There exists among today’s hobbyists of all stripes a tragic teleology. It is understood that any hobby has the potential, if done adequately enough, to metastasize into an income-earning activity: the fearsome “side gig” or “hustle.” Naive and confused, I do not feel comfortable conceding all of my activities to the market. I retain some foolish hope that it is valuable to have non-commodified expenditures of labor, even if the fruits of said labor are discrete objects capable of being sold.

Even when a website does not explicitly commodify its contents, there is often the implicit reality that the contents themselves are the advertisements, and the commodity is the “brand” of the author’s personality. Such websites participate in the same hustle game by attempting to showcase the author as a product, their public-facing works a portfolio rather than expression for the sake of expression.