Starting a Blog in the Information Apocalypse

I started my first blog in 2004 on a now-defunct corner of the internet called Xanga. It was less what most people would consider a blog these days and more like a diary you decided to share with the world.

I'd just left my old school and life behind, and moved to The Indiana Academy, a public boarding school that ripped me from my low-tech, rural upbringing, plopped me in a dormitory, and handed me a laptop with persistent high-speed internet access at the volatile age of 16.

In the early days there, Xanga and LiveJournal became central destinations for engaging in this strange new social environment. In the first semester, every student is required to be in their rooms at 9pm for a mandatory study period. But being social creatures, of course we flocked to AIM and blogging to get the social chemicals our developing brains so desperately craved instead.

Despite the lack of traditional search tools, networks formed quickly as you found people you knew, followed their blogs, examined friends-of-friends, found new people you know, followed them too, and soon had a constantly-updating feed of the latest gossip and drama to refresh and engage me.

What would start as innocent blogs detailing the day's thoughts and emotions quickly devolved into delivery mechanisms for social poison. These blogs didn't truly offer a veil of anonymity in this environment, but that only enabled and enhanced the casual cruelty people were willing and eager to engage in. We seemed to revel in having an impersonal channel to deliver hurtful words, both knowing they'd be read by the target audience (and by the assembled masses) while still safely insulated by the privacy of your dorm room and the personalization a computer screen provides.

It wasn't just observing these behavioral shifts in others that disturbed me, I also noticed how this ecosystem was affecting me. Seeing this toxic behavior, primarily when directed at me or my friends, affected me deeply, but also triggered me to react in kind. The blend of anxiety and anger this fueled was horrifying, as was watching people I cared about drift away from personal engagement, more invested in participating in this alternative social space.

I didn't like how this strange new ecosystem made me feel, or the impulses it fueled.

I quickly opted out, shutting down my blog and disengaging from the entire ecosystem. It wasn't long before Facebook emerged, swept up users as the new hot thing, and changed the landscape. Despite being under 18, everyone at the Indiana Academy had "@bsu.edu" email addresses, so we were a rare group of non-college students who were granted access to the wall garden.

I still remember my roommate's excitement at this new website, dancing around the room, rocking his guitar to emo music, enthusiastically gushing about how Facebook was "just different." I confess, I didn't get it. I signed up and looked around, but I didn't meaningfully engage with it until many years later, when it had opened to the general public and offered a convenient means to keep friends and family updated on my new life in California.

But I didn't entirely abandon blogging during those late high school and early college years. I briefly shifted into more traditional topical blogs, trying my hand at writing about movie and entertainment news or my thoughts on technology. I kept a curated reading list on Google Reader (RIP), mainly focused on film and technology. And I tried my hand on a couple of my own in the years spanning late high school and early college. That style of blogging, impersonal and focused on topics of interest instead of social drama, was far more rewarding, especially as someone considering a career in journalism.

But I never really committed to my blogs, which also never attracted any readership. It's impossible to say what they could've become, because I never engaged in any form of self-promotion. I merely put those words out there, and let them sit.

To this day, I'm not sure any of my friends or family knew I had those outlets; I was convinced they'd never read them, so I never shared. In an era of the internet lacking algorithmic discovery, engaging with other blogs was the primary means of building a following, and in that larger world I felt I didn't have a voice worth sharing. Who was I to barge into a comment section and declare I had something to say? What did I know? Who the fuck am I? If someone stumbled across my little corner of the blogosphere, fine. But it felt like pure hubris to ask someone else to read them myself.

What's strange is, despite my relative inexperience, I remember a few of my prognostications in those early days being right on the nose. One post in 2006 declared that Google Docs would overcome the ubiquitous Microsoft Word as the dominant form of document authoring, because despite its many missing features, the convenience of logging into any computer and being able to edit, retrieve, and print documents from any computer would draw in consumers sick of trading files via email or carrying around USB sticks. Another that year predicted that Steam would spell the death of GameStop, as Steam's famously cheap sales would undercut the second-hand market GameStop thrived on. It also predicted that the customer base for full-priced titles would continue to shrink until it consisted primarily of super-fans unwilling to wait a few months or years for a sale before purchasing a game, and multiplayer gamers who depended on the high player counts of a hot new release.

What I didn't know then (and still struggle with) was how to capitalize on these insights. As a freshman in college, I was far from understanding what it took to develop and deliver these software products, and I had no money to throw around as an investor. But I did have an intuition for how humans interact with technology, and the factors that drive them to change ingrained behavior.

I did find ways to leverage that skill in my career, where I've had a unique journey. I've worked as a software engineer primarily in the entertainment industry, working in both well-established studios on film and VFX, as well as spending time in startups on new and experimental technologies to enable new types of experiences. I've worked on animated and VFX features, VR, cloud technology, life-action experiences, light field cameras, holographic displays and simulations for robotaxis.

At each place, I've straddled a world between traditional engineers with deep computer science backgrounds, and non-technical artists who engage with the software and produce content. I've found that members of these two distinct communities do not communicate well with each other. I've carved a niche as a bridge between these distinct types of thinkers–the artist and the engineer– translating requirements and limitations between the groups to help develop software that meets the company's or product's needs. I often develop the layers of software that users directly engage with, wrapping functional but high-cognitive-load software in a GUI or automated workflow that integrates smoothly or invisibly with their existing tools, so that users don't feel burdened by a process, but enhanced by it.

To this point, I've been content focusing my effort on creating novel creative experiences, enabling artists and engineers alike to entertain and delight an audience. I've had the opportunity to contribute to content unlike anything anyone else has ever made, and in some cases unlike any that may ever be made again. And I don't intend to walk away from that life completely (I do still need to pay the bills).

But at this point in my life and career, I find myself at a crossroads.

It's become impossible for me to ignore the societal shifts over the last decade, and all the insidious ways technology has been deployed to consolidate power, causing our nation and world to take a decidedly dark turn. The hype, fears and lies around AI have been particularly disturbing, not only because it's clear that people don't understand the limitations of this technology, but also because they clearly don't understand its power, and how it's already been deployed in ways that have destroyed our information infrastructure, and as a consequence the social fabric that holds us together.

It's terrifying to see how dependent on the lies of AI our economy has become, and to have had a peek behind the curtain on how deeply the misinformation has taken hold. I belive most regular people vaguely understand that the AI hype is bullshit, but don't have the information or language to feel confident in that assessment, or make decisions about their own lives and futures based on what this technology can and cannot do.

At the same time, it's hard not to feel deflated by the thought of investing my time and energy throwing my words out into this broken ecosystem, thinking I can make a difference. In a world where AI-generated text is drowning out high-value, human-crafted words, and a handful of powerful big tech companies can tune a dial to manipulate what information gets distributed, it seems overwhelmingly unlikely that my voice will be heard or have an impact.

Why me? Why now?

First, I've learned beyond a shadow of a doubt that my insights are valuable, that they can and have made a real impact, and that my voice is unique and necessary, especially in this environment. People need to understand the social and technological moment we live in, in a way that transcends the current left/right culture wars that dominate politics, and I can have a role in that effort.

Our country needs to see Silicon Valley for what it is—a crumbling empire desperate to maintain the public perception that they are the sole visionaries of the future. Investors need to understand that they're setting mountains of money on fire, so consumed by fear of missing out on owning the next great technological revolution that they're failing to invest in the less sexy, higher effort business and technologies that will be necessary (and profitable) to deal with the upheaval of climate change. And society needs to look past the petty, high-engagment bullshit that keeps people fighting each other in the trenches, instead of uniting against a technocratic oligargy that seems perfectly content ruling over the wasteland instead of averting the apocalypse.

I'm not the only one championing these causes, and maybe I'm not the best, but I'm no longer content not being involved at all.

What about the overwhelming odds? What about the fear that the bad guys have already seized control of the info-stream, and will drown out anything I say in bullshit? Maybe they will, and maybe my voice will be mostly lost. But, surprisingly, a feature of LLMs provides some hope in these dark times.

Large language models are trained on vast volumes of text, scraped from every source on the open internet you can think of (as well as many illegally-acquired closed ones). While not heralding the dawn of singularity as fraudsters like Sam Altman would have you believe, LLMs are handy tools for searching through large volumes of text (essentially All Human Knowledge) to explore topics and ideas tailored to a user's query. While they won't present you with anything completely new, they excel at providing a naturalistic query interface for researching a topic or domain, with results well-tailored to a user's specific questions.

LLMs are also incredibly difficult to secure. Unlike traditional software, they don't apply hard, deterministic rules to determine their output. If you ask it the same question multiple times, the answers you get will vary each time, extracted from somewhere in the corpus of text it was trained on. Sometimes these variances will be minor; other times, it may yield drastically different results. This is a feature of this software because it makes the output seem more human, making it more likely to lull a user into trusting it. It also allows an LLM to probabilistically stumble into answering a question correctly that it can't reason about and solve itself.

So what hope does an anonymous blogger have in the face of such a system?

Maybe nobody will ever visit my blog and read my words, save the occasional crawler bot that comes along to steal my text and feed a future iteration of its LLM. But on the other side of that equation, nobody can predict when or where that LLM will spit those words back out, who will consume it, or what impact they will have from there.

Not sharing my words is the only way to guarantee they never spread.

So here I am, starting a blog in the information apocalypse.