A few days ago on Twitter, there was a thread on "the annual buying of The Notebook That Will Change Everything (tm)". It was tongue in cheek, well-aware that a single notebook or planner can't do anything on its own. I've been hanging around r/journaling on Reddit a bit, and there's often threads on: what notebook, what pen, what techniques (the common answer: it doesn't matter; just start). Very similar, in my other life, to the threads I see on game development forums: what language, what framework, what IDE.
These are essentially the same problem, people finding it easier (or maybe even more desirable) to talk about the work rather than to sit down and set about the business of actually doing it. It's something I think about as, eighteen years removed from the rise of social media, we are increasingly detached from what it means to create online. We don't create, we post; we don't build websites, we build brands. We curate perfect photos, discarding hundreds for the perfect shot that will confirm to whatever strangers the algorithm selects that our life is well-lived, our life is good, all of this offered within the walled garden of a particular site, intended to keep it "sticky", in that awful business parlance, to keep users scrolling or flipping through an endless stream of what has depressingly come to be known as "content".
The early web was a mess. Before Google (or, at least, an earlier incarnation of Google that didn't prioritize scraped and reposted sites and SEO-gamed garbage), search engines pretty much sucked. People hopped from one to another as they got slightly better, or just as importantly, slightly faster. My own journey was something like Webcrawler, to Lycos, to Altavista. But the web in that day hadn't cooled: it was a still a place where, at your ISP, you often got some webspace, some light instructions on how to update it, and what you did with it was up to you. Unlike the current state of things, where everyone's personal or professional site (if they even have one) is the same variation on the boring-ass mobile friendly, reactive, hamburger menu'd WordPress template. But before companies successfully monetized tools and frameworks of homogenization, there really were no rules. Tables for layouts. The most godawful gifs. Fuck yeah, frames! Things looked wildly different. NeoCities is a decent place to look now to get a sense of the individualism that made up the fabric of the web.
Part of what fascinates me is how much of that history is lost. The Wayback remembers some, but not all. Most of what people were doing then is now gone, the individual web replaced by the corporate. Do a search for something. "Cats". How many results are someone's personal website or fansite? Probably none. Sponsored placement. Wikipedia. Movie and Rotten Tomatoes. Purina.
What seems to have tilted things (probably forever) is the fact that most people spend most of their day on their smartphones. Laptops are now specialist devices, desktops especially so. I, personally, a developer staring down middle age, haven't used a desktop at work in years, and at home in a decade and a half. The family computer, the thing we used to sit down at and go online and be transported away while our families watched TV in the next room, is basically dead. In its place, people's portals are now small, rectangular screens. We scroll a bit. Maybe get bored. Switch a different app. Scroll again.
From a corporate perspective, this is ideal. The primary input is the touch, the tap, the swipe. There are keyboards, but they're awkward: few people would argue the phone is a great medium for writing longform text. And touch, tap, and swipe are gestures of consumption, not creation. What little creative acts ordinary people do on the web these days (TikTok videos, tweets, and so on) are constrained, allowable acts within the ecosystem of a particular app. When that app, or site, shuts down, your "content" (ugh) is gone. Hope you downloaded your archive. Hope the site even offered that functionality.
I've written elsewhere that LiveJournal was the death of the journalling scene that I was in, although I haven't fleshed out fully what I mean or feel by that. Partly, I mean it made discoverability less interesting. It used to be that people would leave you, specifically you, guestbook messages with a site link. I remember finding all kinds of interesting journals that way. There's a thrill to that, in someone leaving you a note and hoping you'll check them out. In doing that yourself. On LJ, there was some of that. A comment always linked back to a journal. You didn't have to start from your own posts. You could begin from anywhere. Discoverability was great; discoverability was impersonal.
But LJ also took the individualism out of what was then a personal creative practice. We were writing our own HTML (and later CSS), stealing each other's JavaScript, and our sites were a deep reflection of who we were as people. I remember my own site, largely just text, alongside the teenage design divas who created artistic 300x200 images in pirated copies of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. We'd redesign regularly. We could do whatever we wanted. Our sites were ours.
I don't think there'll ever be a renaissance in this space specifically because I don't see people going back to laptops and desktops as their primary devices. My Thinkpad is my main device, but for my partner, it's her Pixel, and for most people, I suspect that holds true as well. If we aren't using devices that prioritize creation, what's created will be thin and shallow. In that way, keeping a gemlog feels like futility but is also a radical act: here is something intentional, here is something made with thought. Who will find it? Probably no one. But that's fine. At least it exists. Something small. A signal in the noise.
Maybe there's another change coming. The current web feels weighed down, untenable. Deeply shitty. But maybe not. Maybe in two decades the web will just look the way it currently does, but somehow worse. How do you tell people that they too can make things? How do you favour an online experience that centres the ordinary person and their everyday? I'm not sure what the winning strategy is. If there is one. Perhaps it just needs enough people to stop overthinking it, stop wondering the right way to make things better, and just get started.