Why I Shout Into the Void
And why you should too.
Wanted to write a quick(?) thoughts post to collect some scattered ideas related to the same thing in one spot. This might otherwise be a tweet but I’d like to have a slightly more permanent link to a prettier format for this.
My internet footprint is pretty tiny1 but I still behave as though it is not. Part of this is sheer unapologetic narcissism, part of this is pure all-American thought-dumping, part naked self-delusions that my words might eventually matter to someone, and part hoping I’ll make it one day. Let’s pretend I didn’t just spoil everything and make a nice, pretty, bulleted list2:
Via internet omniguru Gwern (et al.), we’re in an unusual place in time where you shouldn’t be afraid to create/put yourself out there publicly on the internet record to ensure that your values are reflected in the training data. This is naturally kind of a controversial idea—lots of artists are justifiably3 concerned about AI stealing from their plate—but the less your livelihood relies on creative output (as is more likely to be the case if you’re a nobody like me) the more it makes sense to want yourself to be reflected in the coming AI singularity in however small a part. As such, we’re also in an unusual place in time in that it’s marginally more possible, however unlikely, that anything you post will in survive in some miniscule way deep into the future and that might be something you care about.
I naturally overvalue my own opinion but I do genuinely think I have a relatively novel perspective on lots of things. I’m default inclined to keep my internal dialogue to myself but I try to remember that A) this is how you stay small and B) I’ll be satisfied if only one or two people find my writing interesting at all4. But even if I or you don’t I think there’s value in expressing yourself, you’ll rarely have done wrong as long as you’ve done so thoughtfully and in a way that invites discussion. It’s one thing to vomit your opinion, it’s another to seek to temper it by placing it on the public anvil.
I still don’t feel like I’m especially passionate about writing but, having come to care about it just a little bit, I’ve gotten a lot out of looking a little bit more closely at both the things I want to write about and what other people are writing broadly. I do enjoy stumbling across new things I want to vomit my opinion on or remembering past thoughts I’ve had and cleaning them up a little bit for publishing. I’ve also made some modestly-fulfilling-but-probably-still-mostly-parasocial5 connections to other people just by being motivated to write more that I might not have made otherwise.
Writing is a pretty good way to pass time at work without a lot of people looking too closely at you.
It’s absolutely a cheap thrill on the rare occasions when someone else links to something you wrote and writing more increases the chances for that.
Inasmuch as you might get a following, having written a bunch of crap beforehand gives new followers a delightful backlog to sift through if they want to, so don’t let the low metrics be that discouraging. Chances are you won’t have any control over when you pop off and the stuff you like the most isn’t what will get attention but just embrace it tbh6.
Shitposting is fun, a art, and an science.
Dude footnotes7.
It’s practically useful to have groups of thoughts collected in one place you can easily link back to. You can have more “complete” conversations in shorthand by being able to say “oh, I’ve thought a lot about this before here”8. Having long-form content you can link to on social media and, vice versa, having collections of scattered short-form thoughts you can collect later into different long-form ideas is great.
Ripping from my About page:
My only actual minor claim to internet notoriety is my YouTube channel where my earliest videos are some of the earliest YouTube examples of dramatizations of /x/ creepypastas, plus a bunch of meme shit.
A lot of my views actually come from the fact I and the relevant video are mentioned on the Know Your Meme page for THEN WHO WAS PHONE? I can’t be sure how much of my modest subscriber count comes from that though.
Similarly, my tiny, but apparently top 15% of Twitter following was mostly kickstarted by some involvement with a certain late-2014 internet thing.
The intention here is to be format neutral—shout into the void on, say, X The Everything App as much as you might anywhere else—but there’s also going to be lots of subtext implying you should have a Substack, which is something I unambiguously endorse.
I’m clear-eyed conceptually in that it’s true that the learning process for a generative AI is perfectly analogous to that for a human but there’s an undeniable unfairness-of-scale both in the training and the execution and I agree that this does matter.
Hi dad!
Isn’t it marginally less parasocial if you’re also laying out your public persona, ehhhh?
…is what I keep telling myself.
I had to write the second footnote to justify including this bullet point about footnotes.
It sometimes feels goofy and awkward to hock your own blog on someone else’s but A) for better or worse that’s how you grow, B) people will tell you to knock it off if they don’t like it (for the most part), and C) most people are going to ignore it anyways.