I started writing this blog exactly a year ago. The research project I was working on at the time was driving me insane, I’d started writing an article about corporate dress codes out of sheer frustration, and I felt like it was a good time to stop merely thinking about starting a blog and actually sit down and do it.

When I first started doing this writeup, I did not expect to still be working on it 6 months later. Finishing this was a long, long overdue task for a while. This is the second write-up I’ve done of a talk I’ve given. The first one I did was for “How to be a Talentless Hack in Public”, which I published in zine form first, before then publishing the text on this blog several months later.

I’ve been “blogging” on and off for more than a decade now. I struggle to decide what to put out there: I have so many thoughts, and I rarely have a time or place to share them. Every place sort of has its own issues: I love text-based social media, but the best we have is forums like reddit, which are not a great place to post “opinions” or thoughts, because they’re intended to be discussion forums, or Twitter-style (are we seriously calling it “X” now?) platforms that incentivize very short posts, which in turn incentivizes writing the pithiest version of your statement possible with no nuance whatsoever, which incentivizes reactionary statements and makes productive conversations very difficult.