The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him, his publisher secretly censored entries behind his back, and he worked himself into periodic breakdowns trying to finish the damn thing.

When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work.

Diderot has been on my mind lately, spending the Xmas period scrolling through the dwindling numbers of social media platforms that haven't yet been purchased by an "eccentric" (read: race-science obsessed) billionaire or banned by a foreign government.

Diderot's project was fundamentally about building infrastructure for thinking. He wanted to create a shared repository of human knowledge that anyone could access, organized in a way that invited exploration and cross-referencing. He believed that structuring information properly could change how people thought.

He was right.

270 years later, we have more information than any civilization in history. But aside from Wikipedia, we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

And I think the fix, or at least part of it = going backwards to a technology we've largely abandoned: the blog, humble // archaic as it may seem.

The Pamphlet Problem

Before social media ate the internet, and before the internet ate everything else, and before everything else ate itself, blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages. It could be rigorously researched or entirely speculative. It could build an argument over weeks or months, with each post serving as a chapter in an ongoing intellectual project that readers could follow, critique, and respond to.

The blogosphere of the mid-2000s had its problems: It was insular and often smug, prone to flame wars between people who agreed on 95% of everything but found the remaining 5% absolutely unforgivable. But it also produced actual intellectual communities.

Remember those?

People wrote long responses to each other's posts, those responses generated further responses, and you could follow the thread of an argument across multiple sites and weeks of discussion. The format rewarded careful thinking because careful thinking was legible in a way that it simply isn't on platforms designed for rapid-fire engagement.

Social media removed the friction of publishing, and in doing so removed the selection pressure that separated signal from noise. We "democratized" the ability to publish (good?) while simultaneously destroying the conditions that made publishing meaningful (bad!).

Diderot spent twenty years on his infrastructure.

We handed ours to advertising companies and - like Pilate - washed our hands of it.

The Architecture of Attention

When you write a blog post, you're creating a standalone document with a permanent URL. It exists at a specific address on the web, and that address doesn't change based on who's looking at it, when they're looking at it, or what algorithm has decided they should see next. The post is there, stable, waiting for whoever wants to find it.

Compare this to a tweet (by God I'll not call them "X's") or a Facebook post, which exists primarily as an item in a feed, algorithmically sorted, personalized to each viewer. Your post might appear at the top of someone's feed for an hour and then disappear into an infinite scroll of other content, never to be seen again. The platform has no interest in whether your post is found next week or next year; it has a vested interest in keeping users scrolling through new content right now.

When I write a blog post, I'm writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they're interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who's made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.

When I write for social media, I'm writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. Everything I produce has to compete, in real-time, with everything else that could possibly occupy that user's attention. The incentives push toward provocation and emotional activation. The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.

Diderot understood that the container shapes the contents. The Encyclopédie was a collection of facts, yes, but more fundamentally it was an argument about how knowledge should be organized. Cross-references between entries were themselves a form of commentary, connecting ideas that authorities wanted kept separate. We've restructured the presentation of ideas around the needs of advertising platforms, and not by accident, and we're living with the consequences.

Montaigne's Heirs

Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning "attempts" or "tries." The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated.

The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne's direct descendant. It's a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you're not sure where you'll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you. You can return to the topic weeks later with updated thoughts. The format accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns.

Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.

I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they've moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. These are people who used to produce ten-thousand-word explorations of complex topics, and now they produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each one optimized for immediate engagement and none of them building toward anything coherent.

It's like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.

What Makes a Blog Actually Work

Most blogs are abandoned after three posts. The ones that persist // accumulate value have a few things on common:

• They have a perspective, not just a topic. A blog about "marketing" is forgettable. A blog about "why most marketing advice is wrong and what actually works" has a point of view that gives every post something to push against.
• They build. The best blogs create posts that reference and extend earlier posts, developing ideas over time rather than starting from scratch each week. Gwern's site is an extreme example, with entries that get updated for years, accumulating evidence and refinement. But even a modest version of this works: a body of work that compounds.
• They're written for someone specific. Not "everyone interested in X" but "the person who already knows Y and is trying to figure out Z." Specificity creates resonance.
• They exist at a consistent address. A blog at your own domain, with permanent URLs, can be found and referenced for years. Content locked inside platforms disappears when the platform changes or dies.
• Their authors accept that most posts won't go viral, and that's fine. The value is cumulative. A blog with fifty solid posts is an asset even if no single post ever breaks through. Most social media content has a half-life of hours; a good blog post can draw readers for a decade.

The Discovery Problem (And Why It's Overstated)

There are rote objections: nobody reads blogs anymore. The discovery mechanisms are broken. How is anyone supposed to find a new blog when they're competing against algorithmic feeds specifically designed to capture and hold attention?

Etc, etc, etc.

But there are a few things worth noting:

Search engines still index blogs far better than social media posts. A well-written blog post on a specific topic can draw readers for years through Google (or Kagi // DuckDuckGo if you're nasty, and by nasty I mean excellent); a tweet is lucky to get attention for twelve hours. Hell, call it six. Hell, call it three and call me an optimist at that. If you're trying to build a body of work, or to create something that will outlast the platform of the moment, a blog is simply a better tool.

What else?

RSS never actually died. It went underground. Feedly, Unread, NetNewsWire, and other readers still have millions of users. The people who read blogs tend to be the people worth reaching: curious, patient, willing to engage with longer arguments.

Newsletters are still a discovery layer, no matter how many people pronounce their untimely death. You can write on your own site and distribute via email, getting the permanence of a blog with the push distribution of a newsletter. The writing lives at your domain; the email is notification infrastructure.

And the fragmentation of social media is actually creating demand for alternatives. Every time a platform implodes (Twitter's ongoing collapse, Instagram's slow retirement // decay into a metaphorical Floridian condo, TikTok's uncertain status, Facebook's demographic hollowing) people start looking for more stable ground. The infrastructure exists. It's waiting.

A Room of Your Own

Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of having a room of one's own: physical space for creative work, free from interruption and control. A blog is a room of your own on the internet. It's a place where you decide what to write about and how to write about it, where you're not subject to the algorithmic whims of platforms that profit from your engagement regardless of whether that engagement makes you or anyone else nebulously smarter.

Diderot built the Encyclopédie because he believed that organizing knowledge properly could change how people thought. He spent two decades on it. He went broke. He watched collaborators quit and authorities try to destroy his work. He kept going because the infrastructure mattered, because how we structure the presentation of ideas affects the ideas themselves.

We're not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it. By maintaining our own spaces, linking to each other, creating the interconnected web of independent sites that the blogosphere once was and could be again.

So:

Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.

The blog won't save us. But it's one of the tools we'll need if we're going to save ourselves.

Start Today

If you're convinced, the practical options:

Write.as is minimalist, privacy-focused, no-frills. You can start anonymously and upgrade to a custom domain later. The editor gets out of your way. Good for people who want to write without fiddling with settings.

Bear Blog is extremely lightweight, fast-loading, no tracking. Free tier is generous. The aesthetic is deliberately simple, which enforces a focus on writing over design tinkering. Privacy-first.

Ghost (powering this blog) is more fully-featured, with built-in membership and newsletter tools. You can self-host (free) or use their managed hosting (paid). Good if you want to eventually build a paid subscriber base but want to own your infrastructure. Open source.

Micro.blog was built explicitly as an alternative to social media, with cross-posting, a community timeline, and support for short and long posts. Has an indie web ethos baked in. Good if you want the social layer without the algorithmic manipulation. Manton (founder) is one of my favourite folks to follow // read lately. Good insights.

All of these let you use a custom domain, which you should do. Buy yourname.com. It costs ten dollars a year and your writing will live at an address you control, regardless of what happens to any particular platform.

Pick one. Set it up this week. Write something. Send me a link (email joan@joanwestenberg.com) and I'll read it. The first post doesn't have to be good; it has to exist. The second one can be better. That's how this works. That's how it's always worked.