A Blogger’s Manifesto

In support of my debut novel, released in 2022, I thought it might be prudent to create a content site. My first instinct was commercial. The amount of advertising necessary to ensure consistent sales on sites like Amazon is prohibitively expensive, and I figured that a blog might drive some traffic to my book for free.

My interest in Film Noir had only increased since my college years and I’d been working my way through the canon, starting with pre-code/proto-noirs from the early 1930’s. I often took notes while I watched, story details that might inform my fiction writing process, or simply observations that I wanted to remember. Turning these notes into blog articles seemed like a relatively low cost way to produce content for the blog, and soon enough I had completed around half a dozen posts.

I carried out some research on the world of blogging, which to my surprise was mostly about SEO. I learned that writing quality had almost nothing to do with the viability of an online publication, and that everyone was marching to the algorithmic beat of Google’s drum. Domain authority, link velocity, topical authority, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, site performance metrics, page speed, topical relevance, keyword density, heading optimization, meta tagging, meta title optimization, CDN’s, E-A-T…and never mind the wacky world of WordPress. This jargon-laden shit went on forever, but I learned what I could and gave the site a shot.

Ironically, or perhaps tragically, my website’s first six months turned out to be the best. For whatever reason, my articles began to rank. The Film Noir space is relatively small, with heavy competition from only just a few large sites. At that point in time, old-school forums, tumbler pages and even micro-sites on Blogger were still receiving clicks. A handful of my articles got ranked on page one, and the others landed on page two or three.

This initial traction created the unfortunate belief that with additional resources and continued work, one day I could monetize the site. My focus would remain on writing novels, but producing monthly articles would be a way to exercise those muscles during fallow uncreative periods.

I had no interest in monetizing using a subscription model, which back then still seemed pointless if you didn’t have a pre-existing audience. I also didn’t want to use my articles to sell a bunch of plastic branded crap—I didn’t really think a Too Late To Die Early t-shirt would be going viral on Instagram anytime soon. 

Monetization required an upgrade to the tech stack, increased site security, and a data-driven approach to content planning. I started choosing films to write about based on factors other than my own academic interest, focussing instead on things like competition, topical authority, and internal link building.

At first the strategy appeared to work. Once I published twenty articles, I even acquired a few organic back links, a feather in my cap in terms of how Google would begin to crawl and rank my site.

While the site’s trajectory appeared to be on track, the expense kept adding up. By the end of 2024, my cost to run the site exceeded $1200. While I could afford to take this loss indefinitely, I really didn’t want to. The entire point of a launching an online business was to take advantage of the low barrier to entry, but the barrier just kept creeping up. Cost aside, what really turned my stomach was the advent of AI.

I should be clear that I am not against artificial intelligence or its potential to improve our world. I do, however, disagree with the notion that an LLM will eventually somehow morph into a conscious being.

In other words, while the technology is sound, an LLM will only lead to AGI as a component of a larger, more intricate system that has the capabilities to navigate and comprehend the physical world. But will it be a conscious person? With an imagination and a soul? Of course not.

Consciousness is born, not built. There’s not a single neuroscientist that can explain where it comes from—or where it goes.

For those of you, who like myself, suspect that human consciousness might be a hidden function of our universe, I recommend the work of Roger Penrose or Stuart Hameroff. Even if you come away skeptical, at the very least, you’ll abandon any notion that a pattern matching algorithm created on a spreadsheet can eventually become a conscious being.

At any rate, 2024 was the year that SEO related companies began incorporating AI writing tools into their software suites. I’m sure that scrappy start-ups bolted LLM’s onto their products even earlier than that, but early 2024 was when I noticed the technology becoming standard across many mainstream platforms.

I wasn’t bothered by the writing tools themselves. If you’re a shitty writer, now you have a tool. So what? Just like if I’m a shitty carpenter, I can go out and buy a tool to make my work a little bit less shitty. In either case, access to a better tool will only bring your performance up to adequate. A true expert, one who’s done the training and has accumulated the experience and has dedicated their entire working life to honing a specific craft, well, you’ll never be as good as them. In other words, matter how good your tools are, if you sucked before, you just suck a little less right now.

It was the AI powered research tools that bothered me the most. With the ability to process and comprehend natural language, an AI powered SEO tool enables users to not only assess why a given post gets ranked, but to also instantly produce a semantic duplicate of the article in question.

It wasn’t long before my site was being crawled by AI bots, sometimes on a daily basis. My position inside Google Search began to drop, replaced by knock-off articles that were clearly generated with my content as their primary source.

At first I only noticed smaller sites participating in this grift. But mid-way through 2024, by complete coincidence, I stumbled upon an article on a very reputable independent music blog that I knew without a doubt had scraped and re-configured my review of Micheal Mann’s brilliant 1981 debut, Thief.

So then I freaked and started blocking crawlers. When daily crawls began to multiply beyond my ability to manually keep up, I installed plug-ins to automate the process. From there, my Google rankings tumbled further, to the point where human traffic decreased to almost zero. Beyond a dedicated group of unidentifiable readers, scattered around the globe, my only visitors were bots.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the phenomenon described above was not unique to just my site. Looking back, I now believe it was the real world beginning of the “dead internet theory.”

This hypothesis describes an internet devoid of original, human derived content, replaced by walled gardens and private websites that prevent their proprietary data from being scraped and then subsumed by their competitors. With search engines providing instant answers with AI, customers never have to leave the page. Independent websites with no traffic cannot make money selling advertising. Search engines that don’t send traffic beyond their ecosystems have to sell subscriptions as opposed to selling ads, again reducing the incentive for human beings to produce original content. And the process just goes round and round and round, until what was once a thriving online ecosystem has been reduced to billion channel television.

The end result of all my angst was to delete the site and relinquish the domain name, a decision that I made before the start of 2025. I figured there were other cheaper ways to drive some traffic to my books without supplying plagiarists with royalty-free fodder for their AI generated slop.

My intense hatred of social media left me with a narrow list of publishing options.

I opened an account on Medium, where I paid the monthly fee required to monetize one’s posts, and published three short stories from a collection I released in 2024. I knew beforehand Medium is not a well-known destination known for readers interested in fiction. I also knew that without a pre-established following, achieving any kind of scale would be a challenge. Having said that, the bar for success was pretty low—it’s not like my defunct blog ever earned a single dime. But eighteen months in, my Medium account has yet to function as a money-maker or a lead generator in any measurable way.

I had another look at Twitter, then quickly cancelled that account in 2025 for reasons I will keep to myself, but should be reasonably obvious to any reasonable person.

I also spent some time on Reddit. Given its text-based format, and also the commitment of the volunteers who moderate the site, I thought it might be a place where I could find ‘my people.’ A few months into that attempt, I decided it was not for me. I’ll admit, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sub-reddits where one can consume or participate in relatively thoughtful discussions on specific topics.

However, my anecdotal takeaway is that the site cannot survive (and by survive, I mean achieve consistent growth) without also catering to “everybody else.” And it’s everybody else I have a problem with. In fact, I can state without hyperbole that during my experiment with Reddit, I came across some of the most absolutely stupid drivel that I’ve ever witnessed in my life. And while by now I’ve grown accustomed to a degree of online nonsense, what sets some Reddit users apart is their commitment to defending idiotic points of view in such painstaking detail. Another cohort seems to be the type of user who creates a post with the intent to generate engaging conversation, and yet, the topic or question being posed is irrelevant or categorically insane. In other words, despite the corners of the site that host intelligent debate, a disqualifying portion of the user base seems to be comprised of quasi-intellectual pundits who seek to elevate their feelings of academic inadequacy via pointless arguments with users who possess identical psychological profiles, but opposite political opinions.

Long story long, the aforementioned platforms weren’t for me. I figured YouTube was my last remaining choice.

I started up a channel that I populated with re-posted movie trailers, all of which were downloaded for free from other sources. I stuck with the Film Noir theme, created playlists for each sub-genre, and even posted full length Film Noir classics that had lapsed into the public domain. I created my own intros and outros and also upgraded the resolution of each video, most of which were originally shot on film. I also created my own thumbnails, but based the artwork on my own aesthetic preferences rather than the standard YouTube style in which  someone with their mouth wide open appears to be completely flabbergasted by a mundane object.

I posted one video per week for twelve straight months. I didn’t optimize the video descriptions or post any original content of my own. I didn’t participate in the YouTube eco-system, nor did I follow, tag, comment or even view the other content in my space. The only cost beyond my time was the monthly price of an Adobe subscription. After one year, the channel attracted thirty subscribers and reached just over 20,000 views. I saw a mild uptick in my book sales, but not enough to say the project was a success. Now, I realize that I did not follow best-practices, and that without original content, the prospect of success was rather slim. But the truth is, I don’t want to be a “You-Tuber.” I just want to write my stuff and sell some books. And thus although the cost was minimal, so too were the rewards.

So for the five or six people still reading, you might be wondering, what brought me back to blogging here in 2026? Four specific reasons, and they go like this:

1) I found this platform. Ghost is cheap, easy to use, secure and even the free version looks pretty good compared to a lot of the turnkey options out there like SquareSpace or Weebly or whatever. The newsletter/blogging combo is also quite appealing. Substack always seemed like you needed a pre-existing audience and I’m not sure that it generates much traffic from the open web.

2) I’m no longer totally convinced the internet will end up dead. I suspect that AI slop is quickly destroying organic social media engagement and that pretty soon, most of those sites will just be total crap that generates synthetic engagement from autonomous bots—basically the social media equivalent of “have my people call your people.” All those clicks and eyeballs will need a place to go, and in that scenario, I think human curation (and creation) might stage a little comeback.

3) AI companies will eventually run out of data with which to train their LLM’s. We can see this problem playing out already as they scramble to make deals with legacy publishers and news outlets like Reuters or the New York Times. I believe that in the not so distant future, even small publishers or newsletter writers like myself will be able to earn a nominal fee by licensing original text-based content to the very companies that ruined the internet by trying to steal it in the first place.

4) People will never stop reading. I’m sick and tired of all the doomers out there saying that it’s dead. The truth is, reading fiction, or even non-fiction, was never really a mainstream habit.

Originally, consuming written text was limited to members of the clergy or the aristocracy: those who had been blessed with the education, time and money that it took to access and consume the information. Later, the practice expanded downward to the bourgeoisie, land owners and business people who also enjoyed surplus time and money. And then much later, when labour conditions improved, and the appropriate scenario existed for a middle-class to be created, reading became a widespread habit enjoyed by millions.

But with the advent of both radio and television, reading’s glory days were under threat just as they were taking shape. And thus began the long slow decline of literature and reading as a form of mainstream entertainment. And with the constant evolution of digital technology, we saw that same decline extend to culture and academia as well.

In other words, reading has never really been a thing that average people do—and it’s never been a thing that stupid people do at all. So I’m not worried about whether reading will “survive.” And I’m not certainly not worried about readers.

As for me, I love reading and writing and watching well-made films. I believe in the Humanities, in Western Thought, in the English Literary Canon, in the free and open movement of people and capital and ideas, in academic expertise, and in the marketplace of culture—where things like copyright and intellectual property still matter.

Most of all, I believe that all those things contribute to a life that’s rich in meaning, enjoyment and purpose.

In our current era, we’re not just suffering from an economic poverty created by the scarcity of supply-side inputs, we're suffering from a poverty of spirit, a poverty of intellect, and a poverty of meaning.

Meaning comes from understanding. Understanding comes from knowledge. Knowledge comes from learning things about the world. There is no better way to acquire deeply useful knowledge than through reading—and there never will be. Ask any neuroscientist.

In conclusion, Too Late To Die Early will now resume publishing, beginning with this post. You’ll see some older content first, albeit re-purposed to be less Google-friendly. By early Spring, brand new posts will be on the way.

If lots of people end up patrons of the site, fantastic. If a small but thoughtful group of people end up coming here instead, even better.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

See you in the movies,

Tod