This is Not My Side Hustle

I got an email from a guy who doesn’t understand why I’d run a website without trying to monetize it. My response became a manifesto. Oops.

I didn’t intend for this to become a manifesto, but here you go.

a public response to an unnamed bozo’s sales pitch

So, yeah. I got an email overnight from somebody who visited my site and had important questions like:

Of course, if I paid him (and if I acted now I’d get a discount off his usual fee) he could devote his attention to me as a social media guru and help me boost my profile, grow my followers, and achieve the prominence I deserve so I can write for a living.

This is a silly sales pitch from a silly person who probably can’t deliver on any of their promises, and such cosmik debris hardly merits a personal response. Nor can I be bothered to quote their email with attribution; I am instead paraphrasing and condensing. Nevertheless, the questions I abstracted out of this clown’s bullshit might be worth answering.

supporting a website without advertising?

This one’s easy. I am not a “content creator” (except in the bathroom, where everybody creates — or excretes — content). I have a day job; for my sins, I am a full-stack thaumaturge at a Big 4 consulting firm. It pays me a fairly generous salary that was respectable before the plague, and is barely adequate today. I rent a domain for about $15/year. I rent space on Nearly Free Speech by depositing money into an account that is debited based on how much traffic my site actually gets. If the account runs low they email me and I top it up. Since the site is static HTML (with a little CSS as a treat) and has no server-side or client-side code, hosting and running site usually doesn’t cost me more than $5-10/month.

If you do the arithmetic you’ll find that it’s not that expensive to run a website, especially if you don’t get a lot of traffic. I spend more money per year on streaming TV subscriptions that my wife uses more than I do, and even she acknowledges that they’ve become like cable TV in that most of what’s available isn’t worth her time to watch.

I certainly spend a hell of a lot less on this website than I do meeting the annual deductible for my capitalist death panel employer-provided health insurance.

Even if I were to monetize, all I would do is make my website shittier for what might, if I’m lucky, amount to enough money per month to take my wife out for pizza. I’d have to report the income, ad revenue is 1099 income and thus taxed differently from wages and salaries from a W2 job, and tax prep for a W2 job is already more complicated than it needs to be thanks to lobbyists working for the likes of Intuit and H&R Block.

why full-text RSS instead of a newsletter?

RSS is “pull technology”. It’s there if you want it, and when you’re ready you pull the feed and get updates. This, in my opinion, is how the Internet should work.

Newsletters, app notifications, etc. are all part of the opposite paradigm: “push technology”. This is particularly blatant with notifications in smartphone apps and on websites, which will often call them “push notifications”.

The difference between pull technology and push technology is that the former relies on polling and the latter runs on interrupts. Every email you get from a newsletter and every notification from an app or website is an interruption, a demand for your immediate and undivided attention.

Push technology may be more effective for certain purposes, but at what cost? The use of push technology has turned computers and the internet from technologies that could serve and assist us into technologies that rule us.

I don’t want to contribute any more to that than I already might at my day job.

On a more practical level, if I collect personal details like names and email addresses for a newsletter then I become responsible for how that data is stored and used. I become liable should that data leak or be stolen. The European Union in particular has become more stringent in regulating the storage and use of personal data, and with good reason.

We’ve seen what corporate surveillance firms like Google and Facebook do with the data they collect. We’ve also seen the harm that can result from data that gets leaked or stolen. Particularly memorable is the case of Ashley Madison, a website for men who wanted to set up extramarital affairs with chatbots pretending to be women. Apparently people killed themselves after being exposed.

I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I do this, perversely enough, for fun. Part of the fun is — should it ever be necessary — being able to tell GDPR enforcement apparatchiks to fuck off because not only am I a US citizen operating on American soil, but I don’t collect data on EU citizens in the first place. I don’t even have HTTP server logs, let alone cookies or a mailing list.

I don’t keep secondhand fuel rods from Three Mile Island in my basement, so why would I want your data? It’s just as toxic.

why have my own website?

I don’t want to be a digital sharecropper. I’ve done it before – I used to have 20,000 followers on Google+ and 1,500 on Twitter in 2014 – and it wasn’t worth it.

Google+ was dragged out behind the barn and executed in 2019. Sometimes I miss it, the way you might sometimes miss an ex even though you really weren’t all that great for each other.

I don’t miss Twitter. I don’t get to miss Twitter because it just won’t fuck off and die already. Twitter is still hanging on under Elon Musk, but instead of being the virtual equivalent of a bathroom wall it’s now competing (with Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, and Gab) to be the worst toilet on the internet.

On a more idealistic level, I still believe in John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. I still believe the internet is a place where everybody willing to build their own space online can enjoy mostly unfettered freedom of expression, one of the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Am I completely free to speak my mind straight from the heart on my personal website, regardless of how offensive it might be? No. My host can still give me the boot if I post anything too egregious, but they host sites far more offensive than mine, because their speech is still legal in the United States and protected by the First Amendment, and donate the hosting fees they collect to organizations opposing their nastier clients’ views. They call it “Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons”, and it’s a policy of which I wholly approve.

Does this mean I don’t participate on platforms I don’t own and operate? No. I’m on the Fediverse and I’ve recently joined a couple of old-fashioned web forums. I maintain a presence on a couple of old-fashioned web forums, among them the one run by 32bit.cafe and Basement Community. Not to mention MelonLand and the Midnight Pub. But I do so knowing that I am a guest and that what I can freely post on my own website might not be suitable for these platforms. However, it’s no different from going to a bar. I might be able to walk around with my cock hanging out at home, but that’s not acceptable behavior out in public so I need my own place in both meatspace and cyberspace.

Furthermore, while there are people who seem to do reasonably well tying a domain they’ve rented to their accounts on Medium or Substack, I suspect that they will regret it if these platforms ever run out of venture capital and must shut down for lack of revenue. Substack supposedly funds itself by taking a 10% cut of subscription fees from paid newsletters, but we’ll see if that revenue is enough to satisfy investors ever hungry for an ever-growing return on investment or if Substack faces enshittification like every other platform seems to do. Also, Substack is still a Nazi bar.

why give away my fiction?

I already tried selling it. I published Without Bloodshed over a decade ago, and Silent Clarion a few years after that. For a couple of years my novels sold well enough to complicate my tax prep. I was paid quarterly royalties, recieved 1099s, and had to report the income. I had to track business expenses: authors’ copies, promotions, advertising, conventions, accommodations for conventions, meals, mileage, etc. Every April I’d lay awake at night wondering if this would be the year I faced an IRS audit.

I actually had to run a business. I don’t think I did particularly well at it, and I would rather not attempt it again, at least not as a third full-time job on top of my day job and being a devoted husband.

I’m not interested in trying to sell books on top of my day job any longer. I’d rather just put them on my website, where they’re available if somebody wants them, than settle for the less than the deal I want.

What sort of deal do I want? I can explain it in four words: replace my day job. That’s right. I want the same deal Charles Bukowski got.

And if I can’t have that, maybe you’ll find this more palatable. I don’t give a damn if you’re Teen Vogue or Tor Books: if you want me to write for you, I want you to put me on your payroll as a full-time salaried employee getting a W2 every year. I want at least $125,000/year with the usual benefits, annual increases to cover the cost of living, and guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime. You provide requirements and deadlines and I’ll meet them.

Just like I do as a software developer. Don’t give me shit about not having a MFA that would “qualify” me as a writer. I don’t have a BS in computer science, either, but I manage reasonably well without it. This is still America, dammit, and you don’t need a degree to prove that you can do things, unless you intend to practice law, medicine, or actual engineering. You can just do it.

But my Starbreaker saga is off the table. You don’t get to publish that, whether I retain copyright or it becomes “work for hire”. That is my work, done my way. I’m writing it to scratch my own itch, because literature ain’t Burger King and if I want have it my way I’ve got to do it myself.

dude, this is a personal website

This bozo wasn’t the first to ask me why they should take anything I write seriously because I make no attempt to monetize my website. I doubt they’ll be the last.

Nevertheless, it needs to be said: this is a personal website. It might look quasi-professional because of my (lack of) design sense, it’s still my personal website. This is a place for me to express myself. I tell you up front that I’m not a guru or an expert in any particular field, and that nothing I post should be considered factual unless independently verified.

Somebody trying to post as an authority in their field would not tell people that their website is basically television and you shouldn’t believe anything you see just because it seems plausible or rings true to you.

And, really, if you can’t take something seriously unless it’s paywalled or fills your phone’s screen with auto-playing video ads, then you might want to get professional help. In my thoroughly unprofessional opinion, you’re suffering from capitalism-induced traumatic brain injury.

And if this turned out to be a rant, what did you expect? How many times do I have to say it? This is a personal website. Rants and half-assed manifestos are to be expected.

This is certainly not my side hustle, and your side hustle can eat a giant bag of dicks.

update for January 2025

I originally belted this out in 2023, pounding my keyboard in a cold sober rage for about an hour and then uploading it without much proofreading. I meant every word, and I stand by it today.

I have, however, cleaned up the text a little. I’ve updated existing links and added a few new ones. I’m also not on the Fediverse any longer, nor any kind of corporate social media. Parasocial media has been worthless to me for years, after all, and it’s time I acted accordingly. Maybe it’ll even stick this time, though I’ve had less trouble quitting vi than I’ve had quitting parasocial media.

And it’s been a couple of years since my day job paid enough to satisfy me, because the price of everything but our labor has gone up. So, feel free to email me if you have the authority to hire a full-stack thaumaturge and you aren’t working in law enforcement, military tech, AI, griftocurrency, blockchain, advertising, or parasocial media. Or, hell, pay me to write for you. I’ll give you your money’s worth, good and hard.