Can we talking about blogging?

Over the last few months I’ve been getting old gold bloggers in my network to talk about writing more generally. Namely their origin stories and thinking through how their process has developed over time. I’m doing this as a way to highlight the power of writing in the open and to underline the need for more independent voices as we double down on Bloggers Anonymous. Folks who challenge our basic assumptions and do the work openly without being beholden to any one corporate or institutional master are harder and harder to hear above the noise.

I got lucky enough to start the series with Audrey Watters, for many the epitome of that independent and individual voice who has led the charge of challenging the Silicon Valley logic. Even her doom visions for the field might have underestimated how bad and how fast that logic would accelerate—the curse of being so god damned right. Get more truth to power by subscribing to her newsletter Second Breakfast. And chances are she has already seen ‘Matter and Space” the latest episode (at least the first 10 minutes or so) of the soon to be promoted to Black Mirror episode dealing with AI and higher ed. I don’t even know what to say about that other than it is the strangest predatory vibe I have seen in a while, or since the “Common People” episode of this season’s Black Mirror. You can really see them hocking this “disruption” with no sense of irony or reflection on their role in hollowing out the core.

Kin Lane was a natural follow-on from Audrey given they are very much a team in the way they imagine the world we find ourselves in. Kin’s output as a writer is remarkable, he will write several posts in a day across several blogs rocking like it is 2007. What’s more, he brings various personas to the table ranging from the API Evangelist to Alternate Kin Lane with the subtitle: “Nothing you will read here is true, but some of it may resemble the world you know.”

Finally, I caught up with Mike Caulfield last week—it’s been too long. Our chat looks back to the earlier days of the blogosphere and brings us up to the weaponized pre-packaged arguments omnipresent on social media. Mike discusses how he uses writing to dig deeper on topics in order to test underlying assumptions that others tend to bandwagon, his recent post about “Critical Reasoning with AI” twas just that kind of  deep dive on AI, asking us to think about where that technology is at the moment (and its potential value) framing the idea of “reasoning patterns.”

Stay tuned because later this month I’ll be chatting with Amy Collier and Tom Woodward about the role writing has played in their careers as well as the development of the brilliant Demystifying AI series that pushes folks, like Mike, to dig in on critical reasoning with AI.