Hey.

I’m starting a blog, here, at the end of 2025. Why now? Many reasons. Let’s start.

The way the world is

The Source material:

The reasons

The last few years has seen a lot of personal self-doubt. A lot of questioning who I am, who I was, what went wrong, and what do I do next? I used to write. A lot. Both non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. And then I stopped. Around the same time that social media became popular and short, quippy status updates to impress my friends became more important than thoughtful expression. Correlation isn’t causation, but…

I used to love finding new music. researching and downloading albums, learning about artists. Spending hours curating playlists and giving them to friends and loved ones. And then I got busy adulting. And then Spotify showed up. Correlation isn’t causation, but…

I used to love reading. Novels, poetry, philosophy, social criticism. Learning new things. Escaping into new worlds. Collecting books and holding them. Used book stores and coffee shops. The smells of hundreds of espresso shots pulled from an undercleaned La Morzocco mixing with dust in the slipstream after pull after pull of books. Of the musk of used books themselves. Of the rank of a university library carpet. And then I went to grad school. And started working full time.

I used to have free time for all of these things. Then the knock out combo of adulthood: jobhousekids whamwhamwham.

And what free time I did have? The phone. Oh the phone.

I used to love the internet. I was passionate about discovering it, being part of it, its weirdness, absurdity, vast information landscape. And then we got algorithms and tech bros and neo-liberal capitalism and the phones. Oh the phones. And now at the end of 2025 after pushing back against algorithmic claims and news articles about how much of a hellscape the internet is… I get it. And I give up.

So much has been said about the attention economy that I don’t need to get into it here. But what I’ve come to is that, phones don’t just intentionally steal your attention. To me, what’s so much more insidious is that they steal and warp our decision-making ability. Or mine, at least. And that part isn’t talked about enough.

Cell Phone Capitalism forces you into hundreds of short-term micro decisions, rather than long-term planning.

Oh damn a new post. How can I answer as quickly as possible the most clever thing, the funniest thing for this situation, the truest thing, the best thing. What will garner the most likes, the most upvotes, the most reactions. I want the reaction. Reactions mean more dopamine. How do I get the reaction? Right now? I’m not allowed to think about anything for long enough anymore. Not what I’m feeling in the moment, not family budgeting, not a five-year plan, nothing.

Oh look, more America shit. America’s pompous bullshit machine is so huge that Canadians can’t ever figure out what it means to be Canadian, even after two major] identity crises in the last decade. I can unsubscribe from every American themed subreddit I want, every American influencer, block every site from Google News, and I’ll still be pushed American bullshit—and it is bullshit, not propaganda or culture or manifest destiny, it’s bullshit—because the algorithms are designed in America by Americans and there are ton of them online compared to the relatively few Canadians.

Did you know? Canada’s news landscape is predominantly owned by Americans? And because internet news knows no borders, no daily newspaper delivered to your doorstep, Canadian outlets also have to compete for eyeballs. Leading to more and more depressing headlines, more ragebaiting. It’s no longer If it Bleeds, it Leads. It leads if it can top the feeds. So Canadians don’t own the Canadian news.

We own less and less because of the internet of 2025. You don’t own your music if you get it on Spotify et al., you don’t own your audiobooks if you buy them from Audible, you don’t own your books if you buy them from the Kindle Store, you don’t own your movies if you buy them from a streaming platform. You don’t own your family pictures if you post them to Instagram and store them on Google’s Cloud. And you don’t own your ideas if you post them to someone else’s social media company.

So what, get rid of the phone? Get off the internet?

See, this is the tricky part. I can comfortably say I am some version of a neo-luddite, but I don’t want to abandon the internet. Instagram can Desktops and laptops do make the attention economy a bit easier to control. Computer code is more available to more developers, meaning more like-minded people can code browser extensions to, say, turn off neverending-scrolling features. Unlike apps, where code is closed and you can’t do a thing to change the app experience. But even then, that’s not an escape. Everything and everyone is on the internet, and as Ryan Broderick says, the internet is flattening the world as we know it.

It’s the uncomfortable truth underpinning pretty much everything that’s happened in pop culture — including politics — since the 2010s social media revolution. The online platforms that created our new world, run on likes and shares and comments and views, reshaped the marketplace of ideas into an attention economy. One that, like a real economy, is full of very popular garbage. And, also like a real economy, is now so vast and important that it’s virtually impossible to change it. If you want access to it, you better get comfortable making lowest-common-denominator bullshit in front of a camera. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to feel good about doing that if you’re an idiot.

I don’t have the best answer about what to do, but I have a place to start. I spent the money and bought a NAS. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, and it’s exactly that. A series of hard drives, connected to your home wifi network, with attached software that allows you to replace services like Google Photos, OneDrive, and other cloud storage services as long as you’re connected to the wifi. Many of them have their own infrastructure to allow you to access your files from anywhere, the same way that the cloud does.

With Jellyfin, you can create your own personal Netflix. With Plex you can do the same. And organize your music library.

NASs have been gaining in popularity over the last five years. It’s an expensive solution, but nobody that I know who makes the investment says they regret it.

What’s next?

Over the next year, as I setup and develop the NAS, my goal is to change how I interact with media.

Phone Use

  • Disable all notifications from my phone, except from my wife. There is very, very rarely a time where I need to answer someone right away. I don’t need a device to tell me when to check it. I’ll check it on my own time, when I feel like it.
  • Start leaving the phone in central locations. plugged in like the wall phones of yore. The bedroom, the kitchen, the car. As much as possible it should be out of my pocket and out of sight.
  • Delete Instagram. Try this: Open your reels, of the first twenty you come across, how many are trying to sell you something? Whether a traditional ad, or an influencer. Instagram is more and more of a cess-pool. Which is a shame, because I genuinely enjoy the comedy I find there, some of the recipes, the tips and tricks.
  • With hopefully less time

Create and publish this blog

  • This blog is being created using software called Hugo Without getting too technical, I didn’t want to start a blog on someone else’s platform that they owned. With their ads. With a WordSquareWixSpacePress.com address. This blog is mine and I don’t care if anyone sees it. Hugo allows me to use Obsidian to write posts, and have them upload to my site, that I own myself.
  • Make it intimate and wide-ranging. I used to like to write poetry and fiction. That can be here. I have many hobbies. I can explore and think about them here, each in their own categories. How my Zen practice is going. Woodworking. Electronics and computing. The internet. Music.
  • Lock it down and ensure as best as possible that it isn’t scraped by AI.

Music

  • Get rid of Spotify premium
  • Start discovering music again via Bandcamp music criticism sites, and other
  • Buy an external CD Rom Drive
  • Digitize my current CD collection
  • Start buying used CDs
  • Download something like MusicBee to organize local files.
  • Buy an MP3 player and load it up with MusicBee to listen there.
  • Learn about the artists.
  • Listen to full albums, start to finish, especially from artists that still make full albums.
  • Start curating my own playlists again, complete with descriptions.

TV and Movies

  • Start buying physical media and loading into the NAS.

Reading

  • Buy more books, as much as possible from independent and used bookstores.
  • Carry them everywhere. Anytime you think you need to look at your phone. Pick up the book and read a page.

Friends

  • Continue to push friends to move off locked-in apps and towards open-source alternatives.

Embrace friction. Reject convenience.

  • This deserves its own post, eventually.

Pay attention.

  • Again, another blog post on this. it’s not enough that I reclaim my attention from your phone. I need to nurture it, develop it.
  • No more one-earbud-in.
  • Attention means attention.

I’ve been writing for about three hours. It feels really, really good. But I should stop.

Sincerely, Whoever I am right now. *