Rejoining a craft that I can’t seem to let go of – at least not completely
I haven’t written a proper blog post in years. I never know what to say when the editor faces me down, when all I have in front of me is a blank canvas. I don’t want to be premature in saying that this part of me – one that has been in me since I first learned to wield a pencil – is dead. It’s certainly in cryopreservation at the moment.
I’ve tried. God knows how I’ve tried, how I’ve begged my mind to let go of even one idea that it knows is publishable, and yet I come away empty-handed, the metaphorical stone unwilling to release any of its precious blood. I don’t know why my brain so stubbornly refuses to let its owner express itself.
Well, I’m here to tell you something: I refuse to be held hostage to my own brain. In the characteristically rough tone I used to use when I wrote: fuck that shit. And in the words of Duke Nukem, let’s rock.
I used to write about some “spicy” topics (no, not like that, you sicko) that lived very near and dear to my heart. I also wrote, often at considerable length, about computer programming and the broader world of technology. As a professional skeptic and amateur enjoyer of math, philosophy, linguistics, and economics, you’d think I’d have rich, endless veins of material to mine for ideas about posts – but I haven’t allowed my mind to stumble down those rabbit holes in quite some time. I never had pretensions about being a rich and beautiful internet star – I probably wouldn’t have the time for that anyway, even if it meant hobnobbing with the likes of Doctorow and Gruber – I just wanted to say what was on my mind and try to participate in the marketplace of ideas.
With that in mind, I’ve decided that this site is going to have a fourfold mission.
- To serve as an outpost of what the Internet used to be like,
- To serve as a depository of ideas I’ve had and essays I’ve wanted to write,
- To serve as my modern-day manifesto about the place of AI, social media, and technology in modern life, and
- To serve as my relief mechanism against a world that seemed to stop changing for the better at some point yet to be determined.
There will be footnotes. There will be bibliographies. There will be inline and narrative citations (probably in APA format, as that’s the style manual I know the best). And if you come onto this site expecting to be coddled, to have your hand held, then prepare to be bitterly disappointed. This digital garden is meant to make you think, to show you the results of thinking for yourself, and to encourage you to help reclaim the principled, civil communication that was once far easier to find online than it is now.
If this mission accords with you, then I bid you welcome.
If it doesn’t, then may I suggest that you consider the consequences of living with the results of other people’s thinking rather than thinking for yourself.