Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
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I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a *massive* database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I'm now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I've thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this "The Memex Method":
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"Memex Method" is also the title of an essay collection (from this blog) I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but it keeps getting bumped because of *other* books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's *Enshittification*. I'm now fully *two* books ahead of myself, with *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* coming in June, and *The Post-American Internet* in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection).
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"Memex Method" is also the title of an essay collection (from this blog) I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but it keeps getting bumped because of *other* books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's *Enshittification*. I'm now fully *two* books ahead of myself, with *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* coming in June, and *The Post-American Internet* in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection).
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Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.
Blogging is - and always has been - a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.
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Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.
Blogging is - and always has been - a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.
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One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history - 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).
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One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history - 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).
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The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.
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The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.
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Six years ago, I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don't know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I'm always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day's list.
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Six years ago, I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don't know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I'm always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day's list.
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I also dropped some things this year, notably, my "linkdump" posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called "Hey look at this," which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn't have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.
However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things.
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I also dropped some things this year, notably, my "linkdump" posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called "Hey look at this," which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn't have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.
However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things.
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So I started writing the occasional Saturday "linkdump" essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects - a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as "ringing the changes," but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least).
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So I started writing the occasional Saturday "linkdump" essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects - a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as "ringing the changes," but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least).
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They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here's all 33 linkdumps; they're not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they'll be in a different form:
This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it's hard work.
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They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here's all 33 linkdumps; they're not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they'll be in a different form:
This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it's hard work.
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The fact that it's hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I've got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can't overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment.
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The fact that it's hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I've got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can't overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment.
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This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I'm assured is very treatable, but which - to be totally honest - sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:
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This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I'm assured is very treatable, but which - to be totally honest - sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:
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Making Pluralistic is several *kinds* of hard work. Over the past six years, I've become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight - into yourself, and into the thing you're doing.
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Making Pluralistic is several *kinds* of hard work. Over the past six years, I've become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight - into yourself, and into the thing you're doing.
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I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to *any* visual field in a serious way, until now.
Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying *as a visual artist*.
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I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to *any* visual field in a serious way, until now.
Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying *as a visual artist*.
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I find myself pondering visual works the same way I do prose - mentally unpicking how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:
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I find myself pondering visual works the same way I do prose - mentally unpicking how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:
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There's also a *ton* of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:
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There's also a *ton* of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:
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Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):
This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a *ton* of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them.
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Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):
This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a *ton* of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them.
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This year, *all* of them got *worse* (incredibly).
Medium - where I used to have a paid column - has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I *do* schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually.
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This year, *all* of them got *worse* (incredibly).
Medium - where I used to have a paid column - has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I *do* schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually.
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There's no *way* I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.
Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that *completely* broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, *then* start typing. It's ghastly.
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There's no *way* I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.
Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that *completely* broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, *then* start typing. It's ghastly.
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So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong.
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So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong.
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Here's how busted Tumblr's visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and *then* you can select the word.
Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just *sucks*.
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Here's how busted Tumblr's visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and *then* you can select the word.
Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just *sucks*.
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If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes.
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