Hiya, this is Órla. I run this here website.

I remember the days when the internet was tiny. There was no ‘Meta’, just Bebo. I couldn’t use the computer at the same time as the house’s landline. Children knew how to read analogue clocks. The Towers still stood. Those were the good old days.¹

Now, everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket at all times. I can point my phone at the sky and it will tell me what satellites, airplanes, and constellations are above me at any moment. People are in relationships with robots.

The Algorithm™ dictates what media you consume- if you look at a post about pottery for half a second longer than any other post you see, it will spew more pottery content at you. If you post something that The Algorithm™ doesn’t like, you get blacklisted, and none of your other posts show up for people. For a business, that is catastrophic. As a human, that’s insane.

The reasons why I don’t like social media are endless. So, it is with that in mind that I’ve decided to start posting my longer format things here. That’ll mean that the stuff that I genuinely put a lot of work into can’t get taken down or hidden by The Algorithm™, and the people that actually want to see it get to see it. It’s a return to the good old days.²

If you want to get an email when I post, subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll let you know. I’m not going to be bombarding you with emails the entire time- maybe one every two/three months (if I have my life in order- otherwise they’ll be a lot more infrequent).

-Ó

Editor’s Notes:

¹ Órla was born in December 2001. She does not remember ‘the good old days’.

² Again, Órla was not alive/online during the era of the decentralised internet. Google etc has had all of her personal data since her conception.

What’s all this then?