Those that didn’t make it

I want to talk a little bit about failure.

This is a photo of the wall next to my desk where I’m currently working on the 2026 edition of my ongoing series, Standing Still In A Storm. I’ve been doing this project for close to 15 years now, with each year the guidelines changing a little bit. The basics remain the same: painted freehand parallel lines in black gesso that are not allowed to touch but meant to get as close as possible to one another. The paper size, border measurements, and brush width vary year-to-year, but the general rules are always the same.

So far, this year I’ve finished 18 pieces—including these six failures. For one reason or another, each of these did not meet the standards I have for the work. On some the ink bled under the tape (an issue I did not discover until the work was already complete and otherwise satisfactory). On some the slightest twitch of my hand caused the black lines to meet at some point. On others the proportions weren’t right and by the time I got to the last line it ended up wider than the brush I’m using. Whatever the reason, these are the failures—one-third of the work I’ve done so far.

I feel like artists online only ever show their successes. The ones who post process videos only do so when the final work is suitable for publishing. Content creators and influencers crop frames and set up shots that don’t actually represent what they’re doing. The rule of advertising is that everything has to be positive all of the time, and the internet has become one big advertisement for life. It’s all success stories, and I wonder how many of them are outright lies.

The thing is, everybody fails. The process of taking inspiration to creation is an arduous one. Yet in a society that demands better results faster, standards lessen, quality drops, concepts fade, and the finished product is cheapened. It’s no wonder those obsessed with capital love AI—it removes all the parts that take time from creativity, but in doing so it also removes everything that makes a creation good.

Failure is important to process. It’s a learning experience, much more so than achievement. By having this entire sect of culture that only shows finished products, it becomes akin to something between a gallery and a mall. The human values have been lost, and it’s not because people don’t fail, but because in the public eye, they’re not allowed to.

There’s all this talk about AI and Google Zero effectively ending the internet as it has been known—creating a sole point-of-contact online to be an all-encompassing AI bot. The people who will profit from this are, of course, touting the possible ‘benefits’ from such a thing, and there are plenty of users out there who can’t live without something like ChatGPT telling them how to raise their children. I am against all of this, but as an example I will use something from internet history I personally detested—the Mommy Blogger.

Mommy Bloggers consisted of predominantly affluent, lonely housewives who shared every minute of their existence on personal journals which revolved around motherhood, housekeeping, and marriage. It was the kind of societal trend that rose to enough prominence to merit its own plotline on House by 2010. I didn’t give it much attention because I was basically the opposite of its target audience.

Now this demographic has moved on to social media or podcasts, but I can’t help but feel something was lost when that happened. The format of the blogs they were writing inherently required a sense of creativity and a forthrightness that, while possibly creating controversy, garnered camaraderie among other mothers. While the results can be similar in the world of podcasts, the off-the-cuff nature of just chatting feels far less heartfelt and more gossip-oriented. The inherent nature of what is being communicated gets reduced from meaningfully inquisitive from an individual perspective to a bland riff.

That’s what the ‘new internet’ and AI truly deliver: less creativity, less meaning, less potential for individuals to discover relationships with themselves and others alike through actually thinking about things. Considering yourself and others can be paths to empathy, social bonds, and overall feeling less lonely in the world. Silicon Valley tech has not only frayed those ends but is promising a world with even less possibility for those things (at least online). The internet will be reduced from a once-mecca of individual expression to a recursive loop of slop. Getting rid of search functions where people can actually discover the independent side of the internet only accelerates all of this.

There are still Mom Blogs out there, and a search over at DuckDuckGo will show as much. Yet it’s only a matter of time before people become unaware that this, or any type of personal expression, ever existed online to begin with. (The great irony being all of this is what fueled the ‘knowledge’ of AI bots to begin with.) There are many, far greater, crimes that AI and its proponents commit, but these sort of existential losses of potential creative outlets feel particularly damning of the road humanity is headed down from a purely meaningful perspective.

I moved recently. Or, perhaps, I’m in the process of moving. I still have some floors to vacuum and trash to throw away and a microwave to drive from East Hollywood to MacArthur Park. Nevertheless, things are in motion and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to begin writing online once again. Clean slates, fresh starts, et cetera.

I can’t exactly say why I stopped to begin with. It was a number of factors. My usual writing partner (a stiff drink) has been out of my life for coming up on five years now and, to be honest, it’s been proving incredibly challenging to get in the mood for anything creative while sober. Drinking can be a destructive habit, sure, but it also allowed for me to blur out the mess of the world and focus on just what I was feeling. Without that assistance, the overwhelming existential weight of everything makes the idea of writing, drawing, or even getting out of bed in the morning feel like a pointless endeavor. What good is it to do anything in America these days, anyway?

Then there’s the Dead Internet Theory, which contributes even more to the tsunami of What the fuck am I even bothering with any of this for? thought patterns that plague every spark of inspiration I may get these days. With most of the internet a devolving dialogue between bots and the rest of it a grotesque monetization scheme amidst the dying embers of capitalism, contributing to the static doesn’t feel like a valuable way to spend my time. (This is to say nothing of a declining literacy rate and the fact most people get content in short-form video now.)

Anyway, I’m moving, and I don’t know if it’s my new IP address or just the timing, but from my new place I can no longer watch YouTube videos. The site requires I sign in (I do not have an account) in order to view any of their content. For whatever reason, this pushed me over the edge and I guess re-starting this little blog is my way of putting one more site on the internet that doesn’t track its audience—no required log-in, no storing of cookies. Just whatever bullshit I come up with, free to any and all to read or leave.

So we’ll see where this goes, or if I can maintain it. I’ve taken down all the writing and work archives, as it’s been too long since I’ve painted anything and don’t really feel like hosting shit from ten years ago. I guess it was good while it lasted.