The Dying Art of Having Something to Say

In 2017, I wrote about blogging with the wide-eyed idealism of someone who still believed in the democracy of the Internet. I was twenty-two, convinced that “the way Gutenberg gave everybody the power to read, the Internet gave everybody the power to write.”

[**A Personal History of Blogging *Trying to Understand the Democracy of the Internet* blog.brennan.day](https://blog.brennan.day/a-personal-history-of-blogging-346f27ef479d)

## I.

It’s 2025 now. I’ve been blogging for a decade. The landscape has shifted so dramatically that when I search for “blogging”—if anyone even uses Google anymore—what surfaces is a grotesque parody of what we once called writing: *Here’s how to start a WordPress (with my referral and affiliate codes) in order to write content with longtail keyword SEO and funnelling and integration and* —

Oh my God.

The word has been hollowed out, its corpse animated by marketing speak. What we call “blogging” today bears no resemblance to its original intention. It’s not even the same word anymore.

## II.

Don’t misunderstand me. Good writing still exists. Substack thrives as a “creator economy” focused on “newsletters.” Writers are finding their audiences, their voices, their revenue streams. Maybe this is semantics—maybe the medium doesn’t matter if the message survives.

But something fundamental is missing.

Something has been lost in translation from blog to brand, from writer to content creator, from having something to say to having something to sell.

## III.

People point to short-form video—TikTok, Shorts, Reels, whatever the fuck you want to call them—as the ultimate democratization of the Internet. And yes, there’s something to be said for the frictionless nature of recording yourself with your phone’s camera, uploading in short bursts to an audience hungry for distraction.

You don’t need to know how to write. You don’t even need to know how to read.

But this is pure ephemera. You might get thousands of views compared to the dozens who read your written work, but only because people consume thousands of these tiny videos daily. How much is being remembered? How much changes us?

Short-form video content and the cynical, crony-capitalist version of blogging share the same existential problem: meaninglessness. A decay of our humanity, not an uplifting of it.

## IV.

To have a blog—to have your own website where you *write*, to be part of the independent Internet—remains available to anyone. Anybody can become a writer, a reader, an intellectual. These are not gatekept, elitist intellectual pursuits, no matter how much mainstream propaganda pretends they still are.

Create something that lasts. A legacy.

To perform the practice and ritual of writing is to create an identity, to create tangible impact on the world.