Comment by jrflowers

That is, indeed and of course, okay. I feel myself bound to note that such behavior as his is very much par for the course here on the "orange website," whose culture is strange even among its cohort. It's part of why the design makes all comments public. But it's just a website and no one can reasonably dictate how someone else feels about it. (Not that that would stop many here from trying! But it also isn't quite perfectly true to say you stopped engaging, is it? Posting a meme isn't the same as posting nothing, and acknowledging when someone else is due the last word is also a skill I find worth having.)

This is a strange website even among websites. At different times here I have been accused, quite in earnest, of being a paid influence agent of FSB and of MSS - that is, of the Russian and Chinese foreign intelligence services, respectively. That was a pair of positively comedic conversations! I've been told that I'm insane, that I'm evil, that I'm a criminal for working, that I'm a criminal for talking critically about my work, that I don't deserve a livelihood, that I shouldn't talk about my childhood abuse, and oh, good grief, I'm sure I'm forgetting far more than I am likely to recall before coffee.

In spite of all that, and often enough in spite of itself, I have found this place more or less worth the effort. Among other things, it has been a splendid arena for the bareknuckle practice of that ancient and worthy science called rhetoric. But, contra Mr. Gackle, who I think suffers the verderer's easy failure to notice the borders of his forest shrinking over years, this place really isn't what it was thirteen years ago, or even five. (No blame; it's an accurate reflection of the industry. And feel free to review my comment history, of course. I think it is a reasonably good illustration of what it looks like when someone spends ten years 'learning in public;' what I no longer agree with I now know better than, and - even though I say so myself - there are lots of good parts.)

I do not at present have a blog. My previous one [1] is now of beloved memory, but do feel free to check out what was there. Where I stood to take that cover photo, it was even more beautiful than my camera made it look. In that place now stands a self-storage unit, full of garbage some American consumer pays to store who does not want it and fears to lose it. So it goes. Maybe in fifty years we'll make tires there again.

As to whether I will have a blog, I'm sort of in two minds at the moment about Internet publishing - which is a hell of a thing for someone to have to say who built his first website, and took his first paycheck for that work, in 1995.

Frankly, I'm no longer sure I see the point, or at least not as a primary medium. That isn't primarily a statement about AI, either. It's just...well, it's kind of hollow, isn't it? Messages in bottles, constructs of light and shadow, ships failing even to pass in the night. Nothing human, nothing even evidence that humans were here, because what is here? Where is there a here to be?

I'm not talking about AI, but I am talking about why AI is so much more fluent here than humans, I think. John Perry Barlow was an idiot and a madman, a liar and a mountebank: there is no place here. Nothing but words, 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' That soliloquy is the obituary of a cowardly man for his own soul. To quote it here, in this no-place where nothing is ever more real than a word, feels condign.

I'm happier writing in my diary, which as of last night is 3150 pages long. (It takes up a shelf!) I'm happier taking snapshots with a shitty Samsung phone camera whose only destination is on paper: I literally print them at 4x6 on an Epson Ecotank and put them in cheap little plastic albums, just the same as you would get from your local one-hour photo in 1993. I'm happier making things, I find, than frowning at flickering lights and fantasizing.

I would much rather spend a day every month making paper booklet newsletters on my guillotine cutter and saddle stapler, and send them around in physical correspondence among we who enjoy writing and reading such, than spend one more mortal hour fucking around with CSS in order to make something that doesn't even properly exist, you know? Or not more than a thought unrecorded.

Oh sure, I'll put shit on the Internet eventually, maybe. But it's not going to live and die there.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230326154310/https://aaron-m.c...