After the clip goes viral, the author disappears

I still remember the tiny humiliation of that footer on my first website, where I published amateur poetry.

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It sat there as if it mattered. Maybe it did because people used to read stuff then. It was a warning, all right.

I was proud to have my poetry published on the World Wide Web. I declared to anyone who asked me why I was spending so much time staring at a screen. It wasn’t normal then. But HTML wasn’t going to update itself.

I would get tons of visitors, too. Every so often, I pull up that old site in the Internet Archive, wince a little, then linger longer than I expect. It is embarrassing, sure. It is also grounding. Proof that I was willing to sound ridiculous in public.

The tools kept changing after that. Blogs replaced hand-coded HTML pages. Feeds replaced bookmarks. Podcasts came with their polite lists of platforms, the modern version of browser compatibility badges.

But the audience never really evolved. People stayed distracted, impatient, hopeful for shortcuts, occasionally generous, and often confused. The medium shifted, the posture remained the same.

We keep pretending each new format will fix the fundamental problem of attention, when all it really does is rearrange it.

My recent stumble hurt because it arrived dressed as momentum.

70+ days of posting felt like progress until one clipped video collapsed the illusion. Context evaporated. Someone else edited my words into a performance I never agreed to give. Suddenly, I was not speaking to my people but being narrated to strangers. That kind of fame is not attention; it is a loss of authorship. It teaches you quickly how little control you actually have once something leaves your hands.

And I wasn’t really comfortable with that. I publish incognito for a reason. But I do show my face, so that you know I am good-looking. And most likely real.

There is a quiet intellectual thinning happening now because incentives reward outsourcing thought. Algorithms decide what deserves oxygen. AI makes it tempting to skip the slow parts entirely. The contradiction is apparent and uncomfortable. These tools can sharpen a voice or erase it, sometimes in the same breath.

So this feels like a reset, not a reinvention. A daily practice, not a growth hack.

Writing every day is less about output than orientation. I am not trying to generate thoughts faster. That’s already done and dusted. I am using AI to figure out how to hold them (my thoughts that is) long enough to hear what they are actually saying. AI is phenomenal at that.

If AI helps stitch the narrative together, fine. The spine still has to be mine. The work now is not to be louder, cleaner, or safer, but to stay recognizable to myself as I keep going.

Yeah, and Happy New Year to those who celebrate.