Blogging Was a MacBook

There was this week in Berlin—September 2017—when you could pay 99 euros to learn how to become a professional blogger. Workshops on food blogging, WordPress, SEO, how to turn words into money. The pitch was clean and simple: come learn from people who’d actually done it, and you could be next.

I knew some of the speakers. They weren’t frauds. They’d built real audiences and made real money documenting their lives, their meals, their opinions. But what they were actually selling was a fantasy about what it takes to get noticed on the internet. And the funny part, the part that was right there in the marketing copy, was the unspoken truth: you didn’t really need creativity or discipline or courage. You just needed a MacBook and enough time to care about the metrics.

By 2017, blogging had already started dying. It was becoming influencing, which is a different product entirely—more conscious, more optimized, more calculated. The workshops were the death rattle, in a way. Once everyone had the equipment and the knowledge, the thing that made blogging work—the feeling that you were writing because you had to—became just another part of content strategy.

I never went. I wasn’t trying to monetize what I was writing. But I remember scrolling through the schedule and feeling something like relief that I’d missed whatever moment made that necessary. Blogging used to be something you did because you had thoughts. By then it was something you had to be trained to do, which meant it had stopped being blogging.