A BIT OF ORIENTATION

Writing is one thing.  Publishing is another -- in fact, it's various things, depending on the economy, politics, and culture.  It doesn't have a lot to do with writing.  More to do with profit-makers promoting some writing and neglecting or suppressing others, according to what people will buy.

The Internet once attempted to by-pass financial profit for the users or even to some degree for advertisers.  What Facebook has discovered is what people are calling Surveillance Capitalism, which is how to create a compass in a sea of people, and then sell the trade routes.  They buy and sell what users post, without knowledge or permission, as though they have discovered a new natural resource, which they have.

Out here in Montana with one old computer and a copper wire contact, I use Twitter daily to keep in touch and to announce every new blog post I write, which in my case is something like a magazine column except more frequent and more strangely focussed on what matters to me rather than what some editor thinks will sell.  There are a lot of readers, but nothing spectacular, most of them invisible, usually more than 300 a day and sometimes more than a thousand a day.  I don't use analytics.  Lately, with my dislocated arm still hurting, I post half as much as I used to, but I expect to go back.  On the other hand, I sometimes want to stop blogging so as to write weirder stuff.  Or just do exercises on rarefied topics and methods.  I have no fantasies about writing that will survive me.

My family and relatives don't read my blog much if any.  I have made some cultural transitions that they have not, so I don't make much sense to them and I scare some of them.  They have accepted conformity in order to be prosperous, but they wouldn't frame it that way.  They do say that I am poor partly because, to their way of thinking, my mind is off in outer space or something.  I tell them "get off Facebook" and they don't want to.

Anyway, they think that posting tweets is childish and rather unsavory, a pursuit by malcontents showing off.  Trivia.  Buddies. What Trump does at dawn.  I have to admit that a lot that goes on is the formation of affinity circles who pass news around their connections.  Northwestern Canadian indigenous people -- or at least part of them -- are in a momentous struggle for identity and land.  That's not gossip.  Digesting the sea change of politics in the US and keeping in touch with developments are also a big part of my attention.  I have to admit that some things are so angrily obscene that I have to look up the words in special dictionaries, but I am rather fond of David Simon's vocabulary of hybrid insults combining low insult-words with patterned adjectives.  "You camel-driving fuckup!"

My particular fav posts are always brief.  One is Thoughts of Dog which tend to be like "Beautiful pancake you have there -- wouldn't you like to give it to me?"  The other is "The Tweet of God", which is often rueful about what He left out when He created people.

Umair Haque and Razib Kahn are two writers who open thought-doors for me.  Umair rails passionately about the chaos we are in.  Razib began as a genome analyzer explaining statistics but now has an intense political message.  Several thread-creating reporters are expert on the Mafia, Trump's tight connection with them if not the same.  They keep history alive.  Maddow avoids talking about this stuff but she knows about it and it fits with what she does say.  I don't miss a night of her unless someone else is hosting.

Umair publishes his dark convictions on Medium, which followed Blogger and Twitter as inventions by pretty much the same people.  Medium is an attempt to put writing back into the hands of the writers, but it doesn't quite work.  Partly, the writing is done by a class of chattering people with a sort of journalism attitude, often high school thinking.  Scandalously, they worry that they have nothing to say.  (Certainly not true of Umair or Razib!)  They are "curated" which means they fall back into the same old pattern of control by editors and publishers.  

So what goes onto the internet from this old computer operator falls halfway between Blogger and Medium with a sidebar of Twitter.  It works for now.  Some of it is good chapter content for a "book."  I haven't ventured into the high tech vids, pods, and personal websites.  Despite keeping a tight focus, I'm running out of time.

Lately I've been sharing personal realizations about my life trajectory.  I'll probably keep doing that.  If you think you recognize yourself, you're probably wrong.  Anyway, any story can be told from many aspects and you may simply not look at things from that angle.  And I fictionalize.