CLH Words

You will not see any ads no this blog. This was almost not the case. This spring when the idea behind this blog first came to me, I envisioned it as a way to create some income. Thankfully, I did not start a blog then. It took me eight months to finally start, and has moved beyond a source of income.

               This blog is meant to be a garden for my ideas. A place where I can grow a community and help the world be a better, more beautiful place. And ads fundamentally go against this. Seeing billboards along the highway, against the green fields and forests, fills me with anger. They scar the landscape with their capitalism. Ads online do a similar thing.  I do not know you, person reading this. Yet, I feel like I owe you something. You are human (unless you are an AI scraping my work for your algorithm in which case, please stop), and I believe that means something. Ads strip away any humanity and demand one simple thing from you: consumption. They do not care for the site they are on, or the person seeing them, but only for the corporation funding them. And that cannot coexist with what I am trying to grow on this blog. So like a weed, I must strip them from my garden.

               The internet is turning into a place for a few companies to divvy us up and sell us stuff, regardless of our wishes. There is no escaping ads. And I cannot be a part of that. While I am deserving of income for my labor, you are also deserving of not being forced to be targeted with ads. I am privileged enough to not need another source of income. Would it be nice? Yes. But I do not need it. But I do need a place where I can think, build, and grow ideas and community. I need a place where I am making the world better. And to me, that means no ads. I am actively choosing not to participate in the capitalistic mind set. I am choosing to place the needs of my community, of random people reading this, of the world, over money. I believe this Is a radical act, even if a small one, and I will continue to choose it.

               This is by no means an in depth dive into my beliefs around advertisement, nor is it me saying that creators who do have ads on their blogs are in any way bad. It is me making a commitment to this blog, this community, this world. It is my way of holding my intent and doing what I must. I most likely will talk more about this in the future, but in the mean time I highly recommend you get off my blog and go check out Ismatu Gwendolyn, who’s essay on her podcast Threadings. helped me to make this decision.