The End of the Road

Bidding the blog farewell, and journeying to wherever the wind takes me next.

A. Khaled
6 min readDec 31, 2021
Photo by Sergi Dolcet Escrig on Unsplash

A good writer knows better than to stretch their story beyond its natural conclusion, and for myself and this blog, the writing was on the wall for about a year and change, and I was just scared to embrace it.

Shortly after Covid hit — and from anecdotal observation, I gather this has not been only the case for me — viewership took a massive hit across the board after what was a pretty bountiful 2019. I owe a lot of my earlier growth to a series of stories I did on the original ContraPoints pile-on that now seems like it is a part of some very distant history–but I didn’t want to be known as “the pro-ContraPoints essays guy”, and so in an attempt to escape being pigeon-holed in a niche I didn’t necessarily desire, I adopted the wholesale pitch of internet culture coverage as the central identity of my writing.

While things looked briefly on the come-up as readers took keen interest in what I wrote no matter the subject matter, Covid and the 2020 Democratic primaries soon halted any momentum I’d built up as they’d consume the media cycle for what seemed like an eternity. I did partake the only way I knew how — by tackling the systemic dimensions of the issue instead of hyperfixating on specific bad actors — but that wasn’t nearly…

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A. Khaled

Internet culture scribe with an interest in the digital economy, content creators, media and politics.