Paul Glover, Photographer

I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul.

• “Invictus” - William Ernest Henley

There is something which has been profoundly bothering me about social media platforms lately.

No, it’s not the toxic dumpster fire crammed full of poorly-targeted ads, irrelevant reels, AI generated misinformation and no fact checking worth a damn nature of social media circa 2025. I mean, yeah, that bothers me, a whole hell of a lot. But it’s not what I’m here to talk about, at least not directly.

My issue with social media platforms is that they are transient. Not guaranteed. The future is decidedly uncertain.

I think of all the time I spent on, and posting to, Twitter. Before Musk turned it into a platform where the very worst of the worst are more than welcome, even encouraged, to participate. Before I decided I wanted no part of that and deleted my account. All gone. I don’t care about the content so much, but the time I spent on there is not a zero quantity. That’s time I could have used for something productive, or useful or even just relaxing, damn it all.

Now, with abdication of fact checking and a steady enshittification toward advertising I don’t want and random engagement-bait content I certainly don’t want while the stuff I do want is buried, all coming to a Meta platform near you, I see Instagram heading the same way; a platform I used to be on. I already quit participating and deleted the app. Sooner or later, I may delete the account too.

Then there’s the recent reminder, courtesy of the TikTok “ban”, that platforms can just be taken away, or that they can end up in the hands of people whose agendas do not align with your beliefs. That’s hardly the first; anyone here old enough to remember when GeoCities was the place to call your home-on-the-web?

How many IG/FB people have fallen foul of “community standards violations” and lost their accounts¹? How many have had their accounts actually stolen by scammers?

Gone, all gone. Like Ralphie’s turkey dinner at the end of A Christmas Story. All with limited or no recourse.

The truth of it is that if you don’t control the platform, you can’t guarantee it will be around for as long as you need it to be. Your favorite social platform could be bought by a soulless husk of a tech bro venture capitalist who sees it as a monetization or AI-training opportunity. It may even have been designed that way from the start².

It could be banned because some fragile proto-dictator thinks there are too many people being mean to him on it.

And when it’s gone, so are the things you put there. So is the time you invested into creating them, and the connections you built up. Now if you were smart, you had the content saved somewhere else and can repost it. But the time, that you can’t get back. The community, that is gone. You’re starting over.

Then there’s the transient nature of the content itself. The volume of posts to social sites is staggering, and the lifetime of any one post is short as a result. That photo you spent hours on gets a brief glance, perhaps a like, maybe if you’re lucky a “nice capture bruh” comment. Then its off the top of the screen, doomscrolled away for the next bit of content, and the 100 after that.

You throw fistfuls of pixels into the flaming void, only to see them glitter ever so brightly for a split second before they’re incinerated into nothingess and lost forever. Your reward is the demand that you create more, post more, all while engaging more with content the corporation wants you to engage with, and being force-fed advertising, all while your hard work is used to train the AI metabot which will later on flood the platform with even more slop. Because if you don’t, if you stop, you will be punished, memory-holed by The Algorithm.

I dunno, but that doesn’t sound like a fun time. It doesn’t sound like being able to create your art on your own terms, at the speed you are able to. Art is about creating things which enrich souls. It’s not about churning out content as fast as you can until the robots using your stolen content as learning material get good enough to replace you entirely.

What I want to do is create, when I am able, on the timeframe I want to. If I make one photo I’m proud of in a month, well damn it, I want to be able to enjoy that. I want it to be someplace where it can be found, where it can breathe and not be drowned out by the noise around it. I want anyone to be able to enjoy it. If I write a 1000-word article, I’d like it to be easy to find, and to stay put.

Which is where this site comes in. It has been live, in some condition or other, since the turn of the millenium. It will remain available for as long as I pay the domain name renewals and the host stays up. If I want to be sure I’ll have my photography and writing somewhere for as long as I choose to, this is the only way to do that. If it goes away or changes that is by my choice, not someone else’s.

I control this platform. I own the domain name. The content can be hosted just about anywhere that has a decent internet connection, even on a server in my basement if need be. If I build a newsletter mailing list, that is mine also.

I am, indeed, the Master of my Fate, and the Captain of my Soul.