Busy day today, but there is always time for a few good links:

• Why I Lugged My 27-Pound Toddler to a Rocket Launch
• Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction
• Honesty and Transparency Are Not Enough
• So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies

Adam Mastroianni nails it:

When people revile a degree from Harvard’s Extension School and revere a degree from Harvard College, they’re saying that the value of an education doesn’t come from the fact that you got educated. It comes from the fact that you got picked.

Alas, it is a paid post, and the more I encounter those the less I think of Substack and — this is not rational, I know — people who use it to blog. Because that is all Substack is: a blog with an optional, easy to implement paywall. I am not a fan.

Venkatesh Rao, while retiring the Ribbonfarm blog, makes a serious prediction:

I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era. And what has emerged to take its place is not the blogosphere (and really shouldn’t try to be), even though parts of it have tried to claim the word.

I don’t think there is any single heir to the blog, or to the public social media landscape it dominated, anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire when it collapsed. And this is as things should be. Emerging media should emerge into their own identities, not attempt to perpetuate the legacies of sundowning media, or fight over baggage. And of course, many architectural elements of the blog will live on in newer media, just as many patterns we live with today originated in the Roman empire. Chronological feeds, and RSS-like protocols are part of our collective technological vocabulary. So at least in a technological sense, nothing is dying per se. But in a cultural sense, we are definitely witnessing the end of an era.

A few people beg to differ, of course, but there is a generational gap here and my kids may be viewing blogs the same way I saw Bulletin Board Systems, and note that some of those are still around! But maybe not; this post’s main home is, after all, on a blog. Which yesterday had 3 orders of magnitude fewer visitors than a single social media post (about which I will write more soon here, not on X). So it goes…

Happy to be able to cross-post to Threads, but now that I’ve been fiddling with micro.blog settings I see that Bluesky crossposting stopped working for me around 2 months ago. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

A few good links for the weekend:

• Nassim Taleb — Meditations on Extremistan (I will come back to this soon)
• Vukovar (Enter the demon)
• How the Impressionists Became the World’s Favorite Painters, and the Most Misunderstood (in my backyard, will see)
• The joy of clutter

Speaking of blogs of old, Joel Topf’s Precious Bodily Fluids has been online since 2007. As most, he went from writing several times per week to every few weeks to not even every month as life moved to Twitter but he just published a new post that includes Neal Stephenson’s treatise on the Hole Hawg and for that alone is worth a shout out.

Much like the Nobel family tree one could, I suspect, construct a blogging family tree, and Dave Winer would be at the root of it all. Kudos.

From The End of the Modern World by Fr. Stephen Freemen:

Modernity is a rhetorical device. The modern world does not produce wonders or even Apple Phones. Those are the work of technology, something with roots in the ancient world (cf. the Antikythera Mechanism). Modernity is simply the place where the myth was invented — not technology.

And from a 2018 blog post comment (↬John Naughton):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes (sic) but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

M. John Harrison in an unpublished interview from way back before Sunken Lands… came out:

If people didn’t have Joseph Campbell’s artful wish-fulfilment (sic) fantasy to place them at the centre of events and keep them enchanted with their own reflection, they might dump their wish to be princess of all they survey, and instead channel their dissatisfactions into making a better world for everyone.

This line of thinking is why I am a grateful reader of Harrison’s and… not a Campbell fan.

Michael Lopp wrote something yesterday in the useful-not-true category:

[…] I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

Derek Sivers had a similar idea:

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

They are writing about different settings — Lopp about figuring out what’s already there, Sivers about creating something new — but the approaches are similar: to get to the grey area, first figure out the edges. This also tends to be my approach, but it is not how many people think and if you are to avoid painful misunderstandings better have a preamble ready.