I’m probably going to be too busy elsewhere to do much writing here for the next several months. Updates will be sporadic and brief, unless I decide to repost old stuff from elsewhere.
This is a good time to take stock of things.
The reason I hopped onto Substack a couple of years ago was because Blogger had gotten too lonely. At this point, it’s a zombie platform. I was never really interested in Substack’s built-in monetization options; what drew me was the ecosystem. It’s so easy to stumble upon smart essays by cool people without having to go out looking for them. Following other writers whose work I enjoy, and seeing them engaging and weighing in on my own stuff from time to time, has been very gratifying, and occasionally reminds me of my time in the early webcomics scene. I could do without Notes—and I suppose I’d be a more effective Substacker if I felt differently—but whatever. I’ve been a lot happier here than I was on Blogger.
When I started out, I set two goals for myself.
1. Stick to a theme. My old blog was all over the place. One week I’d be writing about worldbuilding in Magic: The Gathering; two weeks later I’d be writing about Kant. I’d review Melville novels, write about conversations I’d had with friends, vociferate about current events, punch out listicles about X-Men comics, etc. When I decided to give Substack a shot, I thought I’d try to specialize. Since I was reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Guy Debord at the time, I thought I’d attempt some variety of—well, let’s call it technosocial commentary.
It’s been fun—although I increasingly feel I’m not really qualified for it, and that perhaps I’ve said all I care to say about the subject, or that I can say about it.1 Over the past year or so I’ve written rather too much about The Way Things Was in the years before the web turned to slop and Big Tech ran amok, and I don’t like to think of myself as an old man who gets lost in reminiscences when confronting the present.
Maybe I’ll change my mind about this later on. We’ll see.
2. Keep it short. At the beginning, I challenged myself to write shorter, more digestible pieces than I was accustomed to. I’ve always had problems with brevity, and figured that this was a good time to work on that. Write something that can be read in ten minutes or fewer, and update on a weekly basis. I’ve totally failed at this one. I’ve never been too good at setting hard deadlines for myself (as in, write and post something by the end of the day), and before long I fell back into my old habits of just starting to write (slowly, fussily) and continuing to write for as long as it took to unwind the thread of an idea.
In short—in two respects, I tried to take a more disciplined approach to Substack than to my old blog. I fear I arrived at the worst possible outcome: updating too infrequently and writing overlong pieces about a general topic in which I have no especial expertise.
Sometimes I do miss writing uncritical pieces about lowbrow stuff like video games and comic books.2 Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t toss it all and exclusively compose and post fiction. Who knows?
I’ll be thinking it over. In the meantime, here’s some old content you might like to browse through: a few multi-part essays (or something resembling essays) and the short fiction I’ve shared here.
Dante’s Medieval Transhumanist Fantasy
Bacon’s Empire of Mankind
Jacking Ourselves Off In Outer Space, Forever
Sympathy for the Devils: Gamers
Sympathy for the Devils: TERFs
Sympathy for the Devils: Rednecks
A Requiem for Techno-Optimism: I’ll Remember 1995
A Requiem for Techno-Optimism: A E S T H E T IC
A Requiem for Techno-Optimism: All that Is Solid Melts into Air
A Requiem for Techno-Optimism: The Hangover
Requiem Footnote: Ad Nostalgia
After Art, Part 1
After Art, Part 2
After Art, Part 3
Some Notes on Games—Preamble
Some Notes on Games—Community & Cult
Some Notes on Games—Through The Motions
Some Notes on Games—Identity & Inferiority
Some Notes on Games—Oldweb as Anti-Environment
Some Notes on Games—Condemned to Effects of Giddiness
Thus Spake Barnabas
The Heron
Léger's Demon
About a Webtoon
The Feud
Living with the Now
Reading anything by Rob Horning is a humbling experience.
Uncritical in the sense of looking at their content instead of their forms, not contemplating their functions vis-à-vis the culture industry or the Spectacle, etc.
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