There are three reasons I'm starting this blog.
Number one: I want to force myself to write in a concerted, focused
way, even on smaller or irrelevant topics. It's striking to me that I am
very used to writing in the abstract—I probably write a novel's worth on various
chat services every week or so—but when I start to do long-form
writing, I tend to over-think things, get bogged down in details,
and then give up.
I have another blog
where I will write about technical topics every few months, but I'm
pretty negative about the quality of my writing there, which makes
me feel less excited about writing new things there.
So reason one for this blog is that it's a
place for me to practice writing without feeling like it has
to be, well, good.
Number two: I'm a collector of the weird. I like reading about
disproven, disused, or even just forgotten theories, and odd,
off-kilter pieces of art or science or literature, and unusual
social movements, and everything that could be categorized as
esoterica. I have a set of favorite etymologies and a set of
favorite conspiracy theories and a set of favorite esoteric
programming languages, and I've done reading about
a whole slew of odd topics, but especially food and language
and notations and just plain weirdness. So reason two for
this blog is that I can try to take all this miscellany and
throw it into a place that's not just my head.
Number three: I'll probably write a lot about computers—I am,
after all, a computer scientist—and in part, it's because I've
started to notice something unusual about my own relationship
with computers. In contrast to many programmers I talk to,
I'm still excited about computers. There's a particular
kind of joy and excitement you get when you first learn how to
program, when you first explore a fascinating algorithm or
learn a different kind of language and start making things
happen on your screen. It feels like magic.
I think for a
lot of people, that feeling tends to fade over time, once you
look into the guts of the machine and notice all the
cut corners and awkward edges that exist in our modern
computing environments,
to say nothing of the even worse state of the cultural,
social, and economic structures that surround computing.
We have amazing
underlying ideas that we've obscured with layers of cruft
and a thick forest of hacks, argued over with unwarranted fervor by
cliques of short-sighted super-specialists who don't know what
history their craft is (to say nothing of what insights
they'd stand to gain from studying it),
all deployed in the service of widespread Orwellian
surveillance both public and private, or at least in the service
of blandly Objectivist reimaginings of existing service companies
with a thin veneer of WebView disguising the same old greedy
hucksters playing the same cynical capitalist game.
It's not hard to get disillusioned.
Certainly, it's important to be aware of those problems—but
I also think that if we're ever going to iron out those problems,
we need to be motivated by excitement and not resignation or
anger. We need to recapture and relive that excitement, so we
can build a new world motivated not by greed and exclusion but
by joy and wonder.
So reason three for this blog is that I can try,
in whatever little way, to share a little bit of my excitement
for the future of computers.