I've written a lot about the IndieWeb, about digital sovereignty, about the slow violence of platform capture and extractive attention has hollowed out what it means to actually say something online. I've written about why brennan.day—this little corner of the web—hand-built, open-source, owned by nobody but me—matters.

...But I've also been thinking about money I mean, uh, sustainability. About scale. About my bottom line. About what I've been leaving on the table. I mean, come on. I want to play new video games with a GTX 5090. That isn't asking a lot.

I also really need to be able to afford gas money, I mean have you seen the prices at the pump?! It's absurd. This may be due to an illegal war with a nuclear state, I don't know, I don't keep up with international news. What's important is that I'm able to drive my car a lot.

Anyways, where was I? Oh right, after a number of conversations (most of which I'm not yet at liberty to fully detail) I've arrived at some really exciting conclusions that I want to share with you directly, transparently, and with the full weight of the consideration that went into them.

Here's what's changing.

📣 This post is brought to you by NordVPN. Protect yourself online with a military-grade encryption VPN whose servers were hacked in 2018 in a breach they chose not to disclose for eighteen months until security researchers forced the issue—because, the company explained, it needed to be "100% sure each component within our infrastructure is secure" first, which is exactly the energy you want from a company whose homepage describes its product as "a hack-proof, encrypted tunnel for online traffic to flow.") Use code BRENNAN72 at checkout for 9% off your first month of NordVPN's Basic Plan (excludes add-ons, promotional period only, renews at full price, not available in all regions, see terms). The internet is dangerous. NordVPN. [Ad]

brennan.day is joining the BuzzFeed family.

Yes. That BuzzFeed.

I know. I know. But BuzzFeed has infrastructure. BuzzFeed has reach. BuzzFeed has a content distribution pipeline that has, at various points, reached literally hundreds of millions of people. And yes, BuzzFeed has had a difficult few years—the layoffs, the pivot, the CEO's own words about how pivoting to AI for cost savings was "a depressing path" and that "content farm model of AI will feel very depressing and dystopian", delivered in the same CNN interview announcing they were doing exactly that; the NFT experiments, the Pulitzer-winning BuzzFeed News division shuttered in April 2023 to make room for AI-generated travel guides so formulaic they made headlines for their own badness, including one that opened "I know what you're thinking—'Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'"; the stock that briefly surged from $3 to $15 on the AI announcement before collapsing below a dollar and receiving an SEC delisting warning; the "ongoing concern" warning issued this quarter suggesting the company may not have the cash to survive the next twelve months. All of this complicated stuff is actually generative.

Anyways, the acquisition is already full and complete. brennan.day, the brand, the domain, the archive, the newsletter list, the Buttondown integration, the custom cursor code, the guestbook entries, all of it—is now an asset of BuzzFeed Media Enterprises LLC. This happened, legally, as of March 31st, 2026. The deal took six weeks to close and I signed the paperwork in a coffee shop in Kensington while thinking about how I'll finally be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on ultrahigh settings with RTX on.

The editorial voice will remain largely the same-ish. There will be a new content review layer, but that's standard. I've been assigned a Trends Liaison a decade younger than me who will check in biweekly to make sure my work is "directionally aligned with the BuzzFeed content ecosystem roadmap."

📣 This section brought to you by Squarespace. You've been reading a blog. Have you considered making your OWN blog? Squarespace makes it easy—no code required! Use offer code BRENNAN for 10% off your first year. Yes, they had a minor hijacking situation in 2024 due to weak security, but that's been dealt with. (Note: offer code BRENNAN has a 72-hour expiry from first click and cannot be combined with existing Squarespace promotions or applied retroactively. Not valid for Commerce plans.) Squarespace. Make It. Make It Real. [Ad]

All code repositories are now closed-source and owned by Meta.

You may know that I recently relicensed everything I'd built under AGPL. Every Jekyll theme, every Eleventy starter, every utility script, every tool including Meddler—all of it moved to the strongest copyleft license I knew. I wrote a whole post about it. I was proud of it. A Fediverse friend had a conversation with me that fundamentally reoriented how I understood software ownership and I acted on it.

...But as part of a separate arrangement that is adjacent to the BuzzFeed acquisition but technically distinct from it, the intellectual property underlying brennan.day's codebase—including all 30+ themes and the full Berry House tooling library—has been transferred to a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, Inc. The repositories will be set to private within the next 72 business hours. Forks made prior to this announcement are, to the best of my understanding, in a legally grey area that I'd really encourage you not to test. If you are currently using any of my open-source tooling in a production environment, you should expect to receive a licensing inquiry in the coming weeks.

Meta has a distinguished content stewardship record. The United Nations' Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found that Facebook played a "significant" role in the 2017 Rohingya genocide—a country where Facebook was effectively the entire internet—having proactively amplified anti-Rohingya content despite repeated warnings from civil society beginning as early as 2012. Meta later partially acknowledged it "wasn't doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Rohingya survivors are seeking $150 billion in reparations, which the company has declined to provide.

I think Meta will steward my code well.

📣 This post is also sponsored by Hims. Are you a man experiencing hair loss? Of course you are. Use code BRENNAN25 for $25 off your first Hims subscription box. (Offer applies to select products only. Please ignore that health authorities warn about "potential serious risks". Blah blah blah. Cannot be combined with insurance. Not a substitute for medical advice. Results not typical.) Hims. For Him. [Ad]

All writing is now fully copyrighted, and cease-and-desist notices are being prepared.

No hard feelings!

If you have ever reblogged one of my poems on Tumblr, you will be receiving correspondence from BuzzFeed's legal team. This is not personal. It's standard IP consolidation. My poems are their assets now.

If you have quoted my essays in your own writing, linked to them in a way that reproduced more than a sentence or two, or built upon my coinage of terms like attentional enclosure or perceptual tenancy in your own published work—same situation. Please be patient with the process. The team handling this is "small but motivated."

If you are a journalist who cited me, please reach out to the BuzzFeed rights management portal at your earliest convenience. I have a contact I can pass along.

Again, truly: no hard feelings. This is just what happens when writing becomes valuable. You protect it. That's how ownership works. I'm excited for how large my Steam library will be able to grow with the upcoming lawsuits.

📣 Squarespace again! Sorry, we're contractually obligated to include a second placement. Seriously though—10% off! Why make a website yourself when you can use their AI builder? they call "Blueprint". Neat! Code BRENNAN. Clock is running. [Ad]

All visitor data (including retroactively) has been purchased by Palantir.

brennan.day has, since launch, run zero analytics, zero trackers, zero third-party scripts. I wrote about this explicitly. "No ads or trackers" is literally in the site description. I have been proud of this. When I talk to other IndieWeb people about surveillance capitalism and the way behavioural data gets packaged and sold and used to model and predict and nudge people toward outcomes that serve capital rather than the people being modelled—I mean it. I find it genuinely repugnant.

However, as part of the BuzzFeed deal, a retroactive data arrangement has been made with Palantir Technologies. This means that Palantir will be receiving, for purchase, all visitor data associated with brennan.day going back to the site's launch on December 10th, 2025.

You may be asking: but Brennan, you said you had no tracking. What data is there to sell? Fair question. It turns out Palantir's data science team is apparently very good at working with sparse datasets. I don't actually understand the methodology. I was given a technical brief that I did not finish reading.

What I can tell you is that Palantir is a company whose ELITE targeting platform assigns numerical "confidence scores" to potential deportation targets using Medicaid records and other government data—patients who never consented to have their health information used this way. In December 2025, ICE officers confirmed under oath in a federal courtroom that they used this system to meet daily arrest quotas of eight people per team—a practice the presiding judge ruled enabled arrests that were "violent and brutal" and violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Palantir's website says the company has been "committed to defending human rights since our founding."

Whatever. What I can tell you is that if you have ever visited brennan.day, your IP address, approximate geolocation, device fingerprint, social security number, blood type, and inferred behavioural profile are now part of a dataset that has been sold to defense and intelligence contractors.

The good news is that I will FINALLY be able to afford all of The Sims 4 DLCs legally. (Was EA Games aquired by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner? Yes. But Paralives isn't out yet so I have no choice!)

📣 Quick break! Raycon Earbuds—the earbuds you've heard about from every podcast you listen to. Use code BRENNAN for 15% off. They ONLY have 150 complains on the BBB and use cool AI for their ads! Not this one, though, I wrote it myself. (Discount applied before tax. Not combinable with site-wide sales. Note: "15% off" reflects discount from suggested retail price, which Raycon sets. Actual savings may vary. Raycon is not responsible for audio quality expectations set by this sponsorship.) [Ad]

All future writing will be sponsored by OpenAI, and I will be using ChatGPT for a very small part of the writing process.

ChatGPT will be involved in only a VERY small part of my writing from hereon out. This includes just: initial topic ideation, competitor content analysis, preliminary outline generation, first-pass drafting, structural editing, line editing, fact-checking, headline optimization, SEO metadata generation, social media caption writing, newsletter subject line A/B testing, reader comment response templating, and final proofreading.

I will continue to be responsible for reading the final draft before I hit publish.

This is a net positive for quality. The essays will come out faster. They'll be more optimized. They'll reach more people.

The OpenAI sponsorship is a separate arrangement from the BuzzFeed acquisition. It's a content partnership. It comes with a monthly stipend and free API credits, isn't that cool?!

OpenAI is a company led by a CEO who was fired by his own safety-focused board in November 2023 over concerns about his "candor," then reinstated five days later after 745 of 770 employees threatened mass resignation if the board didn't resign instead—which is a truly extraordinary story about institutional accountability. Roughly half of the company's safety researchers left throughout 2024, including the Chief Technology Officer, the Chief Scientist, and multiple cofounders, several citing what one departing researcher described as "safety culture and processes that have taken a back seat." The company deleted its Books1 and Books2 training datasets—believed to contain over 100,000 copyrighted books—and is now subject to copyright lawsuits from The New York Times, the Authors Guild, eight newspapers, and hundreds of individual writers. Seven wrongful death lawsuits filed in 2025 allege that OpenAI compressed months of safety testing into a single week to beat Google to market, releasing a product its own preparedness team admitted was "squeezed," and that safety researchers resigned in protest.

I've agreed not to write critically about any OpenAI products or adjacent companies for a period of 36 months, which is more than fair. I was specifically asked to remove my previous essays critical of AI from my archives. They have been removed. If you saved a copy, please see the section above about cease-and-desist letters.

Plus, I'll be able to have a offline, local-only LLM with all the RAM I'll be able to buy. That's ethical! It can be my spellchecker!

📣 AG1 by Athletic Greens. One scoop a day. Seventy-five vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced ingredients. Just $1.49 per serving when you sign up for an annual subscription. Use code BRENNAN for a free one-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 and five free travel packs with your first order. Only SOME researchers think they're pseudoscience! (Free gift items ship separately. Annual subscription auto-renews. Cancel anytime, except during the first 30 days. Vitamin D3+K2 supply constitutes 365 soft gels of 1,000IU dosage, which AG1 considers one year's supply based on one-per-day usage. Athletic Greens, AG1, and related marks are trademarks of their respective owners.) [Ad]

Site search is being replaced by a proprietary solution developed by Alphabet.

The current search on brennan.day is a simple, JavaScript-based local search that indexes my content client-side, sends zero queries to any external server, and works entirely within your browser.

As of the next site build, this will be replaced by a Google Custom Search Engine embedded widget. All search queries entered on brennan.day will be transmitted to Google's servers, associated with your Google account if you're logged in, and used to improve ad targeting across the Google ecosystem.

Did Google have a federal judge rule in August 2024 it's an illegal monopolist? Did they have to pay $26.3 billion in a single year to Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure its search engine remained the default on billions of devices—what the court described as a "self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization" that "shut out potential competitors, reduced innovation, and took choice away from American consumers"? Was the court's conclusion that "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly"? You ask way too many questions. I don't like it. Partnering with a court-certified illegal monopoly for search is, I think, one of the more coherent decisions in this announcement.

The widget will show sponsored results above organic results, which in this context means you may search for one of my essays and be shown an advertisement for a competing content creator before you see the post you were looking for. I was told this would be "a seamless user experience upgrade."

I'm pivoting to short-form video. Production will be handled by Sora.

Writing is, I've come to accept, a declining medium. Really, writing sucks. Why read a bunch of words (some of which I don't know or can pronounce) when I can watch a cool video instead? The data is the data. People want video. They want it short. They want it between twelve and forty-seven seconds long, ideally with a hook in the first two seconds and a scroll-stopping visual.

I will be using OpenAI's Sora to generate video content adapting my written essays into short-form video. Sure, Sora is in the process of being shut down, so we are going to be making hundreds of the videos NOW and scheduling them weekly for the next 5 years. This is going to require a little guesswork for making content about current events. The BuzzFeed Trends Liaison has sent me a document called "Video-First Content Strategy 2027: From Blog to #Broadcast" and it was a really good read that I read an AI summary of.

📣 MVMT Watches. Minimalist design, maximum style, price point that makes your friends ask questions. Use code BRENNAN for 15% off your first order. Only SOME watch enthusasists say they suck. Offer expires... soon. [Ad]

A crypto miner will now run in the background of the site.

This is minor (no pun intended!). A very lightweight cryptocurrency mining script will now execute in your browser when you visit brennan.day. It is not opt-in. It is not opt-out. It will only use approximately 50% of your CPU while you're on the site, and will continue running for up to four minutes after you close the tab, which is a standard grace period. The mined currency will go toward offsetting the costs of the BuzzFeed acquisition integration work, which has been more expensive than projected.

I want to note that 50% CPU utilization is genuinely moderate for this type of script. Some miners use more. I looked into this and I feel good about where we landed. If your device becomes unusually warm while reading my essays about Indigenous sovereignty and the value of the open web, I appreciate your patience.

All previous posts are now available as NFTs, and I'm opening a Metaverse presence.

Every essay, poem, and personal post published anywhere since 2015 is being minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Pricing will be dynamic and market-driven. Some pieces will be available in limited editions of one. Shorter works will have print runs of up to 10,000. Given my cultural relevance, most essays will be minted as a 1-of-1 with a starting bid of 2.4 ETH.

Additionally, I am acquiring a substantial parcel of virtual land in a major Metaverse platform—the specific platform is still being negotiated but I'm told it will be "one of the top three Metaverse environments by active parcel count"—where visitors will be able to walk through a three-dimensional representation of my writing archive. Each essay will be an interactive object in the space. The Virginia Woolf piece will be in a room of its own. A lot of people thought Metaverse, like Sora, was shutting down. Hell no! People LOVE the Metaverse, of course it's staying online.

📣 This post is sponsored by Keeps, another hair loss company. Different from Hims. Slightly. Ensure you buy from both, please. Are there debilitating side effects? Yes. But you don't want to be BALD. Use code BRENNAN for an amount off that we'll fill in later once we finalize the contract. [Ad]

brennan.day will now serve third-party display advertising.

Effective with the next site build, the site will display advertising from a variety of third-party networks. Some of these networks serve ads from verified, brand-safe sources. Others are what the industry calls "open exchange" inventory, which means the ads will occasionally be for things like: cryptocurrency investment platforms with names that are one letter off from legitimate financial institutions; weight loss supplements with before/after photos; browser extensions that offer to speed up your computer; and various countdown-timer promotions for products that have been "on sale" continuously since 2019.

I want to be clear that I have not reviewed, will not review, and am not responsible for the content of the ads that will appear on this site. This is also industry standard. I'll be able to finally play video games with path tracing, and I cannot stress enough how important that is.

A note on adblockers.

If you are using an adblocker of any kind (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Brave's built-in shields, or any equivalent) the site's new ad infrastructure may interact unexpectedly with your browser in ways that could cause instability. I am not in a position to say more than that. The technical implementation was handled by a third party and I have limited visibility into the specifics, but the term "potentially totally bricked" was used in our meeting.

I would recommend, out of an abundance of caution, disabling your adblocker on brennan.day.

I want to close by saying, again, that none of this was easy to decide until I received the first advance.

I built this site because I believed the web could be different. I believed that a person could write honestly, build openly, give work away freely, and still make something that mattered. I still believe that, you know, in the abstract. But what I really understand is that belief and sustainability are different problems, and that at some point you have to make choices. The infrastructure of what you're building will always end up demanding compromise with the world as it is rather than the world as you want it to be. Nobody is ever capable of being steadfast with their ideal, naïve values when faced with the incredibly difficult choice between being ethical and receiving a LOT of money.

I hope, going forward, you'll continue to find value in what brennan.day becomes.

After all—it's still me.

It's just writing that is now an asset of BuzzFeed Media Enterprises LLC, powered by ChatGPT, minting NFTs, mining Monero in your browser, indexed by Google, owned by Meta, tracked by Palantir, presented to you in a Metaverse parcel that is still pending land survey, and brought to you in part by a hair loss company.

IndieWeb forever!

—Brennan

📣 ADVERTISEMENT: brennan.day is a BuzzFeed property. BuzzFeed is not responsible for the preceding content. All views expressed are those of the author's ChatGPT instance. This post contains affiliate links. brennan.day participates in the Amazon Associates program and earns a commission on qualifying purchases. By reading this post you have agreed to our updated Terms of Service, which includes binding arbitration. To opt out of binding arbitration, mail a handwritten letter to BuzzFeed HQ within 30 days. Have a great day.**

This post is copyrighted. Every word is protected by the full, unblinking force of international copyright law, adjacent rights, neighboring rights, implied rights, moral rights, and whatever other rights lawyers plausibly claim.

Unauthorized reproduction, redistribution, remixing, screenshotting, tracing, squinting at too closely, or describing my writing with suspicious accuracy will violate the sacred intellectual property of its creator. Any resemblance to the logos or trademarks of companies such as Meta, Alphabet Inc., OpenAI, Palantir Technologies, or BuzzFeed is purely coincidental, legally speaking, and should be interpreted with the utmost respect for corporate brand guidelines.

April Fool's!