“You get what the algorithm gives you. This is both a meagre blessing and a wicked curse.”
- writingslowly.com

#indieweb #blogging

Open, free and poetic

The Web is 34 years old! Following on from Plenty of ways to write online, here are some really practical resources to help you create your own presence online :

Keeping the Web free, open and poetic.

Old hands will probably find a few useful tips here too.

Oh, and here’s another great big list of useful personal website stuff. Actually, I’m making a note of this for my own ‘going down the rabbit-hole’ purposes:

Resources List for the Personal Web

A rabbit dressed in a jacket is hastily running towards a burrow entrance in a detailed ink illustration by Arthur Rackham.

It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.

*Image source: Public Domain, Wikimedia.

#indieweb #webwriting #worldwideweb #blogging

Plenty of ways to write online

It’s now easier than ever to write online if you wish to. Here’s a list of more than 40 blogging platforms. Many are free or have a self-hosting option, and you can pretty much choose your own adventure here, so why not get going?

Manuel’s list of blog platforms

Now, some say writing on your own website is a wasted opportunity, because hardly anyone will read it. A better way, they say, is social media. That’s simply because the social media algorithms bring good writing to the surface to present it to far more pairs of eyeballs.

OK. The big problem with this advice is that the main platforms are capricious. They change their rules all the time, they lock you in, then boot people off for no reason, while still enabling trolls. They destroy databases with no warning; they promote genocide and fascism while claiming they’re not publishers so owe no responsibility, and they generally behave on a spectrum between exploitative and sociopathic.

You get what the algorithm gives you. This is both a meagre blessing and a wicked curse.

My partial solution is to publish on my own site while syndicating elsewhere. I keep the ‘canonical’ version here on my own website, while publicising it in as many other online locations as I wish. This is a little more work, but gives me control without total invisibility. And some of the syndication can be automated, through RSS and APIs.

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world|Molly White

But there’s also another side to the equation. How small exactly is a ‘small’ audience? My blog has a few views. If I was doing live events I’d be truly delighted with the numbers! And since you’re reading this, now seems like a good time to thank you personally. Yes, thanks for reading!

Social media is a river. Your post there might get a lot of eyeballs but it’s very quickly lost in the ceaseless flow. In contrast, a blog post like this one is smaller and slower, but more enduring. If you’re reading this from the future, thank you for proving this point!

And anyway, to get a message across, millions of readers aren’t necessary for most people. Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic email has a million readers, and Mr Beast has about 300 million followers on YouTube. Well, good for them. But does it really matter to the rest of us?

In his post, Hope for the Web, James says:

“Every personal website is a glimmer of hope, a metaphorical star in the sky that shows how wonderful the web can be.”

That’s right! And writing online is a conversation with yourself too, a conversation you might not otherwise have. the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard might have agreed. If he was around now I bet he’d be publishing a personal website.

“Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong”. Søren Kierkegaard, introduction to Provocations

The opportunity is yours and the time is now, to write for many, to write for a few, to write for yourself. So what are your Provocations?


It’s also easier than ever to publish a book. Check out mine: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters. And to stay connected, subscribe to the weekly email digest.

Watch in awe as a fleeting thought becomes a lasting note

I’ve been asked a great question about my writing process:

Curious to know, is this post, and other short ones like it, basically repurposed main notes from your zettelkasten? And, if so, care to show an example of “before and after?”

Tldr; No.

To be honest, this question put me on the spot. I often write posts on the run, and the post in question was no exception. I couldn’t think where the quote at the top of the post had come from. It isn’t in my Zettelkasten, my collection of working notes. But then I also keep a big swipe file of tasty quotes (collector’s fallacy is real!)… and when I looked, it wasn’t in there either.

But then I remembered: I have several writing projects on the go at one time, and I’d been reading through an old manuscript that I haven’t touched for some time. As I did so, this particular quote stood out for me. It inspired a new thought and so the writing of this short post was effectively me writing a new Zettelkasten post on the fly. How so?

A post about different ways of seeing and organizing, emphasizing the need for multiple perspectives in understanding vision and incorporating insights for adaptive decision-making.

See what I did here?

  • First, I recorded the quote that attracted me, giving the full reference so it can be re-found later. I was inspired by the idea that our supposedly singular vision is actually two separate processes, rods and cones, working in unison.
  • Next, I made this my own by recording my own reflection: even more striking, we have two separate eyes, yet still see only one image.
  • Third, I added a meaningful title: If there’s more than one way of seeing, there’s more than one way of organising. This small point about how vision works could be a metaphor for social and political organisation - that’s what I started to think. What may look like one unified effort is very often the combined result of many adjacent processes working together to create the effect of unified action. And if this is the case, then there’s surely more than one way of doing it. I didn’t elaborate, since, as I said, I wrote this on the run. But what’s implied by the post’s title gives me a jumping off point for future notes (like this one).

The bit where you say: So what?

Maybe I’m overstating things, but then maybe this short post is a model of how I approach writing notes in my Zettelkasten:

Now what the post failed to demonstrate is the great value of links to other ideas. After all, a linked note is a happy note. So to atone for this gross omission, I’m doing it now. And just look at all those links!

Make the most of your note

This whole exercise, of working and reworking notes, is strongly inspired by a great line in Bob Doto’s book, A System for Writing:

“The note you just made has yet to realize its potential.”

I just love this saying. And I’ve written in more detail about this exact process, in How to write a better note without melting your brain. In that article I go through a worked example of how to turn a crappy note into a useful note. But unlike me you’ve probably never written a crappy note, so don’t bother reading it.

——

Thanks for reading this crappy note. You might like to sign up to the weekly email digest, for all the week’s Writing Slowly fragments, presented in a (slightly) greater whole.

And look out for my new book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

Hot takes on our future with AI

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Writers. Of this little book, let’s just say it’s quite keen on humans.

Meanwhile, here are eight hot takes on the latest problems, questions and opportunities AI is giving us. It was going to be just three, but the hot takes are coming thick and fast right now. If only there was a technology that could just summarise everything so we don’t have to read it. Until then…

A data center server rack is filled with various cables and illuminated indicator lights.

And do I have my very own hot takes on AI? Well yes, as it happens, I do.


Thanks for reading. Why not check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. And if you like this website, you can always sign up to the weekly email digest.


If there's more than one way of seeing, there's more than one way of organising

💬 “Our eyes are built for two perspectives. During the daytime we rely on our cone cells, which depend on lots of light and let us see details. At night the cone cells become useless and we depend on rod cells, which are much more sensitive. The rod cells in our eyes are connected together to detect stray light; as a result they don’t register fine details. If we want to see something in bright light, we focus the image on the center of our retina (the fovea), where the cone cells are tightly packed. To see something at night, we must look off to the side of it, because staring directly at it will focus the object on the useless cone cells in the fovea. The way we see in bright light differs from the way we see in shadows. Neither is the ‘‘right’’ way. We need both.” - Gary Klein (2009) Streetlights and Shadows. Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision-making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

On reflection, more can be said along these lines. Another way of looking at this ‘double perspective’ of human vision is to note that it constantly depends on some kind of accommodation between our two eyes working simultaneously and in concert.

So although vision is actually several processes taking place at once, we insist on perceiving it as one unified process. We can’t help it. We’re made to synthesize. But that doesn’t mean it is one process.

The cat is characteristically ecstatic to see that the proofs of the new book have arrived. Not long now before it’s published!

Two books labelled not for resale sit on a shelf with a plant and two sand timers, while below a cat walks past.

#amwriting #booklaunch #comingsoon #nonfiction

💬 On Notebooks and Thinking Better Thoughts

Once we’ve let our thoughts mature for a while, we’ll want to produce something for other people to look at, an artifact.

Exactly so.

A stack of four notebooks is placed on a white surface next to a potted plant and an hourglass.

As Alan Jacobs says, reading more books and reading books more - they’re not the same thing.

I designed a book in three and a half hours

A while ago, well, quite a long while ago, I designed a book in three and a half hours. Fun, yes, but it wasn’t very publishable.

Now, years later, I’ve finally got round to updating and redesigning the whole thing.

Yes, I’m still writing slowly but I’m excited to say it will soon be available for sale - so watch this space for more information.

Book Machine's webpage features event details for Sydney, with a focus on the ArtSpace and Another Book Fair in 2015 and 2017, alongside images of a book cover and people working at tables.

Thinking about Joanna Macy today. In memoriam. I was very influenced by her insistence on both the necessary grief and the vital hope.

I’m unqualified to diagnose the following writers with ADHD but I’ll do it anyway

Yes indeed: confidently diagnosing deceased note-making writers with ADHD, while in possession of no medical qualifications myself, is a temptation I simply cannot resist.

For example I have wondered about:

  • Leonardo da Vinci, whose notes were “a collection without order”;

  • Leibniz, who created a haystack of notes (oh, and calculus);

  • Aby Warburg, who suffered from Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections; and

  • Hermann Berger, a Swiss author who wrote a novel about a Zettelkssten (two actually) but didn’t publish it. 

  • Then there’s cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, who invented a whole new methodology for his Arcades Project, which he didn’t finish. Wikipedia. He’s certainly a candidate for unqualified posthumous ADHD diagnosis.

As I said, it’s interesting, but for now I’ll stop there. 

—-

This post started life as a comment on Reddit. If you’d like more from me, but in a weekly email, why not subscribe right now?

💬 “The things that make us different, in the right context are superpowers. You know, Saul Steinberg said the thing that we respond to in any work of art is the struggle of the artist against his or her limitations.

This makes me feel like there’s an awful lot of wrong context lying about. I guess we all need to find a place where we can thrive, or else make it ourselves.

The original quote is from Kurt Vonnegut’s recollection of a conversation with Saul Steinberg.

#creativity #writerslife #deepthoughts #inspiration

Less than keen on having a ‘second brain’:

“I only have one brain, and it’s internal, thankfully. But I’m still very happy with the idea of the ‘extended mind’. My brain remains firmly in my skull, but it nevertheless uses the environment in many different ways to extend its capabilities.”
- The mastery of knowledge is an illusion

Algorithms are prisons that control you: A surreal poster illustration depicts a person with their brain exposed, attached to a cage-like computer monitor with a keyboard.

I saw this poster on the street but it’s originally from Cyberpunk Videozine vol.1 (1999).

#pkm #notetaking #zettelkasten

💬 Most attempts at providing computerised tools for writers have thrown out the affordances that previous analogue systems offered, almost without noticing their loss. - writingslowly.com on Ted Nelson’s evolutionary list file.

“Sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.” - writingslowly.com

📷Photo challenge day 30: solitude.

💬"I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me." - Rudyard Kipling.

And there’s more solitude.

#mbjune

A striped gray cat lies on a shelf next to a vibrant, circular abstract painting, a sculptural art piece, and a vintage lamp.

Don't let your note-making system infect you with Archive Fever

The Zettelkasten note-taking system offers a structured approach to organizing thoughts but might induce “archive fever,” which may lead to an obsession with preservation over actual writing. Here’s how to protect yourself.

📷 Photo challenge day 26: bridge.

I’ve used this as a metaphor for writing, but it’s also a real bridge, of which #Sydney has many more than the famous one across the harbour. The image shows the causeway to Bare Island, at the mouth of Kamay, Botany Bay.

#mbjune

A wooden pier extends over a rocky shoreline at sunset, with a calm body of water and a distant landmass in the background.

📷 Photo challenge day 29: winding.

It’s well worth taking a look inside White Bay Power Station in #Sydney - as previously seen on day 7 and day 5. Oh, and day 23 last year.

See the whole #mbjune photogrid.

Several hoists with chains are hanging in a workshop setting, featuring a variety of metal components.