Forward

I started blogging a litte more than 20 years ago, about the same time as everybody else did. Listen to me, my children, and I will tell you of time when the internet didn’t suck! Instead of using humanity-destroying social media, we wrote posts on our blogs and we had little internet-friend circles of blogs and we’d use RSS feeds to see when our friends posted interesting things and it was glorious.

But I am not hear to bury Caesar. I’m here to auger another blogging restart, of the type that I embark on every few years or so. I started here on Blogger, moved to Tumblr (about five years after it was cool), then moved to Medium (about five years after it was cool), and after trying a brief foray on Substack (about five years after it was cool) I thought I'd just acknowledge that there's a pattern here and come back to Blogger. Like I say below, I only left Blogger because it stopped being trendy, and that is a stupid thing to do. 

If you’re reading this and you don’t already know me, I have lots of pitches about why you should read me, and I'm making them all the time, via my writing. Here's another one: at some point in the semi-recent past my wife (who is actually way smarter than me — more on this as we go) said something to me to the effect of, “You are the smartest person everyone that you know knows.” So first, here’s some ego: it’s not that I, like, super disclaim this or anything. I am, for instance, very good at learning and implementing algorithms, which is an attribute of humans we appear to value above all other forms of intelligence.

And I am also a really, really good primate. You know what the smartest monkeys do? They look at the successful monkeys around them and the copy what those monkeys do. I am…really good…at that. I think most of what reads “smart” about me is actually that. A particular skill of human mirroring and mimicry, if you will. It sometimes looks like a magic trick, and maybe it is.

This is useful, because in most all other respects, I am a complete moron. I can’t read*. I can barely write. I cannot deal with big abstractions. I cannot think unless I break things down into the simplest possible pieces. And I cannot tell you how much I am not being humble right now. You know those times in high school or college when you got called on and you didn’t know the answer (or worse, you weren’t paying attention)? But the teacher just stood there, putting you on the spot, and everybody was staring at you and you were stuck there like a deer in headlights? Do you remember what that feels like? It feels like that, in my head, all the time. It is a constant feeling of, like, “duh.” 

If you follow the asterisk below it explains what I actually mean by, "I can't read." It's orthogonal to the thread I'm following here, so it's a footnote. The statement, "I can barely write," however, is definitely on-topic. It's true, I can barely write. A blog entry like this is about the best I can do. 

I can, and sometimes actually do, do the things that any half-decent writing coach would tell me to do (I actually cohabitate with one of the greatest living writing instructors of the English Language. I will never miss a chance to mention this. I have a little dream of people in the future reading this and realizing, "oh yeah, huh."): practice. Sit down and write. If you write lots of blog entries, you'll eventually have a book. Etc, etc. I am doing that. I will continue to do that. It's important.

Lately, though, I have come to start noticing the internet and how the blogging of the early internet was just a method of using it in the old paradigms that we were used to. We are used to the world of writing and publishing, and when we were first on it we used the internet as a fast, wide-reaching printing press. That, notwithstanding Substack's recent attempt to restore the internet of 2005 by grafting a little bit of Late Capitalism onto it, is a very dead end. Or perhaps not a very dead end, but something more like trying to use a space shuttle as a car. You can do it, but it's not what the thing is designed for. 

One of the things that the internet does allow you to do is engage with other minds in internet-y ways. A famous person who's currently availing literally anyone of her mind in those internet-y ways is the writer and thinker Naomi Alderman**. She's offering up her mind to be engaged with and I've been doing it heavily lately. There's a lot going on in her mind, and a lot of it is pretty heavy. But I accept that burden because it's also a thing that I can do with my mind -- engage with another that's offering itself to me in more or less real time across thousands of miles and a massive time-zone difference -- that is specifically internet-y. The internet is, and I'm quoting Alderman now, a new information technology. It's on par with the invention of writing or the printing press. Those things changed minds, in the literal sense. We are 30 years into it and humans haven't adapted to this technology at all. And it's time. Like, right now. 

* Obviously I can read. I am an avid reader of fiction, for instance; what I absolutely cannot do is read any kind of hard academic writing. If the text is meant to directly impart knowledge of a subject to a reader, I cannot get anything out of it. My eyes glaze over. I went to college and almost immediately shifted to mathematics because of this problem. Long story short: I have strabismus in my left eye, and it went undiagnosed until well into adulthood. Imagine trying to become any kind of professional athlete when you’ve got a hitch in your left hip: it doesn’t matter what the rest of your body can do, you will always be at a distinct disadvantage. You will need to find something else to do with yourself besides play baseball.

** The old paradigms of the internet would dictate that I link Naomi's name to something there. But she's Of The Internet, so you can go find her yourself.