The unavoidable buzz (in my personal echo sub-chamber of the Internet) the past few days has been the recent podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Kyle Chayka (whose new book is Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, I haven’t read it) about how search and social-media algorithms are breeding sameness and “dulling our ability to know what we like.” It overlaps a bit with my blog intro from a couple weeks ago, and this will be a recurring theme here, as it’s been a fixation of mine for many years now — both as a historically very online person who has consciously watched the influence sphere evolve, and as a person who used social media to build an online retail business in the early phase of that evolution. Also, obviously, as a blogger. Relevant to this particular link set is that the Kara V link above came “the old-fashioned way,” as a recommendation by one of my favorite human referral sources, Alicia Kennedy.

Venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote in a 2006 advice piece called “How to do what you love” (via The Marginalian) to be leery of prestige, meaning other people’s favorable opinion: “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” I think the ‘like’-button era version of this would be ‘Prestige — in the form of social-media currency — causes you to focus not on what you like, but what you are liked for liking.’

Last summer, I was digging up old press about Readerville (and The Readerville Journal), a site I created and ran from 2000-2009, long since lost to the ether. It was a classic — pre-“web.2.0” — discussion forum for readers and writers, basically a precursor to Goodreads and LibraryThing and so on. It got a lot of press in those years, but largely on sites (“webzines”) that, like Readerville, no longer exist. Among the articles I found, though, was the Los Angeles Times reporting on its demise, and I was tripped up by the paragraph that begins “Readerville had clearly evolved since 2000; it used blogs to drive many of its content areas … . Was it a weblog making recommendations about books … or was it a community of readers?” Huh? Readerville wasn’t a blog, I thought for a second, but of course it was — in its old-school way.

In the mid-late ’90s, I’d been working at Internet upstart Salon — back in the days when you could basically read the whole “web” (via your dial-up modem and quite possibly your AOL browser) and have to wait for someone to post something new — when technology editor Scott Rosenberg started talking about doing a story on the phenomenon of the “weblog,” a new term that would eventually be shortened to just blog. These were the days when, as Carolyn Kellogg rightly noted in her LAT obit for Readerville, putting something on the web meant coding HTML pages and FTPing them to web servers, and then hoping someone would find it and look at it and maybe tell a friend about it. A weblog was a list, basically/originally, on an HTML page someone had created with the purpose of simply linking to good stuff they had found. And a good weblog would develop a following. Content was starting to swell; search engines weren’t great (I also remember the first time Scott used the word Google); but the more stuff there started to be, the more we all relied on nerds with FTP access to find good links and share them.

Readerville’s “homepage” had always been that sort of weblog — sort of a mini-version of the legendary Arts & Letters Daily (which I just discovered lives on!, fundamentally unchanged! albeit now powered by Substack). I think I originally updated it with 3 or 4 new links a day, and older ones dropped off. And yeah, we talked about those and a million other things in the forum. By the time I shut it down, I was doing more original content, with contributors, in a sort of early version of what we think of as blog now: a scroll of short pieces under recurring headings. But it was still all basically manual, as Readerville’s fundamental problem was that it was trapped on outdated, expensive, proprietary software. And so, ultimately, ether. But it was inarguably my first blog.

Around that time blogging platforms (“Content Management Systems”) were really taking off — Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad and WordPress were mostly jockeying for dominance. More and more people were getting online and many of them knew what an RSS feed was and how to add it to their Google Reader to be able to follow their favorite blogs in one place, no matter what platform they were published on, and man those were the glory days. Blogs became more and more about original content, but the simple act of linking to great stuff lingered, in the form of link-list posts and blogrolls. And then came the cataclysm: the death of Google Reader and the rise of social media — and with it, the Influencer epoch.

I hear people saying blogging is dead, we miss blogs, but really now everything is a blog and everyone is a blogger. Social media took the blogging CMS and miniaturized it, built in the follow function and put the feed front and center, while limiting it to only content created on their platform. Substack, the current hotspot, revived long-form blogging by prioritizing the emailed-post function and calling it a newsletter (in addition to facilitating and normalizing the paywall), and they too are increasingly leaning on a built-in feed reader to keep people inside their ecosystem. All of these services are using self-fulfilling popularity algorithms to serve you the content they want you to see in addition to (or instead of) that which you’ve chosen to follow. And so all of these walled gardens, blogs though they may technologically be, are more than enough to make one miss the olden days.

So here I am, starting a mid-old-school weblog in the year 2024, on good ol’ WordPress, and I hope you’ll choose to follow along. I miss those pre-influencer days of simple link-sharing, commentary and conversation as much as anyone possibly could. This being not my first rodeo, though, I also know how much work it is to create a good blog, and so I’ll be approaching this a bit differently (in ways I’ll work my way into), and will be asking for your support.

Which leaves the matter of the blog’s name, Collapse and Delight. Honestly, it feels a bit odd to be doing something so retro at this moment in time. Among other things, it’s painfully easy to see how 2024 could be the year that the U.S. ceases to be a democracy, that another World War breaks out the old-fashioned way, or that AI accidentally starts a nuclear one. We have one foot across the threshold into a world where disinformation and misinformation (especially in the form of fake audio and video) are indistinguishable from facts and reality, and too many of us have no regard for fact and reality anyway. But that makes me want, more than ever, the simple act of connecting with fellow humans over a good read or an inspiring profile, a good-faith debate about an idea. 

Collapse and Delight was the name of a short-lived blog I once had on Posterous (my favorite of the lost platforms) and I’m reviving it now because it has never felt more appropriate. In January of 2004 (twenty years ago exactly), I read and fell in love with poet Mark Doty’s gorgeous, 70-page work of art-crit/memoir, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. There’s a passage where he talks about the time, as a young briefly-married man, that he visited his then-wife’s elderly mother and how wonderful she was to them. It was all complicated in many ways, but he says of her, “She did nothing but love us and dwell in the world of collapse and delight,” and I’ve never forgotten that line. I’ve been around long enough to have experienced my share of both. And while the collapses we all face are so much more urgent today than when I first encountered Doty’s phrase, the need to seek out and cling to delight also feels more pressing than ever. I hope we can do both together here.