(2021-03-11) Rao Elderblog Sutra 12

Venkatesh Rao: Elderblog Sutra: 12. In a curious way, I feel like ribbonfarm has gone full circle and is back to being a baby blog again, to the extent blogs can be babies at all in 2021.

the rapid rise of Substack, the sudden explosion in highly produced essays on static sites, and most recently, essays being sold as individual works of art via NFTs (non-fungible tokens), has made me feel old in the relatively young newsletter/static site world (which I also participate in), and young again in the blogging world.

The new stuff already feels old in a way blogging never did.

The renaissance stuff that’s been happening since about 2018 has a very time-bound, linked-to-news-cycles feeling (the news in newsletter is justified), where blogging has always had a very outside-of-time feeling. (Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock, (2020-02-24) Rao A Text Renaissance)

The growing conversation around the “creator stack” and the “passion economy” has displaced what used to be a blog-centric conversation. Notably, the conversation this time around is curated by investors and entrepreneurs rather than open-internet culture types. It is pragmatic and commerce-minded, not about defending some lofty principles of openness with manifesto after manifesto. Much as I like the embodied values of the older stack tech, I never had patience for explicit values-derping like Barlow’s Declaration Of The Independence Of Cyberspace, which always struck me as tedious posturing.

the ease of setting up for monetization has a lot more people trying harder, for longer, to make it work.

On the consumption side, some sort of adoption restraint has broken down, and paying for independent media has now become a mainstream behavior.

On the one hand, there’s real money in play now for the average “creator” than there was even for the best bloggers in 2001. On the other hand, “creator” is code for a new kind of service economy with Customer Service expectations.

Blogs are genuinely out of the scope of the conversation. The technology is too old, requires too much work to maintain, and takes too much DIY effort to plumb for monetization.

Here’s a difficulty scale:

• 100: cgi-bin Perl e-zine circa 1999
• 85: earliest blogs, with manual RSS wrangling, circa 2002*
• 50: WordPress, including monetization plumbing circa 2020
• 15: Substack
• 8: My guess of where the superconducting baseline will be once Twitter integrates Revue, Spaces etc. properly, circa 2022

The only piece of the text renaissance trend to buck this general trend of falling costs and complexity is Roam Research, which I’d rate at a difficulty level of around 80 to use with power-user fluency

Roam is actually a kind of Unix shell pretending to be a web app. It promises the convenience of modern technology but actually delivers some sort of nerd-out maze of worthwhile inconvenience and complexity, a hilarious kind of bait-and-switch in an unexpected direction.

I use a subset of Roam’s functionality that keeps my own use at a difficult level of say 45.

I have no intention of ever becoming a Roam neckbeard, just as I never got deep into Unix shell mastery, but it’s nice to see a breed of neckbeards emerge. Always a healthy sign for a tech ecosystem.

Actually, if you squint a bit, blogging is not so much out of scope as the undeclared shared enemy of the text renaissance.

No single piece of renaissance text-tech can disrupt WordPress across the whole territory it occupies, but the action is around many new contenders biting off a big chunk of the market. It’s actually a bit like what happened to Craigslist.

From the dinosaur side of the fence, the very fact of being left out of the conversation like an embarrassing old uncle has made blogging feel young and interesting again

Though WordPress is old, the mode of creation it sustains — a sort of stand-alone, vertically integrated homestead in an environment presumed to be a digital wilderness — is young and interesting again.

As the “creator stack” and “passion economy” grow bigger, more corporatized, and more dependent on platform economics, the hedge value of a quixotically stand-alone operation increases

As part of my rebalancing, I’ve decided to shut down the Art of Gig, one of my two Substack newsletters, and devote more attention to the back-burnered experiments here.

It feels a bit like selling a car to buy a horse, but there’s things you can do on a horse that you cannot in a car.

maybe blogging too will undergo enough of a technical renaissance that we’re no longer talking a reactionary hedge bet on horses, but a futuristic hedge bet on Mars rovers.