The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

Summary

In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him, his publisher secretly censored entries behind his back, and he worked himself into periodic breakdowns trying to finish the damn thing.When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work.Diderot has been on my mind lately, spending the Xmas period scrolling through the dwindling numbers of social media platforms that haven't yet been purchased by an "eccentric" (read: race-science obsessed) billionaire or banned by a foreign government.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. 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.The Pamphlet ProblemBefore social media ate the internet, and before the internet ate everything else, and before everything else ate itself, blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or ...