Category: Medium

I quit

Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death

A vintage Chesterfield cigarettes ad, featuring Ronald Reagan, identified as star of “Voice of the Turtle” and thus likely from 1947

I smoked from the age of 13 to the age of 33. I loved smoking. I loved having something to do with my hands. I loved making friends by cadging — or sharing — cigarettes. I loved learning Zippo tricks, finding beautiful old cigarette cases at flea markets, learning to roll a cigarette, then learning how to do it one-handed. I loved the excuse to take breaks from my work.

But I hated smoking. I knew it would kill me. I watched it kill people I loved. They died hard. Gradually, the quixotic pride I felt in the lengths we smokers went to in order to engage in our increasingly disfavored habit turned to horror.

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Probably

We also serve, who write and boost.

A blurred roulette wheel in motion. Image by Angelo_Giordano, CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
Image by Angelo_Giordano, CC0

There was a time when I would read the whole internet, every day.

Oh, not all of it. But when Usenet — the internet’s first widescale social media — was bridged into Fidonet (a network of dial-up BBSes), my local free bulletin board system began to import several hundred Usenet newsgroups, updating several times per day. I would dial up to this BBS and read my way through all of the new posts on these groups.

Early on, this was easy. Then, as traffic picked up, and as more newsgroups entered the feed, it got harder. Then it got impossible.

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Consent theater

Some of privacy’s thorniest questions

The torso and hands of a zoot-suited con-artist playing a shell game; behind his body is a Matrix-style waterfall of green characters on a black background. The pea in the shell-game is the eye of HAL9000 from 2001. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Just say that we “fix” Facebook, making it possible for you to take your data and go to a rival service, one that respects your privacy, pays its taxes, and isn’t bent on enclosing all digital spaces into its pervasive surveillance walled garden.

It’s an idyllic vision, but our problems are just getting started.

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The Memex Method

When your commonplace book is a public database

The complex, hand-wired backplane of an electromechanical supercomputer at the Computer History Museum boneyard; it is an impossible tangle of wires joining various subassemblies.

I’ve been a blogger for a little more than 20 years and in that time I’ve written a little more than 20 books: novels for adults; novels for teens; short story collections; essay collections; graphic novels for adults, highschoolers and middle-schoolers; a picture-book for small children, and book-length nonfiction on various subjects. I’ve written and delivered some hundreds of speeches as well, for several kinds of technical and non-technical audience, as well as for young kids and teens.

Over that same period, I’ve published many millions of words of work in the form of blog-posts. Far from competing with my “serious” writing time, blogging has enabled me to write an objectively large quantity of well-regarded, commercially and critically successful prose that has made many readers happy enough that they were moved to tell me about it — and to inspire some readers to rethink their careers and lives based on how my work made them feel.

There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

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