Hello!

Blogging has gotten pretty stale for me, because it stopped being blogging long ago.

Blog posts used to be sites for conversation. A one-two punch of professionalization and twitterization killed the traditional blogosphere. (Google's murder of Reader didn't help.)

As blogging started to become a springboard into journalistic careers or academic notoriety, authors (myself included) felt more and more compelled to police the quality of our posts. Instead of, "Here's what I'm thinking about today, wanna talk about it?" or "Wow, she said something (interesting|wonderful|terrible) let's blockquote the highlights and go through it!", every blog post became a kind of resumé item.

The quality of blog posts individually much improved, for sure. Many bloggers became edited journalists, for Vox or The New York Times or The Atlantic, and of course articles there are usually much higher quality than a typical old-school blog post.

The quality of the conversation, however, collapsed. We have now constructed an intellectual world filled with brilliant baubles you can admire but not touch. All this ostentatious quality has made us collectively stupider. On Twitter you can writhe about it all, of course, but it is not the sort of place where ideas cumulate and converge. The best Twitter threads are lost to time in a way that even the most trivial blogposts are not. There are Substacks now, but they are their own pathology, each one a chatty little Netflix.

I am off Twitter almost entirely now, and thank god. You can find me on Mastodon, and I mean to experiment with using that forum as a comment section, following Carl Schwan, though maybe in a less JavaScriptey way. The death (at least to me) of Twitter has inspired for me a renaissance, technically. All of a sudden, the internet seems open again. I'm building my own static-site generator for this and other sites, thinking about ways to build and play that seemed useless when everyone was going to be on someone else's platform anyway.

Anyway, I mean to write here, a lot. And very differently. You should assume that everything you see here was written and published in a single sitting. This is a space for first drafts. I hope, in the spirit of Tanner Greer's classic post, it becomes home to many, many bad takes.