Yesterday morning, I woke up, opened my email, and got utterly blindsided by this:
All I could do was stare down at my ipad and breathe: "What? WHAT? WHAT?!?
It had to be a joke. It had to be a vicious, unfunny hack from somewhere.
There was no reason in the world that any reasonable human being could look at eighteen years of posts on "Coming to Terms" and decide it was "spam."
What the fuck IS a spam blog, anyway?
I went to my bookmarks, clicked on the one for my blogger dashboard. Up came "Women On."
"Coming to Terms" was, indeed, gone.
Eighteen and a half years of my life--my stories, my essays, by personal journal, my pictures--evaporated into the ether.
Just like that. With no warning. And for no discernible reason that I could possibly imagine. Spam, indeed!
When I recovered my senses enough to take some kind of action, I clicked on their "unlock blog" link, and I was taken to one of those stupid "recaptcha" screens where I had to click on all the pictures containing palm trees.
That evaporated, and a little message box came up, saying something to the effect that obviously I'm not a robot, since only a real human being could perform their little hoop-jumping exercise. So the "blogger team" would review my request to have my blog unlocked...and they were sorry for any inconvenience caused by their spam algorithms, which are not perfect, and they're still working on the bugs, and thank you and we're sorry...heh heh. They would let me know their answer in a couple of days.
And that was it. "Coming to Terms" was gone. I had fulfilled the only option available to me to get it back. And now I needed to "wait." My favorite thing in the whole wide world.
Given the chance to think about it a little more, I came to the conclusion that the source of the "report" was very probably someone I had pissed off with a comment on Twitter. Like an idiot, I posted a link to my blog in my Twitter profile. I had thought I was promoting myself...that perhaps I could lure a few more readers. It never entered my mind that I had put a loaded weapon out there in the middle of the culture war battlefield, where anyone with bad intent and a rudimentary knowledge about how social media work, could pick it up and blow my head off with it.
I was of two minds as to how to deal with this...unbelievable turn of random events.
One side of me said, "Calm down. This is ridiculous. Of course they're going to give you back your blog. They have no reason to destroy it."
But I also knew there was no such thing as "the blogger team." There are no human eyes examining the content of blogger blogs, any more than there are on Facebook or Twitter. It's all about algorithms and machines that react to clicks. Some asshole came to my blog and clicked "report," and some machine grabbed 18 years of my life and wiped it off the internet. There's no reasoning with that. There's no appeal process when you KNOW they are absolutely wrong. There's just "click here and we'll let you know." And hoping that it's the right click to get an algorithm to decide to let me have those 18 years back.
So I prepared myself for the worst. I told myself that this might be the Universe telling me that my little blog "no longer served," and making the decision for me that it was time to let go of it. I steeled myself to accept that and move on. It was only a blog, not my life, that was ending. I could go on without it. I would go on without it. I would survive.
But I would have to survive with a hole in my soul that you could drive a truck through. Because that was how I felt.
Through all the bullshit of the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, through the process of social media becoming cesspools of political misinformation and central battlefields of America's ever-expanding culture war, I always thought of "Coming to Terms" as my safe place. It was mine. My own little corner of the internet. If only by virtue of the number of years I've kept it going...there had to at least be some kind of squatter's rights that apply to this lonely, crumbling little corner of ancient internet. Right?
Seriously? Hah! It was never mine. It doesn't belong to me. I only lease this little, tiny, unremarkable speck in a huge ethereal metropolis. And the powers that be can and will kick my ass right out, on a whim, with no provocation. AOL did it fourteen years ago. What made me think Blogger was any different?
So, last night, about 7:00 pm. I check my email, and am greeted by this:
Apparently my click had activated the proper algorithm to get the giant machines in the sky to give me back my blog.Relieved? Yes.
Ready to forgive, forget, and keep soldiering on as if this never happened? Not hardly.
If anything, my perennial love/hate relationship with social media has advanced to hate/hate. Seething, unrelenting hate/hate.
I don't see how I can continue relying on the internet at all, for anything. Not for social interaction, not for information, not for an outlet for my brain meanderings. Certainly not for a place to put things close to my heart so even my smallest audience of less than a dozen souls can read, and know me, and agree or disagree, or at least know I'm still alive.
I always thought I knew that being on Twitter was like dancing with a poisonous snake, but I never imagined actually getting bitten, and what that would look like.
Now I know.
And now, I have to figure out what I want to do about this whole mess.
But I strongly suspect that my internet presence is going to shrink drastically...possibly to nothing.
I'll have to see.
In parting, this is what I have to say to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and all varieties and permutations of social media that have cropped up like deadly toadstools in the past 20 years:
...and the evil capitalist AI horse--the one dragging the world over the cliff into the abyss--that you rode in on.
