Tag: blogging (page 1 of 1)

April 10, 2026

pocket full of … kryptonite? sunshine?

Long-time readers know of my love for and commitment to the open web: sites with no intervening platform, no paywall, just sitting there on the World Wide Web in plain HTML which cats and dogs can read! (Allusion alert.) My buddy Austin Kleon — with his 300k Substack subscribers 😳 — teases me about this. This is me in blue:

He has a point, but here I am, still, out here on the range — and when I decided to start a big project about the films of Terrence Malick, as I just did, I put it on the open web too. Why?

My economic model — post everything that I own on the open web and ask for donations at my Buy Me a Coffee page — suits my anarchist principles. Voluntary collaboration, give and give back, etc.
As long as I still have a full-time professor’s salary — that is, for the next thirteen months — I can afford to have at least a few such principles.
But when I lose that salary and have to downsize my life, I still plan to be here, because I don’t think I would gain much by moving to Substack, or anywhere else. I have a small audience and I am just not wired to do any of the things I would need to do to grow it — for instance, promote myself on Substack Notes, write clickbaity posts with clickbaity titles, etc. And that crap probably wouldn’t work anyway. Signing up to support me at BMAC may be slightly more difficult for most readers than signing up at Substack, but not much: I have no reason to think that if I went to Substack I would get an influx of new paid subscribers. I have my number, and though I’d love to get it to the Thousand True Fans stage, I’m not convinced Substack would help me do that. Besides:
Substack is a platform and platforms enshittify, they just do. They’re designed to enshittify, and to be unresponsive to their users. Substack is already a worse environment for writing and publishing than it was three or four years ago — to me at least, its attempt to transform itself into a social network is nightmarish — and it will degrade further rather than improve. If I end up needing more money because an endless war in the Middle East has gas at eight bucks a gallon and my electric bill at a thousand bucks a month, I’d rather work as a greeter at Walmart than write for a platform. Over the long haul I really do believe that the open web is the safer and better option, at least for me.

So here I am, writing away, and hoping that in my declining years there will be at least a little spare change in my pockets. And that I won’t have to take the Walmart Option.

P.S. Austin’s new book is gonna be terrific.

November 29, 2024

Substack vs. Indie

Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators, says Ted Gioia, and maybe that’s true, but it’s important to remember that people on Substack, like Ted, are not “indie creators” in the fullest sense — they’re dependent on a platform that sets the terms of engagement.

Now, to be sure, if I were going to write on any social-media platform it would be Substack. Most people who write there make little or no money, but it’s possible to do very well indeed, and the 90/10 split of the subscription revenue is remarkably generous. (“Remarkably” because if they had chosen 80/20 or even 70/30 — the latter being Apple’s cut for app creators — not many people would have complained.) But:

Substack is not a profitable company. Its CEO says it could be, but those are just words.
Its unprofitability means that it’s still dependent on investment from venture capitalists, and they can put pressure on the people who run the show to change things up — for instance, to take a bigger cut of the revenues.
The same pressure could lead to the introduction of ads.
Their CEO has written that they don’t like the algorithmic determination of content — but also that they’re “not against algorithms” and will use them if that helps their users. What does and does not help their users is for them to determine, and they can change their minds at any time, for any reason or none. (And they already do use an algorithm to feed you what they want you to see in Notes, their version of Twitter or Bluesky, which shows up on your home page and cannot be hidden).
Not only could the founders of Substack change their minds about any of their policies and procedures, and do so at any time, they could also sell the company. Indeed, this would be the norm for Silicon Valley startups.
In short, Substack is as subject to enshittification as any other platform. And for Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, enshittification “is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

If Substack — and Bluesky, another platform getting a lot of love these days — does not enshittify, that would be a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. If you’re a creator who wants to avoid enshittification and remain independent, your best bet is to claim your turf on the open web — that is, where we are right now.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use Substack — Austin Kleon, whom I just linked to, has a great Substack — and what Freddie says is true:

No matter what the usual suspects say, Substack has dramatically expanded the number of people making money as writers and deepened the engagement of a lot of passionate and talented amateurs, and for that I’m grateful. At some point the “own your turf” people have to recognize that the vast majority just aren’t going to roll their own platforms and services, and to insist that they do is simply to insist that a lot of voices aren’t heard anywhere.

No such insistence here! I can easily see why people would choose Substack in preference to what I do here — and indeed, if I had to make my living solely from writing I would almost certainly be using Substack myself. (Also, I would almost certainly be living below the poverty line.) But every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup.

P.S. I’ve seen a lot of bad writing both pro and contra Substack lately, but I just had to laugh at this by Sam Kahn:

On this platform, for instance, I’ve been reading and enjoying Jo Paoletti’s diary — which is well-written and insightful and gives me insight into the mind of this person I’ve never met. There simply is no forum, prior to the launch of Substack (or, let’s say, of the blogosphere), that would have given me access to Jo’s diary. No newspaper would have run it — what is the news hook? — no publisher would have printed it unless Jo had gone on to be, like, a head of state or turned out to be a serial killer. A platform like Substack multiplies by some logarithmic absurdity the volume of expression in the written word. It releases founts of creativity that, for decades or centuries, were buried.

That’s a pretty significant parenthetical correction there! It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging.

Let’s be clear about what Substack is: it’s a blogging platform with a paywall — that’s all. And it’s not the first one: Medium, among others, preceded it. Substack is just the one that happened to catch on, largely because it offers the best (i.e. least revenue-extractive, most flexible) deal to writers. But it doesn’t enable any kind of writing that isn’t already enabled by the World Wide Web.

October 30, 2024

the Mathom-house

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.

— J. R. R. Tolkien, “Concerning Hobbits”

When I see something online that I think I might want to read, I send it to Instapaper. As I have commented before, if I wait a few days before checking my Instapaper queue, I typically find that at least 75% of the articles I have saved are no longer of interest to me, so I delete them. That has happened to me so often that I have incorporated it into my intellectual method. But usually a few of the things I’ve saved seem worth reading.

Sometimes when I’m reading them I’ll see something that I know I want to write about — I may even know precisely what I should say about it. In such cases the relevant passage goes straight into a text file and I begin drafting, or anyway sketching out, a post or an essay.

But often I read something, find it possibly intriguing, but don’t know quite how to respond. In that case it becomes for me a mathom: I have no immediate use for it, but I am unwilling to throw it away. I have always been uncertain what to do about such textual mathoms, and have tried several different strategies over the years, none of which have really worked for me, for reasons too tiresome to explain.

The best answer has always been available to me: post the passages to this blog, and tag them accordingly so they can more easily be found later and linked to related writings. Now, that practice inevitably creates misunderstandings, because most people online think that if you post something you obviously agree with it, unless you explicitly attack it. Before the day is out I’ll get emails from people shocked, shocked, that I posted something related to Renaud Camus without denouncing him. But spending a few minutes a day deleting angry emails is a relatively small price to pay for having a better way to sift and reflect on what I read.

So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it.

September 23, 2024

POS, not POSSE

(I thought about a non posse non peccare joke here, but it was too hard. Just want to go on the record about that.)

Here the always-excellent Mandy Brown writes about her recent experience with the POSSE model of writing on the web: Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Write on your blog or your micro.blog and forward your posts, as it were, to the social media platforms.

Will it be weird, to write this way? Probably. I’m tossing the same words into (currently) three totally different networks, each with their own affect and moods and characters of the day. I’m keeping my distance, such that I likely won’t hear the replies (at least, not with any timeliness) or see the ripples my words make, should they make any at all. But maybe we need more weird — not in the very recent sense of the word, but in the sense of prophesy or potential, a spell or charm, the magic, the wild, the wyrd — that which is becoming, rather than that which has already passed us by.

I completely respect what Brown is doing here, but my own view is that the way to find the wyrd is through a slightly different method: POS, not POSSE. Skip the syndication.

I think often about some comments by Louis C.K., of all people, that Austin Kleon posted on his Tumblr a long time ago:

You have your number. It’s very dangerous to be liked by more people than should like you. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for you. There’s gonna be a shock down the road for them, or you’re gonna dilute yourself and take yourself to a place where you can’t live with who you are. I think that you make an honest account of who you are and you live with the results. The results will be appropriate to who you are.

And I would add that it’s unhealthy to be read by more people than should read you. In my last sustained period on Twitter, six or seven years ago I guess, when I was still promoting my published writings, I remember often — quite often — getting replies or quote-tweets from people who had no idea what I was saying but wanted to comment on it in a way that corroborated or reinforced their sense of themselves, their social self-presentation, a social self-presentation that typically took the form of performative partisan self-righteousness. Most of them hadn’t read my work, of course; they had only seen a tweet (by me or by someone else) about something I had published. But even when they read it they didn’t understand: my ideas came from a place so distant from their intellectual and personal formation that those ideas were unintelligible to them. But still they commented.

That’s when I realized that sometimes it’s good to reduce the size of your audience — to make your work a little harder to find. That was the standpoint from which I was operating when Breaking Bread for the Dead came out, which didn’t help its sales! (Sorry, Penguin Press.) And I’ve continued along that path. When I write, I’m not looking for hooks to current events — for me, that’s now a reason not to write about something. I don’t promote my writing on social media, and I don’t ask anyone else to do so either. I’ve become the writerly version of the family in The Quiet Place, trying not to attract the attention of the uncomprehending and incomprehensible aliens.

Well, sort of. I don’t think of all my online readers as malicious invasive predators. But there are a lot of people out there in social-media world who hear everything but see and understand nothing. I’ll just tip-toe out of their range, thank you very much.

So: POS, not POSSE. I’m not syndicating because I don’t want to expand my audience. I’m just writing here on my own site (blog.ayjay.org and social.ayjay.org) and if you find me here, that’s great. Just be careful who you tell about me, okay?

June 21, 2024

the uncanny valley of blogging

I used to call my blog Snakes & Ladders, because that reflected my belief that culture – culture-as-a-whole – is never simply ascending or declining, but is undergoing in its various locations constant ups and downs. But beneath that point is an image of myself as an observer and critic of this cultural moment. Now I call the blog The Homebound Symphony, in honor of the Traveling Symphony in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, because I have stopped thinking of myself as an observer and critic and started thinking of myself as a preserver and transmitter. Another way to put this: Whereas I once tried to be a public intellectual, I now just want to be a … I dunno, maybe a convivial conservator.

There’s no money in being a conservator, no prestige either, and almost no attention. I am dramatically less visible now than I was a decade ago, or even five years ago. But for me that’s a feature, not a bug; I have consciously worked to make my audience smaller, chiefly by focusing on what interests me, especially when it interests almost no one else. (I have my number.) That focus warms my heart and gives me peace, so I’m going to keep doing it, even if nobody notices. Looking at the whole public-intellectual game now, I think: I’m way too old for that shit.

This change of focus has also led to a renewed commitment to blogging. If you’re a public intellectual, you may need to write books and essays to make arguments, and to intervene in the Discourse via social media, to change minds. If that’s your thing, then maybe you’d want to use Substack, since it pushes its writers towards (a) hosting comments and (b) engaging with readers via the comment section and Notes. But that is soooooo not my thing; by contrast, a blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission. It’s a great way to put ideas and images and musical compositions in meaningful relation, including creative tension, with one another. It’s an attention cottage.

What’s funny about all this is that a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

December 29, 2023

Venkatesh Rao:

Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.

Amen to that. Though I really do believe that there will be a slow and perhaps not readily noticeable renewal of blogging. I’m keeping my eyes peeled. See the “blogging” tag at the bottom of this post for more thoughts along these lines.

December 4, 2023

bring back the blog

Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I was still on Twitter. I was misquoted there. I’m probably still being misquoted there, but I don’t have an account any more, so I can’t be sure. Anyway: people regularly attributed to me this statement: “The internet is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.” In fact, I never said that or wrote that. (It would never have been true anyway that the internet was the friend of information.) But I did say something rather like that, though using a word that in the intervening almost-two-decades has disappeared: in an essay for the late, lamented Books & Culture, I wrote, “Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.”

The blogosphere?

Yeah. It was a word, I didn’t make it up. The blogosphere, at least as I used the term in that essay, had two major aspects. First, in those days before social media, there were bloggers – some professional, some amateur – who used their blogs the way that many people would later use Twitter: they blogged all day every day. Two of the most famous bloggers of that era were Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds (AKA Instapundit), and while Sullivan eventually took a different tack, and came to lament the effects of such constant rapid-fire posting on his mental and physical health, instapundit.com is still cranking out the posts, though not all of them are by Glenn Reynolds. I am writing these words a little after 2pm on an ordinary Monday, and a quick check informs me that there have been 52 posts so far today.

The second element of the blogosphere was: comments. Almost every big blog had a robust, not to say mob-like, comments section, and while many of us tend to think that comments were killed by social media, most of those 52 Instapundit posts from today have more than 100 comments, and an Open Thread post that went up last night has 1723 comments and counting. (“Whatever happened to Camel Jockey?” one commenter asks. “He just quit posting.” Apparently he’s one of the few.) And while many of the old-school blogs are dead and gone, a surprising number of them remain active, and still have a multitude of commenters. In turns out that social media did not kill blogs, but just co-opted the discourse about blogs. Once journalists got addicted to Twitter, they stopped paying attention to what was happening elsewhere — but that didn’t stop it from happening.

So when I wrote about the blogosphere I meant these two things: rapid-fire hour-by-hour posting coupled with lots of comments. And my point, in making that statement so often misquoted, was simply that you could get a great deal of information from those bloggers – Sullivan and Reynolds in those days rarely linked to fake news – but because the pace was so fast, because the bloggers and their commenters alike were responding so quickly to so many stories, there was no time to think.

I wrote that little essay at almost exactly the moment that Twitter went public. Soon thereafter (I signed up for Twitter in March of 2007) I learned more than I had ever thought it was possible to know about responding without thinking. The blogosphere was, though I didn’t know it in 2006, the least of our worries.

But of course, not all blogs belonged to the blogosphere, as I was using the term in that essay. The original blogs, or “web logs,” were just lists of links to interesting things a person had found on the nascent internet. But then – especially after the creation of the Movable Type web publishing software in 2001 – the blog became, for many people, especially those who didn’t aspire to journalism, a kind of online diary or journal. And while I don’t want to bring back the blogosphere, I definitely want to bring back the blog.

Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

Let’s bring back the blog. And leave all the bad things spawned by the blogosphere to social media, where they belong.

November 30, 2023

Venkatesh Rao:

Despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate. And it’s hard to blame any particular party in the picture. The technical decisions that lead to the sort of messy problem that afflicted this site can’t be attributed to malice, objectionable politics, or billionaires behaving badly. They’re within the band of ordinary technology management decisions I see all over the place in my consulting work. Humans are just not good at building complex technologies that mature to a graceful immortality. The WordPress-based blogosphere is at the outer limit of complexity we are capable of getting to.

As someone committed to blogging, I worry about this — especially the “aging people who maintain it” problem. When people who blog, or even who once blogged, retire, will engineers from the post-blogging social-media era think that a platform like this is worth saving?

November 28, 2023

the personal blog and essayism

Brian Dillon:

Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing, and the essay reveals itself to have been less compact and smooth than thought, but instead unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed. Which is to say — I can’t prove it yet — that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence. And for what it’s worth my attachment to it seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, a labyrinth’s-worth of stray threads. You might say I’m torn.

Well, yes: exactly.

May 15, 2023

the three paths of micro.blog

I’ve written here from time to time about the excellent service known as micro.blog — and I still want to commend it to those of you who have had enough of the big social-media platforms. You have to pay for it, but you get a lot for your money, including freedom from advertising.

Micro.blog is a highly flexible service with many intriguing features, and it may be hard for new users to decide just which ones are most useful for them. Perhaps it would help if you think of micro.blog as offering three different (though overlapping) paths, and spend some time considering which path best meets your needs.

Path One: Community. For many users, micro.blog is a smallish community of like-minded people — a place to connect with interesting folks, in a much more low-key and undramatic way than what places like Facebook and Twitter (and even Mastodon) offer. If you go to the Discover page you’ll find something that looks like this:

That’s a great way to find people who share your interests.

Path Two: Blog. Micro.blog is also a great blogging platform. It was, as its name suggests, originally designed for small posts, but it scales up to posts of any size. When your post gets longer than 300 characters, you get the option to add a title to the post; then people looking at your timeline will see that title as a link, which they can click on to see the full post. Micro.blog also offers categories that you can use to organize different kinds of posts. Basically, it can replace any of the cruftier and less agile blog platforms, like WordPress — but it has a much more streamlined and elegant UI for posting. Best of both worlds, I think. (For longer posts, like this one, I still use the WordPress-powered blog you’re reading, because I have 15 years of tags here, but for everything else I use micro.blog because it provides such a comfortable environment for writing.)

Path Three: Journal. This has become my primary way to use micro.blog. I mainly post (a) photos, (b) links to what I’ve been reading — micro.blog is definitively the best blogging platform for readers — and listening to, and (c) the occasional brief audio post (AKA microcast). It’s a great way for me to share what I’m up to for folks who may be interested — but also, and for me primarily, to keep a kind of life journal.

Here’s the key takeaway for you: Micro.blog is equally useful for each of these paths. So if you start out using it just for blogging but then decide you want more of an interactive community, you can shift in that direction. It will accommodate your needs. Now, as I have said before, it will — by design — never be a place for you to monetize your brand, troll, shitpost, or become an influencer. But hey, there are plenty of other platforms better suited for that kind of thing. Micro.blog is better suited for the more human and humane paths I have identified here.

December 8, 2022

the blog as a seasoned technology

For several years now I’ve been writing about the distinctive virtues of blogging, which has become, I keep saying, a seasoned technology that promotes lateral thinking. When people start talking about the imminent collapse of Twitter — something that now looks like it won’t happen, and I’m inclined to bet that the next year will see a gradual return from Mastodon to Twitter — there was talk of the possibility of a blog renaissance. But I don’t think that will happen either.

You have to have a peculiar kind of mind to enjoy blogging, and even those who have such a mind might prefer platforms that enable certain modes of interaction that blogging doesn’t make easy. (For instance, speedy exchanges.) I dislike those modes of interaction, and I love to blog, so I will continue to do this.

But as Robin Sloan says in a comment I quoted the other day, “Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.” A while back I asked a question about this: “How can I encourage readers of my blog to seek some of the benefits that I get from it?”

I do increasingly feel like that Japanese guy who paints in Excel.

June 17, 2022

excerpt from my Sent folder: nodes

I try to make the best of the blogging environment, but I have always been fascinated by Jorn Barger’s early-web idea of what he called “single-layer web design” — it’s ironic that he is sometimes called the inventor of the weblog, because while he was one of the first to create a reverse-chronological list of links, that’s pretty much all they were, links, not developed ideas. Almost all of his Robot Wisdom site has disappeared since he abandoned the web some 20 years ago — I think the only thing left is this mirror of his James Joyce page.

But when I started making my actual home page, this is the model I had in mind: all the relevant information and necessary links on a single page, written in absolutely bare-bones HTML. And if I had the technical chops to do it, I’d ditch the blog and make my entire web presence a series of about five pages, each of which would be a kind of topical node, and each of which would continually in revision. Maybe one of them would be a Barger-style link-weblog, or I might just use micro.blog for that.

For example: like you, I am deeply attached to revising my posts — one recent case:

Unnamed

Thirteen revisions is on the low side for a longer post. Often I’m correcting spelling errors or tweaking the style, but sometimes I go in and use a <mark> tag to highlight; I might add an UPDATE, or, if I don’t like the way an update would make the post look, I’ll hop over to txt.fyi and write up an appendix and then link to it (I should probably make a page at ayjay.org, since txt.fyi could disappear at any time, but usually I’m too lazy). I also will sometimes help generate what I think of as internal dialogism — sorry for the fancy language — by using the <details> tag.

But what I really want is the ability to make several pages that use all these tricks and more: highlights, details, footnotes, appendices, digital sticky notes, and (maybe above all) versioning — the ability for readers to diff, as it were.

Four or five topical nodes, ever-expanding, linking out and back, commenting on itself, inviting commentary from others, etc. etc. THAT would be the coolest thing ever, to me. In fact, I might start experimenting with a basic page structure that would allow a first approximation of this vision….

May 17, 2022

Cory Doctorow:

Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them. […]

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

I like this post very much — and especially Doctorow’s idea of a blog as a place to make your commonplace book public. I hesitate to go all-in with this approach simply because I don’t want to overwhelm my readers with stuff.

I’m trying it out, but this is my fifth post today, which seems massively self-indulgent. On the other hand, it is rather odd for me to have two separate collections of notes, one on my computer and one on my blog.

May 12, 2022

bloggy

A friend of mine wrote the other day to commend some of my recent posts for being “bloggy.” There can be no higher praise. I love blogging bloggily, but it’s not easy to do.

I’ve spent decades practicing the craft of writing for book publishers and periodicals, and that craft requires me to seek clarity, coherence, and completeness. But those aren’t the virtues of blog writing: the Blog Imperatives are exploration, experimentation, and iteration. You’ve got to be willing to try out ideas that you’re not wholly comfortable with, ideas you don’t yet have a firm grasp on; and then you need to circle back later to revisit and reconsider.

In fact, one of my writerly tasks in the coming weeks is to read through old posts here and see if I can find some dots to connect; if I do, I will connect them through linkage and tagging. Keep an eye peeled for these Posts of Revisitation.

If you think my bloggy work here is valuable, you may support it through my Buy Me a Coffee page — see the link at the top of this page. I wrote an update for my supporters today: you may read it here.

March 7, 2022

revisiting architectural blogging

I think a lot about blogging, about why I like it, what I think I can accomplish through blogging that I can’t accomplish, or not easily anyway, through other kinds of writing … and that leads me to metaphors. For instance, I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advance and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers:

Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.

Of course, if everything goes wrong this site could end up as an example of Horror in Architecture.

I’m not sure we have a proper language for understanding either how to produce or how to receive something like this, and we may not get one, because the most of the people who were building a culture of blogging were pulled away from that culture by the more frictionless and yet far less rich and diverse social media factories. It’s as though a bunch of people who were building their own Watts Towers ended up setting those projects aside to work for a factory that makes prefabricated housing.

My only real hope in this regard is that people have increasingly come to understand that the frictionlessness of social media is not its primary feature but rather its defining bug. They just don’t know where else to turn, and I think the difficulty of knowing where to turn is a result of the collapse of the variety of blogging possibilities over the past decade. At one point you could choose from among a pretty wide range of platforms, including TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger – created by a company called Pyra Labs before it was acquired by Google in 2003 – and of course WordPress, but now WordPress is for to all intents and purposes the only one left standing. (The others still exist but are close to the life-support stage.) There are of course a wide range of blogging options for the technically astute, but there aren’t very many for people who are just beginning to get interested in blogging, who think they might want to dip a toe in the waters.

The open web is worth saving. We need to reject the monocultures of the walled factories. So let me make just one more plea, for those who feel that they can’t quit social media cold turkey, for micro.blog. Get a micro.blog account; it’s easy to set it up so that you can crosspost to Twitter. (You used to be able to crosspost to Instagram but of course Meta put an end to that.) Let the crossposting be your training wheels and then, after you’ve spent some time away from the hellsite, you might find yourself capable of disabling the crossposting and living only in the smaller and healthier community of micro.blog.

FYI

I should say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I very rarely weigh in at micro.blog – I do almost all my writing here and only post photos over there. I am not by any reasonable standard a public figure, but I’m public enough that when I post anything anywhere I get more comments and questions than I am capable of handling. I am simply a profoundly introverted person, and interacting with strangers or even acquaintances is stressful for me, and my life right now doesn’t have room for any unnecessary stress. So I’m not going to be participating in any online conversations at all. But if you want social media to be in some sense social, there are better places to find that than on the megaplatforms.

Anyway, all that to say: I want to build something strange on the open web, and I wish more people were doing the same.

UPDATE: I posted this draft by accident. I guess I will need to … maybe do a sequel later? Sigh.

January 4, 2022

why?

Let me just say a bit more about why I’m doing this Buy Me a Dragon thing. My thinking can be condensed into three simple points.

First: I’ve never been able to get published the things I am most interested in writing. I do not blame editors for this – they are professionally required to think of what won’t lose money, or what fits with their periodical’s mission and purpose, or what the people above them in the hierarchy will tolerate. And look, I’m a pro at this game – I have rarely even asked editors to publish my less marketable thoughts. I have trimmed my sails appropriately in advance. (Though I remember with great delight the rare exceptions – for instance, when John Wilson warmly agreed to let me write a 30th-anniversary essay on Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. That was a red-letter day for me.) But…

Second: I have been thinking a lot about this from the English novelist M. John Harrison: “The idea you have when you’re young, to reach the edge of what can be done with your abilities and find out what might happen if you went past it? You promise yourself you’ll try but then wake up fifty years later to discover that you were in fact always too sensible to push things until they fell over, in case people thought less of you. In your seventies, though, it doesn’t seem to matter any more what other people think. That’s probably the first phase of your life in which you can actually do what you want. And certainly the last.” I’m still several years from my seventies … but I’m ready to be in that frame of mind now. And this blog may be the only venue where such exploration — as Eliot said, “Old men ought to be explorers” — is possible for me.

Third: I have been genuinely moved by the messages I received from people when I suspended this blog last month, and by what they have written on my Buy Me a Coffee page. I had no idea that this blog meant anything to more than a dozen people. This recent encouragement has given me heart to resume my writing here – after a period in which I felt it was a completely pointless activity.

So that, in sum, is why I’m here. Buy Me a Coffee allows me to continue this work that’s meaningful to me without feeling that I’m losing money. It allows me to get paid — some, anyway — for what I really really want (and on some level need) to write. And that’s a wonderful feeling. So massive thanks to all who have supported me in this endeavor.

July 29, 2021

the fault

This is prompted largely by Robin Sloan’s comments on comments.

A decade ago I was active on Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinboard, and wrote a couple of comment-inviting blogs on magazine websites. Now?

No Twitter
No Tumblr
Pinboard bookmarks are set to private
I blog on my own site, and have comments disabled
I’m on micro.blog but only post photos

What happened? In a nutshell: I simply got tired of strangers wanting to argue with me. (Also, it was moronic to be that Extremely Online. I don’t know how I got anything else done.) Twitter was, you know, Twitter. Blog comments were generally what one would expect from blog comments, occasionally useful but prone to degenerate into spats. People who followed my Tumblr would write — you couldn’t disable such on-site messaging — to chastise me for signal-boosting something I had just quote-posted. People would email similar chastisements about something I had saved on Pinboard, apparently under the assumption that a bookmark is an endorsement.

Even when I moved to micro.blog, where folks are in general extremely nice, I had to stop posting anything but photos because strangers would invariably show up wanting to argue with me about … well, anything. As though the subject doesn’t matter so much as the act of arguing. I don’t know whether such people feel that argument is a means of sharpening their ideas or whether they just want to be heard, but I keep thinking, Man, does everything have to be subject to disputation? Can I not just put something out there for people to take or leave? Even now that I am blogging without comments, I regularly get emails about my posts, and at least 90% of them are negative. It wears on you after a while. (I continue to believe in the intrinsic value of the blog garden, so the negativity isn’t keeping me away.)

The reigning assumption seems to be that every posted opinion or preference or experience or plain old link is an invitation to debate or refute — that’s what social media, to many people, fundamentally is for: debate and refutation. And as long as that is the reigning assumption, then no platform, it seems to me, can be fundamentally different than all of our other platforms. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our platforms, but in ourselves, that we are disputatious.

June 21, 2021

A tiny pendant to the previous post: One of the ways I try to maintain the very possibility of thinking of this blog in gift-economy terms is by avoiding all analytics. I don’t know how many people read this blog — I’d guess that regular readers are probably in the high two figures — ; I don’t know which posts get more attention and which get less. (Not posting to Twitter helps here also.) My ignorance protects me from playing to the crowd. Since I crave attention as much as the next guy, preserving my ignorance is an important discipline for me.

I also want to write at some point about how this blog can even potentially participate in the gift economy only because I do other things that participate in the market economy.

June 21, 2021

managers and givers

I have written frequently on this blog about what I call metaphysical capitalism, and that orientation to the world takes several forms:

Understanding human relationships in purely contractual terms: e.g., consent becomes the only criterion of sexual ethics.
Believing that my happiness can be purchased in the marketplace, and further that a just society purchases my happiness for me (e.g. by paying for my sex-reassignment surgery or my MFA).
Conceiving of conflict as a matter to be resolved by appealing to The Authorities: as someone once said (extended searching hasn’t recovered the source), a disturbingly large number of people treat almost every conflict, at work or at play or on social media, as an excuse to Convince Management to Take Their Side — to take their side by getting some offending person fired, or banned from YouTube, silenced, excluded. This view is capitalist in a distinctively modern sense, because it assumes massive corporate bureaucracy as an immutable given, like what we used to call “a force of nature” before we decided that nature is not given but rather plastic and moldable according to our will.

Each of these forms of metaphysical capitalism is a way of giving up — giving up on meaningful structural change to our social order, giving up on imagining an alternative to technocracy, giving up on thinking of my self as something other than a commodity (even if it’s a commodity I claim to own). It’s agreeing — probably unconsciously, unthinkingly — not just to live under the corporate constitution but to see that constitution as the only Power enabling our flourishing.

We typically don’t see it, but this is Lucifer as new management.

Lately I’ve been re-reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which clearly describes the radical difference between the market economy and the gift economy, but struggles to articulate a way to escape the former and embrace the latter. The spread of the market economy into every area of life is exactly what I mean when I talk about metaphysical capitalism, and Hyde sees this spread arising from, made necessary by, bad faith: “Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.”

Again and again in this book Hyde makes three points.

A gift is not a gift unless it circulates.
Circulation requires more than two people. “The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points.”
The one who wishes to engage in the gift economy must give without expectation of return — must give in the knowledge that those who receive it will only be able, or willing, to do so in the terms of the market economy. The recipient, that is, may simply keep the gift rather than passing it on, thus failing to maintain the necessary circulation.

The implications of this argument are multiple. Here I just want to note one that Hyde acknowledges and one he does not. He sees the connection with a topic I have sometimes explored here and hope to explore further: anarchism. “There are many connections between anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy – both assume that man is generous, or at least cooperative, ‘in nature’; both shun centralized power; both are best fitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart over codified contract, and so on…. Anarchism and gift exchange share the assumption that it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears.”

The second implication is theological: This is my body, given for you. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross is offered, is graciously given — see John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift — to those who may not receive it at all, or who may receive it greedily, in hopes of keeping it as their own, their Precious, not forwarding the gift into circulation, not allowing community to appear. Again search is not helping, but I think it’s John Milbank who writes somewhere of “the tragic risk of kenosis,” the tragic risk of God’s self-emptying for people who neither deserve nor especially want that gift. (It would be seriously wrong to think that “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” is a statement only or even primarily about Israelites.)

One of the things I love most about the structure of the modern Eucharistic rite is the way it enables, and calls our attention to, this circulation of gifts. We begin with the Liturgy of the Word: we hear Scripture read and preached, we make our profession of faith, we confess our sins against God and our neighbor, we exchange the Peace with one another; and then, in gratitude for this our reconciliation, we bring our gifts to the altar. (“All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”) But that just leads to the Liturgy of the Table, at which the ultimate Gift is celebrated and received: the Gift of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. No matter what we try to give back, God always gives more, and more, and more. My cup runneth over. So those financial gifts we offered go out into a needy community, and we ourselves, at the end of the service, ask God to “Send us out into the world in peace, to love and serve You with gladness and singleness of heart.” It’s not a line, it’s a circle.

Well. These are high thoughts. But what I am trying to do is connect these theological and social ideas with certain quotidian practices — for instance, writing blog posts. There are two major reasons why I am writing about these matters on my blog. One is that the blog format allows for ideas to be developed tentatively, to be returned to, to be revised and expanded. But the other reason is that blogging at its best can be a form of participation in a gift economy: I’m not asking you to pay anything for what I write here, and if you find that it has any value, you may easily share the URLs with others. It ain’t much, but it’s what I got. And who knows, maybe circulation will add to its currently quite limited value.

March 22, 2021

blogging and the blogosphere

Robin Sloan’s reply to my last post, which was a riff on something Robin wrote … ah, you’ll figure it out. Follow the links. Robin has been very generous to me.

Children, gather around. Grandpa has a story to tell.

A long, long time ago, there was a a network within the network we call the World Wide Web, which is of course a network within the network of networks that we call the internet … anyway, this demi-network was sometimes called the blogosphere. And once, back in the first decade of the 21st century, Grandpa wrote that “the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.” Of all the millions of words that Grandpa has published, those are the most quoted. And Grandpa is not super happy about that.

See, the blogosphere, when Grandpa wrote those words, was dominated by sites like Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. The Dish shut down; TPM morphed into something larger and more complicated, as did Instapundit – though the latter is closer to its original incarnation. When these sites were at their height, fifteen years or more ago, each was basically one person pumping out responses to the most recent news all day every day. Dozens of posts per day, in some cases, and almost all of them what we would now call tweet length.

Which explains why nobody makes that kind of site any more. If you want to post in microbursts from dawn to dusk, Twitter is a superior platform.

When Grandpa wrote against the blogosphere, that kind of site is what he had in mind: a constant stream of hot takes, some of which had to be walked back later because they were offered before, and instead of, reflective consideration. You’d therefore have a better sense of what I meant in that much-quoted line if you replaced “blogosphere” with “Twitter.”

In short: Blogosphere ≠ blogging. Blogging, at least as I try to practice it here, is a different thing. What I like about blogging, and the reason I have chosen this as the venue for my thoughts on Invitation and Repair, is summed up in Austin Kleon’s post on blogging as a forgiving medium: “Blogging feels to me like a world of endless drafting, endless revisioning.”

Exactly. I post a thought; later, I return to it with an update; someone responds and I incorporate their thoughts into a new post that links to them and to the original – basically, what I am doing right now. Note also that blogging, when done in this fashion and in this spirit, is also seriously dialogical, and I think there is a close connection between a dialogue-friendly medium and a forgiving medium. More on that another time, perhaps.

In his Preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick wrote,

One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that an author should think through all of the details of the view he presents, and its problems, polishing and refining his view to present to the world a finished, complete, and elegant whole. This is not my view. At any rate, I believe that there also is a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

This series of blog posts is one of those “less complete works.” But that doesn’t mean that, for me anyway, it’s any less serious.

UPDATE: Another way to think about blogging, in the spirit that I’ve outlined above, is to see it as a way to open oneself to stochastic resonance.

May 20, 2020

Wittgenzen

In a new and extra-special edition of his newsletter, Robin Sloan writes about why he likes texts that have “a modular structure, an accelerated pace — a bit of TV’s DNA grafted into the capacious form of the book.” And he thinks about how this kind of writing, as exemplified by Georges Simenon’s brief, arrowing Maigret novels, court the world of pulp:

And while the utter disposability of a lot of pulp (culturally as well as physically) isn’t appealing, some of its other characteristics are VERY appealing. Speed! Unpretentiousness. Accessibility. And seriality, of course: the feeling of discovering the first installment in a series and, if you like it, zooming forward, absolutely devouring it, until you join the mass of readers who are caught up, waiting for the next release.

And then he says, “Okay, so, for many years, I’ve thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to produce something with that shape? — an ongoing series of relatively small pieces published at a steady clip, gathered up later into something substantial.”

I find this thought both interesting and appealing, and I want to expand it. because Robin is also helping to write a video game, creating his own video game, sending little stories in the mail … and I wonder whether the idea of many “small pieces published at a steady clip, gathered up later into something substantial” might encompass not just pieces that are published in the familiar genres of fiction but might also extend to other genres and even other media altogether. You could end up with something like a multifaceted jewel, a body of work that has a kind of thematic integrity, but an integrity that might be discernible in full only by the person who made it.

But maybe to some considerable degree by the most sympathetic and attentive of readers/viewers/listeners/players. Owen Barfield once wrote of his friend C. S. Lewis, “There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking, something for which the best label I can find is ‘presence of mind.’ If I were asked to expand on that, I could say only that somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he thought about anything.”

A consummation devoutly to be wished, as I think about my own career anyway.

Bruce Sterling has just announced that he’s wrapping up his 17-year run on his blog. I’m going to quote at length:

I keep a lot of paper notebooks in my writerly practice. I’m not a diarist, but I’ve been known to write long screeds for an audience of one, meaning myself. That unpaid, unseen writing work has been some critically important writing for me — although I commonly destroy it. You don’t have creative power over words unless you can delete them.

It’s the writerly act of organizing and assembling inchoate thought that seems to helps me. That’s what I did with this blog; if I blogged something for “Beyond the Beyond,” then I had tightened it, I had brightened it. I had summarized it in some medium outside my own head. Posting on the blog was a form of psychic relief, a stream of consciousness that had moved from my eyes to my fingertips; by blogging, I removed things from the fog of vague interest and I oriented them toward possible creative use….

A blog evaporates through bit-rot. Yet even creative work which is abandoned and seen by no one is often useful exercise. One explores, one adventures by finding “new ground” that often just isn’t worth it; it’s arid and lunar ground, there’s nothing to farm, but unless you venture beyond and explore, you will never know that. Often, it’s the determined act of writing it down that allows one to realize the true sterility of a silly idea; that’s how the failure gets registered in memory; “oh yes, I tried that, there’s nothing there.”

Or: maybe there is nothing there yet. Or: it may be ‘nothing’ for me in particular, but great for you. “Nothing” comes in many different flavors.

What I find interesting is how Sterling thinks of the whole set of writing venues, from private notebook to blog to published fiction and nonfiction, as a single endeavor, each element of which is necessary but not in predictable ways. And what those elements are necessary to is the development of his own thinking.

I think what Robin Sloan and Bruce Sterling in their posts are pointing me towards, whether they mean to or not, is a different way of looking at these matters. Maybe the really important thing is not whether an idea gets published, or the genre or medium in which it makes its way into the world, but the integrity of my Gedankenwelt, my thoughtworld. A kind of Wittgensteinian reorientation in which publication may happen, but whether it does or not is effectively external to the real project.

I’d like to get to that posture of serenity and unconcern, but instead I spend a lot of time worrying over the relations among the various kinds of writing I do. And it occurs to me that the major impediment to my achieving what I have just decided to call Wittgenzen is the publishing industry.

Now, to be sure, and without any doubt, the publishing industry has been very good to me. I am enormously grateful to my agent and my editors for bringing my voice before the public. But one thing the publishing industry, for understandable reasons, doesn’t like is to pay for something that has been made public, even in part, somewhere else. The more I write about something on this blog, the lower the chance that I will be able to sell a more-fully-developed version of it to a publisher.

And yet blogging, for reasons Bruce Sterling has laid out, is good for thinking, for my thinking anyway. To borrow a metaphor from my friend Sara Hendren, who borrowed it from engineering, blogging is a kind of sketch modeling: something more ordered and structured than notebook jottings, and less fixed and complete than a published book. Moreover, blogging is formally networked in ways that neither notebooks or books are: each post is linked not only to the online writings, or images, or films that it interacts with, but also via tags to other similar posts. Properly executed, a blog can approximate Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project, for reasons suggested by Eli Friedlander in this essay on Benjamin. Or, to put it another way, a blog is a Wittgenzen garden.

So here’s my situation: the more I write at this blog, the less opportunity I will have to publish my work in book form; but also, the more I write on this blog, the better I will think. I still believe in lateral thinking with seasoned technology; I am still trying to put myself in a position where I don’t know where I’m going. But it’s not only easier, it somehow feels more responsible to take advantage of my publishing opportunities, which so many people would love to have. (Also: cash money.)

As those posts I just linked to will show, I’ve been going around in this circle for years now. But one of these days I’m gonna figure it out. One of these days I’m gonna take the plunge into the who-knows-what of Wittgenzen. These posts are here to give me courage and wisdom for that day.

October 31, 2019

on blogging

Brent Simmons is right: It’s weird to see people bemoan the decline of blogging and do it on Twitter. You can blog! You can blog for free if you want! (Though the best options require a few bucks.) Get over your social-media Stockholm Syndrome and start doing the thing you know is better. Cross-post to Twitter or Facebook if you must, but own your turf and tend your garden. Now that you can register your own domain name at micro.blog you have no excuse: it’s easy-peasy.

I am still hoping for a Blogging Renaissance, but lately I’m thinking that one necessary element of a true renaissance will be to get the readers of blogs on the same page as the writers. Everyone who writes a blog for a while knows that one of the best things about it is the way it allows you to revisit themes and topics. You connect one post to another by linking to it; you connect many posts together by tagging. Over time you develop fascinating resonances, and can trace the development of your thought. Venkatesh Rao has thought a lot about this in his series of posts — he calls it a “blogchain” — on blogs as “elder games.”

But this is not typically how readers read blogs. Not many people read this blog, but those who do typically just read the most recent posts — three days back, max. I add links to earlier posts, but almost no one clicks on them. People don’t click on tags either. And I think that’s because we have all been trained by social media to skim the most recent things and then go on to something else. We just don’t do deeper dives any more. So one of the things I want to be thinking about is: How can I encourage readers of my blog to seek some of the benefits that I get from it?

June 9, 2019

trying

A little less than a year ago I wrote a post about cultivating my blog as a kind of garden. I made reference there to something I heard about from Robin Sloan, the game designer Gunpei Yokoi’s idea of “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” — taking established and perhaps unsexy technologies and finding unexpected new uses for them.

Since I wrote that post I have started a newsletter, because a email newsletter is also a seasoned technology, and I wondered if I might be able to do some things with it that I can’t do with this blog. I’m still experimenting, still learning, still looking for what will make that project sing — but I am really enjoying it so far, and getting some lovely responses from people, and this morning I realized that one of the reasons I like doing the newsletter so much is that I have (quite unconsciously) understood it as a place not to do analysis or critique but to share things that give me delight.

What brought about that realization was reading the most recent edition of Warren Ellis’s newsletter, in which he writes this:

Here’s a thing that came up in an email conversation the other week, that I don’t think I’ve ever made explicit to you: herein, I only talk about the things I like.

This was an important decision for me, made some years ago. It is great fun to annihilate something in a storm of arch Menckenesque hail, and I’ve done it in the past. But I came to the place where I questioned its utility here. If I’m spending time and space on something that is bad, then that is time and space not used to boost the awareness of something good. And that is a poor trade-off, these days.

A thousand times yes.

I mentioned earlier that I learned about “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” (LTST) from Robin Sloan, and Robin with his Year of the Meteor project is doing just that, employing Risograph printing, the U.S. Postal Service, a print-and-mail service called Lob that’s typically used by businesses for mass mailings, and who knows what else in the future.

Similarly, for his Ridgeline project, Craig Mod, while on a long-distance walk in Japan, tried sending brief messages and photos to subscribers all over the world by plain old SMS. The project ended up having some bugs, but the idea is enormously generative. As Robin wrote about Craig’s project, “Craig is always making new tools, trying new things, like the SMS experiment. Like he is really TRYING. What if 10X more people were TRYING?” I want to be one of those people who is trying, too. Trying to share things I like in unexpected ways.

May 22, 2019

plain text and WordPress

Here’s something I often find myself wanting to do: write plain-text files in a text editor using Markdown and then publish directly to WordPress. As far as I can tell, there’s only one way to do that on the Mac: Byword.

There are other apps that give you some of what I want: for instance, you can publish directly from MarsEdit, which is a great app, but it’s a full-scale blogging engine with a database, not an editor of simple text files, and while you can write there in Markdown, you don’t get syntax highlighting. iA Writer is a beautiful environment to write in — its bespoke typefaces (Mono, Duo, Quattro) really are a delight to the eyes — but when you’re ready to publish in WordPress it opens a draft in your default browser using WordPress’s horrifically ugly and user-unfriendly editing environment. And avoiding opening WordPress is one of my chief goals in life. Ulysses lets you publish directly to WordPress but it saves your files as weird little .ulysses packages, and while you can extract your text files from them, that’s a pain, and you can’t use your own file and folder structure.

As far as I can tell, on iOS Ulysses and Byword are the primary options for posting directly, and Byword only allows you to choose from five typefaces only, the single monospace option being Courier, and I don’t especially like Courier. I’ve been trying to do this in Drafts, through Drafts actions or Shortcuts or some combination thereof, and I’m sure someone with more skills than mine could make that happen, but to this point I have failed. Though I can post to micro.blog directly from Drafts, which is nice. But Drafts saves its files to a database. I want individual text files because you can open and edit them on any computer in a myriad of apps.

I’m writing this on my iPad in iA Writer, and I suppose that when I’m ready to publish I’ll open it in Byword and publish from there, but that’s a lame workaround. Given the ubiquity of WordPress, this ought to be easier.

May 22, 2019

Musée à croissance illimitée

Thanks to that excellent blog Futility Closet I’ve learned about Le Corbusier’s idea for a Musée à croissance illimitée, a museum “that would grow like a snail’s shell, coiling in a rectangular spiral as needs required and as funds became available.” Corbu explained that “Every time a visitor, in the course of his wanderings, finds himself under a lowered ceiling he will see, on one side, an exit to the garden, and on the opposite side, the way to the central hall. The Museum can be developed to a considerable length without the square spiral becoming a labyrinth.”

This strikes me as a wonderful model for developing a complex set of ideas over time, and one for which the blog, or more generally the hyperlinked online site, is especially well-suited. As a number of commentators have pointed out, this is what Walter Bemjamin was doing with his Arcades project, which was hypertext before hypertext: “the theater,” he said, “of all my struggles and all my ideas,” precisely because it was necessarily unordered and unfinished. When Arcades was published in book form, many critics complained about the way it was ordered, but of course any and every ordering was subject to the same criticism. The very idea of the project defies the structuring of the codex.

For some years I wanted to write a book called The Gospel of the Trees, but couldn’t make it cohere into a linear form, and a finally realized that it would be better as a website comprised of text and images that can only be navigated randomly. That project is only somewhat Benjaminesque, because while it’s nonlinear and (theoretically) open-ended, it has a single theme, whereas Arcades represents all of Benjamin’s thinking.

I like writing books, and my employer likes for me to write books, but I really do think that if I were independently wealthy I’d spend the rest of my life making my own universal, non-linear Musée à croissance illimitée right here on this blog. And see, after many years, what it all adds up to.

July 13, 2018

the blog garden

My friend Dan Cohen recently wrote,

Think about the difference between a blog post and a book: one can be tossed off in an afternoon at a coffee shop, while the other generally requires years of thought and careful writing. Not all books are perfect — far from it — but at least authors have to wrestle with their subject matter more rigorously than in any other context, look at what others have written in their area, and situate their writing within that network of thought and research.

This is absolutely true — as I know from long experience with both genres. But what if there’s a more enlightening comparison? What if, instead of comparing a book to a blog post, you compared it to a blog? If a bog post is too small to compare to a book, a blog might be too big — keep on blogging long enough and you can have enough words to fill several books. If that’s the case, then one might find it interesting to compare a book to, say, a particular tag on a long-standing blog.

An example: For some time now I’ve been thinking of writing a book about John Ruskin. And I still might. But I’ve been led to consider such a book by gradually gathering drawings and quotes by Ruskin on this blog (there are also a few Ruskin entries at Text Patterns). Suppose that, instead of architecturally writing that book, I simply contented cultivating my Ruskin garden? (See this post for the architecture/gardening distinction.) More images and more quotations, more reflection on those images and quotations. What might emerge?

Well, certainly nothing that any scholar would cite. (How would that even be done? All the handbooks to scholarly documentation are still struggling with how to cite websites and individual articles — citing tags is not even on their radar, I suspect.) But I would certainly learn a lot about Ruskin; and perhaps the sympathetic reader would also.

In some ways this would be a return to what I did a few years ago with my Gospel of the Trees site, which arose because what I wanted to say about trees just couldn’t be made to fit into a book, in part because it refused to become a linear narrative or argument and in part because it was so image-dependent and book publishers don’t like the cost of that. But the advantage of a tag over a standalone site is that each post can have other tags as well, which lead down other paths of reflection and information, in a Zettelkasten sort of way.

My friend Robin Sloan tweeted the other day — I’m not linking to it because Robin always deletes his tweets after a few days — that, despite the many calls these days to return to the good old days of Weird Indie Blogging, there are still plenty of charmingly weird things being posted on the Big Media sites, especially YouTube. Point taken: no doubt this is true. But for my purposes the problem with the Big Media sites is the absolute control they have over association: you don’t decide what is related to your post/video/audio, they do. “If you liked this you may also like….” A well-thought-out tagging system on a single blog creates chains of associated ideas, with the logic of association governed by a single mind (or in the case of a group blog, a set of intentionally connected minds). And such chains are powerful generators of intellectual and aesthetic value.

I really do think that the Back to the Blog movement, if we can call it a movement, is so timely and so important not only because we need to, as I have put it, tend the digital commons, but also because we were just beginning to figure out what blogs could do when their development was pre-empted by the rise of the big social media platforms. Given the accelerated pace at which our digital platforms have been moving in recent years, blogs may best be seen as an old, established, and now neglected technology.

I think it was also Robin Sloan who recently directed my attention to this Wikipedia page on the late Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi, who promoted what he called “Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology”: finding new and unexpected uses for technologies that have been around for a while and therefore (a) have clear patterns of use that you can rely on even when deviating from them, and (b) have decreased in price. Nintendo’s Wii system is the classic example in the gaming world of this way of thinking: some of us will remember that when the Wii was introduced critics were flabbergasted by its reliance on previous-generation processors with their limited graphics capabilities, and were certain that the console would be a total flop. Instead, everyone loved it.

Blogging, I want to argue, is a seasoned technology that is ripe for lateral thinking. The question for me, as I suggested in my previous post, is whether I am willing to set aside the conventional standards and expectations of my profession in order to pursue that lateral thinking — in order, that is, to give up practicing architecture and going in for a good deal of gardening.

July 13, 2018

new uses for old blogs

More ideas about ideas: Given my current interest in intellectual gardening rather than architecture, in allowing ideas to emerge rather than trying to generate them by a brute-force attack, I am reconsidering the way I have historically used my blogs, and wondering whether there’s not a better path to intellectual substance than the one I’ve been following.

This has been my M.O. going back to the relatively early days of Text Patterns, when I was working on The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction: Use the blog to generate and try out ideas, get feedback from readers, develop the ideas a little further … and then put on the brakes. But why did I put on the brakes? Because I knew that I was getting close to the point at which there would be so much of the book’s contents online that a publisher wouldn’t want to buy it. And so the idea-generating stage of the project would effectively come to an end.

Not altogether, of course; I could still write in notebooks or sketch ideas or whatever. But two things were missing: the felt need in writing a public post to achieve at least some minimal level of coherence, and the feedback from readers. Moreover, when you’ve been generating ideas using a particular method and then are forced to switch to another one, you tend to lose momentum. So effectively I found myself working with the ideas that I had generated to that point in the project — even when I didn’t feel that I had explored my chosen topics as thoroughly as I would have liked. And this happened more than once, most recently with my idea for a book on what I called Anthropocene theology.

So in these situations the limits and boundaries of my projects are set, not by the inner logic and impetus of those projects, but by the preferences of the publishing industry. But that’s a superficial take. Why, after all, should I allow the publishing industry to set those boundaries? Because in my line of work the highest-denomination currency is the book. I have my current job because of publishing books — Baylor simply would not have sought me out and hired me had I not been able to list several books on my CV.

Put it this way: If I had never blogged a single word I would have precisely the same job I have now; if I had blogged millions of words without publishing books I would not have a job.

But, you may say, at this point in my career why don’t I just do what I want? I have tenure; I have no administrative ambitions (indeed, just the reverse); I am a Distinguished Professor and there’s no such thing as an Extremely Distinguished Professor or Sun-God Professor. If I am feeling the demands of the publishing world as a heavy yoke why not just throw it off?

Well, I might. But I hesitate for two reasons, or maybe it’s one reason with two parts.

My profession has never figured out what to do with online writing, except for a few peer-reviewed online journals. It is still devoted to finished products — and vetted products too, despite the manifest problems with peer review. Scholars will cite a dozen mediocre peer-reviewed published papers before they’ll cite even the most brilliant blog post.
And working to the established standards of my profession is, as I have noted, what got me my current position, so that I can’t help feeling that if I were to strike out into unfamiliar writing territory I wouldn’t be keeping the implicit contract I made when I took this job.

So if I were to do the thing I am contemplating — pursue big intellectual projects all the way to their completion here on this blog — my university’s administrators would be unhappy, the publishers who want to publish my stuff would be unhappy, my magnificent literary agent would be unhappy, and some part of me would be unhappy.

But what if, by following SOP for my profession, I limit my ability to think? What if I curtail the development of ideas and end up fitting them into familiar boxes rather than following them to surprising and new and fascinating places? Isn’t that a heavy price to pay for professional adequacy?

control and surrender, architecture and gardening

Eno

Tom Phillips, Brian Eno
oil on canvas
35.6 x 25.4 cm
1984-85
collection: the artist

Tom Phillips writes:

I once devised a television project whose abbreviated ghost now forms, not inappropriately, an introduction to the film I worked on with Jake Auerbach (Artist’s Eye: Tom Phillips, BBC2 1989). The title was to be Raphael to Eno: it traced the lineage of pupil and teacher back through Frank Auerbach, Bomberg, Sickert etc. until, after an obscure group of French Peintres du Roy, it emerged via Primaticcio into the light of Raphael. Thus I find that at only twenty removes I am a pupil of Raphael. Brian Eno as a student of mine (initially at Ipswich in the early sixties) therefore continues that strange genealogy of influence as the twenty-first.

I cite that simply because it’s awesome.

The relationship between Phillips — one of whose most famous works is A Humument, an ongoing-for-decades collage/manipulation/adaptation of a Victorian book — and Eno is a fascinating one in the history of aleatory or, as I prefer, emergent art.

I’ve been talking about all this with Austin Kleon — whose newspaper blackout poems are descendants or cousins of A Humument — who not only knows way more about all this than I do but who also has been posting some great stuff lately on the themes of patience, waiting, and what I recently called “re-setting your mental clock.” See for instance this post on Dave Chappelle’s willingness to wait for the ideas to show up at his door.

And of course that post circles back to Eno — so many useful thoughts about being a maker of something circle back to Eno — quoting from this article:

“Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.” Eno considers all his recent art to be a rebuttal to this attitude. “I want to rethink surrender as an active verb,” he says. “It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.”

In another talk, one in which he also spoke of control and surrender, he developed another contrast, between creativity-as-architecture and creativity-as-gardening:

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn’t necessarily exactly what you’d envisaged for them. It’s characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I’m really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I’m deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am.

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included. So there’s something in the notes to this thing that says something about the difference between order and disorder. It’s in the preface to the little catalog we have. Which I take issue with, actually, because I think it isn’t the difference between order and disorder, it’s the difference between one understanding of order and how it comes into being, and a newer understanding of how order comes into being.

I was texting with Austin about all this earlier today:

austin

This is all good for me to reflect on right now, in this season of heat and uncertainty.

August 31, 2014

always remember

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here. The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email.

— Brent Simmons