After some thirty-five years writhing—sometimes happily sometimes not—in the heart of the thing that has become the social web, I’m retiring. Some three hundred thousand words, five thousand photographs, thousands of likes, a dozen blogs, five or six newsletters, four podcasts, a few memorable threads, a couple of careers, a few pieces of music, and nearly fifty pieces of video later, I’m done.
It’s not that I’m no longer interested in the creative energies and passionate experimentation that drew me to the internet and to the web all those years ago, and through which I felt often sustained and supported over the last few decades. Rather, it is what it has become that has convinced me—finally, and after frankly too much consideration—to stop. The parts that are wonderful, and affirming, and embrace and support our humanity are diminished constantly by those that are not, and don’t. To participate, rather than simply consume, is exhausting, sapping one’s attention and passion and joy from those things, places, and people for whom it actually makes a difference.
My creative energies are falling into synch, each valley and peak finding higher and higher resonance. But these need to be independent of the marketplace, regardless of how one defines and measures the latter. Among my greatest loves and joys is the capacity for us to make sense in so many myriad and wonderful ways of the world we inhabit, and our ability to share it with others. It is our greatest and most extraordinary gift—to each other, and to ourselves. We can, of course, sell those things that come from those gifts, sparks forever frozen in form. But the work itself is priceless, regardless of the algorithmic parasites that are burrowing deep into the marrow of our culture, and the sycophantic enablers that reduce everything to nothing.
As I’ve said before, we are already too corrupted and compromised by this world we’ve created. We can not withdraw entirely if we wish to be in community with those whose efforts we appreciate as manifestations of the best of us. But we can pare, pare, and pare back until we are in a place where energy spent is recouped in pleasure gained. For me, it is a radical proposition, but one that seems completely and self-evidently right.
On 22 November, those thirty-five years of production will go dark. Of course the machines have copies, but those don’t concern me. I’m not hiding, just withdrawing. But not into utter obscurity. The heart of my work these days is with atelier tushu. It is a place of discovery and experimentation, and in so being captures where I am and what I aspire to. That place remains available to whoever happens to wander by. And, of course, the wonderfully idiosyncratic design firm that Steffany Hollingsworth and I have managed to create, reflecting and evangelizing a shared passion for humans in all their glorious storytelling magnificence and pursuit of meaning, continues along.
Thanks to all of you for reading what is almost certainly much too long for the world as it is. And most importantly, my deepest gratitude to those who found communion and joy in whatever it was I did, whenever I did it.
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