I’ve been thinking a lot about the online world vs. the offline one lately.
I still remember clearly the march toward where we are now, from the good old days before every home had a computer and every hand held a cell phone.
- My first computer – a Commodore 64.
- My first work computer – a PC running a 386 intel chip I bought second-hand from my employer.
- My first mouse, a special purchase I requested from my employer to make navigating my work computer a little easier.
- My first social media – way before it was called that, when AOL discs were flying through the mail and the web didn’t yet exist.
And then it launched – this glorious new thing called the World Wide Web, making it easy for anyone to post pages atop the internet. At first, no one quite knew what to do with it except throw advertisements on it. Over the period of three months, suddenly every billboard and magazine ad had a web address on it.
I remember, too, when AOL finally caved and opened a portal to the web, and in the process insured their own eventual decline and fall.
Back then, some joker put up a page that said “You’ve reached the end of the internet. Please turn around and go back.” And it was kinda true. There was a short period of time when it was humanly possible to visit every single site on the web.
We witnessed the rise of the internet business – Marco and I were fairly early adopters and rode the wave, building a great web business connecting LGBTQ+ folks with travel accommodations, realtors and wedding vendors. We rode that wave for a decade and a half, until it faltered in the early to mid twenty-teens.
And we joined Facebook when my eighty-year-old friend invited me. And then I joined Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest. They were mostly fun, frivolous spaces back then, sites where you were more likely to see a picture of your friend’s lunch sandwich than any more serious posts about politics and division. Where you could truly build a community of people like you whom you never would have met otherwise.
And then we watched the whole thing teeter and start to go south, like a building being gnawed away at its foundations by voracious termites.
Our business peaked around 2013, then began to fall into long decline as Google abandoned their “Don’t Be Evil” motto and began to soak up ALL THE TRAFFIC. It started with their refusal to index and show sub pages on our sites in their search results, only a couple major ones. It worsened as they tightened their SEO rules, and then started taking our content and showing it on the search page without the reader ever needing to visit our sites. And it culminated with so-called AI, grabbing our content and content from other sites and mashing it together to serve it, again with only rare site visits, to their search clients.
We fought the whole thing for more than a decade, reworking our sites multiple times and chasing SEO, building social media profiles, crafting unique blog content.
All we managed to do was stave off the worst of it a little bit longer.
In the end, We were just disillusioned and tired. Dead tired.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Or maybe it did – maybe human greed and the requirements of Capitalism for MORE MORE MORE, always MORE meant that it was always going to end up like this. I guess we’ll never know.
The real change in me began when I joined the Sacramento Book festival team in 2024. At last, I had something new to work on, something to build that was local, that wasn’t as dependent on what was left of the internet and the world wide web. Something that mattered.
It was a real-life exercise in what real people can still create together, on the ground. Sure, the festival has a website, but I’m not obsessed with how it ranks or how much daily traffic it generates. Sure, it’s still on social media, but on our terms (and we have a wonderful volunteer/committee member who knows how to play their game).
But mostly, it’s been about bringing people who love books together, and to say it has been wildly successful is an understatement. Our visitor count last year reached almost 10,000, and attracted the attention of Sacramento State University, where it will land for 2027. We also directly helped birth a sister festival in San Jose, and possibly a third one in the next year or two.
Most of all, the process has helped restore me and my faith in people. And it landed me my new job as Events Coordinator for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.
In our attempt to go more local, Marco and I have also scaled back our Amazon purchases, choosing to buy locally when we can. Yes, some of the places we shop are still corporations, but we choose to work with the ones who respect our communities – Sacramentans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks overall.
For his part, Marco is engaging in another example of local connection, working with a team in our neighborhood to make gift bags for seniors in nursing homes, with the necessities and comforts many of them lack. I’ve watched this process transform him, and the support from friends and family has been nothing short of amazing.
The one blessing the slow collapse of the internet has given us is the way it has forced us to fall back on what’s real and true in our offline lives. Our family, friends and neighbors, our love of books and reading, and our ability to do things for others (and the willingness to accept help ourselves when we need it).
So here’s an idea. Every now and then, put down your phone. Back away from your computer. Remind yourself that there’s a whole real world out there waiting, for you to engage with it.
Take up a charitable cause. Find a new passion. Visit downtown and those boutique stores you haven’t been to for years. Live in the real world for a few hours, where the trolls and memes and politics can’t reach you.
The internet (or what’s left of it), will still be there when you get back. 😉