Five Texts Found in the Wreckage
Sara wrote something for Daily Bread Mag about the question of monetizing a personal blog—specifically, the question of why she won’t. My updates have nothing to do with information and mostly only serve my own amusement. All that reach goes unused. And sometimes I genuinely feel like I’m offering my readers zero value. Am I completely out of my mind?
She lands somewhere I recognize: a blog can be something other than a platform. Just a place. I’ve been writing in public for over twenty years and I still don’t have a better answer than that.
On the question of audiences: ZEIT Online sat down with two of the RocketBeans guys at the six-month mark of their internet TV channel. On size versus engagement, one of them said it plainly: It’s worth more to have a small but very active fanbase than ten million subscribers, half of whom are dead weight.
True since day one of the web. Nobody in media has ever really accepted it, which is how we ended up where we are.
René from Nerdcore is leaving for the United States for a few months, and before he went he put a lot of people up against a wall in the best possible way: I’ve been wading through increasingly boring feeds for years, waiting for someone to actually do something. Instead, some business-school asshole founds the shittiest website in the world, jerks himself off at dead-future-media conferences about his fifteen billion fake clicks, and suddenly he’s defining what internet culture looks like? Not on my watch.
I think about that sentence every time I see a content strategist explain what the internet is supposed to be for.
Two pieces from the same week that are harder to read and stay longer. Deutschlandfunk ran a long piece on dying villages in eastern Germany that have quietly become strongholds for the far right—places where organized neo-Nazi groups fill the void left by collapsed local infrastructure, offering ride services, running children’s festivals, making themselves indispensable. The mechanism is simple and ugly: when the state withdraws, someone else steps in. The piece was pegged to Tröglitz, where the mayor resigned under pressure from far-right demonstrators, but the phenomenon is far wider than any single town.
And Annabel Wahba wrote in the ZEIT Magazin about how children’s nakedness has become obscene—how the fear of pedophilia has spread so deep into ordinary life that a child playing naked in a garden now reads as a risk to be managed. She doesn’t dismiss the fear, but she draws the line carefully: I don’t want my children to become masturbation material for some sexually disturbed person. But I also don’t want to be talked into fearing something that, in the unlikely event it happened, I wouldn’t even know about. And neither, especially, would my children.
It’s a genuinely difficult piece—not because it’s wrong, but because it’s right and nobody wants to say it.