That would be nice... Of course, I know my beliefs, as they are structured, researched, forged in the flames of imagined debates with inept foes. When I call myself a socialist, I thoroughly mean... This tree looks quite nice what kind of tree is it? Must be a birch. Hmmm, a beer sounds really good right about now...

Such are the cogent thoughts of an ideologue. Left on their own, thoughts tend to swirl, blend into one another, and trail off, never to be found again. Yet, in writing, such as this particular paragraph, a thought is made concrete, however partial. Through the reflection of writing, language can be wrestled with, fashioned to look one way or another. Moreover, this writing or language is not solely the intellectual property of each of us, all developing our own proprietary language ™ (at least not yet). It is external, made by others, developed over time, and objective, in the sense that they "exist" as an object in our mind.

I say all this nonsense to really remark on this weird world of blogging. This is not putting "pen to paper," but rather slamming away at a keyboard, writing in HTML because of the way I naively set up the SQL database behind this website. It could hardly be said that I am writing in "English." In fact, as others would remark, I am not. Either way, the consideration of "writing" now involves thinking through and coding just how exactly thoughts are to be presented, structured, datafied and stored. This even says nothing of how they are being algorithmically flung around, hyperlinked, and perhaps even turned into memes.

While this all sounds rather 2000s or earlier (admittedly, even the word "blog" sounds dated now), this conversation is far more relevant today. The behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many others enter this very intimate flurry of thoughts. My previous stream of consciousness can now possibly be read as various potentials for tweets. Rather than fashioning some sense out of a chaotic flurry, this constant circulation of text becomes "content" to be commodified and endlessly passed around. Part of the "mission" of this site is to see a way out of this. This being said, I'm not too deluded into thinking that this "writing" will offer clarity in this goal. If anything, putting an abrupt end to this circulation will likely do more good than this. Despite these facts, this writing is not necessarily geared towards a target audience or is a strategic piece of "content" (I already do that as a copywriter); instead, this is an act of "writing" with the aim to eventually make sense.