8r4d It really is all about expression, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the reason I post all this stuff. Online blogs. On apps. Anywhere. The internet has given us this tinderbox of personal expression where anyone can say anything, make money from advice or creativity or entertainment or humour or hate.

I’ve never been much of an expert in any of this stuff. I am a participant, and I’ve always tried to participate from a fair and rational perspective with an outlook that has promoted something good for everyone. Have I been perfect? Hardly. Who the hell has ever had right to make such a claim?

In the last few days I fear a new era has begun. I was inclined to think that social media had simply become a medium for irrationality and unfiltered anger, but we are truly shifting that space into something much darker. The social web has become a place of political reprisal, of repression of opinion, of Orwellian nightmare.

The first time I ever logged on to the internet in the nineteen nineties the internet seemed like the biggest and best thing that humanity had created. It was the democratization of information. Little did I know then that these things follow an inevitable pattern. Smart people make something to be used for good, clever people turn it into a way to make money, and then dark people turn it into a platform for ideological control. That shift has been happening for some time now, but September 2025 is when it truly cemented itself.

As of today, daring to post the so-called wrong opinion online can result in your name on a list, losing your job, being banned from travel. And of course this has always been true about posting dangerous or violent content, but the politics of what counts among such categorization has profoundly shifted in recent days. Disagreement with a political position now comes with a side of such idle threat-making, and we have responded by simply shrugging and suggesting that it is all inevitable.

People shrug at a change in our world that will touch us all at some level, and not in a good way. And worse, the people cheerleading such things seem unable to realize that they are destroying the foundations of the very thing they think they are protecting. It is sad and terrible and disheartening.

I built this little site as an alternative to social media and so it is. Social media is dead. It is no longer safe to post anything, and the decay of its corpse will only accelerate in the coming months.

I am taking another step back and will continue to post my happy vibes here, document my simple expression and love of colour and nature and music and words on this little site and on the platforms I own and control. I can no longer in either good faith or without fear for my personal liberty participate much elsewhere.