I tried to add an archives page to the blog a couple days ago and the entire site collapsed with the message This Website Has Encountered A Fatal Error strewn across the bottom. I’m still trying to figure out what I did wrong. One of the hurdles I have is a lot has changed since I learned to code and build out WordPress themes back when it was still a new thing. Most now isn’t even code-based, and the parts that are require an industry-level knowledge base to understand.
Beyond just being an inconvenience to dig up pages that actually have the code and examples I’m looking for to build out pages with, it just kind of makes me feel bad about the internet. There used to be something incredibly fun and rewarding about spending an afternoon—because, really, that’s all it took in the days of simple HTML sites—making a personal web page.
These days, we live in the age where everything fails after a couple years. Smart phones, appliances, cars. Nothing is built to last. We can look at old furniture, hand-built by craftsmen, and admire its longevity and attention to detail. When I was growing up, I remember companies still offered lifetime guarantees on what they sold. Somewhere along the line, that all stopped. That’s kind of a parallel to what I imagine the not-too-distant future will be like for people online, surrounded by social media AI slop, where nothing is real and no voice is authentic, wondering what the early days of the internet were like.
There’s a purity and connection created between a person and an object when something is done by hand. It’s a kind of transference of humanity to an object. The combination of technology, capitalism, and trade expansion has always disrupted the processes of personalized building. From log cabins to the suburban sprawl, from loom-spun sweaters to fast fashion sweatshops, from painted portraits to the photograph to AI slop—we’re always in a state of ‘progress,’ yet simultaneously lamenting the fact the objects that inhabit our lives were always better back in the day.
Nothing is ever better because it becomes automated. It just becomes more convenient. It’s justified to the masses by way of ‘consumer savings,’ yet the harm comes in the form of disrupting community businesses with box stores, with individual creative designs replaced by templates, with personal interactions turning into people consulting AI bots about their lives. Industrialization has been a slow burn and the jump to what comes next has been a long time coming, but it’s almost here and I don’t think people are prepared for how this is going to alter the very nature of what it means to be human. It’s just so sad.
