I feel weird about the internet

Should I bite the virtual hand that feeds me?

To paraphrase the wonderful Norah Ephron, who famously wrote an essay called, ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck,’ I feel weird about the internet. This discomfort isn’t new, but this past week, it’s been amplified to a degree that’s impossible to ignore.

An article published in The Atlantic sent shockwaves through the global writing community, and I was rocked by my own personal ripple. Essentially, the article alleges that Meta - the behemoth corporation that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters - used LibGen, a virtual library of pirated books, to train its enormously profitable AI models. The Atlantic also provided a means of searching for any author’s name and works in LibGen, prompting a flurry of panicked queries from writers around the world, including me. I entered ‘Leah Hazard’ in that little search box and there were my two biggest-selling books, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story, and Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began. Both books appear to be present in LibGen in English, along with Italian and Portuguese (Womb) and Swedish (Hard Pushed). Should I have felt a secret frisson of smugness on realising that my books were ‘important’ enough to be scraped without my permission? Reader, I felt neither important nor smug. I just felt sad.

Photo by Mehrpouya H on Unsplash

My books are the culmination of years of hard work: idea development, research, writing, editing, marketing and promotion. Not only that, but my books are woven into the most special and sacred thing: my family life. My words help support my family, but also, my family supports my writing. My husband and children have accepted, even enthusiastically cheered, the fact that I disappear into my makeshift office for hours - cumulatively, years - in order to produce something that will be meaningful, engaging, and yes, profitable. My words have temporal, emotional, linguistic and financial value. I never told LibGen or Meta that they could share that value, use it for their own devices, or profit from it. Because I was never asked.

But here’s where the real discomfort comes in: although I obviously feel angry and dismayed by the possibility that Meta may have used my writing for its own benefit, one of Meta’s products - Instagram - is a huge part of my life, and one that I have undeniably used for my own benefit. Sure, I like a silly scroll through pointless reels as much as the next person, but more importantly, Instagram has allowed me to promote my work and my profile to an almost unlimited global audience. I have arranged workshops via Instagram contacts, sold more books because of my Instagram visibility, and found private clients for birth and career support through Instagram. The app is my single most valuable business tool, as well as a reliable and frequent source of mini-dopamine hits throughout my day.

I’m tempted to come off Instagram completely - why should I still use a tool owned by a company that may have treated my work with such flagrant disregard? - but at the same time, who would I really be hurting by doing that? Probably, only me. Closing my Instagram account would mean less visibility. Less community. A disappearance of sorts.

So I feel weird about the internet. I don’t know how to use it or where to situate myself anymore. I don’t know what I owe it, or what it owes me.

I’m in a place where I’m not even really sure what this Substack is, or should be, anymore. Should I start charging for these newsletters, as a way of taking a stand over the value of my work? Or should I continue to embrace the democratic principle of free readership, which might also, in turn, help me generate more paying readers for my other, longer works? Reader, I’m all a-tizzy. I don’t have the answers. Nor do I have any fun links, tips or tricks to offer this week. Help a girl out. What do you think?