There is no reason to write a blog in the year of our lord 2025. Whatever presence blogs used to have in the culture write large has been subsumed into posts, video, and newsletters. It’s not even that no one reads anymore – although no one does – it’s also that the very idea of navigating to a dedicated website to read someone’s thoughts is deeply old-fashioned. It’s inconvenient and inefficient. It feels vaguely self-centered: everything else in our digital lives, which is say just our lives, arrives to us friction-free, effortless. (At least that’s what we tell ourselves.) The blog is a vestigial organ, important historically to get us to the moment we call “now,” but not something anyone really wants anymore.

There is also no reason to write a blog the way I am currently writing this blog, which is on a Raspberry Pi 4 running completely barebones Linux – nary a GUI in sight, just pure command line text – connected to an ancient phosphor green Zenith display I bought off eBay for a hundred-and-change bucks. It buzzes just outside the range of my hearing in a way that gives me a headache if I keep it on too long; my younger coworkers complain that it’s loud and annoying, which is, I suppose, the price of youth. In any case: this is all a testament to willful contrarianism, which has been, I must confess, a primary motivating factor for much of my life. I am one of those technical people who does not care much for the direction technology has taken over the past ten to fifty years (range dependent on how misanthropic I’m feeling in a given day). It’s hard for me to look out over the current media ecosystem – one the telos of which seems to both regrettably and inevitably be our current crop of hypercapitalist man-children laying seige on a government that, let’s be honest, might have had it coming – and see much good. Apple Pay is useful, I suppose. That one can stay.

In any case, this is a blog. We don’t need it. I’m writing it anyway. I’m not even going to tell anyone about it. It’s more fun this way.