full bloom blogging

Jon Naughton in The Guardian — The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted — notes that Dave Winer’s blog is now 30 years old. Winer invented RSS which easily syndicates blogs and ensures that podcasts can be played on your application of choice. Like Winer, when I started I also thought that blogging was for everyone. It’s not.

“I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” —Dave Winer

Naughton also notes how big tech has not completely successfully pushed blogging to the margins by creating ‘walled gardens’.

Like many of us, [Dave Winer] realised that what came to be known as the blogosphere could be a modern realisation of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to all, everything was discussable and social rank didn’t determine who was allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and comprehensiveness that tech corporations such as Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically curated while the speakers were intensively surveilled and their data mined for advertising purposes.

Blogging is one of the few civic spaces left for democratic discourse. I noted in the perpetual beta series (2016) that the inconvenient truth is that our existing institutions do not have the answers. They were all designed for a different era. Our markets, designed to capitalize on gaps and weaknesses, are already focused on creating digital platform monopolies, so that the rest of us may become nothing more than users and renters of space. These capitalists are no different than the robber barons of the 19th century.

For instance, in this digital age many of us no longer own anything. When we die, everything that we have rented — our music, our lodgings, our software — no longer belongs to us. Even our identities, like email addresses and usernames, disappear. We become consumers, but not owners. Is digital indentured servitude our collective dystopic future?

Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the wirearchies of the future where there will be shared power and authority based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational model needs to shift on the continuum, away from hierarchy, toward networks. Reverting to old-style, simple hierarchies removes us from our obligation as citizens to build a better networked organizational model for society.

Let’s keep the blogosphere alive and well and thriving.

Image: the perpetual beta series