Category: Read

The next prompt for Blogging Futures is on Infrastructure.

I had a conversation with Tom yesterday, and one of the things we talked about was why more people don't have websites. The tooling around it is better than ever, so why aren't more people getting their own internet spaces?

Part of the Blogging Futures course. Feel free to contribute to the conversation!

Infrastructure makes me think of not specific application but of broad application. How can we foster a multiplicity of blogging infrastructures?

Because there seems to be an understanding in this conversation that no single solution will solve our problems. Constant experimentation of writing possibilities is needed. For that to happen, we need places where that kind of activity can happen – where people can join in blogchains, where people can engage in anonymous publication as mentioned in the previous post, where people can get lost in labyrinths, where people can be a part of a new kind of republic of letters.

What if writing on the web could be as easy as writing on paper?

That is the kind of infrastructure I want on the web - a world where I could write anywhere, even if I didn't have a blog or a website or anything like that. I mean, do you need an account to write on a piece of paper?

I guess Telegraph is a good example of that in action. But why make anonymous publishing platforms second-class citizens? What if they were also integrated into blogs and other platforms? Don't know what that would look like but it would be like little slips of paper inside books, y'know, like newspaper clippings and grocery lists inside used books.

More freedom of where I can write and how I can write.