Packing Up My Words
There was a time when the internet felt like a quiet street at dusk. People built personal websites and kept blogs simply to share what they were thinking about—music, gardening, philosophy, or daily life. It was unpolished, but it was human, and nobody was tracking your every move to sell you something a minute later.
Then came social media. MySpace came first, acting as a strange middle ground. It was crowded and chaotic, but you could still edit your own HTML, pick your own background music, and build a profile that felt like a messy, personalized bedroom. But then Facebook took over and streamlined everything. It made the internet clean, uniform, and convenient, so people gradually abandoned their personal sites and moved inside. We traded control for a standardized box in a crowded room, and tech companies realized they could turn our attention, relationships, and daily presence into money.
The software we used back then reflected that same older spirit. We had shareware—small programs built by independent developers or tiny teams. You could download a tool, test it out for as long as you needed, and if you liked it, you paid a small, one-time fee to register it or send a check in the mail. You bought the software, and it was yours. Now, everything is a subscription. You do not own the tools on your computer anymore; you rent them month to month, while companies track your usage and lock your data behind paywalls.
The music landscape took the exact same turn. We used to collect records, tapes, CDs, or local audio files. You held the album in your hands, read the sleeve, or kept your own library on a hard drive. It belonged to you. Today, music streaming platforms have turned listening into another endless, rented utility. You pay every month for access to a massive catalog, but you own none of it. If a platform loses a license or pulls a track, it vanishes from your life overnight. Music shifted from a personal collection you cared for into background noise curated by algorithms designed to keep you scrolling.
The same creep happened with books. A physical book sits on a shelf quietly. It does not track which page you are on, how fast you turn it, or what passages you highlight. When you buy a physical copy, it belongs to you forever, immune to corporate license changes or remote deletions. Digital readers and subscription libraries brought convenience, but they also brought tracking metrics and digital rights management. Even reading a book became something monitored, analyzed, and rented.
This subscription mindset has bled right out of our screens and into the physical world. You cannot even buy certain new cars now without carmakers trying to rent you basic hardware that is already built into the vehicle. Want heated seats, remote start, or full engine performance? That will be a monthly fee. The metal and wires sit in your driveway, but the manufacturer keeps a remote digital hand on the key.
The whole culture has devolved into absurdity. I took an online IQ test recently, fully expecting the usual trick where they demand your email address before showing the results. It was worse than that. At the end, after spending twenty minutes answering questions, they presented me with an offer to subscribe to my score for $9.99 a month. A monthly subscription to view a single static number. How does that even make sense? It is a complete parody of modern internet monetization, where everything, no matter how small, is rigged into a recurring credit card charge.
If they can rent you the heat in your car or a static IQ score, of course they are going to try to monetize every word you type, too. Now we are at the edge of the AI push. It can be a useful tool, but in corporate hands, it gets greedy fast.
Substack recently partnered with Pangram so people can scan a writer’s work and get an AI grade on whether a human wrote it. Using an algorithm to test for human soul is almost funny, but mostly it is just tiresome. It is another data collection loop disguised as trust, built to help a partner company make money off human expression.
On top of that, Substack has changed. It used to be a good home for long-form writing, but now the whole site is pushed toward short-form Notes. It is turning into another noise machine. Readers are trained to skim quick reactions instead of sitting down with a piece that takes ten minutes of real attention.
When a platform stops fitting the work, it is time to leave.
I am moving my primary writing over to Bear Blog. It is simple, fast, private, and secure. It does not harvest reader data or run on an algorithmic feed. Just plain text on a screen. I might occasionally cross-post an update on Substack, but Bear Blog is where my full focus will be.
If you want to follow along without an algorithm deciding what you see, I recommend using NetNewsWire. It is open source, free, and does not require an account. You can add my RSS feed, and new posts will go straight to your reader.
We do not have to let companies monetize every second of our attention. The quiet internet is still out there if you want to walk back out to it.