hello world 4.0

a brief history of my life on the internet

On Wednesday night, I get a vaguely urgent text from my mother at 9.30pm. I quickly ring her back to find that she wants to know if I’d ever heard of this new thing called web 3.0. It’s mostly a doomsday call about how web 3.0 is coming and my job in tech is soon to be automated away by chat gpt.

I supposed starting a blog in 2023 is the internet equivalent of just finding out about web 3.0. It feels a little stale, perhaps a bit naive, like I’m a few cycles behind the next-big-thing in cool internet things. But to me, writing on the internet feels intuitive.

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It’s Sunday and naturally I’m 2 hours late to a friend’s party in soho. I rush in to a full house, dj set on high vibrations and a generous spread of tandoori chicken. Eventually I find myself talking to my friend m, who I haven’t seen in a few months. We start catching up, about her job in an art adjacent world, and I ask her what it‘s like to pursue a creative career.

Even though I was a creative child, I’ve also always been incredibly risk-averse. I once heard the heuristic that pursuing art as a career means you have to love art enough to be poor. I suppose I love art but only enough to still afford doordashing milk bar to my apartment when I feel sad.

m says to me how she thinks I should just go for it — “I can tell you’re a creative person”.

Because I’m self indulgent I ask how she knows. She says she can tell, some things people have to learn, but creativity is one of those things that come naturally to some people. I’d like to consider myself one of those people.

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I’ve been listening to “the mountain is you” on audible, which is a tiktok recommendation that hit my FYP just as I embarked on my annual Q1 quest for self-improvement. I’m perennially on chapter 4: intuition —  coincidentally, I’ve recently found myself in the same mechanical loop at work and in my daily life, asking mentors, friends how I find my gut instinct because I’m afraid I might not have one.

When it comes to major life decisions or  judgement calls in my career, I find that I can reason my way into any end state. But I'm not sure I want to be the type of person that makes life decisions on the basis of pros and cons. Venture capitalists will tell you that you have to start pattern matching. But what if it’s all noise vs signal, and your models are trained on bad data? How do you even know what’s helpful information? Or that ROI is the best metric to anchor on?

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I know that writing on the internet is intuitive because this will be the 4th blog I’ve started in the history of my life on the internet. I made and wrote my first blog post in 2011 — under a pseudonym because this was still a time where we didn’t trust the world wide web — on blogspot dot com —- a blogging platform which doesn’t exist anymore.

In researching for this blog post, I unearthed this piece of internet history. Digging through my first email inbox, I found an email from 2014 with a comment from a follower that linked to a still working URL:

In 2013, I started microblogging on tumblr. Retrospectively, I'm not sure this even counts as a true blog as tumblr was more of a moodboard time capsule into the early 2010s than a publishing platform, but it was much cooler UX than blogspot. So again I started an anonymous tumblr with a mashing of bon iver quotes, “thinspo” and bad poetry.

I guess it’s worth mentioning my most recent blog attempt: a post-covid spring awakening. The original ideation was something along the lines of downtown ny girl recommendations, but something about having to stay on top of cool new restaurant openings felt untimely and expensive. “some places i like” never made it past the staging feature on squarespace.

Writing this all out, it seems obvious that writing on the internet is something I’ve always gravitated towards. But it’s even more surprising to me, how the themes that I used to write about — clothes, moodboards, places, ideas and things I like —- are still things that I want to write about in 2023.

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The mountain is you talks about how most of our biggest regrets are things we didn’t do. Not as a way to feel negative emotions about not living up to our own expectations but to understand what is imperative to achieve in our future.

Looking back, I feel a bit sad that I never stuck with my 2011 blogspot. In its decade of existence, it’s racked up 16,000 page views and I can’t help but think about what could have been had I just continued writing. I wonder if in another universe, a reality exists where I could’ve been the next tavi gevinson, publishing prodigy turned actress running around the world pursuing art and wearing beautiful clothes. In this universe I’m just another internet girl running late to the party.