A response to Joan Westenberg’s “The Case for Blogging in the Ruins“
Joan Westenberg opens her case for blogging by invoking Diderot’s Encyclopédie, that 28-volume monument to organized thinking that took two decades to complete, survived two government bans, and drove its creator to periodic breakdowns. Her point was that the infrastructure for thinking has always been hard, dangerous, thankless work.
She’s right. But I want to push the argument further.
Blogs aren’t just infrastructure for thinking. They’re infrastructure for becoming. They function as soul technology: consciousness-shaping code that runs quietly in the background of who we are and who we’re in the process of turning into. A blog doesn’t just capture ideas; it scaffolds identity over time. Each post is a small act of self-authoring, a trace left by a mind in motion.
When we traded our blogs for social media feeds, we didn’t just lose a publishing format. We lost a technology for self-construction. We gave up spaces designed for slow accumulation, revision, and return, and replaced them with systems optimized for immediacy, performance, and erasure. The feed has no memory, no patience, no tolerance for unfinished thought. It asks you to be legible now, not coherent over time.
A blog, by contrast, lets you think longitudinally. It allows contradiction, revision, and growth without demanding that you pretend you were always right. It gives your thinking a spine. Without that spine, the self starts to fragment into reactions and poses. What disappears isn’t just depth of thought, but continuity of becoming.
The Format Shapes the Self
Joan writes about how “the container shapes the contents,” referencing how Diderot’s cross-references in the Encyclopédie were themselves commentary, connecting ideas authorities wanted kept separate. This is deeper than she goes, and it’s the heart of what makes blogs essential.
The format you use to express your thinking doesn’t just organize your thoughts. It shapes what thoughts are possible. It determines which connections you can make, which uncertainties you can acknowledge, which versions of yourself can emerge through the writing.
When Montaigne invented the essay (the essai, the attempt), he didn’t just create a literary form. He created a technology for self-development. Those tower writings weren’t about establishing positions. They were about discovering what he thought by watching himself think. The essay was a mirror that talked back.
The blog is Montaigne’s direct descendant, as Joan notes. But it’s more than that. It isn’t just an heir to the essay as a literary form; it’s an evolution of the essay as a lived practice. Where Montaigne used the page to observe his own mind in motion, the blog adds duration, accumulation, and public continuity. It turns the solitary tower into a persistent workspace, one where thinking unfolds not just within a single attempt, but across years of attempts, revisions, and returns.
In that sense, the blog is not merely a container for essays. It is a temporal engine for self-development. Each post becomes part of a visible chain of thought, each link altering the meaning of those that came before. The self that emerges is not a position taken once and defended forever, but a process that can be traced, interrogated, and consciously shaped over time. This is Montaigne’s mirror, extended into a longitudinal archive. The mirror doesn’t just talk back anymore; it remembers.
Stories as Code, Blogs as Compiler
To say that stories are code is not metaphorical flourish. It’s a functional description. The narratives you repeat about yourself define the conditionals that govern your behavior, the loops you get stuck in, the defaults you fall back to under stress. Tell yourself a story about being the kind of person who hesitates, and hesitation becomes automated. Tell yourself a story about being resilient, and your system routes failure differently. The story runs first. Action follows.
Over time, these narratives harden into invisible infrastructure. They decide what feels possible, what feels forbidden, what you notice, and what you edit out of awareness entirely. You don’t consciously choose most of this. The code executes beneath deliberation. This is why changing outcomes without changing stories rarely works. You’re trying to override behavior while leaving the underlying program intact.
Blogging makes this machinery visible. When you write repeatedly in a space that preserves context, you can see the narrative patterns that are generating your life. You can spot the recurring subroutines, the inherited assumptions, the legacy code you never meant to install. More importantly, you can intervene. You can refactor a story. You can write a new function. You can let an old narrative deprecate rather than pretending it was never there.
This is why stories don’t just describe reality. They compile it.
When you write on social media, you’re executing pre-compiled code. The platform has already decided what shape your thoughts can take (280 characters, reaction buttons, shareability metrics), what emotions are valid (outrage performs well, nuance dies), what self is allowed to emerge (provocative, certain, instantly legible).
You’re filling in variables in someone else’s program.
When you write a blog post, you’re working with source code. You have direct access to the narrative architecture. You can build functions that take multiple posts to execute. You can declare variables that don’t resolve for months. You can write recursive loops where each post calls back to earlier ones, creating compound understanding.
Joan writes about blogs that “reference and extend earlier posts, developing ideas over time rather than starting from scratch each week.” That’s exactly right. But it’s not just about ideas. It’s about identity. Each post is a procedure call in the larger program of who you’re becoming.
The blog as format allows for what social media actively prevents: the messy, recursive, contradictory process of actual transformation. You can be uncertain. You can change your mind. You can document the change. The permanent URLs mean your evolution has an audit trail. You’re not rewriting your past; you’re building on it.
The Texture of Transformation
Social media flattens everything into declarations, as Joan observes. “Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away.”
But transformation isn’t declaration. It’s iteration. It’s trying things out. It’s what Montaigne meant by essai: the attempt, the provisional exploration, the acknowledgment that you don’t have it figured out yet.
This is exactly what my narrative alchemy work requires. You can’t debug consciousness if you can’t acknowledge bugs. You can’t rewrite the code if you can’t see the code. Social media gives you a WYSIWYG editor with most of the functionality locked behind proprietary algorithms. Blogs give you root access.
Joan mentions watching people who “used to produce ten-thousand-word explorations of complex topics” now producing “dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each one optimized for immediate engagement and none of them building toward anything coherent.”
It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.
Here’s what she doesn’t say: those fragments aren’t just aesthetically inferior. They’re functionally different. A ringtone can’t do what a symphony does. It can signal. It can alert. But it can’t develop a theme, build tension, create resolution, take you on a journey. The format limits the function.
When you’re working with consciousness, with personal narrative, with the deep stories that determine how you move through the world, you need the symphony. You need the space for development, for complexity, for transformation that unfolds across movements.
Permanence as Practice Ground
Joan’s point about permanent URLs is crucial, but it’s worth unpacking why.
A tweet exists in an eternal present. It appears, performs, disappears. There’s no before and no after, just the algorithmic now. This trains you to think in isolated moments. Every thought is a fresh start, unconnected to your previous thoughts, your previous selves.
A blog creates a timeline. A history. A narrative arc. You can link to your post from three years ago and either build on it or acknowledge how you’ve changed. You can trace your own development. You can see the code as it evolved.
This isn’t just useful for readers. It’s essential for you. When you can see your own evolution documented and accessible, you learn something crucial: you’re not a fixed thing. You’re a process. Your stories aren’t truth; they’re snapshots of a moving target.
This is the heart of narrative alchemy. The goal isn’t to find your “true story.” The goal is to develop conscious relationship with your story-making process. To see the narrative machinery in action. To realize you’re both the programmer and the program.
Social media makes this impossible. Your old posts are buried in infinite scroll or deleted for expedience. The platform doesn’t want you seeing your own patterns. It wants fresh engagement, not deep reflection.
The Writer’s Room on the Internet
Joan invokes Virginia Woolf: “A blog is a room of your own on the internet.”
Yes. And more specifically, it’s a private laboratory for public experiments. It’s where you develop your practice before it’s perfect, where you work through ideas while they’re still half-formed, where you give your consciousness permission to evolve in view of others.
This is radically different from the performance requirements of social media. On Twitter, you’re always on stage. Every post is a positioning move, a reputation play, a signal to your audience about who you are (or want to appear to be). The format demands certainty even when you have none.
A blog allows what I’d call “ceremonial uncertainty.” You can perform the ritual of thinking-through-writing. You can do the work publicly without pretending you have answers. You can invite readers into your process rather than your conclusions.
This is essential for any kind of transformational work. People don’t change through exposure to certainty. They change through witnessing authentic process. Through seeing someone else’s struggle and recognizing their own. Through finding permission to not have it figured out.
Building What?
Joan’s closing argument is about infrastructure: “We’re not going to get a better internet by waiting for platforms to become less extractive. We build it by building it.”
True. But let’s be specific about what we’re building.
We’re building:
A library of becoming. Not a repository of finished thoughts but a record of minds in motion. Each blog is one person’s developmental arc made visible. Collectively, they’re a distributed archive of human transformation.
A training ground for consciousness. Blogging isn’t just publishing. It’s practice. Every post is a rep. You’re training your attention, your articulation, your capacity to sit with complexity. You’re developing what Diderot had: the ability to sustain years-long intellectual projects against opposition and exhaustion.
A resistance network against cognitive collapse. When all thinking is optimized for virality, actual thinking becomes impossible. Blogs create protected space where thoughts can develop at human speed, where nuance survives, where you can say something that takes three thousand words to say properly.
A technology stack for soul work. This is where I part ways slightly with Joan’s framing. She’s talking about intellectual infrastructure. I’m talking about existential infrastructure. The blog isn’t just a tool for thinking better. It’s a tool for becoming someone who can think differently. For rewriting the stories that run you. For debugging consciousness itself.
What Makes the Work Work
Joan lists what makes blogs work: perspective over topic, building over time, specificity, permanent addresses, acceptance that virality isn’t the goal.
All correct. But there’s a through-line here worth naming: these are all features of sustainable practice rather than extractive performance.
A sustainable practice has:
- Perspective: A point of view you’re developing over time, not just reactions to trending topics
- Cumulative value: Each session builds on previous sessions, creating compound growth
- Specificity: You’re serving a real need (yours and others’) rather than optimizing for mass appeal
- Stability: The practice can be found when needed because it exists at a consistent address (physical or digital)
- Long time horizons: Value accumulates across years, not hours
This describes both a good blog and a good consciousness practice. Which makes sense, because at the deepest level, they’re the same thing.
The Ringtone Symphony
That line of Joan’s keeps returning: “It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.”
Here’s what haunts me about that image: most people making that choice don’t realize they’re making it. The shift is gradual. You start sharing short thoughts on Twitter because it’s convenient. Then you notice which posts perform well. Then you start optimizing for that performance. Then you realize you haven’t written anything substantial in months. Then you forget you ever could.
The technology has rewritten your practice. The format has rewritten your thoughts. The code has rewritten the coder.
This is why Joan’s call to start a blog isn’t just practical advice. It’s an invitation to reclaim authorship of your own consciousness. To take back root access to your narrative operating system. To remember that you can compose symphonies.
Starting in the Ruins
Joan’s title is perfect: “The Case for Blogging in the Ruins.” We’re not building in ideal conditions. The platforms are collapsing, the attention economy is brutal, the discovery mechanisms are broken, and most blogs die after three posts.
So why do it?
Because the practice is the point. Because you need a place to think that isn’t owned by advertising companies. Because you’re trying to become someone different and that requires sustained, visible work. Because the format shapes the thought and you want a format that allows for uncertainty, complexity, evolution.
Because stories are code and you need a place to write new code.
Because, as Joan writes, “The blog won’t save us. But it’s one of the tools we’ll need if we’re going to save ourselves.”
Here’s what I’d add: the blog won’t save us, but it might save you. Not from external threats but from the internal collapse that comes from outsourcing your consciousness to platforms designed to extract value from your attention.
Diderot spent twenty years on his infrastructure for thinking. He went broke. He watched collaborators quit. He kept going because the work mattered.
Your blog won’t take twenty years. It might not survive three posts. But if you’re serious about consciousness work, about narrative alchemy, about becoming someone who thinks differently rather than just having different thoughts, you need infrastructure.
You need a room of your own on the internet.
You need a place where the code is visible and you have permission to rewrite it.
You need a blog.
Practical Magic
If Joan’s piece convinced you of the why, here’s the what-next:
Choose one of her recommended platforms (Write.as, Bear Blog, Ghost, Micro.blog). Don’t overthink it. They all work. Pick based on aesthetic preference or flip a coin.
Buy your domain. Ten dollars a year for yourname.com. This matters more than it seems. The domain is your commitment to the practice. It’s your claim to a stable address. It’s your statement that this work happens on ground you own.
Write post one. Not your manifesto. Not your definitive statement. Just 500 words on something you’re thinking about. Hit publish. Feel the slight terror. That’s correct. You’re putting unfinished thinking into the world. That’s the practice.
Write post two. Reference post one if relevant, or don’t. Build if it makes sense, or start fresh. The pattern will emerge over time. Trust the accretion.
Write post ten. You’re now in territory most blogs never reach. You have a body of work. Not a polished body of work, but a body of work. You can see your own patterns. You can start deliberately developing them or consciously breaking them.
Keep going. The value is cumulative. The practice is transformative. The code is rewriting itself.
This is soul technology. This is infrastructure for becoming.
This is how we build it by building it.
If you start a blog, send me a link. I want to see what you’re building. Email me or find me on Twitter/X The first post doesn’t have to be good. It has to exist. The rest follows from there.