Graxie
← Home

Why this exists

Why on earth would I build a new website in this day and age?

AI agents are eating the world. Search engines are not-so-quietly being replaced by something that answers for you, so you never click through, with “mentions” going to the highest bidder. No-one will find it anyway, so why bother?

Fair question… here’s some of the reasons that I’m doing it…

Sovereignty

I wanted to own my words. Not rent space on a platform that can change its rules, throttle my reach (until I pay more), censor or block me, or vanish overnight—taking everything I wrote with it. So this lives in a simple, portable format (mostly Markdown), on servers I control, in a shape that will still make sense in twenty years. It can’t be taken down or scrubbed from the record, because I’ll always have a copy. That matters to me more than it used to.

Not for an audience

This isn’t a growth play. There are no SEO tricks here, no traction tactics, no funnel. I’m not measuring myself by the number eyeballs I land in front of. I can write what I feel, when I feel it, and let it sit here for whoever wanders by. If that’s one person, or no-one—it’s enough.

A more human web

A lot of people are asking why build a website at all now that you “can’t find an audience” anymore. I understand the question. But I came of age on this thing—I’ve been here since 1994, and especially around 2000 with the explosion of blogging and true social media, when the ideas expressed in the Cluetrain Manifesto were taking shape.

For me, it was never about being an A-list blogger for me. It was about sharing ideas. Conversation. Respectful, thoughtful, meaningful dialogue. I still crave that—the older, slower, more human web—and want to put my efforts into that, however “old fashioned” that may seem.

Legacy of ideas

I’ve chosen not to have children, so my sense of legacy lives elsewhere—in ideas, and institutions that embody them. The things I help bring into the world that might outlast me, and do a little good on their way.

That’s a high bar to hang on a personal site, and I don’t pretend each post clears it. But the instinct is the same one that’s run through how I apply my productive capacity in all of life: build something that lasts beyond you, where the value lives on, without your hand necessarily on or in it.

Writing in the open is a small version of that. An idea I set down here might lodge somewhere, get carried further by someone I’ll never meet, become a foundation a stranger builds on, challenges a belief that brings someone to a new understanding of the world. Even the half-formed ones, the dead-ends mapped—if they’re out here, they’re part of the record. Part of the conversation that keeps going after any one of us steps away.

AI will likely scrape this and not attribute it, and that’s something I’m willing to trade-off, if what I write here adds even a little to the inputs—the pool of ideas and experiences that shape what gets built next—that’s good. That’s contributing to the next set of “conversations.” I’d prefer attribution and a link back… but even if that doesn’t happen, I consider it a worthwhile endeavour.

All of a piece

When you write for an audience, you start strategising every post. Does this fit? Is this on-brand? Which channel does this belong to? And slowly you fragment—scattering yourself across spaces, each tuned to a different crowd, none of them quite you.

I’m done with that. I have eclectic interests that run deep: technology and music, design and sustainability, craft and spirit. I don’t want to keeptrying to shoehorn that into a format for a particular audience. This site is just me, undivided. All of it in one place, because that’s how it actually lives in me.

A calling card

If we’ve met in person, this is probably where I pointed you.

I do a lot of things, and which one comes up depends on who I’m talking to, and the context of the conversation. Maybe it’s the energy transition, fretless bass and live music, instruments and pedals, fashion that fits a trans-femme body, design, sustainability—or a combination.

In any one conversation you’ve likely only seen one or two facets of who I am. But you might be interested in others, too. And they’re more connected than they may first appear—this site is in part a way of demonstrating those inter-connections.

I’d rather not hand you one of four business card I have to carry in my bag. So instead: one place that holds all of it, and reflects all of me. Follow whichever thread caught your interest—or feel free to wander into the ones that didn’t come up, if you’re curious.

gx

Most music links here go to YouTube. Not because it’s the biggest, but because it’s publicly accessible—anyone can follow a link and hear a full track without an account. And of the platforms where that’s true, it pays artists the best. More on why →

About the typeface

Body text here is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next—a free font from the Braille Institute, designed for low-vision readers with deliberately distinct letterforms (so B doesn’t blur into 8, or I into l). I find it easier on the eyes at the sizes I use here, and it’s free for personal and commercial use.

About the licence

As part of my commitment to working and learning in the open, I license my writing here under Creative Commons. This is a practice I’ve done for decades—specifically, under the Attribution - Non-commercial - Share-alike (BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license. This means that you’re welcome to share and adapt what you find here, as long as you provide attribution, are doing so for non-commercial purposes, and to pass those same freedoms on to others in any derivative work. You can do all of that without “asking” (though I’d love for you to let me know if you do). And if you need different terms, you can ask…