I’ve been shifting my online life away from socials and back to RSS. One thing I discovered a while back on Twitter was Cory Doctorow’s threaded versions of his essays on Pluralistic; in today’s, about a hacker jailbreaking a John Deere tractor, was a link to an old essay on “the Memex Method,” which is less a method for anything in particular than it is an apologia for blogging. Writing frequently and publicly, the argument goes, is a way to make a daily practice of rigorous thinking, to blaze landmarks on your mental trajectories, and to attract an audience who likes the way you think.
It’s a convincing argument. Like, I definitely would have forgotten there was a rap battle in the 14th-century Chinese classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms if I hadn’t written it down. And if I hadn’t decided to write a post referencing “the Memex Method,” I probably wouldn’t have gone back and verified that, yes, “memex” sounds familiar because I read it in the Laundry Files.
Anyway. I’m not a full-time writer, and I still have a lot of little kids to take care of and actual books to write; this isn’t yet another doomed declaration of a daily practice. But it is to say that you might be seeing a little more from me here, if only in the name of placing a few more waypoints in my memory.