I first registered JoeLamantia.com in 2001. It was not serving an educational institution, or a military organization, or offering technical infrastructure, and obviously not a digital government site, so I chose the .com top-level suffix, meant for a general purpose Web presence.  I’d founded a startup at the same time: an Asia-Pacific B2B marketplace for surplus consumer goods from pre-WTO-China.  The domain was a personal digital presence – ok, a hedge – in case I needed to find work… Like so many, the startup did not survive the .com crash and post-9/11 venture capital market shutdown.  (I ended up speaking and writing about the entrepreneur experience some years later.)

From then on, I posted on professionally related topics, for the growing Internet and technology / design / product community.  The site and all content was open-access (creative commons as of 2002): I was not interested in competing with large industry media outlets, tech-focused or otherwise, if that had even been feasible.  It ran Google adds for a brief window in the mid 2000’s, largely to confirm the hypothesis that generating meaningful revenue was at least a full-time job, if not fundamentally impossible.  The largest quarterly ads payout, from ‘peak’ traffic to timely topics that were top in Google rankings, was well under $100.

For the next 15 years, I continued publishing, happily embedded deep in the long tail.  Topics included design and strategy as part of product development.  Deep dives on information architecture visualization.  Design systems, patterns, and enterprise architecture.  Design ethics and social media.  Pre- Saas-gold rush enterprise software.  Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality.  Data science, big data, and product strategy for machine learning / AI.

My professional context shifted to leading larger teams.  The final posting was 2014.

In 2018, possibly fraudulent transactions triggered my bank to automatically issue new cards for all my accounts, including the card on file as the default payment method at my domain name registrar.  Thanks to unfortunate coincidence, the registration renewal cycle activated soon after.  Automatic payment failed, the domain’s registration was ‘released’ …and one of the new generation of  sniping bots grabbed JoeLamantia.com immediately.

This was… a bit of a surprise.

As it turns out, my explicitly non-commercialized name domain was worth thousands of dollars in the algorithmic attention economy.  This thanks to a history of relatively high search engine rankings — back before Google search was enshittified — and resulting steady traffic around a series of hot topics, accumulated over more than a decade of early publishing on what was originally long-tail nerdery, but became new categories of technology, global-scale media, and big business.  What started as sharing evolving professional perspective, morphed into vulnerability to financialized (also) surveillance capitalism‘s algorithm-powered automation.

JoeLamantia.com went dark.

Then it turned into an astro-turf content-farm, surfacing as an automatically generated faux-blog that nominally addressed topics like data science and business intelligence / analytics, but primarily functioned as a siphon for inbound organic traffic around the original content and topics.  Like petro companies w/ fossil fuels, the site’s new model was commercial extraction of accumulated natural resources — link capital — via ‘mining’ of information architecture.

I tried to purchase the domain back several times over the next few years.  Meanwhile, the focus evolved from narrow content extensions of the original topics, to general-purpose digital working and life adjacencies, to self-help filler.  It was not directly a honey-pot or powering scams; more so an ersatz pathway that lead to schlock content from providers like taboola and outbrain.  Spam, but not toxic or dangerous.

The site wound down, as financial returns from the traffic streams declined.  Eventually, it was abandoned, like the Garamontes civilization using fossilized water to construct short-lived cities in the arid Sahara desert.  I stopped checking on it.

Then, in 2022, I discovered JoeLamantia.com suddenly pointed to an unlicensed Indonesian online casino – an offshore crypto-digital gambling site.  It’s served as some sort of mirror / domain redirect since.

In an oddly satisfying way, this feels like one of the most cyberpunk possible outcomes for a personal .com domain that began as a small portfolio site twenty years before, when the Web was new(ish).  It’s not as big as an international pop-star’s avatar being used as a Russian malware vector, but we can all hope there’s even more exciting things coming…