You know the one where you’ve been promising to yourself to write something for days, but then this interesting thing appears in your peripheral vision, or that total and under disaster unfolds directly in front of you, or an entire universe of washing falls from the sky on your head, or you leave the kitchen for ten minutes and apparently an entire army of borrowers silently trash the place…
That.
At the start of the month I wondered about trying to write a blog post every day - as a replacement of sorts for “NaNoWriMo”. It’s kind of sad that NaNoWriMo is no more as an official thing - but also kind of comforting that it has gone full circle.
I probably need to explain (not that anybody wants to hear an explanation, but I can feel a rant coming and if I don’t write it somewhere it will just boil away inside me, then come out as an over-reaction to something else).
When anything “happens” on the social internet that reaches a peculiar sort of popularity tipping point, enterprising (read: predatory) individuals will try to “own” whatever it is. It happened with NaNoWriMo, and it happened with “NaBloPoMo” too. As soon as anybody tries to own anything, their true intentions typically become apparently - to make bank on whatever it was, and en-shittify it for everybody. There’s no guilt about the en-shittification of whatever was good, because it’s all about making bank and walking away.
Very few people seem to do anything for altruistic reasons any more, and that makes me a little bit sad.
I guess once the en-shittification of anything eventually collapses in on itself, it gives the original idea another chance to happen again - and that’s what I’m hoping will happen with NaNoWriMo.
I should probably explain that too. NaNoWriMo is a contraction of “National Novel Writing Month”. Even the name is short sighted - it should have been IntNoWriMo (because… you know… international).
Perhaps if something is a good idea, it will live on - and re-seed itself in the collective consciousness. NaNoWriMo started as a meme. So did NaBloPoMo. Just people, tagging their content with the hashtag, and making it discoverable. Life found a way.
Of course it used to happen a lot more easily than it does now, because the entire social internet has been en-shittified - with platforms funnelling users into ever more restrictive silos to turn them into solyent green content sausage machines that can be monetised and eventually turned into slop.
Oh my word I sound angry.
I suppose I am actually. I remember the earliest days of the internet - of the web - and the enlightened moment when we all left the previous walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve, CiX, and countless bulletin boards - and had our “Holland Tunnel” moments.
I’ll drop the Holland Tunnel reference in for those that have not seen it: