What We Bring Back From Hell

I’ve been reading a lot of Mark Fisher lately. That’s not why I’m stating a blog. It’s probably got something with why I’m starting a blog now after many years of thinking “hey I should start another blog”. But it’s not the primary motivator. Just a little bit of a final push. Fisher was a powerful writer and much of the writing he did was on his blog, K-punk.

Perhaps my desire for a blog is a bit of hauntology (a topic Fisher returned to frequently). Perhaps it’s wistfulness for lost possible futures that has stuck with me. Some resonance with the structure and culture of the early Internet. I don’t think it’s based on anything so crass as nostalgia. I don’t have any desire to revive Livejournal or tag other bloggers in fad posting memes. (“List five albums you want to get your back blown out to and then tag five people!”) I don’t think there’s any reviving the nascent Internet. The corporations and the management consultants won. The race towards perfectly smooth cognitive surfaces is over. Friction is gone and so too is much of what makes the Internet special.

By adding a little bit of the right friction back into my own work, I think I’m hoping to recapture part of that early world. To traipse down into the Underworld to which it’s been consigned and try to bring something back. Something of value, if I’m lucky.

This isn’t my first blog of course. By my count it is my fourth. The first was personal and painfully sincere as many were at the time (circa 2002). It’s hard to say that it was “about” anything. If any record of it survived, I suspect it would be inscrutable to all but possibly a handful of my friends.

My second blog was much more serious, much to its detriment. I tried to write about politics and current events and whatever caught my eye. It was worse than the first one, but for orthogonal reasons. No 20 year old should ever write publicly about the world. It’s grotesque.

My third was much better. It was a music blog. I reviewed small bands in a weekly newsletter and wrote one longer form review per week that was picked by a poll of my readers. It was called Fifty-Two Tuesdays and it was just successful enough that I met a few bands and started getting free records from indie labels. In 2008, this is what counted for massive success.

I think this blog will be very different from those in many respects. As I said, this is not a fit of nostalgia. Rather I want a place to write out loud, and I feel like there’s something of value to be pulled back up from those early days. I think this form is important. And I hope the pace and friction that it requires of both myself and my readers will be useful.