Mastodon Archive

There are all these articles on CBD and THC with author attributions of famous internet people of the '00s and '10s. I assume they had articles on the original site. How did these spammers get control of the site, including the original content? I found the original creator of the site, it's on his LinkedIn, according to that he ran it for 16 years. Did he sell it? Has it changed hands, lost in corporate shuffles until landing at an SEO farm with a cannabis lobby client?

I think I found the author of that post I'd saved, but only on LinkedIn. It took some triangulation. He wrote some cool stuff in the '00s, but now it's mostly gone. That reminded me of my friend that also disappeared himself from the Internet in 2008. Now he's mostly disappeared from IRL as well, or at least from my real life. Maybe he just has new friends.

I went and read some of his old posts on the wayback machine. I saw my site in his blogroll, my band in his link list. His posts were prescient, thoughtful, informed, they felt important. Now they're only on that archive. I don't know how the thinking they represented has changed in the years since 2008, really. We've talked and hung out with increased irregularity since, now about 1x a year. I'm afraid maybe not again, as my more recent messages have seemingly not been received.

He posted some back then about selling out, having no viable path towards the ascetic writer's life he aspired towards. He made a lot of money in these intervening 2 decades. I don't think he has to work anymore, although like most things those kinds of details are kept secret.

Anyway, the rabbit hole was all very nostalgic and sad in a pathological way. These emotional journeys back through these archives are much more common in my experience than the intellectual, enlightening variety.