We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere.
It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1
We can’t fully abandon these spaces, and I’m not arguing for that at all. Instead, I want to put more effort into building/maintaining/contributing to the spaces I *do* control/own (or small spaces that can’t be so easily destroyed by someone in power), and I want to encourage everyone to start doing so. Some of this is personal (I miss the blogging culture of the old Blogspot days) and some of this is professional (I don’t want social media to be my primary face on the Internet). So that’s what I’m going to do. If you’re doing it, too, throw a link in the comments to your stuff so I can follow along!
So here’s what I’m going to try to do in 2025:
- Post more stuff here.
I have not kept up with blogging once the microblogging platform took over as the main place for “discourse” (or since it became clear that many of those platforms were discouraging clicking links). Some of that is due to burnout and impostor syndrome and various other things. However, I think it’s time to actually put words to the WP interface and try to post more things here. I may even have some new, freeing rules for myself to help encourage that activity. - GenAI Academic Literature Project
Those following me on social media already know that I’ve been reading some of the academic literature on GenAI in my field (English, writing studies, literary studies, digital rhetoric, etc.). I’ve already shared some of my thoughts on that literature, and I expect to do the same on this blog in the near future. There will be an opening post about this some point next week. Stay tuned! - Stream and Podcast Stuff
I recently started streaming again on Twitch (Wednesdays and Sundays at 6 PM Central), and I hope to continue doing so for much of the year so long as I reach some of my goals (500 followers on Twitch, etc.). I will also continue recording and producing The Skiffy and Fanty Show; this will be the show’s 15th year! - More Patreon and Other Things
My Patreon has been a quiet space for too long, and I hope to come up with a more regular schedule for content there. Additionally, I haven’t maintained a newsletter in over a year, so I’ll do some thinking about how to do that and what it might look like in a sustainable form. - Speculative Literature Foundation Work
A while back, I took on the role of Director of the Portolan Project at The Speculative Literature Foundation. I’ve been terribly bad at my role due to burnout and all the moving and what not, but 2025 is going to be a year of big completions because I need this. I need to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile in the public educational space. And contributing to this project is the best way of doing that.
Some of these are things I was going to do anyway, so listing them is more a way of acknowledging them as part of my “workload” for the year. The other things are, I think, small enough that I can be successful at them, especially because I’m not setting hard targets for anything that didn’t already have one. I’m going to need that because writing this blog post has made me realize how out of practice I am. This was not easy, and that’s rather sad because there’s nothing particularly hard about this post. My brain and my fingers just aren’t used to it, and I think that’s a darn shame.
So there it is. 2025, here I come…limping forward one step at a time…
- This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
