You’ve little doubt heard concerning the prepare wreck that’s Twitter’s present state beneath Elon Musk. Even if you happen to would favor a Twitter with much less content material moderation, as Musk had stated he wished to create, it’s onerous to be optimistic about Twitter’s future amid Musk’s wave of haphazard sackings. So many people at the moment are beginning to ask: what does the world after Twitter appear like?
And, effectively, do you bear in mind the world earlier than Twitter? It was stuffed with blogs! A Substack put up from Brad DeLong right this moment linked to John Scalzi, who I bear in mind greatest sixteen years in the past for taping bacon to the cat. (I miss the ’00s in various methods. One thing I never expected I’d say.) Scalzi, like me, didn’t cease running a blog even when it stopped being cool, and he suggests that within the post-Twitter world “everybody ought to begin running a blog once more.”
Will the post-Twitter world be a blogosphere again? Maybe that’s simply the wishful considering of us bloggers. However we are able to at the least take some steps to make it occur. And one of many issues Scalzi reminds us – one thing I admit being delinquent about previously few years – is to go to different bloggers’ websites. Now, as was already the case in blogs’ heyday fifteen years in the past, few of us have the psychological area to recollect to repeatedly go to a number of weekly or biweekly up to date websites. However there are methods to make the duty simpler. With some blogs, like this one, you may subscribe by e mail. For others: blogs suffered a serious blow when Google killed Google Reader, however its features are nonetheless out there by way of Feedly and The Old Reader: instruments that may ship new content material from a number of blogs to you.
Crucial factor I can do on this put up is to identify different philosophy blogs that, like mine, have continued chugging alongside in the course of the Twitter period. As a result of Scalzi and I should not the one ones who’ve stored it up. Most clearly there’s the Indian Philosophy Blog, which I co-run with Elisa Freschi – and he or she has stored up her own blog all this time as effectively. The IPB’s sister weblog in Chinese language Philosophy, Warp Weft and Way, stays energetic. My exchange with Justin Whitaker earlier this 12 months was notable in that his half of it passed off on his own blog at Buddhistdoor.
And a few of the older blogs in Western philosophy stay too. The Speculative Realist movement, in some ways born of blogs, retains on going at Larval Subjects and Ecology Without Nature. Front Porch Republic carries on the identical model of mental conservatism that intrigued me a decade ago, by way of a really completely different political period. And the larger-scale blogs at Daily Nous and New APPS proceed as effectively. Blogs have been an excellent place for exciting philosophical concepts earlier than there was Twitter – they usually look effectively poised to stay so after Twitter.
Cross-posted with minor modifications at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
