Sharing my opinions on the internet feels a little bit like pissing into an ocean of piss.

That’s not to insult anyone who’s reading this - apparently this particular holler into the void is above all that by pure dint of having a very discernible intent: it’s what I wanted to put out there, it’s my voice.

There may be some weirdos following my RSS feed (hi, I love you, I understand you) but the reality is that I don’t really know what our relationship is. There’s a deep craft in how hilariously low tech this blog is, which is fundamentally enabled by the fact that I have literally no need to give people recourse to respond on my platform. Y'all can email me just fine (I’m pretty easy to find if you think about it for 5 minutes) or message me on a number of platforms that I keep around simply to have a viable feedback loop, but in real discourse there’s not the worry that you’ll platform someone else or have some drive-by asshole try to “teach” you something. If you want to defend that, understand that there’s a complete lack of established social contract going on, so what’s the difference between “I’m helping you” and “I’m accidentally browbeating you to feed by own ego”. A slippery slope.

What I’m getting at here is that we’ve modeled our online relationships around real-world concepts that they don’t map to. The “town square” equivalence is not there - I went to Leicester Square the other day to observe, and it transpires that in meatspace people aren’t just in this consistent high din of screaming their inner monologue for validation. They’re sitting around and watching each other, largely having conversations in groups whilst gathering around other people.

Our lives were intrinsically private things within my living memory, and mine still is to a large degree because I’ve been at the sausage-face making adjacent sausages to the ones that we live our lives by, and over the years I’ve just kind of quietly opted out. To quote my favorite person in the whole world in one of their most persistent bits of quiet wisdom: “I will not shout to be heard”.

So I’ve mostly been quiet all these years on the internet apart from a couple of IRC channels, occasional bursts of mania or unearned confidence on social media, and increasingly withdrawing from the view of anyone except those who know me deeply.

My life has always been defined, though, by confusion at other people’s lack of interest in the feedback loops of their own interactions, and that’s why I’ve always been communicatively at odds. Language is a prison because of how we’ve come to use it solley within the contexts of debt and markets (our world), and written word has become the metric-du-jour as to whether you’re outputting enough “value” into the world. The language of the internet is parallel, not totally decoupled, but increasingly divorced from it’s spoken cousins which will always be anchored in part to a real, visceral, localized effective life. It’s simultaneously ossified and ephemeral, each word is considered added to our aggregate text. And what is our aggregate text? Mostly spam by this stage, soon to be overtaken (if it hasn’t been already) by slop. Nobody’s ever read it, why would they? There’s not time to infer value from it any more.

And I think that’s fundamentally the rub - written word is by its very nature an asyncronous information tranfer mechanism, but our mistake is in thinking that it’s guaranteed to be communication when we don’t even have any ways to guarantee it will either be consumed (i.e. even have an audience, thus can a transfer even be said to have happened?) or interpreted “correctly” (read by the correct audience, be written by an author who has enough knowledge of their audience to confer the message effectively…).

You could argue that some of those arguments could be applied to spoken word, but if you can’t adjust the argument based on the confused look on my face then I don’t know how to help you…