Restarting what never really started

Is this thing on...?

Sometimes it feels like the early days of Web 2.0 again, when everyone had a blog. These days its a Substack, or a Beehiiv, or a newsletter on Ghost, but a fundamental question is truer than ever—what do I have to add to the cacophony online? Gone are the days when we wrote for the sheer novelty of it, trusting search engines would bring readers to us. And embarrassed by the idea that someone might actually read what we wrote.

Now we know readers are unlikely to find us by chance, and even less likely unless we have some point to what we’re writing about. And we also know that our words and our writing style will be stolen by LLMs, used to train models with no benefit to us.

So why write? Why write when your interests are as broad and unfocussed as you’d expect from a person with adhd? Why spend your time training LLMs, when the real reason for writing is a desire to express yourself and to be read by humans?

I suppose, in the end, the answer is “why not write?” The drive to write is real, it’s constant. So why not create some random essays?