In 1776, a Quaker living in Philadelphia recovered from a severe illness with a peculiar conviction: they had died and been reborn as the Public Universal Friend. The Public Universal Friend was sans gender but avec mission: to spread the message, received during the illness, that there is “Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory, for Thee and for everyone.”
To this day, scholars debate the nature of the Public Universal Friend’s transformation. Was the Public Universal Friend a trans or non-binary person? Or was the Public Universal Friend a woman, as assigned at birth, who embraced gender non-conformity to acquire some measure of personal and professional freedom? Is the Public Universal Friend’s identity reducible to an object lesson on the tyranny of gender roles, the tyranny of sexism, or the universal nature of God? Or did the Public Universal Friend, like all of us, contain multitudes?
There may be “room, room, room” in Big Tech’s servers for billions of accounts. But there is no room for more than one self.
Mark Zuckerberg once famously claimed that “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Big Tech has largely followed this theme, flattening us into unitary “users” or “customers” whose behavior can be profiled, predicted, and manipulated.
When anyone can follow us across the Web with one Google search, there’s significant pressure to compress ourselves into a public unitary identity or “personal brand.” I spent fifteen years of my career selling the “personal brand” to my clients – and inflicting it on myself.
The Public Universal Friend may have found liberty in a rebrand, but I only found oppression in mine. The greatest liberation the small web has given me is freedom from the tyranny of the Public Unitary Identity.
the corporate web ruined my writing
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post titled “the small web is rehabiliating how I write.” In it, I noted that I’ve made a living as a writer for over 25 years. I made the vast majority of that living by writing for the corporatized, commercial Web: what I called “The Web of Selling Things. The Web of Engineering People’s Behavior So They See More Ads and Buy More Stuff. The Web of ‘What Sells.’”
To no one’s surprise, decades of churning out the kind of “content” that has cluttered search result did no favors to my writing. I made the Web worse, and I made my writing worse in the process.
“SEO” gets only part of the blame. The attitudes and expectations that created “search engine optimization” did most of the damage. The corporatized Web assumes that “the customer” has a Public Unitary Identity too. “The customer” does not want to think, to plan, or even to read.
As a commercial Web writer, my job was to convince the customer that whatever curiosity, desire, or need drove them to the site could be satisfied by clicking “buy.” Thus, everything written for “the customer” required a surface-level take presented in a chipper, somewhat urgent cadence. As I described it in my blog post:
It’s a superficial, plasticky approach designed to give the reader just enough information to get them to buy something or to click the next article – but never enough information to satisfy them. This lack of satisfaction is by design. A customer satisfied by reading won’t make a purchase. Nor will they spend additional time on the site, click more links, or return for additional advertising-packaged-as-content. The writing is not a product or a conversation. It’s a wrapper.
Decades of writing like this did more damage than I realized. I migrated to the small Web out of a personal and perennial dissatisfaction with the time I spent on social media and commercialized Web sites and blogs. I missed something I knew I’d experienced but could not name. I found it on the small Web - and faced a professional reckoning.
in which i understand and embrace my failures
The reason I was so bad at building a Public Unitary Personal Brand for myself is that I tried to fit all my varied interests, skills, and careers into a single, saleable “brand image.” That’s hard for any human to do; we all contain multitudes. Add the fact that I’ve had dozens of jobs and four entirely separate careers now, and the job became nearly impossible.
I couldn’t compress myself into a brand slogan. I tried. But I could not sell the idea that “Molly” was someone who was “passionate about marketing!” or “committed to my career!” when I’ve had four separate careers in 30 years and only market anything so I can eat.
Attempting to cram all my actual skills, experience, and interests into a single unitary brand was terrible for business. My constant discomfort with it showed in my work. I edited blog posts over and over. I deleted, un-deleted, and rearranged my work more than I actually wrote. The Public Unitary Web Site was a mess, and so I was I.
Writing for my Public Unitary Personal Brand blog was an exercise in self-dentistry. I hated it. I avoided it. I had regular cases of writer’s block. And I hated myself for hating it. If “writing” were really my “passion,” surely I’d be overflowing with enthusiasm for fantastic ideas like “Top Ten Keyword Research Strategies” and “How to Optimize Your Site for Voice Search.” Right?
I might even have believed that I deserved to be bad at Web marketing, except that I’m actually pretty good at Web marketing. Just not when the “product” I have to crush into flavorless paste is me.
When I wrote the Bearblog post about the small Web rehabilitating my writing, I said I’d preserve some of my cringiest Public Unitary Personal Brand stuff for posterity. I will not. I’ll only release that stuff again if someone pays me handsomely to do it. And that person is getting a pdf. I’m done making the Web worse.
the personal web is rehabilitating me
In “the small web is rehabilitating how I write,” I cite several signs of my rehabilitation: “I’m calmer. My attention span is better. I get genuine satisfaction from both my online and my offline activities.”
The trend has continued. In the two months since I quit social media and deleted the Public Unitary Personal Brand blog, both the volume and quality of my writing have increased. Instead of fighting myself to write one blog post a week, I have to restrain myself from writing more than one or two a day. Sure, some of them are bad, but my interest in writing shows up daily. It used to be nearly non-existent.
My attention span is growing back, too. As I wrote in another recent blog post, “I went from barely surviving 1,500-word articles to actually enjoying 15,000-word articles. ...I can watch entire television shows again witout jonesing for The Scroll.”
I spent years telling clients that the sweet spot between their customers’ attention spans and Google search engine rankings’ tolerance was 1,500 to 2,000 words. And it is. That’s about all any of us can tolerate of manipulative, plasticky marketing content intended to manufacture a need and sell us the solution.
I thought I couldn’t stand reading anymore. Turns out I just can’t stand reading Web. 2.0 drivel. On the small Web, I prefer longer pieces. The kind written by humans for humans.
Most importantly, computers are Fun again.
computers are Fun again
My first program wasn’t the classic “Hello World.” It was a personal variant. Sometime circa 1992, I learned about BASIC’s PRINT command and immediately made our old Apple IIGS introduce itself to me: “HELLO MOLLY I AM THE COMPUTER.”
Stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere (we didn’t even have touch-tone service until 1998) and forbidden from owning video games for most of the 90s, I made the most of our Gateway 2000 by learning everything I could about how to navigate and manipulate both the DOS shell and the Windows 3.11 settings, to the annoyance of my parents. I spent hours on that machine – so many that my mother cut me off more than once.
I built the computer I took to college with me in 2000: a PIII 500 with a 2-GB hard drive and a profligate 256MB of RAM. With access to my first-ever stable Internet connection, I started learning HTML and made my first website.
I switched to a laptop in grad school, because I needed a machine I could carry on the mile-long walk to and from classes. Free time became a laughable luxury, and my Web site fell by the wayside. Instead, I became an early adopter of Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Twitter. I stopped trying to fix my own hardware and ceded control over much of the software.
Somewhere between graduate school and my first corporate job, I let myself become an end-user. And computers...stopped being fun.
I have enjoyed the computer more in the past two months than I have since 2002.
I’d forgotten how intensely satisfying HTML is. I write a thing. The page changes. I see if what I wrote did what I wanted it to do. It’s immediate, straightforward, direct, logical feedback from my writing. One cannot get that kind of feedback from editors of English prose, because the meaning of a word or phrase is always up for discussion.
Despite loving HTML, I have neglected it in the past few weeks for Gemtext. The panoply of options in HTML is fun; the lack of them in Gemtext is freeing. By depriving me of equivalents to <strong> or <em>, Gemtext forces me to think about the structure of my phrases, clauses, and sentences. I have to rely on the language to place emphasis. It’s a way of thinking about English I’ve never had to do before, and one I deeply enjoy.
I started running Ubuntu again for the first time since 2008. Like a lot of people leaving abusive relationships, I didn’t realize how badly I’d been treated by my OS until I ditched Windows and Android. My phone now runs Sailfish OS, which is a dream to use and offers a purpose-built IDE for creating native apps. Its developer fanbase is so fun I’ll gladly learn C++ just to join them.
I learn new things daily. I spend my free time in the “zone of proximal development” – the thin Venn diagram overlap between “things I know” and “things I’m discovering,” just before those two tip into the zone of “things that are too hard.” The zone of proximal development is the optimal space for learning. For curious nerds like me, it’s also the optimal space for fun.
I thought the computer had changed. It hadn’t. My relationship to it had. Learning I could change that back has been one of the coolest discoveries I’ve ever made.
The computer doesn’t have to be “that thing I’m stuck to so I can convince capitalism I deserve to eat.” The computer can be Fun.
“but Molly, isn’t your screen name a personal brand-”
Yes. I’m findable as “drmollytov” all over the small Web and Geminispace.
The difference is this: I chose to stick everything under one pseudonym for my convenience. It saves me from remembering a dozen different usernames. It also lets me cite myself more easily across genres/publications/protocols. It’s not for other people; it’s for me.
I make new things online almost daily. My Web site is now a repository of ideas, projects, and links, rather than a unitary mask trying to sell something. I can express the multitudes I contain.
I feel no pressure to create a Public Unitary Identity from my screen name. “drmollytov” is one name with multiple identities: librarian, gardener, retro games enthusiast, Trek fan, encyclopedia reading nerd, budding programmer, part-time subversive, rant factory, cat lady. I don’t need to compress these into a single “career” or “identity.”
The small Web (and Geminispace) frees me not only to contain multitudes but also to express them. There is room, room, room, in the many mansions of the Internet, for all of me.
Molly Tov is a writer and librarian. She blogs at drmollytov.dev.
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