Fuck Blogging

day 1 crash out

I thought bloggers were essayists. I thought blogging was a natural continuation of the human intellectual spirit, a passing of the torch from Chesterton to Siskind.

I was wrong. Blogs aren’t a natural, convergent structure among possible media of human communication, suitable for specific communication purposes. They’re a transitional period between newspapers and TikTok slop. Information systems will localize due to the collapse of social trust: blogs are only (currently) a prominent intellectual mode because of the collapse of academia. Ideas will be communicated in the form of generalized slop, in person (or electronically in-person), or within permanent, archival modes like e-books.

Edutainment, in general, has become so superficial and false in general that people who want to be educated will learn to avoid it, which by evaporative cooling will allow it to use even shallower veneers. You’ve probably already seen this happening. In real life, not as an ironic meme, I want to understand category theory which is why when I was recommended this article I had a disabling immune reaction. I will have to read a book.

I had to be persuaded to blog. People said to me, “You’re a good speaker,” or “you should start a podcast,” and I would think: these people are retarded. I deduce this from the fact they listen to podcasts, rather than reading. I’m not interesting. I’m not “an intellectual.” I studied and studied and studied strange texts not out of particular virtue but because it took me months of rereading psychoanalysis and tens of thousands of words of excerpts, repeated as mantras, to reach a level of social functionality sufficient for a woman to have sex with me. Every time I make a stranger laugh, it is the culmination of a life-project.

I couldn’t write a book because I don’t know enough, and of the book it would be true, “this could have been a blog post.” I refuse to create irredeemable turboslop: I approached designing my online identity with minimality, throughout the process indulging in a surly paranoia. “I love other people’s attention, so I will make sure only to get it on merit.” Very realistic. “Many peoples’ blogs degenerate into self-obsessed diaries,” I reasoned. “I will only post when I have a well-defined opinion about a topic, which is novel to my intended audience,” I concluded, not knowing the difficulty and complexity of the industrial process which produces this particular sausage.

So far as I can tell, a self-obsessed diary is what most blogs were. As a zoomer, I learned the word “vlog” before “blog”: The old internet is dead, the resurgence of blogging through Substack a mere Kingdom of Soissons. The bloggers I admire, the last vestiges of an extinguished tradition known as basic literacy, are non-representative. Yudkowsky a mad autodidact, Siskind a literal prodigy, TLP a cultural relic. When I emailed a applied mathematician and blogger asking where I could study problems as interesting as those he blogs about, he told me, “Most of my work isn’t as interesting as the work I put on my blog.” I literally do not have the experience or knowledge base required to write words which are useful or pleasant to others.

Anyways, this is my first of 30 posts for Inkhaven, a rationalist blogging program. For 29 days I plan on producing ideological pandering for the beautifully eugenic Bay Arians. Enjoy. After that, maybe I’ll pivot to becoming a hereditarian Twitter personality, or maybe a stylite. It’s better than academia.