, is the desire for those of us who are terminal posters to share our thoughts somewhere. And that’s why I, and a lot of others I know, have been thinking about getting back to blogging. While I get to write about plenty of what interests me at PCMag, there are things I want to share that just don’t belong here. When I stopped blogging, those things typically found a home on social media platforms like Twitter—but now that the site has devolved into X, it’s not a place that I want to support. So as the number of suitable homes for my posts continues to shrink, I’ve been slowly filling up my Notes app with ideas. Yet as excited as I get when I plan out posts, there is a sense that I’ll just be yelling into a void. There are no places online that connect us all anymore. We have been siloed so many times over that some of us are only speaking to ourselves or, worse, AI that has been trained on us.
When I made a blog, I did not know I would be training AI (Credit: We Made a Blog)
This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training.
“In the heyday of blogging, the internet seemed at once immensely vast but also incredibly close. This is no longer the world we live in, offline or online.”
Nevertheless, the language in it is vague enough and too AI-friendly to make me (and likely many others) use WordPress to set up the blog I’ve been dreaming of. This latest loss, coming on the heels of those others, feels like the biggest blow of all, maybe because the two sites are how so many of us started.
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In the heyday of blogging, the internet seemed at once immensely vast but also incredibly close. It was a neighborhood where you could walk over and chat with anyone about obscure shared interests or discover something entirely new that would consume you. This is no longer the world we live in, offline or online. Because I no longer have the logins to Tumblr or WordPress, though, I guess a form of me will continue on in AI that, due to being trained on my old blog posts, will remember baking bread in Brooklyn, has things to say about Basquiat on a sticky summer day, and knows what it’s like to spend a fall day at MoMA looking at chairs. In the death of the internet, we’re all just ghosts in the machine.
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