Diderot’s project was fundamentally about building infrastructure for thinking. He wanted to create a shared repository of human knowledge that anyone could access, organized in a way that invited exploration and cross-referencing. He believed that structuring information properly could change how people thought. He was right. 270 years later, we have more information than any civilization in history. But aside from Wikipedia, we’ve organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability. Something has gone terribly wrong. (View Highlight)
And I think the fix, or at least part of it = going backwards to a technology we’ve largely abandoned: the blog, humble // archaic as it may seem. (View Highlight)
When I write a blog post, I’m writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they’re interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who’s made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty. When I write for social media, I’m writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. Everything I produce has to compete, in real-time, with everything else that could possibly occupy that user’s attention. The incentives push toward provocation and emotional activation. The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling. (View Highlight)
Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning “attempts” or “tries.” The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated. The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne’s direct descendant. It’s a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you’re not sure where you’ll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you. You can return to the topic weeks later with updated thoughts. The format accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns. (View Highlight)
Ensayo, blog
Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of having a room of one’s own: physical space for creative work, free from interruption and control. A blog is a room of your own on the internet. It’s a place where you decide what to write about and how to write about it, where you’re not subject to the algorithmic whims of platforms that profit from your engagement regardless of whether that engagement makes you or anyone else nebulously smarter. (View Highlight)
We’re not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it. By maintaining our own spaces, linking to each other, creating the interconnected web of independent sites that the blogosphere once was and could be again. So: Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking. (View Highlight)