The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

Joan Westenberg on The Case for Blogging in the Ruins:

…we have more information than any civilization in history. But aside from Wikipedia, we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability.

Joan's right. We've taken the greatest information distribution system ever created and turned it into a rage factory. The internet promised us a library of Alexandria in every pocket. Instead, we got a slot machine that pays out in dopamine hits and manufactured outrage.

I've been a blogger for over a decade now. I remember when you could maintain a bang average blog, write a few times a week, and make enough from ads to justify the time. That world is gone. The advertising money moved to platforms that could guarantee engagement through manipulation.

What's left are people like me, writing for reasons that have nothing to do with profitability. We write because thinking out loud is how we process the world. Simply because blog post brain is a better affliction than doom-scrolling brain and maintaining your own corner of the web is an act of quiet rebellion.

The ruins Joan talks about are real. When Google surfaces an AI summary, only 8% of users click through to actual sources. That's half the click-through rate of traditional search results. People don't want to read your blog post. They want the information extracted, processed, and spoon-fed by a machine that may or may not be hallucinating.

This is what blogging in the ruins looks like. You write knowing that bots will scrape your words, compress them into training data, and regurgitate approximations for people who never knew your post existed. Your carefully constructed arguments become raw material for something that has no understanding of what it's saying.

I keep writing though. Not despite the ruins, but because of them. Your own website is still the only place on the internet where you actually control what you say and how you say it. Not Twitter. Not Medium. Not whatever platform is trendy this week. Your blog. Your rules.

Here's the thing about ruins: they only stay ruins if nobody maintains them. Every blog post is a small act of maintenance. Every link is a connection that refuses to be ‘algorithmed’ away. Every RSS subscription is a rejection of platforms that want to be the only interface between you and everyone else.

Blogging won't save the internet. Most people will never read this. The machines that process it won't understand why I bothered writing it. But I'm doing it anyway because the alternative is letting the platforms win completely. They've already got most of the internet. They can't have this bit.