@20

By Paul Ford

Not any kind of eulogy, thanks. And no header image, either.

I started this website 20 years ago, give or take a week. The original address was www.interactive.net/~ford. Eventually it migrated here into the form you see. I took it very seriously for many years and it earned me thousands of readers, thousands of emails, and tons of opportunity. It was better at generating opportunity than money. I drifted away for all the regular reasons.

I had many thoughts about how to mark this moment and all of them were self-indulgent and exhausting. What I do is completely relevant and alive, thank you, and what was lost was lost. People keep expecting me to be wistful and nostalgic. But there was no innocence or purity. Not ideologically, politically, textually, technologically, sexually, or personally. Everything powered by ambition comes with compromise and taint, and is made under ridiculous circumstances. Everything good is transmuted from grudge-fueled self-doubt into something that other people love and criticize, knowing they could do better if given the time and resources.

And it's hard to explain: I was always interested in the history of old technologies, old systems, old computers; this is just a way of knowing, of understanding the origin of our own dumb thoughts. I was that way 20 years ago and will be that way 20 years from now. I'm fascinated by the memories of systems of all kinds. Filing cabinets, junk mail, org charts. I'm glad I got to live through the rise and fall (and rise and rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and mobile rise and responsive fall and rise and fall) of a whole medium.

Some days I want to erase this whole thing—much of the writing is sloppy and immature, and I was, too. But why bother to hit the red button? The path of the Internet has seen fit to do that for me. Almost no one stumbles by here any more, nor do I receive many emails about these old posts. I forgot most of what I wrote (and I also forget of most of what I wrote elsewhere—a spreadsheet I have has hundreds of lines and is still incomplete). The subjects of this website are old-fashioned and the voice is either too fussy or socially problematic. Plus the bramble paths of yore that once led strangers hither are all grown over (people let their DNS entries expire). In the place of a web of lonelyhearts linking together there's a relentless global bray. I can't tell which part I played—if I made things better or worse. Some of each doubtlessly.

I'm in the middle right now. Young company, young kids, unfinished book, 40s, sore back, facing bariatric uncertainties and paying down the mortgage. 20 years is arbitrary nonsense. A blip. Our software is bullshit, our literary essays are too long, the good editors all quit or got fired, hardly anyone is experimenting with form in a way that wakes me up, the IDEs haven't caught up with the 1970s, the R&D budgets are weak, the little zines are badly edited, the tweets are poor, the short stories make no sense, people still care too much about magazines, the Facebook posts are nightmares, LinkedIn has ruined capitalism, and the big tech companies that have arisen are exhausting, lumbering gold-thirsty kraken that swim around with sour looks on their face wondering why we won't just give them all our gold and save the time. With every flap of their terrible fins they squash another good idea in the interest of consolidating pablum into a single database, the better to jam it down our mental baby duck feeding tubes in order to make even more of the cognitive paté that Silicon Valley is at pains to proclaim a delicacy. Social media is veal calves being served tasty veal. In the spirit of this thing I won't be editing this paragraph.

I still feel dumb. I'm still full of myself. I'm still a fat depressive save for that four-year-window when I lost the weight, but that's less of a barrier to success than you'd have thought. Or maybe if I'd been thin I'd be more successful. Who cares? Not you, and not me. No one cares. No one is watching. We're the adults. Anyway, how can one be wistful with a TODO list that unrolls forever.

The things I want to do are strange, simple, and unprofitable. My life is filled with love although six-year-old twins is a hell of a thing. But look: I have a lot of chaos to create and one day soon I'll have the time and resources to do it. One hopes. Give me a year or two and check back. Or wait to 2037. Maybe I'll have a eulogy in me then. We might need one.

Now I have to remember how to log into my website and update the XML files.