To Be Anymore Than All I Am Would Be a Lie

FreeDarko went out of business this morning. A collection of writers who have contributed to the site over the years shared closing thoughts. Mine are there, forever memorialized alongside august company. As a sometime contributor from FD's second life, I do not and cannot claim true ownership over the site. Really, I just felt fortunate to find people living there who shared my interests and approach to them. FreeDarko going dark marks the passage of time in a particular way, though, and watching Beth Shoals shutter up that storefront leaves me feeling that much lonelier on the block. (And I recognize that SB keeps unpredictable hours and runs out of inventory too often.)

FreeDarko built its first audience around the same time that Straight Bangin' was born, and I befriended Nathaniel after we recognized a mutual admiration. FreeDarko was among the wave of important blogs that cropped up between roughly 2003 and 2005. These sites did not merely reflect that blogging was gaining credibility as an alternative to traditional media. They also demonstrated that through the internets, better writing from more sources would give many people long under served by traditional media their respective voices. If you can remember this far back, recall the time when the cringe-inducing columns of Rick Reilly were almost solely what passed as irreverent and alternative. Before FreeDarko and blogs of that generation, sports conversation was unfortunately that limited.

Blogging changed everything for me. When I wasn't reading FD, I was reading Byron Crawford, and the O.G. Different Kitchen, and Sexy Results, and Passion of the Weiss before Jeff was actually a real person with a sterling reputation. I was feverishly leaving comments and working on my actual work later in the day, if at all. I would wake up, read what Hussain and Daily Kos had posted, and feel good on the subway because there was finally a conversation taking place that accounted for what I felt. I was inspired to write because I finally had role models, and it was titillating to join them in a guerrilla medium that felt like a secret society.

Blogging is now as commonplace as corporate websites, and it really is not remarkable when bloggers emerge as authorities, let alone alternatives to the newspaper. Since the middle of the last decade, I have found even more voices that are critical parts of my information stream, my entertainment universe, and, when most lucky, my group of friends. But still, things done changed. As natural consequences of blogging's ascendancy, the space is less intimate, the names less familiar, and the product less reliable. There are new writers who are wonderful and admirable, but there also are plenty who are terrible. There are bloggers who read FreeDarko, who came up on Jay Smooth, and now offer weak derivatives that a larger audience and its diminished standards celebrates all the same. Some of them even write for media leviathans like ESPN, the ultimate proof that whatever blogging once was has been lost, by definition.

FreeDarko passing into its fossilized state will preserve the past but accelerate the steady surrender of the future. It isn't all bad, of course; as noted, there are some great writers working today. FD's retirement does animate the ongoing gentrification of the online neighborhood that FD helped to make desirable, though. Shoals will be heard elsewhere. Hopefully, the rest of the team will be, as well. I'll be here refusing to sell, even if it holds up the Nets' new arena. And on my stroll home, seeing the lights forever turned off at FD, at Start Snitching, and at all the rest, I will be left feeling like Red in Shawshank Redemption. I guess I just miss my friends.