a radical restructuring
Dear readers of this blog,
It is with mixed emotions that I write to you today announcing a radical restructuring of this blog.
Last week I stumbled upon this article from Ars Technica about the increasing ease with which LLMs can identify writers using pseudonyms – even on small corpuses of text, even when that text is about the most mundane things. It brought up a fear of mine, that one day in a U.S. airport, customs officials will take me aside and tell me that they have traced my blog to me, and that because I am a dissident I will be detained or worse.
Naturally, this has caused me to revist the purpose that my blog serves. I like how Sam puts it --- "[my] blog is for my closest friends. it is also for people I meet at dinner parties. it is also for strangers on the web. which are you?" I would miss having these messages-in-bottles sent to people close to me; I've even made a few internet friends through this blog. And yet the stakes cannot be ignored.
Surveillance is the state's first weapon against its people. Once individuals can be identified, they can be divided, conquered, picked off one by one. In groups, we are strong. Alone, algorithmically pinned to a single identity on the basis of every swirling piece of personal information we've ever shown, each of us can be skewered like a butterfly on a corkboard. This is why privacy is a human right; this is part of how our digital age has (unintentionally?) paved the way for new forms of dictatorship.
Conversely, art is what can speak truth to power. A movement can never be sustained if its members silence themselves, and silence is exactly what the autocrats are trying to enforce. How paradoxical and sad is it that by merely having a voice, merely using it, one gives up some extent of one's anonymity?
And yet there is a straightforward answer. When their safety is on the line, the arts go underground.
In line with that, I will be implementing something new on this blog – private posts. They will not be paywalled, to be clear. I have no interest in that. But they will not show up in the regular "posts" page. Instead, for those who are curious, the idea is to write a blog post but publish it as a page (with "is_page" set to true and "make_discoverable" set to false), which means that it will not show up under "posts" or in the RSS feed of anyone who has subscribed to this blog this way.
[note: this section has been updated in response to information shared by some of my readers. thank you!]
Instead, the [new] idea is to write blog posts and save them as drafts. The only way to reach such posts is to follow a link to them – if you click "view draft," you're given a url with a token that allows anyone to see your draft post. Links to the secret posts will be sent over email to subscribers of this blog.
This means that this blog will become a highly exclusive publication that anyone will be able to read simply by signing up for my emails :) so if you have been a longtime reader, or if you're merely curious, take this as your chance to subscribe to read my work.
I have not yet decided what to do with the historical archive of my posts. Converting them all to pages does not remove them from RSS feeds; unpublishing them entirely feels like too much. So much of what I've written about were profound experiences that shaped me as a person; conversely, that is exactly what makes them somewhat personally identifying.
At any rate, here is to doing what you need to do.
Number of private posts that have been created so far (as of March 12): 1