Whoever Is Reading This

Before the millennium, when I had a Tripod page assembled from raw HTML and a handful of people who knew the URL, the internet was just a place to be. You wrote about whatever was pressing on you that week—heartbreak, a fight, the thing you couldn’t say out loud anywhere else. The domain was a string of random characters that protected you precisely through its obscurity. That felt like enough to be honest.

Something shifted, gradually. The audience became less abstract. The boss might be reading. Your parents probably are. The data persists somewhere, indexed and retrievable, potentially usable in ways you can’t anticipate. There are awareness campaigns now, injected anxieties about what it means to have a public self online—and they’ve worked. I see more and more people going quiet, pulling old posts down, closing their blogs. The fear of being read by the wrong person has become stronger than the need to write, and that’s a loss I don’t know how to calculate.

What I miss is the specific relief of putting something true into words and letting it exist somewhere outside my own head. Not for an audience—for the act itself. The early internet made that possible because nobody was really watching. Now everything is potentially watched, and the mere possibility of surveillance has done what surveillance always does: changed the behavior of people who might otherwise have been reckless and honest and interesting. I feel that cost every time I sit down to write something that actually matters to me.

I don’t have a resolution. I keep writing, partly out of stubbornness, partly because the alternative—carefully curated silence, a performed version of a life—seems worse in a way I can’t fully articulate. But it’s not the same as it was. There’s always a small awareness of potential audience attached to the blank page now, and that awareness costs something. Whether it costs too much is a question I keep returning to without quite landing on an answer.