Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.

The part that rankles the most is that they’re touting these “opt-out” setting as if they’re worthy of praise, but its basically the same as saying “you can elect to stop being on fire if you want to, but not until after we’ve doused you in gasoline and lit you up.” The idea that adding the option to opt out of having your data SOLD to some third party is somehow a good thing is almost as much garbage as pretty much everything made by an LLM or image generating algorithm (I refuse to refer to them as “AI” since there’s absolutely nothing “intelligent” about them). This whole thing is infuriating but the implication that they’re doing something good here, by allowing attentive users to search for a setting they can flip to stop future data scraping (along with a request to remove data scraped in the past which may or may not be respected since its just asking politely rather than an enforceable mechanism to have your stolen data removed) rather than forcing people to find the setting to opt into having their data used for a plagiarism machine, is especially galling. I’ve already spent an hour today looking for alternatives to WordPress and have found a few viable options that I’m already looking into.

I’m not leaving yet, though. Other companies (most notably DeviantArt), have changed their policy in response to publish backlash, but I really can’t imagine how anyone up the ladder from WORDPRESS AND TUMBLR, sites KNOWN FOR CATERING TO ARTISTS, thought there’d be anything but incandescent outrage in response to this development. It seems likely that they were hoping no one would notice until they’d signed and sealed the deal for everyone’s data, but then this does include a company that has an “AI Assistant” baked into the UI for WRITING BLOG POSTS, so who the fuck even knows anymore. What this means in the short term, at least for me, is that this is my last blog post on a site hosted by WordPress until I’m absolutely certain that my data will not be sold to whatever Venture Capital Schmuck comes along with a desire to plagiarize and what is apparently enough money for literally everyone to pretend that copyright law doesn’t exist. I’ve got posts scheduled since Automattic’s statement says they’re adding the opt-out option [I was able to find it, opt-out, and even find a blog post from Automattic that talked in more detail about what the setting is supposed to do, so my scheduled blog posts will continue for now, though I’m absolutely not uploading another chapter of Infrared Isolation or any other piece of fiction to this blog], but I’m still going to be looking into self-hosting options in what little spare time I’ve got so I don’t have to worry about this bullshit in the future. I’m willing to pay to keep my data safe and to not need to worry about some asshole company secretly trying to sell my data before I notice whatever bullshit they’re up to.

Frankly, this is the last thing I needed this week. This is the last thing I needed any week. I already struggle with how pointless this blog feels, sometimes. How difficult it is to keep creating and putting this stuff out there when no one seems to really care about it or engage with it. How much it sucks to hear from people how much they love my writing on the rare occasions that someone I know actually reads something I wrote and then to never hear from them again because they didn’t read anything else ever. And yeah, I can see a number of clicks coming to my blog from other places, but they come and go without any other trace, so it’s difficult know if people are actually reading anything or if something with a lot of views was just blessed by the algorithm devils or if it was actually interesting and eye-catching enough to push people to click-through to read it. I work in an almost silent vacuum. I get almost no feedback and I keep myself going because the act of writing has value to me. Knowing that this work is going to be stolen by some asshole with more money than humanity and that every single step of the posting process beyond the effort I put into writing, editing, and sharing the posts is doing its damnedest to extract every bit of value from my work that can be created, found, or stolen… That makes it almost not worth it.

Still, there’s options to transfer (probably by backing up and then uploading the backup) this blog to a site hosted somewhere else, but who knows how long that hosting service will last before it starts altering its contracts to include a provision that will allow it to see any data they host to some Venture Capital Shithead or another (like Squarespace and THEIR data selling opt-out setting). There’s really not a lot of hope in the next few years, barring some massive alteration to how ineptly most of the world’s governments handle anything to do with the internet or the intellectual property of individuals rather than corporations. It’s still my best bet, at the moment, since anything else will involve starting from scratch all over again. If I have to do that, if that becomes my only viable means of protecting my data from being easily scraped by any asshole with the technology, I genuinely might just give up on writing as a whole. It’s not even like the major publishers, who are already shitting the bed by squeezing writing as much as possible, have done anything but try to see how much algorithmic bullshit they can get away with, so there’s little point in doing any kind of writing other than to tell stories to my friends. It’s pretty soul-crushing, if I’m being honest, and I don’t even have a bad answer for what to do about all this mess.