In general, I'm seeing fewer spaces online for writing and sharing stories via writing. I thought it was maybe just me, until a podcaster I listen to, who's a former writer, mentioned that there's less money in it. Venture capitalists are bored by the written word now, I guess, so they're not putting money into online writing. (They are putting money into #LLMs like #ChatGPT so that the robots, who don't need to be paid, can do the writing rather than people.) It seems like anyone who wants to share their perspective with the world needs to do so via video or at least audio. There's less of a market for websites that rely on text. Writers now seem to have pivoted to video or they put out their own individual newsletters, but there are fewer spaces for people to write and reliably get paid for it.

#Precarity #Neoliberalism #Capitalism #LateStageCapitalism #Writing #Internet #InternetCulture #InternetSpaces

And back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was one of the people who was hopeful that the #internet could be different. Perhaps I too optimistically generalized my own internet use to the world. When I was a teen, I used my family's painfully slow dial-up to learn about things that no one else in my conservative Christian community would talk about, like #AbortionRights and #LGBTQRights. I used the internet to expand my perspectives, and I thought everyone else would too!

Unfortunately, I was wrong, but for a while, that felt possible. There was a sort of #feminist resurgence in the late 2000s and early 2010s that online spaces like #Jezebel were part of, and they made #feminism cool. They were full of women writing in a style that pulled no punches and that could be as explicit and sarcastic as writers who were men often were. In retrospect, it was often shallow, but to me leaving conservative Christianity, it felt liberatory!