Exordium
Why start writing a blog, now of all times? These last few years I find myself thinking more and more about the possible end of human endeavor, what it would mean for me, for how I think about myself and my life. Clearly we’re not there yet, but for the first time it seems conceivable not as a “one day perhaps”, but as a plausible outcome of events and trends currently unfolding. We’ve come a long way since Utopia. 11. though if current trends do continue, I don’t think we’ll be so lucky as More had hoped.
Such circumstances could certainly weigh against creating a blog. Why hone one’s skills (writing or otherwise), when soon machines will do it all better? Why waste effort struggling to form your thoughts, when the machines are happy to help? Or, coming from another direction entirely, why waste time navel-gazing when there’s so much work to be done?
Yes, why?
For one, publishing my works and thoughts to the world makes them real to me; it grounds them, prevents them from being lost in a drawer, forces me to make them concrete. I like doing things, and I like myself better when I do the things I want to do. In the past, posting anonymously has been a great motivator, and even private writings (my notes and journals) have done wonders to array my messy thoughts, close loops, and make clear what needs to be done (or not done). So I hope that posting under my own name will have an even greater effect!
I also hope that posting as such will help connect me to other people. The first article of Henrik Karlsson’s that I read was A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. 22. though I am much less excited to receive mail from people’s “agents”. That itself would be enough to justify all this. On a related thread, I find something in the view (whose source I cannot remember) that now, more than ever, is the time to write, if one hopes for one’s thoughts to be preserved. Writing is the natural language of the new machines, and so to publish is to inject your thoughts into theirs, if only as a drop in the ocean.
Finally: one way or another, I spend too much of my time writing. It will be a relief to my friends that I might instead post my screeds here, rather than in our groupchats.
Then what about?
The standard advice for creating a popular publication is to pick a theme, post with regularity, and try to engage your readers. As I hope the last section conveyed, the telos of this blog is going to be different. I hope that what I write will be interesting to someone, but that is still only a secondary purpose. All the reasons I lay out above have been with me for years, nagging my thoughts whenever I come around to “what would I like to do this month?”. As such the list of topics I have stored up is rather long, and I cannot promise any sense of continuity. We’ll see how this goes. Happy May Day!