You’ve little question heard concerning the practice wreck that’s Twitter’s present state below Elon Musk. Even in case you would like a Twitter with much less content material moderation, as Musk had mentioned he wished to create, it’s onerous to be optimistic about Twitter’s future amid Musk’s wave of haphazard sackings. So many people are actually beginning to ask: what does the world after Twitter seem like?
And, nicely, do you keep in mind the world earlier than Twitter? It was stuffed with blogs! A Substack put up from Brad DeLong at present linked to John Scalzi, who I keep in mind greatest sixteen years in the past for taping bacon to the cat. (I miss the ’00s in numerous 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 will a minimum of take some steps to make it occur. And one of many issues Scalzi reminds us – one thing I admit being delinquent about prior to now 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 often 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’ll be able to subscribe by e-mail. For others: blogs suffered a significant blow when Google killed Google Reader, however its capabilities are nonetheless accessible by Feedly and The Old Reader: instruments that may ship new content material from a number of blogs to you.
A very powerful factor I can do on this put up is to title different philosophy blogs that, like mine, have continued chugging alongside through the Twitter period. As a result of Scalzi and I aren’t the one ones who’ve stored it up. This weblog’s co-founders every have our personal blogs: I’ve Love of All Wisdom and Elisa Freschi has her own blog. The IPB’s sister weblog in Chinese language Philosophy, Warp Weft and Way, stays energetic. My exchange with Justin Whitaker earlier this yr was notable in that his half of it befell on his own blog at Buddhistdoor.
And a number 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 a really totally different political period. And the larger-scale blogs at Daily Nous and New APPS proceed as nicely. Blogs have been a terrific place for exciting philosophical concepts earlier than there was Twitter – they usually look nicely poised to stay so after Twitter.
Cross-posted with minor modifications at Love of All Wisdom.
