Invariably Abandoned

Why blog in 2024?

In my previous post I talked about the difficulty I encountered when writing my first blog post. Now I want to talk about how I got over it, why I was motivated to even consider it in the past, and why I am motivated to write one now.

I have always enjoyed writing, at age ~14 I have a distinct memory of a school project that involved writing a 500 word short story. I got consumed by it and wrote a 10 thousand word "book" that barely got through my first ideas - I think my teacher ended up giving me full marks and I am not 100% sure she took the time to read it. I rarely write anything anymore (code, code documentation and matrix/whatsapp messages nonwithstanding) and I didn't really know that I even missed it.

Each time I tried to start my blog in the past I took inspiration from other technical blogs that you might find on medium or dev.to. These tend to have very little personality or humanism in them and I think that's why the act of writing them felt like work rather than pleasure. That's not to stay they don't have a place, they get to the point and content like that is definitely needed and has helped my countless time. It's just to say I was not deriving enjoyment from writing in this style.

I was also motivated to create a blog not for the joy of writingm but rather to further my career, pad out my CV and maybe even show off to friends or colleagues. This focusing on the end-product rather than the process I think also dampened my motivation. I was stuck thinking: "I would like to have a blog", rather than "I would like to write a blog".

A few days ago I was researching configuring Thunderbird to use PGP keys and came across a blog post by bacardi55, this one to be precise. I was struck by how the delivery felt distinctly more human than other articles I consumed elsewhere. Through other articles and links of bacardi55 I found there is a whole community out there that write in this very human, "stream of conciousness" way, many involed in the IndieWeb or Project Gemini.

One in particular that captured me was OhHelloAna. Their writing feels very real and human, and includes the ups and downs of their life. With people on social media often hiding the downs and exaggurating the ups I often find it hard to see the human on the other side of the screen. The type of writing Ana was publishing contrasted this and I really felt this was a "real person" I was connecting with.

Speaking of humans and real people, I want to touch on one other motivation for starting my blog now in 2024: AI. AI has come into the world like a freight train over the last couple of years, and mostly I have embraced it. It has changed they way I do my day job and research things, and so far it seems mostly for the better. However I have a real fear that it's going to change the way we communicate on the internet for the worse. It's already writing emails for people, making social media posts, creating whole websites, and much more. I fear the day where everything we consume online is ai-generated and converges into one generic personality.

With this in mind I am making the promise that the content of this blog will never be even partially generated using AI. It will stay in the form it comes from my brain into my text editor: typos and non-optimal wording and all.

I wonder if there should be a new standard of a meta tag for blogs and other mediums that asserts: "this content was written by a real human".