How do you explain starting a blog in 2023? What possible excuse can there be, on an internet whose only real rule is to never look backward, to hitch your wagon to a 20 year old discarded format?

Well, in the words of the kids who are gleefully strip-mining 20 year old culture for music and clothing fashions, blogging was… a vibe.

I find the resurgence of the term “vibes” in recent years a fascinating linguistic phenomenon. As our inability to collectively reason through even the simplest controversies has become more obvious, we’ve had to rummage back through our cultural detritus for language that is sufficiently vague and emotional to actually connect with each other. At a time when even the most minor controversies of pop culture fandom can generate vicious antagonism, vibes provide a comfortingly bland level on which to connect. Either the vibes are right or they aren’t, no need to litigate each party’s identity-defining take on politics or who a popstar is dating.

As a third generation (ethnic, nonpracticing) hippie, I can’t help but approve of this rediscovery of the language of my people. The language of every subculture tends to embody its critiques of the dominant values, and “vibes” was a reach back to the Spiritualism of the 19th Century just as High Modernism reached its apogee. The hippies did not produce a coherent alternative to science and capitalism, but their language lingers on as a reminder that there must be more to life than the march of technological and material progress. And it’s no wonder that we find ourselves reaching for its gauzy, spiritualized sense of meaning again, now that modernism’s last great project, the internet, seems to be collapsing in on itself.

Growing up in the 1990s, the opening of the great internet frontier felt like the beginning of a new and better chapter of the human story. The bings and buzzes of a dial-up modem seemed to herald a new era, which united the old enterprising human spirit with the “pale blue dot”-era awareness of our interdependency and fragility. From the moment I first began to understand what the internet was (helped along by a friend’s mystifying account of accidentally buying dogfood on Prodigy), I was sure that it was the key to a Star Trek-style future of mutual understanding and collaboration. What else but utopia could possibly result from connecting all the world’s people and information?

That dream still felt within reach when, out of recession-fueled desperation, I got a job blogging about cars and the car industry in 2008. I didn’t particularly care about cars, although I quickly realized that they were an incredible lens through which to explore countless fascinating and important topics, but from the very beginning it felt like there was an opportunity to use the internet the right way. Blogging in those days was, to dig back into the hippie lexicon, a groove… and it’s worth explaining why.

Each day, the “real news outlets” would report stories about the auto industry, a brief and meaning-laden dispatch that lacked only the context necessary to fully appreciate its meaning. As a blogger, my job was to take that story and add context: link to the stories that led up to this one, and then add analysis about where it might be going. Each news item is a snapshot, a single informational data point, and we tried to surface the meaning that connected them together. In the process we helped Google fulfill its mission to organize the world’s information, and because we ensured that each news blog post linked to at least three pieces of real context, Google repaid us with incredible search ranking.

For a brief and glorious moment, the system worked. I got to educate myself about the auto industry, my readers got real value from the context I provided to each new story, Google got real-time information organized in a way that prioritized real meaning, and the website I worked for grew its traffic and revenue. When I realized that I was part of a virtuous cycle, in which I and the readers and Google exchanged value fairly while making the internet a better place, I knew I had stumbled in something I wanted to do. I had found my groove. The Star Trek future of harmony and understanding beckoned.

The immaculate vibes started wearing off fast, sometime after the term Search Engine Optimization entered the vernacular. Slowly it began to sink in that it was much easier and cheaper to simply rewrite news items and press releases and just game your way to the top of the search results, and that the outlets who took that approach were winning. Then, one day I woke up and the virtuous cycle of honest work and real value had been replaced by a vicious cycle of numbing drudgery, worse content, and less-informed readers. By the time social media got its claws into what was increasingly referred to as “the content business,” any illusion that the internet would propel humanity toward its better natures had become untenable.

By then, my blogging experience had opened plenty of other writing opportunities, and for some time there was a sense of meaning in simply having transcended blogging, and contributing to big name outlets. But other writers and reporters had spent their entire lives wanting to write and report, whereas I always felt like I was trying to replicate the sense of a groove that I’d felt as a blogger. Life behind a paywall is more prestigious and better paid, but what you give up is the feeling that you can help shape the internet, in your own little way. You begin to wonder if the groove was ever even real, and whether your reliance on a vague hippie word to describe it doesn’t almost prove that it only ever existed in your head.

In such a state of mind we become vulnerable to life’s seductive forces, and for the better part of a decade Twitter became my internet groove. First as a professional platform, then as an increasingly personal outlet, Twitter eventually colonized my entire internet experience and developed into a deeply unhealthy obsession. Its breadth and immediacy tricked me into mistaking its feed for the internet, its dopamine rush for real professional accomplishments, its glib interactions for real connection. Even after the Tesla Wars made me realize Twitter’s profound shortcomings as a medium, which led me to writing Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, I couldn’t break my addictive relationship with it.

And so it is that Elon Musk’s bizarre and ill-advised purchase of Twitter, along with a significant amount of unrelated turmoil in my life, has led me full circle, back to blogging. After fifteen years spent with my ears pinned back, chasing cars, I’ve finally stopped to look around and I can’t find anything about the internet that reminds me of the groove I was once in, or suggests how to get back to it. Looking around the internet, it’s clear I’m not alone.

Moments like this can be overwhelming. When personal, professional and planetary crises converge, you have to take steps to manage the cognitive load. Steps like adopting words that don’t even try to process things rationally, but speak to deeper sense of meaning that we can only feel.

We have to start tuning into the vibes.

Finding our groove.

That’s why I started a blog in 2023.