Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.

I’ve been struggling with these feelings for a while. I’ve even written about them in the past. Mostly in the context of trying to talk to my coworkers about the problems of their beloved text and image generating algorithms and the ways they’ve brushed me off or made it clear that they don’t care. The latest of these failed attempts on my part was telling my boss, who also uses WordPress for his side business’ website, about what was happening with WordPress’ parent company. In response, he told me he wanted all those plagiarism algorithms to have his intellectual property so they’d have access to the information his website provides. The implication–before I ended the conversation because I absolutely did not have it in me to talk to him about why it’s bad for his intellectual property to be stolen and why the very machinery and computing power of these algorithms is bad for the entire planet, only to have him inevitably brush it off as me being a pessimist or “party pooper” yet again–was that those garbage-spewing media generations would give people correct information and, perhaps, even drive people to his business if they asked for local businesses. Which just goes to show his fundamental misunderstanding of how all this stuff works. I’m not terribly surprised, given that he wants to find some kind of algorithm to do everything for him, including produce podcasts using his voice and do at least half his job for him, but it still stings for this to be the constant refrain that I’m running into with him and all of my coworkers (most of whom should know better). None of them care that these things are ruining creative careers, the internet as a whole, and the environment, so how the hell am I supposed to get them to consider my viewpoint?

All of which makes it feel like trying to produce any kind of creative work is pointless. Why write a novel when it seems like so much of the world is happy with whatever trash a plagiarism machine produced for them? Who cares about artfully crafted sentences or being able to write so smoothly and unobtrusively that it feels like you’re listening to someone talk rather than reading something? Who cares about craft, word choice, deep insight, creative expression, or a writer’s unique viewpoint? Fewer and fewer people every day, it seems, as these machines of information destruction continue to spread and propagate, fueled by the very businesses they will eventually destroy. After all, no one will train one of these environmental dumpster fires on information produced by itself or another similar program. It would poison the data pool and destroy the machine’s ability to vomit up strings of text that resemble sentences or collections of pixels that resemble images. Sure, they could probably work around those problems, but none of these companies are interested in actually engaging with the problems on a larger scale. They want in on a fad and to make as much money as they can before the whole system (or the environment and thereby the entire planet) collapse.

Doing anything to extend the life of this destructive wave makes me nauseous. Doing anything that even might contribute to the extension of this destructive wave fills me with dread. That’s why it’s difficult to write new posts since I am forced to confront the fact that, as a plagiarism-machine free website, my writing will almost always be ripe for scraping by these companies. The only reason it might never get scraped–or, as is happening to more and more news sites, entirely duplicated with enough words swapped around to not be immediately detectable as plagiarism–is because I don’t get enough traffic. I don’t draw a huge crowd even on my most popular days and even those are fairly tame because I refuse to play into the SEO machine. I don’t want to make my website look like every other website just to get it higher up in search engine results. I want to have my own space, that feels more like a place I’d enjoy spending my time and that represents me more than it attempts to be a popular place for other people, but even my little corner of the internet will eventually be scraped for every bit of data it contains, if it hasn’t already. That’s why I am struggling so much with what feels like adding to the pile of stuff that future bullshit-peddling “content” generators will pull on to better inform their patterned but still unintentional assemblages of pixels and scraps of meaning. I want no part in it and I’m not convinced there’s any way to actually stop it other than to not post new things.

I don’t know what to do yet. I know this is coming out more than a week after the original news broke, but I spent three days slowly losing my grip on reality from stress and anxiety, one day trying to recover and almost having a mental breakdown for unrelated reasons, a weekend where I deliberately didn’t think about this just so I could try to recover from this stress, and then three days trying to deal with everything that happened while I was walking up to the brink of a mental breakdown the week before. I have had no time to actually act on this and very little time to think about it. I mean, I know the answer is that, if I’m going to continue blogging, I need to swap over to a carefully managed WordPress (.org) self-hosted somewhere else, but there’s a lot of work involved in making that happen and I barely have the energy to do my job after the endless grind and burnout of the past four and a half months. It’s going to be slow going and I won’t have final answers for a while yet. Which mostly just means you should expect at least one of these posts a week as I continue processing what happened and slowly shift gears until I’ve figured out what I’m going to do. However long that takes. All I can really say about the timeline is that it’ll definitely happen before the end of May since my domain expires in June and I’m not giving WordPress (.com) another penny.