It was important to me when I revived this blog to use the same formatting it had when I started it. I think the URL might be different; I think it might've been slowlygoingbald-dot-blogspot-dot-com when I got it 20 years ago. But the name makes sense.
I worried briefly about leaving bits of digital detritus behind, but why? All links rot; all papers mold. History is just the process of exhuming old people's shopping lists, so let this be content with being that.
How many of my opinions are actually my own? When I summon a memory or a belief, am I calling up something from a part of myself, or just regurgitating something I once read? Has a lifetime of absorbing and reading criticism left dead something that should be alive? How much of what I say I care about do I actually care about?
I've always loved movies with prologues: big-picture, slightly ominous beginnings that provide a specific kind of sweep and emotion. They capture a sense of the movie behind the movie, pulling in threads of the fictional world in ways unique to the opening.
I forget that things like Twitter rolled out as "micro-blogging" services; that is, they were designed to truncate and capitalize on an existing practice. Blogs were already short and random and could be about literally anything, but those services built themselves on hyper-short versions. Over time it started to feel like those little blasts were all that the internet was good for, or all that it had ever been used for, and neither is true.
It's hard to explain. It's like looking at Google Maps and switching from the standard map, full of color-coded traffic and names of places and sponsored placements for fast-food restaurants, to the satellite view, with its sea of trees and roads and even in the man-made structures a sense of the organic. The real view has a tactility, an appearance of something that has to be navigated by knowledge and time, instead of the digital construct, which is just an idea of what's there. The social networks and tweets and faves and rankings were the construct, and underneath is still the organic.
We would write blog posts, just because. They were short or long, focused or rambling. They were devoid of monetization. The idea of charging someone to read them was not just ludicrous but unimagined.
There was no mention or consideration for an algorithm; such a thing existed but was not relevant. Discoveries happened through links and comments. There was the blogroll, like a miniature directory of other blogs you liked, and those links sent people out into the world and could bring them back again. Nothing was optimized. Responsive design did not exist because cell phones did not have the capability to display websites, and when they did, they would redirect to a mobile version of the website, though you could still click/tap a button to see the web version.
It was messages in bottles, packages sent through pneumatic tubes or along conveyer belts, log cabins made from trees whose stumps were visible in the clearing next to the porch. It was the staked plains, people journeying for miles across flatland and driving spikes into the ground to mark their route and map the area. It felt free.
