IIf you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you will find a constantly updated note that tells you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will change to 30. That means Dave’s blog will have caused a stir every day for thirty years.
He is a truly remarkable figure, a gifted hacker and software developer who embodies the spirit of the early Internet. In the 1980s he created ThinkTank, a new kind of software called “outliner,” which automated the hierarchical lists we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but which until then had been scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but now you see outliners built into almost every form of writing software. There’s even one in Microsoft Word, for heaven’s sake!
In 1983, Winer founded a company, Living Videotext, to develop and commercialize the sketch idea, and six years later he sold it to Symantec for enough money to allow him to do his own thing for the rest of his life. One of those things was playing a leading role in the development of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a tool that allows users to follow many different websites in a single application (a news aggregator) that constantly monitors sites for new content. (Think of it as the hidden wiring of the web.)
Once the use of RSS feeds became commonplace, someone had the idea of adding audio files to them, and Dave implemented the idea with a nice nerdy twist: an attached Grateful Dead song. Initially the new technology was called audio blogging, but eventually a British journalist came up with the term ‘podcasting’ and it stuck.
So Dave was there to create some cool stuff, but it was blogging that brought him to a wider audience. “Some people were born to play country music,” he wrote at one point. “I was born to blog. When I started blogging, I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and remains) articulate and outspoken. His formidable record as a technical innovator meant he could not be written off as an idiot. The fact that he was financially secure meant he didn’t have to suck up to anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did. So from the moment he launched Scripting News in October 1994, he was a distinctive presence on the Internet.
Like many of us, he realized that what became known as the blogosphere could be a modern realization of Jürgen Habermas’ idea of ”the public sphere,” because it was open to everyone, everything was open to discussion, and social rank did not determine who there was. allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and comprehensiveness with which tech companies like Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically managed, while the speakers were intensely monitored and their data mined for advertising purposes.
In my experience, most journalists did not understand the meaning of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr. Johnson, they thought that “nobody but a dunce ever wrote except for money,” and so bloggers must be weird. (Which is difficult for those of us who are both bloggers and hackers.) But that was largely because the mainstream media was hypnotized—and blindsided—by the dizzying rise of social media. Journalists assumed that the blogosphere must be old hat, a relic of the past, a meeting place for idiots, nerds and men with ponytails who wore shoes like Cornish pasties. Social media was what mattered.
If that is indeed what they thought, then Winer has news for them: the blogosphere is alive and thriving. In fact, it is where many of the best writings – and ideas – of our time can be found. I can say that because I read it every day using a tool – feedland.org – that Dave built to make it easier to drink from the firehose. As Clay Shirky, an early Internet sage, once put it, there is no such thing as information overload: there is only “filter failure.” And there’s no excuse to ignore the blogosphere.
What I’ve read
Centenary celebrations
Jimmy Carter turned 100 this week, and James Fallows – who had once been his speechwriter – wrote a generous review of him on his Substack.
Look mom, no hands…
Our Unevenly Distributed Future is a striking blog post by Allen Pike in which he questions whether self-driving cars could become commonplace.
The truth about monopolies
The Antitrust Revolution: the title of a beautiful essay in Harpers by Barry Lynn about democracy’s awakening to the dangers of corporate power.
