I love the work of Cory Doctorow – he’s an activist, journalist, editor and author and has repeatedly helped shape the global conversation about technology and how we use it (see: Enshittification).

While his lefty polemics are astonishing, clear-headed, no-bullshit takedowns that help explain how we’ve gotten where we are, I want to focus on a beautiful post he wrote recently, about why he writes a blog.

In his recent post Linkrot, he focuses on the issue of the transience of the internet, how business manoeuvring or even just changing trends can wipe out publications and platforms without us even noticing, and then suddenly you turn around and realise 38% of the web from 2013 is gone.

The part that stuck out to me was his idea of note-taking in public. A sort of “thinking aloud” for the internet. I’m not going to rehash his post here (it’s not long – you should read it!) where he lists its many benefits to him as a writer, but I also want to take a moment to recognise the benefit of it as a way to accurately record moments in time.

For me, it ties into the recent run of excellent journalism over on The Verge, focusing on Twitter and then late last year on SEO and online publishing. The Editor in Chief of The Verge Nilay Patel specifically called those features out as an effort to preserve a piece of history, a combination of technology, business and culture, in a moment that seemed poised to change forever. The logic is that if you want to be able to talk about it accurately in the future, you need to have something you can point at as how it really was.

Cory’s point on Object Permanence hits this same note for me:

The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It’s very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it’s even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment.

Cory Doctorow, “Linkrot” https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/

I have a full time job, hobbies and two small children, so I’m not about to commit to regular blogging, but I really like this reason as a motivation to write a post. Just to say what happened, for myself. To note-take in public.