Back to 2006

I have a new website, and the best way to explain why I’ve made this change starts with going back to 2006.

2006 Was A Massive Shift

That December, a writer named Nicholas Carr published a post on his blog, Rough Type, called “Sharecropping the Long Tail.”

He compared the new social web to sharecropping, the farming system that took hold in the American South after the Civil War. Sharecroppers worked land they didn’t own, and the landowner kept most of the value. Carr saw the same deal on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Millions of people made the content for free, and the people who owned the platforms collected the money.

A few years later, Sonia Simone wrote a piece for Brian Clark’s Copyblogger that gave the term a second meaning. If you build your business on a platform you don’t control, you’re farming somebody else’s land. The platform can change the algorithm, change the rules, or close your account, and your audience goes with it. Her advice was to put most of your time into things you own, like your website and your email list.

The word sharecropping carries a lot of history, and I want to acknowledge its history in a Woke 3.0 world. The sharecropping system started with formerly enslaved Black people. They were freed with no land and no money, and many were forced by violence, need, or deception into contracts with white landowners. Poor white farmers were pulled in later, but Black families had far fewer ways out. So the comparison has limits. Nobody forced me onto social media, and I can leave whenever I want, which is a choice sharecropping families didn’t have.

I’m writing about it here and now because Carr kept coming back to the idea as Facebook grew. By 2012, he was calling it the largest digital-sharecropping operation the internet had produced. He figured the average user’s work was worth about $1.21 every three months, or enough for one bad cup of coffee. It’s only grown since then. Meta now makes $17.72 per person every three months across all of its apps.

(That’s not even Google, YouTube, X, or Substack. This is why I support UBI. You built all of this. You should profit.)

In any event, twenty years later, I’m done working for free.

Back To The Future

I’m pleased to announce that I’m going back to 2006 with my website, Laurie Ruettimann.

It’s blog-first, fast to load, and easy to read. It’s organized in a way that makes sense for people. It’s wholly unconcerned with influence, and it’s 100% owned by me. I actually had fun on the internet in 2006, so that’s part of the push, too.

I even went back to the WordPress OG, Andrew Norcross, and asked him to help me use tools that already exist to build a website that never needs to be updated again.

There’s no Laurie GPT. There’s no AI digital twin. No pop-ups, premium content, or pushy videos asking you like and subscribe to my channel. It’s me, writing. You can also find information about my books and my talks. There are resources for speaker bureaus, an easy way to find my podcast, a link to my LinkedIn Learning courses, and an easy way to find out how I can be your coach.

It’s made for middle-aged eyes. It’s written for humans. And it’s built by humans, too.

I’m proud of this new iteration of my business, which is all about going back to basics. But if you find a bug, I’ll send you a gift card for a good cup of coffee. Just send me a note.