Maciej Ceglowski saved me a fair bit of time by taking Paul Graham to task, though from a far different tack than I’d have chosen. It’s Graham’s signature argument for the similarities between hackers and painters that Ceglowski uses to tip his skewer, as the latter’s pre-tech career as an oil painter gives him unique insight into this dichotomy. He does a good job, and I’d like to offer an addendum to this excellent bit:
I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of shlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the “what is a hacker?” essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger. These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider’s view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
The above is spot-on bitchy truth, but those are not the names that came to mind when I first read Graham’s now-unavoidable essays. I thought, instead, of Jon Katz, author of Geeks and loathed son of the teeming Slashdot cesspool. Graham seems to be making himself out to be this decade’s Katz: a self-styled “geek of letters” who preaches both to the community he attempts to represent and on behalf of that community to the world at large. I’m no millionaire technologist but this seems like a bad career move on Graham’s part.
I want to write more, but the more I think of to write the more I realize Maciej has already said with more grace and good humor than I can presently muster. I’ve been quietly grumpy about tech culture, blogging, the whole lot of it of late. More often than not I start a post and eschew it no more than a paragraph into its creation with a “enh, why bother?”
Unlike, say, Dave Winer referenced above, I’ve never felt that I speak with (or for) the voice of the blogosphere. I never really recognized it as a community; I’m much more of the mind that there are many blogospheres, each for different fields and interests, and these are as close to virtual communities as the medium allows. Yet, as the blogging world at large has grown so dramatically, I increasingly find myself thinking: “someone else will write it.” I don’t necessarily care enough to go out and find that someone. Rather, I have a sort of grim faith that everything will get remarked upon, like a dated image of neighborhood housewives sharing every last bit of the town’s gossip under the hairdryers at the beauty parlor. Everything will get remarked upon, and I probably don’t want to hear it.
That feeling has sparked a slow upheaval of the feeds I’m subscribed to: an ever-dwindling number of “traditional” blogs like mine that span a number of topics replaced instead by crisply written topical blogs, from economics to architecture to cuisine. Many of the A-list blogs have left my blogroll not out of any scenester anti-pop protest but a very personal boredom and desire for new content and ideas (though I do wish Boing Boing would stop its attempt to supplant News Of The Wierd). It stems from a sentiment that should be familiar to longtime readers: I care more about people actually doing something than writing about something. The potential pitfall is that what some people do – really pour themselves into – is write, and write blogs. It’s those blogs I’m seeking out, the ones that smack of crasftsmanship.
This lens through which I’m now searching I’ve also turned closely on myself, and its effect has been paralyzing. I don’t pour myself into this blog; it does not smack of craftsmanship. At best it is deserving of the occasional supportive IM or email I receive. At worst, it begs to be mocked along with the rest of the ever-growing blog slag heap and left to slowly and mercifully dwindle in Google’s PageRank. But then, I’ve been in this mood before, and I usually come out of it wanting to write a post or two.
My point, to tie this all together, is that great writing isn’t a self-decided endeavor. It’s wholly circumstantial, and often deemed after the fact. Maciej was able to write a great, fun, biting piece because Paul Graham has entirely too much authorly hubris to let the community – heck, any community – decide if he’s a voice they support. Truly great writing is purposeful and, in its way, humble; it serves its purpose without pandering or fishing for acceptance. That’s a sentiment I hope some of my fellow bloggers share, because its their blogs I’ll be looking towards to revitalize my daily intake of ideas.
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