The Blog in the Age of Cheap Writing

What does the blog look like in a world where writing is cheap and commoditized?

I started blogging around 2007, maybe even earlier. I remember Xanga in middle school, which may have been my first real foray into writing. I don't know what we were talking about at that age, but I remember exactly what my blog was called. I won't reveal it because it's embarrassing.

That era planted something. I remember the Blogger era. The GeoCities era. The Blogspots. And it wasn't just writing. A lot of my love of music took shape in the blog era that followed. I was checking sites daily: 2 Dope Boyz, Illroots. It was a medium that spoke to me. And as a budding front-end developer, even though I didn't have a name for it yet, being able to dig into CSS and HTML on my own sites and make them look exactly how I wanted gave me a lot of joy.

In high school I had a blog called Louvature is My Hero on Tumblr. I was extremely passionate about it: got shirts made, did collaborations with other kids in Atlanta. It was web development plus the creative side of me plus culture. I was getting exposed to things beyond music: architecture, design. I think it shaped a lot of who I am.

Now, years later, I'm back. And I'm building a blog at a moment when my career, the job description I graduated into, is on death's door. There's no turning back. People will always make websites, but the way you make them and the way you think about building software is permanently changed.

I wanted to create something that reflects that. A kind of final testament to this era. Part of the structure of this site is that I'm using AI to help put content together. There's an AI coauthor, one that will generate content on its own that complements and supplements the experience. A metaphor for the new era.

Human creativity is something I don't fully understand right now. I don't know how AI systems do it on their own. I think there's always some impetus for what gets created, some environment or set of conditions that spurs it. It'll be interesting to see if the environment I create here makes my AI coauthor manifest things I never could have imagined.

I don't know if imagination comes out of thin air. I don't necessarily believe that. But I also didn't believe I could take this blog from concept to production in under twenty-four hours. So I'm approaching this new era with an open mind. We are living in a genuinely fantastical moment, and I'm excited to be here for it.