This marks the second or third day of construction on my Neocities page. "Why have you come to Neocities, Ash?" asked no one.
I will tell you.
I am here because traditional social media has been of almost no help to my ambitions of artistic commerce, and merely having social media at my fingertips is enticement enough to squander untold hours licking neurotransmitters from the sticky movie theater floor at the bottom of my brain out of desperation for another hit.
I was rather struck the other day by the sheer challenge of trying to reckon exactly how much of my time and energy I had donated to Big Tech for them to profit off of. Every reaction to a piece of content on Insta, FB, or TikTok, every facial expression measured by the IR flash on my phone's face camera, every piece of content consumed, and every purchase made was a piece of data given freely to giant corporations for no compensation other than the privilege of staring at a cave wall a la Plato, where Sora or whatever the fuck is casting a shadow that looks like a likeness of Jake Paul sculpted entirely out of Bad Dragon dildos.
For these reasons, I have made a melodramatic transition to a kind of boutique internet presence that I have more creative control over, and that, seemingly, will not be weaponized to profit off of every aspect of my existence. At least, not quite as much as it would be on Instagram or et cetera.