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Hit by a truck?
Oct. 6th, 2020 12:01 amWhat happens to all this blog crap when I get hit by a truck?
What did writing any of it mean?
Earlier today I was reading a summary of a Star Trek episode on Wikipedia and it had a link to a "Medium.com ranking of Star Trek episodes". It turned out to be a sequence of blog posts wherein some internet rando gave his personal take on every episode of The Next Generation, one at a time. The bulk of it was a self-satisfied inventory of every plot point and piece of dialogue that might be considered sexist or racist by the strictest political standards of today, 35 years after the show was produced. This drivel was linked directly to every episode page for the show in Wikipedia, no doubt by the author's own hand.
I immediately thought of all the writing I'd done about Arthur C. Clarke's short stories. Another exhaustive run of a series, done for my entertainment. Having it online makes me feel like I am sharing it with the universe in some small, increasingly irrelevant way, but there are no access statistics, so for all I know no one has seen any of it. Eventually that writing will just vanish into a digital black hole, because I'll be gone and the hosting company will decide to purge their old accounts. What was the point to putting it online? How do I feel about that outcome?
Mostly I have no choice. I suppose I could try and set up a wacky trust fund arrangement where some of the profit from my investments goes to paying a hosting bill, for decades after I die. But if I'm honest, I have to admit that almost everything I write is not noteworthy or interesting to anyone but myself. There's a tiny chance that a hundred years from now someone from my family will give a few minutes of idle consideration to an archive of my crap - "Oh, so that's how my great great grand-uncle amused himself. Literary criticism, myopic predictions about technology, and random introspection. How hilarious!" - but would that be worth the effort? Probably not.
The world is unfair in terms of eyeballs. There are "influencers" on Twitter and Twitch whose words reach a million people a day and get stamped into the logs of a billion devices, even if all they produce is gossip and shade. In the war of eyeballs, between them and me, I definitely lose. Would following the path they're on lead to satisfaction for me? Would I feel better if I did what the Medium.com rando blogger obviously did, and try to attract more eyeballs to my self-important brainfarts while I'm still around, by stealthily linking them into Wikipedia entries? I think that would feel cheap and desperate. I'm lucky that I can approach writing as a pastime instead of a day job, so I don't need to worry about getting published as a means to support myself. And since I don't, what's there to get from worrying about it? Attention for its own sake? Emotional validation? There are better ways to get those.
So why am I thinking about it at all? There's something going on here.
To understand it, I need to draw a line, between what happens before my death, and what happens after it. On one side of the line there's the feelings that my writing can inspire for me, and on the other side there's only the feelings of other people to consider, because I'll be gone.
On the living side, it's clear that I derive pleasure from the process of writing, and often times from the act of tracking back through my writings to remember some thought I had long ago, to share it with someone or build on it. It's like I have an overstuffed notebook, way too big for my back pocket, but it's electronic so it fits on my phone instead. And as I get older, I rely more and more on the electronic realm to be my working memory. The re-re-constructed memories of embarrassing trauma from high school? Those memories are solid. They have entire palaces built on top of them. It's the smaller, more recent stuff, like exactly how I did my last mortgage refinance, or that cool idea for an art project I had while I was pooping, or something really clever that I heard at dinner... That stuff has to go in the notebook, or it's just gone.
It's pretty easy to validate my obsession with writing while I'm alive: I do it for me. But then there's the future, after I'm dead and gone. How do I deal with that?
Some of the stuff I've written about bicycle touring is useful advice. It might be cool to have that linger. It costs almost nothing to keep hosted. I've taken some nice photographs of my family, and of our hijinks. Maybe those are valuable to distant descendants? With so little at stake, it seems wise to just let go of whatever emotional validation I get from believing it remains. Seems mature, and adult, to acknowledge that I don't have control over things after my death, right? It's like obsessing over the contents of heaven or hell: You'll find out when you get there.
But not exactly. Intellectual legacy is not just about us ending, it's about how others carry on. We worry about it for the sake of our kids -- birthed or adopted, either way. That concern is valid. If it's not valid then civilization itself is pointless.
I shouldn't be so nihilistic that I discard what could be a nice little contribution to civilization, right? Nothing big; nothing too ambitious, but certainly not nothing... Some bike stuff, a little slice-of-life rambling about the obsessions of my era, and some cute pictures of family and pretty landscapes. If it lingers that's fine! I'll worry about it, but only just a little.
It's not worth the whole 100-meter freestyle hissy-fit level of worrying I reserve for other things, like whether some homeless Oakland night-owl is going to bust into my van this weekend while it's parked on the street outside, and hot-wire it and drive it away, then hide it behind some warehouse in Emeryville and fill it with meth-smoke and turds. I've really got to move that van out of town. That scenario is really upsetting my sleep.
And hey; cheers to you, far-future person reading this long dead man's words! You never had to worry one second about that big stupid Ford van, with the easy-to-pick locks! Take a second and congratulate yourself for having a whole different set of worries that I can't even imagine right now. Perhaps you're being stalked every day by some autonomous flying drone sent by the post office, because it's mistaken your face for a package it dropped two days ago, and it's trying to remove your head and deliver it to your neighbor?
Dang. I don't see how my bicycling pages or my literary criticism can help you with that. Sorry.
What did writing any of it mean?
Earlier today I was reading a summary of a Star Trek episode on Wikipedia and it had a link to a "Medium.com ranking of Star Trek episodes". It turned out to be a sequence of blog posts wherein some internet rando gave his personal take on every episode of The Next Generation, one at a time. The bulk of it was a self-satisfied inventory of every plot point and piece of dialogue that might be considered sexist or racist by the strictest political standards of today, 35 years after the show was produced. This drivel was linked directly to every episode page for the show in Wikipedia, no doubt by the author's own hand.
I immediately thought of all the writing I'd done about Arthur C. Clarke's short stories. Another exhaustive run of a series, done for my entertainment. Having it online makes me feel like I am sharing it with the universe in some small, increasingly irrelevant way, but there are no access statistics, so for all I know no one has seen any of it. Eventually that writing will just vanish into a digital black hole, because I'll be gone and the hosting company will decide to purge their old accounts. What was the point to putting it online? How do I feel about that outcome?
Mostly I have no choice. I suppose I could try and set up a wacky trust fund arrangement where some of the profit from my investments goes to paying a hosting bill, for decades after I die. But if I'm honest, I have to admit that almost everything I write is not noteworthy or interesting to anyone but myself. There's a tiny chance that a hundred years from now someone from my family will give a few minutes of idle consideration to an archive of my crap - "Oh, so that's how my great great grand-uncle amused himself. Literary criticism, myopic predictions about technology, and random introspection. How hilarious!" - but would that be worth the effort? Probably not.
The world is unfair in terms of eyeballs. There are "influencers" on Twitter and Twitch whose words reach a million people a day and get stamped into the logs of a billion devices, even if all they produce is gossip and shade. In the war of eyeballs, between them and me, I definitely lose. Would following the path they're on lead to satisfaction for me? Would I feel better if I did what the Medium.com rando blogger obviously did, and try to attract more eyeballs to my self-important brainfarts while I'm still around, by stealthily linking them into Wikipedia entries? I think that would feel cheap and desperate. I'm lucky that I can approach writing as a pastime instead of a day job, so I don't need to worry about getting published as a means to support myself. And since I don't, what's there to get from worrying about it? Attention for its own sake? Emotional validation? There are better ways to get those.
So why am I thinking about it at all? There's something going on here.
To understand it, I need to draw a line, between what happens before my death, and what happens after it. On one side of the line there's the feelings that my writing can inspire for me, and on the other side there's only the feelings of other people to consider, because I'll be gone.On the living side, it's clear that I derive pleasure from the process of writing, and often times from the act of tracking back through my writings to remember some thought I had long ago, to share it with someone or build on it. It's like I have an overstuffed notebook, way too big for my back pocket, but it's electronic so it fits on my phone instead. And as I get older, I rely more and more on the electronic realm to be my working memory. The re-re-constructed memories of embarrassing trauma from high school? Those memories are solid. They have entire palaces built on top of them. It's the smaller, more recent stuff, like exactly how I did my last mortgage refinance, or that cool idea for an art project I had while I was pooping, or something really clever that I heard at dinner... That stuff has to go in the notebook, or it's just gone.
It's pretty easy to validate my obsession with writing while I'm alive: I do it for me. But then there's the future, after I'm dead and gone. How do I deal with that?
Some of the stuff I've written about bicycle touring is useful advice. It might be cool to have that linger. It costs almost nothing to keep hosted. I've taken some nice photographs of my family, and of our hijinks. Maybe those are valuable to distant descendants? With so little at stake, it seems wise to just let go of whatever emotional validation I get from believing it remains. Seems mature, and adult, to acknowledge that I don't have control over things after my death, right? It's like obsessing over the contents of heaven or hell: You'll find out when you get there.
But not exactly. Intellectual legacy is not just about us ending, it's about how others carry on. We worry about it for the sake of our kids -- birthed or adopted, either way. That concern is valid. If it's not valid then civilization itself is pointless.
I shouldn't be so nihilistic that I discard what could be a nice little contribution to civilization, right? Nothing big; nothing too ambitious, but certainly not nothing... Some bike stuff, a little slice-of-life rambling about the obsessions of my era, and some cute pictures of family and pretty landscapes. If it lingers that's fine! I'll worry about it, but only just a little.
It's not worth the whole 100-meter freestyle hissy-fit level of worrying I reserve for other things, like whether some homeless Oakland night-owl is going to bust into my van this weekend while it's parked on the street outside, and hot-wire it and drive it away, then hide it behind some warehouse in Emeryville and fill it with meth-smoke and turds. I've really got to move that van out of town. That scenario is really upsetting my sleep.
And hey; cheers to you, far-future person reading this long dead man's words! You never had to worry one second about that big stupid Ford van, with the easy-to-pick locks! Take a second and congratulate yourself for having a whole different set of worries that I can't even imagine right now. Perhaps you're being stalked every day by some autonomous flying drone sent by the post office, because it's mistaken your face for a package it dropped two days ago, and it's trying to remove your head and deliver it to your neighbor?
Dang. I don't see how my bicycling pages or my literary criticism can help you with that. Sorry.
