Oh wow, this is a blog. During this year (2024) I have been slowly writing this post, at times doubting the sanity of this undertaking and at times burning with the need to put these thoughts out here. I have been writing, while sitting in bed in Prague, working on a performance (Nano Steps – Into the Lab), while resting in Vilnius after a roadtrip, while preparing for gigs and doing odd jobs at home or my studio in Turku. I have let this text sit on my devices for months, but alas, now is the time to publish it:

It is the year 2024 and I am starting a blog.

Until recently I thought that blogs are dead. Gone by the way of the dodo sometime around when everyone left MySpace for Facebook. Or probably a bit after that. For a while people were linking blogs on Facebook a lot. But then they started posting their rambling thoughts just straight on the platform that asked them what was on their mind. Or us, I should say.

I had barely put together a MySpace page when Facebook took off in Finland. Of course I was not soon after on that bandwagon, as almost everyone else. Quite a time later came Instagram. Twitter (R.I.P). Platforms upon platforms. And at some point, I noticed, I was not following a single blog online. This was years ago. Not only did no-one seem to be reading blogs anymore, it also seemed that no-one was writing them either. That is where I think we found ourselves: platform-net, the smouldering wreckage of the great liberal, democratic, anarchistic information sharing project called world wide web, now taken over by global corporations (or rather, globally operating mostly very american corporations) farming our data and engagement for profit in some ineffable jumble of machines and markets, that somehow turns our clicks, taps and swipes into more money in some rich persons already big wallet. As Cory Doctorow argues, the development is incessantly depriving the users of internet from most of the very promises that got people to engage and build this infrastructure in the first place.

Then, a bit over four years ago I deleted my social media accounts. I would like to say it was for principled and political reasons that I allude to above, but the truth is that I just noticed that whenever I use those platforms, I get sad. Social media had become a physically and emotionally draining environment. I gave it some thought over a few months, and then decided that I don’t want to use a service that makes me sad. I am much rather happy than sad. And if I have to be sad, I’d rather it was because of some emotionally distressing life event, like loss of someone or something dear, than an emotionally distressing app on my phone that is engineered to get me dependent on using this life-saddening technology. So I said no to life-saddening technology, and quit.

So far so good. But there is one but.

I am a professional artist. And despite working in quite niche fields (mostly object theatre, contemporary performance and sound art) I cannot know everyone personally, and keep everyone who matters for this career personally updated on all the interesting stuff I do, especially not all the time. Neither can I count on media, as the culturally oriented ones, at  least in Finland, seem to be in an even worse condition than blogs in general. Even the ones that operate beautifully have a sadly small readership and unfortunately Helsinki-centric approach, more often than not. So, it seems obvious that I do need an online presence, and it must probably be curated by yours truly. I want to share my work with the world, but I want to do it on my terms, and I don’t want to do it in the sad money making machines of Mark, Elon and the other broligarchs.

So this is the reasoning I made to start a blog. And it all still seems a bit silly and stupid – with no personal social media presence, there is very little I can do to get this thinking out loud of mine noticed in digital space nowadays, for example. If a blog is not present on another platform, does it exist? Perhaps that feeling is why it has taken me months to finish this text and actually press publish. But still, all this seems like the right thing to do. A friend of mine recently echoed a point regularly heard in current times – that an artist’s success is 80% branding and PR, 20% the quality of their actual artistic output. I am not sure whether I am willing to agree, but here I am, dealing with the problem.

Despite aspiring to lead a rather post-digital artistic career (and life), this digital-network-media-society-thing we are currently communicating on (right now me writing, you reading) is here to stay. And it’s not like all the blogs are actually dead, there are some great ones still either floating online or also actively posting interesting stuff. Cory Doctorow I already linked to above. Perhaps more shall be shared later.

So, here goes, Anno Domini 2024. The personal blog is dead. Long live the personal blog. You may expect updates on artistic processes, rambling thoughts and sharing of interesting things and stuff at random and irregular intervals, probably. I’m still figuring out this thing, but I am guessing there is some way to even subscribe to this, if you might feel so inclined.