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| Is blogging dead? |
Part I
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. There are so many reasons for why I haven’t. I’m thinking of where to begin — and to be honest, I’ve thought about penning this post for a while now — but I have no idea where to start. Do I start with why I gave up blogging? And if so, do I talk about why blogging seems like a helpless and lost cause? Do I talk about my personal changes? Struggles? Things that caused me to (sort of) abandon this blog? It’s all rather overwhelming.
I guess I’ll start at a while ago. It’s been several years — and when I say several, I mean several — since I left the land of the pure. For a while after I had left, I still felt connected to that land. I still used to talk about it. In that time, Pakistan has gone to war with India twice, Imran Khan rose from the ashes to become the king, only to then be deposed. Pakistan suffered. Then recovered. And it’s still stuck in that loop of trying to get out of its existential crisis. Gradually however, I’ve begun to lose touch with the realities of life in Pakistan. I am still intimately connected to it, through friends and family. But I don’t live there anymore. I don’t know what trials and tribulations people go through every day. Every now and then something horrific breaks through the plumes and I’m sucked back into the harsh specifics of human existence in Pakistan, but more often than not, it’s just a background blur now.
And when I started feeling this way, I also started feeling like my words about Pakistan were going to start sounding hypocritical. I mean, I left. I found a way out. I found a way out specifically to get away from that reality, from that existence. So who then, gave me the right to pontificate about that reality to people who are living through it everyday? I felt guilty talking about it; I felt like a hypocrite. After all, when I was going through it all, I never wanted to hear from “overseas Pakistanis” with their holier than thou attitudes about what we, the people living in Pakistan, should or shouldn’t do; how we should behave, think or talk.
And then, there’s the ever growing and ongoing threat of consequences for words. Mere words. Which has led people to start self censoring. We police our thoughts, and we censor our words because we don’t want our words to be perceived in ways that could be harmful to our lives. The security state that once existed inside Pakistan, where the proverbial secret state disappears those who it considers dissenters, has now spread to the rest of the world too. The wrong thought and word — arbitrarily defined by the cabal of elites who rule our world — can land you in a world of pain and hurt and trouble. But the bigger shock isn’t that there are consequences for your originality, it is that there is also now, no recourse. You cannot appeal to the conscience of good men and women, women of justice and law, to rescue you. To save you. Those men and women are also subject to the same tyrannies. And try as I might, I don’t believe I’m a revolutionary. There is too much at stake — and I understand what’s at “stake” is all relative. But the harsh truth remains: being outspoken, original, fearless, has consequences that I cannot bear. In a different world, with different circumstances, perhaps I would. But so far, in this world? I’ve not found that courage.
Part II
So, we’ve established that I stopped blogging because: I was talking about Pakistan, and then I left, which made me feel like a hypocrite for continuing to talk about Pakistan; and the things that I was saying fell on the wrong side of the viewpoints of the elitist cabals, and I didn’t have the courage to keep going.
But there’s also the rise of artificial intelligence and machines that has rendered much of our words and writing irrelevant. Blogging as a profession, as a hobby is dead. AI slop rules the internet waves now. Originality is dying. Couple that with our attention deficit disorders thanks to short form content being blasted at us through social media, and you really end up with a double whammy. No one wants to sit and read. Which makes no one want to write. Because if no one reads, what’s the point of writing? The rise of short form slop has fried our neural circuits, and lead to the death of criticality. Maybe that was the goal all along; maybe the goal was to get the masses into a state of collective psychosis. If so, the goal has been properly achieved.
Blogging became popular because it was a way for us to say our piece into the ether of the internet. When traditional and mainstream media was the only form of information, blogging was our way of fact checking them, and making sure everybody (who cared) could hear our voices too. But then slowly, this whole concept was eroded thanks to the rise of social media. Blogging was penalized because social media wanted those voices to shout into the wind on their platforms. So that’s where everybody went. And because of the very nature of social media (where sensationalism rules), it ended up being a gold rush for the grifters. Which left bloggers even further in the dust. Nobody wanted to read a 500-600 word article which might have some nuance, when they could get their fix from someone else in 280 characters. And then there came the age of the siloed platforms. New social media companies emulated the Facebook and Twitter model, and created new platforms that are walled off and siloed themselves. The era of an “open” internet, where you write something and publish it for everyone to see, has been replaced by “distribution platforms” (e.g., Substack), where you write and publish only for the users of that specific platform. The big challenge with that now is that unless you have, or had, a large social media following — that you can now transpose onto the new platform — you’re at the bottom of the barrel, and no one’s really reading your words anyway. Once upon a time, the internet was searched and indexed by web crawlers like Google. Now these platforms don’t let the words being spoken on them from being found by simple search engines. If you want to know what your favorite journalist, blogger, photographer, newscaster, peer, friend is saying, you have to sign up for that platform. You can’t simply type a web address into your browser and catch up. Those days, are long gone.
Part III
So why then, would I return to blogging? I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I guess it’s not so much about returning to blogging, as it is an itch to say the things that I want to say. I know I talked about how there are consequences to your words and thoughts now (side note: if you haven’t read George Orwell’s 1984 yet, I recommend that you read it ASAP), but I also figured that I’m an unknown person throwing my words into a dark void. My website — this blog — is not highly ranked in the search results. No one will likely ever find it. No one will ever read these words. Maybe it’s a passion? Maybe writing here will make me think that I’m playing just a small, tiny part in the grand scheme of things? Despite the risks associated with saying our truths, it still is important to say those truths. Maybe I feel like I want to take those risks anyway? Not because I don’t worry about those consequences, but because those consequences may be worth bearing, if push does come to shove.
There will be changes. This piece is reflective of those changes. I won’t only talk about Pakistan anymore. I’ll talk about everything. Myself. My life. There will be politics, but it won’t be relegated just to Pakistan. Europe and North America are in a grip of an unfurling crisis. It’s important to talk about them too. Maybe I’ll talk about how the moon looks so beautiful in the night sky. After all, the essence of blogging has always been to say the things that you want to say, because no one other than you can say them. So we’ll see how it goes.
In the end, this post isn’t really for you, dear reader. It’s really for me. But if you’ve found this, I’m glad you’re here. I hope I continue to write, and I hope you will return for more.