Every time I test a new pair of speakers, I start with the same song:

“Five Years.”

Not because it’s my favorite David Bowie song. It isn’t. But I know it better than almost any other song because it opens one of my favorite albums, 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

I know where the drums sit. I know how Bowie’s voice should hang in the center. I know when the strings begin to swell and how much space there should be between the instruments.

“Five Years” is more than a great song. For me, it serves as a utility for dialing in my sound the way I like it. Not the way it “should be”, but the way I like it to be.

More on that in a bit. First let’s go back in time.

Five years ago

Five years ago I walked away from a two-decade corporate career.

After a long time of working for someone else (always someone I liked, by the way. I was lucky), I decided to see if I could build something that belonged only to me. That decision led to a number of things: freelance marketing, new clients, new ideas, and more than a little uncertainty.

It led to Rock and Roll Reclaimed, a name I had been carrying around for years without fully figuring out what I wanted it to become.

Originally, the name was literal.

I live on a farm surrounded by old barns, most of which are no longer used other than for storage, because they’ve become obsolete for new, modern farming. So there are piles of weathered lumber and other materials just waiting for a second life.

When I was thinking of leaving my career, I started imagining music-themed (and whiskey-themed, another passion) items built from reclaimed materials I already possessed. Mostly, but not all, wood.

Pictured above: we've got a lot of old barns and structures on our family farm that are pretty, but not totally usable in the modern era. Time and weather is also a factor, and sadly, urban development is encroaching on us. The choice is to either use these old resources in new ways, or potentially lose them. Photos by Mark Dauner.

Those materials would be reclaimed using my limited skill as a woodworker and craftsperson. I’d learned the craft of woodworking from my great-grandpa but never became a master at it. My idea was to synthesize that knowledge with another passion – technology. I’d add high tech tools like CNC routers, laser engravers,  and even AI, to the creation process.

Phrases like “tech-enhanced tradition” entered my mind. And there would be a  great story behind it all. Something worth holding on to. Something that would underscore my life’s thesis that technology isn’t bad, in and of itself, and it can do great things when paired with humanity and creativity. More on that later too.

Then I actually quit my job, and the steady paychecks stopped. It was something I obviously knew would happen, but you’re never quite prepared for it. That’s when things changed. Client work took over. It had to. I say that with all the gratitude in the world for the clients I work with. I enjoy working with them each day and I hope to continue to work with them each day.

The origin was paused, but the name Rock and Roll Reclaimed stayed. It became my freelance business, and it became a source of some puzzlement from new clients until they saw all the rock and roll memorabilia behind me in my Zoom window.

Most never dug further than that, but it’s still there. All that reclaimed material remains, waiting for someday.

During those same five years, though, the word “reclaimed” started taking on more meaning. I realized I had been wanting to reclaim something else. Something not physical, but still important to me:

My place on the internet.

The web that could have been

I grew up online in the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was new.

It was unfinished. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t safer. It certainly wasn’t simpler. But it felt like a place people were building together.

I was in college at the time. Business school, not computer science or engineering. The fact that I had learned HTML and could put together a webpage was fairly uncommon. I was popular in no other way, except in the context of group projects, because I could give my classmates an advantage over the others through the magic of my skill with the World Wide Web.

I landed an internship nobody else in my class could, building and rebuilding the website of a local industrial wholesaler. So much fun, but the office fridge was stocked with Coke and nobody there knew how long it took to make a webpage so most of the time I did my homework.

Back then, if you weren’t taking classes for it, building a website wasn’t easy. You couldn’t Google, or ask Claude Code, how to fix something if you broke it. But it was fun to cobble together some HTML using a paperback reference guide and come out with something that was yours and that anybody in the world could see, provided they knew how to find it.

You published a “personal webpage”, because you had something to say or because you simply thought it was a cool thing to do. There was a magic in that era of the internet.

The eroding promise of the internet

In the early 2000s I attended a couple of Chris Pirillo’s original Gnomedex conferences in Des Moines, Iowa. Chris was (and is) a nerd, and the founder of the technology website Lockergnome. He was also a regular host on the TechTV network. Des Moines was about two hours away, and I thought it was so cool that a guy that I watched on national (basic cable) TV was from Des Moines and hosted big tech conferences somewhere that wasn’t in California, New York, or Seattle (eventually, it moved to Seattle).

At one of those Gnomedexes I remember Chris passionately advocating for RSS and how it was going to change the world. I saw Doc Searls give a talk about the promise of the internet and the Martin Luther-style theses he and his co-authors put forth in their book and website, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”.

I started blogging at that time, armed with the promise of RSS, the ethos that “markets are conversations” (from Cluetrain) and that Creative Commons would change the world by enabling sharing of our ideas freely on our own terms.

The future felt really bright for the internet. Over time, those promises never quite disappeared, but their voices got harder to hear.

For a view of what’s happened that’s far smarter than mine, you can read Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification”, or any number of other books and posts from others decrying the loss of the free and open internet in favor of commercialization, unregulated capitalism, and the erosion of privacy at the hands of our big tech overlords.

"BTOs", I’ll call them.

Not to be confused with legendary Canadian rock band BTO, or Bachman-Turner Overdrive, who are not complicit in any of this. They were just taking care of business. Every day. In every way. Sometimes they’d work overtime.

The Internet’s gotten bigger (and somehow, smaller)

I’m skipping over a lot of the “in between”. I may touch on those eras over time. But today’s internet is more capable than the one I grew up with in almost every measurable way. The technology is incredible. Groundbreaking. Much, but certainly not all of it, is due to the contributions of those BTOs. More accurately, much of that improvement came from BTOs acquiring smart people's work and productizing it.

Whatever the case, it’s harder to feel at home in and find a home in.

The web has become a collection of platforms. We build our digital lives on platforms we don’t own. We learn algorithms we didn’t ask for, then we spend more time gaming those algorithms than we do actually creating.

My career has been in marketing, and specifically content marketing for the past 15 years. Content marketing pioneers Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose have often repeated the phrase: “don’t build your house on rented land.” At its highest level, it means that you might see quick success from a social campaign, but that success might be temporary and fleeting. Audiences are fickle. Platforms change and generally not to favor the user. You’re better off building something you own and control like a website and an email list, even if that something is harder to build.

That’s where we’ve gone with the modern internet, which is based heavily on closed platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. We rent audiences from our BTOs, instead of building human connections, which I believed was the original promise of the internet.

Every year the tools become more powerful, adding more users from who knows where, while the spaces somehow feel more empty and siloed. Content multiplies exponentially, exacerbated by new AI tools that make generating synthetic content at scale quick and easy.

What are we to do? I’m not interested in pretending we can go back. This isn’t about nostalgia. That never quite delivers. Have you ever gone back to try and play an old Atari 2600 game with one of those emulators? It’s fun for five minutes. Then you want your Switch 2 back. Same thing applies to the internet. Some people want Geocities back and have gone as far as to rebuild it. Great for them. I’m not one of those people.

The AI…problem?

I’m not interested in rejecting technology. For instance, I see real value in artificial intelligence but I don’t imbue it with supernatural powers, regardless of the mythical and superlative names being assigned to the models. I know there are many detractors and critics of AI, and I think it’s important and real to listen to them.

I think that tools matter less than the environment they’re used in. The ways in which AI is being distributed and disseminated to all of us, making us worry that the very tools we’re using could replace us, yet continuing to recklessly build and grow with no real consideration for economics, the environment, or society.

Bad.

I use AI every day. And I won't pretend that I don't love it. Used thoughtfully and responsibly, I believe it can sharpen thinking, accelerate creativity, and help people build things they couldn’t build alone. I do stuff with AI each day that I could never do on my own.

To borrow a line from another song on Ziggy Stardust, “It Ain’t Easy.”

Below you’ll find all the answers to all our internet problems

No, you won’t.

I keep thinking I must have all the answers that will make things better. I go down a road of a new belief system, trying it on for size, and it fits pretty well. Then something comes along that changes my thinking and I have to try something else on instead.

I’m not going to do that here. You will find plenty of ideas from me, but not definitive answers. You’ll probably find me trying on some of those ideas. Some will fit and others won’t.

Mostly, you’ll find things I’m doing to try and make my place on the Internet, and in life, feel a little better for me. Maybe (I hope) they’ll also feel good to you. But they might not. We’re all on our own journey, which is why the open internet is so important.

Where I’m (re)starting

Where do I want to rebuild and reclaim my place on the internet? For me, the answer is increasingly on open platforms. I don’t want to live on Meta’s or TikTok’s or OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s or Google’s internet [insert your favorite BTO here].

I want to live on mine. And I want to be able to visit yours — on our own terms. In practice that means publishing in places built with an open ethos. It means participating in communities that aren’t owned by a BTO. It means being able to move my shit somewhere else when that changes.

• It means using open-source software when it makes sense.

• It means using smaller, open-source or open-weight LLMs, locally when possible.

• It means owning, or at least controlling, my own home on the internet, and what goes on it.

• It means open standards matter.

• It means privacy matters.

• It means empathy, acceptance, and inclusivity matter.

• It means AI should help me, not replace me.

None of this is a purity test. I’m not religious about any of it. This isn’t about fleeing the modern internet. I don’t think I could. This is about reclaiming a part of it, even if it’s a small part. It’s about making an effort towards something better.

Rock and Roll Reclaimed

I will share my ideas about all of these things in more detail and why I think they matter. I’ll explore AI as a creative partner and a support system instead of a slop factory. I’ll discuss music, creativity, marketing, and whatever else seems worth examining through my lens and experiences. I won’t be the definitive voice. I won’t be the loudest voice. I just want to be a voice.

None of this is breaking new ground. There are plenty of other smart people talking about this stuff and I hope to lean on their expertise when it makes sense.

Finally, when I have the time, I hope to get back out into the shop and start moving that pile of reclaimed materials out into the world in various forms. I’ll get there, in time.

Five Years from now…

“Five Years” by David Bowie opens The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars with humanity learning that Earth is dying and only five years remain.

A tearful newsreader delivers the announcement. The narrator wanders through a city watching ordinary people unravel in fear, violence, shock, and longing. By the end, he realizes the profound value of everyday human life.

It seems like we’re heading into that kind of place right now, both online and off. Technology designed to bring people together often seems to be doing the opposite. How do we keep our voices independent in an age of overzealous platforms?

At the beginning of this post I shared how the song “Five Years” is more than a song to me. It’s a utility I use to dial in sound the way I like it to be. That might not be the way it should be for everyone.

I’ve played around on everybody else’s platforms. Now I’m going to reclaim my own space again. I hope you like it. It’s ok if you don’t.

If you made it this far, thanks.

Where to find Rock and Roll Reclaimed

You’ll find Rock and Roll Reclaimed at rockandrollreclaimed.com (updated site in progress), with my blog, riffs.rockandrollreclaimed.com on the Offprint platform, which is built on the AT Protocol. You can subscribe for free, follow on Bluesky, or get the free email newsletter each week. You can also follow me on Mastodon if you prefer to live on that side of the open social web.

An accompanying podcast will be available too, with syndication to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all the other major podcast spots (coming very soon). Subscribe here to stay up to date with everything.