Spencer Beacock
Many currents, some wrecks ⛯

Writing towards the network

I saw a bit recently somewhere in the stream suggesting that the internet was less like an archive or library and more like broadsheet newspapers -- pulped, burned, mouse-chewed in wall framing, turned to mush by rain. More ephemeral than we'd like to think basically.

Yet here I am, starting a blog in 2023, with a real feeling of artifact-ness in what I’m writing. It’s not that I inhabit delusions of grandeur when it comes to the significance or durability of what I’m jotting here, but instead this writing feels anchored to a moment.

This restart on internet writing for me is a Twitter lifeboat, in a lot of ways. I spent many years (and many hours within those years) strumming that stream. In the latter half of the ~decade I think the balance sheet for personal value vs. emotional cost started to bleed – a common experience, I think. When a certain billionaire bought it out in autumn ‘22, that was the nudge / bludgeon I needed to shut things down for good. I manually exported a couple years’ worth of bookmark-y likes, ran the Fedifinder widget at the perfect moment of peak Mastodon-ing prior to the shutdown of many accounts, and left. I imagine it’s not a unique story, but there it is.

At the same time, this is writing for something, not just from something. Blogging has always appealed on its own strengths, and now more than ever I find the draw. I like the way it creates room for putting mild weirdness into the world that bleeds beyond a neat professional identity, something I’ve struggled with on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn (my personal interests and professional practice overlap just enough that it doesn’t make sense to keep them totally separate, and just not-enough that it doesn’t make sense to collapse them into one). Other writer-practitioners (some of whom I gesture towards below) seem to navigate this space deftly with blogging at the heart of their approaches, a clearinghouse for the personal and professional that seems to come together into a nice synthesis of “hey this person seems good at their job but also kind of interesting” (striking this balance is probably harder than it looks – let’s check in in a year if this is still kicking and see where it lands).

On top of that opening to the weird, the ability to own your shit (in all the dimensions that entails, I guess, but primarily in the data and operations sense) is deeply appealing. I’ve learned just enough web tech stuff to be mildly dangerous, and the portability and durability of a happy little Jekyll implementation seems great in this moment of having to give up what you’ve built when things go south in The Platforms.

Lastly, I’m admiring the willingness to think in public that blogging encourages. You should expect lots of unfinished posts, cliffhangers, wild goose chases!

So what will I write about? In some ways this blog will be about climate change, I guess. But also I think sort of everything is now? Really I’ll hope to write my way towards some other ways of living and being and doing, ways that prioritize people and collaboration and small and practical things that maybe make our shared existence a little bit better. I’ll write about how services are created and managed and evolved, because that’s what I do for work but also something that I think will be key for making a good life as things fall apart or come together. I’ll write about people and technology, as well, because at some level I guess I believe that while “technology won’t save us”, we also won’t save ourselves without it at this point. I’ll probably also meander, too – this is, after all, hoping to lean into the weird. It may veer into the personal, although I think probably not confessional.

To close out, there are lots of folks providing good guiding stars out there for what blogging can be or do in this moment (although some are technically newsletters – sue me!1). Here’s a few that I’m anchoring on as I start this journey:

  • Sentiers / Patrick Tanguay: I really admire Patrick’s particular niche and focus: “understand the world, imagine better futures” is a tagline not far from what I imagine for this blog, and his “recurring inquiries” on the home page are similarly deeply aligned with my areas of interest here. Until recently, Sentiers also had an interesting trifurcated (?) structure around notes, essays, and newsletters, although that seems to have gone away – truthfully, this blog almost grew in the direction of a ‘digital garden’ as described here by Patrick but in the end I couldn’t be bothered to make it work from a technical or habitual point of view.
  • Dark Matter Labs: DML isn’t an individual, and what they produce aren’t really blog posts. They’re essays, reports, policy provocations. But they’re a nice balance of smart and weird and tangibly imaginative about a set of infrastructural futures that are quite different than our own today but not so different that you can’t imagine the stepping stones. They’re not fanciful but they also aren’t soullessly-technocratic status quo incrementalism. Neighbourhood unions! Right to retrofit! Trees as infrastructure! It’s good stuff. Also, they write about the work itself, which I like, through weeknotes and other ways of exposing what I can only imagine are deeply messy and murky processes of collaboration and iteration.
  • A Working Letter / Mandy Brown: Mandy Brown’s A Working Letter is great for many reasons: it synthesizes widely across the things Mandy is reading; it talks about the work but in a way that feels deeply human and messy and hews away from easy frameworks; and lastly, each missive (formerly) contained a recipe for a cocktail (whether that stopped because Mandy is trying to be inclusive of sober readers or because she started a coaching practice that required a little tilt towards the “professional” side of the “personal/professional” balance, I don’t know).
  • Robin Sloan: Robin Sloan is a… professional crush? Is that a thing? A person whose whole thing is just extremely enviable and yet for exactly the same reasons completely, frustratingly unreplicable (the things that make Robin’s work and practice pathway great are utterly idiosyncratic and I suspect there’s a real lesson there). I like reading Robin’s newsletters and blogging because of the ways he lifts the hood on that work, and also talks about his various interests, and more and less explicitly draws the link between the two (or perhaps exposes the ways in which they’re not really separable).2
  • Tom Critchlow: Tom Critchlow writes a lot about consulting and a lot about writing in public and so in some ways is at the middle of the bullseye for me as I’ve been thinking about… writing in public alongside my (currently publicly illegible) consulting practice. I have learned a lot about the indie consultant pathway from reading Tom and could do worse than paying back into that by writing a bit about the things I’m learning through the work. I can’t imagine I’ll ever write as much as he does about blogging itself but I will absolutely keep reading about it, when puts that out there.
  • Interconnected / Matt Webb: Reading Matt Webb’s Interconnected blog feels a bit like plunging your head into a murky vibrant tidepool and opening your eyes to all the life percolating there. This is a compliment. He’s drawing connections across a bunch of different aspects of tech and society, turning them totally on their head, and bringing a product / design sensibility that orients towards action-informed theory and theory-informed action. The way he thinks about these nascent spaces and the way he articulates that thinking through his writing is a huge inspiration – I often feel like through his writing he’s creating these little pockets of possibility that are either richly imagined or scaffolded through delightful and unexpected analogy.3
  • Workomics / Susan Bartlett: Lastly, Susan Bartlett’s Workomics newsletter has offered a much more close-to-home reference point. Susan was my first real boss and a vital mentor in the early years of my career – most of what I do now rests on foundations that she offered. Her writing offers to the public the kind of thoughtful reasoning, attention to details, and willingness to wrestle with ambiguity and complexity that has helped to shape the way I work and think. If I could write as thoughtfully and frequently as Susan does, it’d be a job well done.

Anyways!

  1. Please do not actually sue me. ↩

  2. Robin is also a lonnnnngtime writer-in-public, contributing to Snarkmarket; a recent newsletter on finishing work talks about how completing projects (even if not perfect) creates a flywheel effect where you start to perceive yourself more and more as a person who finishes stuff and that makes it easier to then finish stuff. He explicitly rejects the idea that writing a newsletter contributes to that flywheel, but I wonder about the extent to which years and years of practice in “typing some stuff then hitting publish” has laid a foundation for him. ↩

  3. One critical piece of blogging inspiration from Matt rests in his personal rules for blogging. I read them as creating a sense of expectation around high frequency, and then systematically eliminating the cognitive barriers that get in the way of that pace. Post lots, and to do that don’t: try to do too much, worry about completeness, stress about nuance, try to be new, try to be cool, try to be interesting, get too niche, think too long about it, etc. There’s some other stuff but that’s what lives in my head from it. ↩