"The Public Viewing David's 'Coronation' at the Louvre by Louis Léopold Boilly, here.

In the late aughts and early teens, a cup of coffee beside me, light tepid when I woke, I'd fire up my computer and navigate to Google Reader. Though unimaginatively named for an RSS Reader, it seemed like magic—a portal through which I could walk and enter the thick words of so many other writers, boughs bending under the weight of conversation.

It's dead now. (For more on why, check out David Pierce's excellent piece for the Verge, here.)

I’ve tried to replace it. I've tried Feedly. I've tried rolling my own. I've even tried Substack—which despite its claims to openness, is little more than a hijacking of one of the last (though diminished) relics of the open internet: email. As Anil Dash writes over at his blog:

Links are powerful — that's why Instagram and Twitter and Threads punish and limit them, and why Substack tries to take credit for them. And that's why "wherever you get your podcasts" is such a radical concept — like email, it's a medium that the tech tycoons don't, and can't, own. People can read your writing "wherever they get their email".

(Bonus points for checking out Dash’s excellent piece on RSS and blogging.)

You might say that email inboxes remain powered by human algorithms as opposed to platform algorithms. That is, we check them; they don’t check us. And despite Substack’s attempt to mediate that relationship, email—much maligned—remains a deeply human-powered technology.

As I write in my forthcoming book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You:

Human algorithms, which technology enables, which allow a person to choose what and when they want to read, empower us. Our platforms’ algorithms, which prey upon human attention, which rely upon computers doing sophisticated statistics to predict what will rile you up enough to keep you glued to your screen, empower the platforms.

But Google Reader is dead now. So is the blogosphere I remember, despite the walled-off facsimile of it Substack is trying to create. One is distribution problem: Who even checks blogs anymore? One is a supply problem: Why check blogs when there are so few to read?

This blog is an attempt to put my money (or at least my time) where my mouth is. But it will only work if people are willing to check it and not be checked by it. We’ve grown accustomed to TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest checking us. Let’s try something different. ❧