A TOTALLY NORMAL PERSONAL DECISION
WHY DOES THIS WEBSITE EXIST?
Once upon a time, I was what the internet might call an influencer. Thousands of people followed along. Numbers went up. Posts performed. Brands noticed. The machine was successfully being fed.
And eventually, I hated it.
Social media slowly turned sharing into performing. A photograph was no longer just a photograph. A road trip was not merely a road trip. Every experience became potential content, and every piece of content was judged immediately by a mysterious machine designed to keep everyone scrolling.
The better I became at participating, the less human the whole thing felt.
So I quit.
I walked away from the follower count, the compulsive checking, the disposable posts, the algorithmic popularity contest and the exhausting expectation that a person should constantly market his own existence.
Then I did something dangerously old-fashioned: I made a website.
THE COMPLETELY SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION
1999 WAS PEAK SOCIETY.
By 1999, society had achieved a nearly perfect balance of useful technology and manageable stupidity.
We had the internet, but it had not yet consumed real life. We had cell phones, but nobody expected an immediate response. We had digital cameras, physical magazines, local car clubs, message boards, burned CDs, printed maps and machines that still came with knobs.
You could go somewhere without broadcasting it. You could own a hobby without turning it into a personal brand. You could disagree with someone without being fed progressively angrier content about it for the next six months.
The web was slower, uglier and infinitely more interesting. Personal websites were built by actual people. They had strange fonts, excessive graphics, guestbooks, opinions and personality.
They were not content platforms. They were places.
EXHIBIT 1999: EVIDENCE OF A BETTER TIME
CONTROL THE MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION
A BLOG IS BETTER.
- Your work disappears in hours.
- A corporation controls who sees it.
- Everything must fit the current format.
- Popularity becomes confused with quality.
- Every quiet moment becomes an opportunity to scroll.
- Your memories become inventory for an advertising company.
- Stories remain available after Tuesday.
- I decide how everything looks.
- Long-form writing is allowed.
- Photographs can be viewed at a useful size.
- No platform can quietly reduce my reach.
- The archive belongs together instead of vanishing into a feed.
THE 1999 EXIT STRATEGY
THE AARONGOESFAST
MANIFESTO
MAKE THINGS YOU OWN.
Platforms change, accounts disappear and algorithms move the goalposts. Build a place that remains yours.
DOCUMENT MORE. PERFORM LESS.
Take the photograph because the moment matters. Write the story because it deserves to be remembered, not because it might perform.
DRIVE INTERESTING MACHINES.
The world has enough silver appliances pretending to be cars. Choose machines with flaws, stories, noises, smells and actual personalities.
GO OUTSIDE THE FEED.
Attend the rally. Help fix the truck. Meet the strange people. Take the back road. Real life has better resolution.
LET THE INTERNET BE WEIRD.
Not everything needs to be polished, scalable, monetized or optimized. Personality is not a design defect.
IF IT DIDN'T EXIST IN 1999, QUESTION IT.
This does not mean rejecting every modern convenience. It means refusing to assume that newer automatically means better.
*Yes, there is a robot in the corner of this page. I questioned it. It stayed.
BEARTOOTH HIGHWAY · MONTANA · SEPTEMBER 2000
Real life has better resolution.
No filter. No feed. Just a road to 10,947 feet that no algorithm can take away.
BACK TO THE BASICS
MOTORSPORTS BEFORE “CONTENT.”
Cars were never supposed to be accessories for a lifestyle brand. They were supposed to take us somewhere.
Motorsports is best when it is local, loud, slightly irresponsible and held together by friendships, borrowed tools and questionable roadside repairs.
aarongoesfast exists to preserve those stories: tiny Japanese cars, old Land Cruisers, dusty rallies, racetracks, mountain roads, broken parts, strange builds and the people who keep showing up.
This website is my permanent garage wall. The photographs are the prints taped to it. The blog posts are the stories being told beside the toolbox.
NO TRENDING AUDIO REQUIRED.
noun, verb, questionable decision-making philosophy
- An independent archive of motorsports photographs, road trips, off-road adventures and mechanically dubious ideas.
- A rejection of disposable algorithmic content.
- A personal website constructed with the belief that the internet was more fun when people made their own pages.
- A manifestation of the deeply reasonable belief that civilization peaked in 1999.
Used in a sentence: “Aaron spent six hours building a web page instead of making a fifteen-second video, which was extremely aarongoesfast of him.”
TRANSMISSION COMPLETE
WELCOME TO MY
CORNER OF THE INTERNET.
Look around. Read something longer than a caption. View a photograph without immediately swiping past it. Find a local event. Drive an old car. Call a friend. Print something.
The old internet is still here. We just have to build it ourselves.
Photo credits
Real photos by real people, via Wikimedia Commons:
1998 Toyota Corolla WRC by Florian Volk, CC BY 2.0 · Beartooth Highway by Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ford Fiesta WRC, Rally GB 2012 by Stefan Brending (2eight), CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Honda Beat by Tokumeigakarinoaoshima, CC0 · Land Cruiser FJ40 at Bromo by Hugo van den Bos, CC BY 2.0 · iMac G3 by Stephen Hackett, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Smartphone (shown in grayscale) by mikemacmarketing, CC BY 2.0 · Nokia 3210 by Michael Brandtner, public domain · CD-R spindle by J-Star, public domain · Kodak disposable camera by Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Macintosh Performa 550 by Mondoshawan22, CC BY-SA 4.0.