Incipit
Why start writing a blog, now of all times? Often I go to sleep thinking on the end of human endeavor: clearly we’re not there yet, but for the first time it seems conceivable in a real and concrete way. We’ve come a long way since Utopia 11. though I don’t think we’ll be so lucky! .
One might say that such circumstances would argue against creating a blog. Why hone one’s skills (writing or otherwise), when soon machines will do it all better? Why waste effort forming thoughts, when the machines are happy to help? Or, from another thread, why spin on these vain topics, 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. I like doing things, and I like myself better when I do the things I want to do. In the past, posting anonymously has helped motivate my actions. And even private writings, my notes and journals, have done wonders to array my messy thoughts, to close loops and make clear what needs to be done (or not done). I dearly hope 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. My first Henrik Karlsson article 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. 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 machines, and so writing connects their ‘thoughts’ to your own, if only in a small way.22. though I am much less looking forward to receiving mail from people’s “agents”.
Finally: one way or another, I spend too much 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!