I’ve been blogging since before blogging existed. Thirty years ago (!), I used to write down silly little stories about silly little things, and e-mail them to friends.
Just to prove that everything is circular, several people angrily demanded that I stop doing this and I ignored them, anticipating modern algorithmic content — I was shoving things in people’s face that they never asked for and don’t want in 1994, man. The line between “irritant” and “visionary” is awfully thin.
At some point, Jason Snell took all of these e-mails and put them on-line, and my nonsense joined the first wave of “personal narrative” sites that had sprung up, for people to write down silly little stories about silly little things.
Of course, by then people were already expanding the form. I was too stubborn and too stupid to see its full potential, and so blogging sailed right past me, into journalism and art and cultural criticism and a thousand other things. There are too many people to mention who saw this coming, and made it happen, and (please take this as complimentary or derogatory, as appropriate) you know who you are.
Meanwhile, I continued steadfastly on the silly little story front, through jobs and getting married and having kids and generally charging towards a sedate middle age.
And at some point, I… stopped. I got busy — see above, re: marriage and kids, etc. — and was getting paid to do some other writing and, well, if you’ve ever had a blog, you know. Literally everyone who has ever had a blog knows.
I’m only posting now because I was blackmailed by Jeff Atwood. He threatened to do something nice for me, and I certainly can’t have that, so I promised to blow the dust off this stupid thing here and see how it goes, if he’d just take his kindness somewhere else.
Back in the beginning, I’d always wanted to keep this blog mild. Like me! No profanity, little if any politics, certainly nothing to cause controversy or upset or — and here’s the real reason — give anybody any reason not to like me.
Well, fuck that.
The history of the past three decades is not going to be kind to milquetoast white guys who thought they could just muddle through without offending anyone or, worse, didn’t think about it at all. I got more forthright when posting on Twitter and then Mastodon, but my own space, here, has always just been fundamentally about silly little stories. I want to change that.
I’m still on the silly story beat, of course. That’s fundamentally part of my nature. But I also want to put my full self — my aspirational self — up on the Internet as well. And anybody who doesn’t like me as a result can suck it.
Things are going to be very hard in this country for a very long time, and if there’s anything that I and people like me can’t afford to be — not if we have an ounce of belief in this country, what it could be, and all the people in it — it’s silent.
This is not a new idea, of course. Plenty of people are walking away from Twitter and Facebook and Omelas, and setting up (or re-vivifying) their own sites. In a world where vast swaths of the Internet are controlled by the men (always the men…) who run trillion-dollar companies, and who are willing to glad-hand and kow-tow and genuflect to an authoritarian for the sake of a buck, having a place free of them — as free as it can be, anyway — is vital.
I just turned 57, and there’s an outside possibility that I’ll still be around in thirty more years. I hope this site will still be here, too, filled with new posts — some angry, some funny, some thoughtful, some really dumb; just incredibly, embarrassingly dumb. I mean, wow.
But those will be posts that say what I really think. Posts where I get things wrong and correct myself. Posts that track a person (and a country) getting better, or at least trying.
And posts — eventually, hopefully, possibly — where all the memories of Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and their ilk are just silly little stories.