A friend just recently re-sent me an interview I did seven years ago. Back in 2011, when asked what I thought about the future of online content, I thought it would either be an amazing destination for artists to express themselves or:

“it’ll be someplace terrible, full of videos that get shorter and shorter and jokes that get more and more alienating and esoteric, until memes are the only form of ‘content.’”

For starters I think it’s pretty unfair of Past Daniel to hedge his bets so thoroughly that his answer was “I think it’ll either be perfect or it’ll be terrible!” You always had a problem with commitment, 2011-era Daniel. But as a recently-unemployed-person on the internet who is looking at the current content landscape and trying to see how a young writer or writer/performer could establish him or herself, I get concerned. Not for myself (because I am not young); just for the next generation. A lot of the people in my class of internet writers and performers and directors had the benefit of time and space to fail. I won’t say we had it easy, but we were lucky because algorithms hadn’t fully consumed the internet when we started making stuff, and people still believed in the promise of the internet enough to let us clowns try some shit.

I don’t worry about the daily vloggers  or prank artists or social experimenters; I worry about the thoughtful kids who need time, encouragement and some gentle nudging to make something cool, the things I got when I was starting out here.

I don’t know. I don’t want to make a new website, because I’m out of the website-making business, but I want to know that there are still places out there for curious and optimistic kids to try shit out, the way my class did. Anyways.

Also, if you click through to that very-dated article, just uh… just ignore the pictures.