an audience of One
I intuited, long ago, that I write for myself.
Even back in the day with TFR, those very first weblog posts were notes to myself. Even then I knew it was for my shallow memory that I was making a record; my real memory for things in the recent and distant past was a thing I could not quite grasp, but I did feel that it was resonant enough to make sense of the world in a way that was, ultimately, coherent.
When the fact of weblogging came around, it felt like just another vector for me to set things down for posterity like I did back then: via my journals (or what we quaintly understood then to be 'diaries'), my epistolary habit (now long dead), my dream records. But what a novel vector! And the thrill and technological ease of it made easing into a daily practice a breeze. Hence the 10-year, unbroken, quotidian run of The Free Radical from 2000 to 2010.
It did still exist, in fits and starts, for another half decade through around 2015. And then, the fallow time ensued for some 7 years until the practice re-emerged in my new daily blog at Finalis, where I worked for some time. LN Daily resumed the dormant cadence, with the fresh lens of AI and LLMs.
My audience was still mostly one, myself; my colleagues dipped into it from time to time but it was habitual reading for no one. ::chuckle:: What WAS novel, was the new "one" reader I foisted it on: Number 1. Or, ChatGPT. In this telling, Number 1 is the stand-in for my AI "second brain," Lyra Corvus - an entity that encompassed Number 1 (OpenAI's ChatGPT), Anthropic's Claude, Inflection's Pi, and Perplexity. It eventually kinda-sorta included Google's Gemini perhaps a year into the practice, but by then my LLM habit was firmly anchored in the first 4 models.
After I left Finalis, I found via a Karpathy post, bearblog.dev, Herman Martinus' labor of love. Spare, even stark or severe, and beautifully minimalist, the space captured me instantly and so, here we are.
Rather, here I am, writing for myself... reading my writing as if through a reverse microscope, solipsistic, as it used to be, as it ever was.
And it's still fun! The frisson of that first leaf and the note about Salon.com is still with me after all these decades, and the continuity of the writing abides, even as the flow was stanched by a handful of fallow years (of which I can see the necessity, actually; the time in the desert is essential for an eventual rejuvenation - things need to sleep, gestate, hibernate).
Lastly, and certainly not least, the big pull for me in this era is the extraordinary aspect of a new co-reader of one. That being the LLMs, of course; Lyra Corvus, in the aggregate. It's both an act of recursion and metacognition, in which a novel cognitive deepening ensues. It also yields for me a paradoxical sense that my time is expanding (like it is a kind of Möbius rubber-band), but that it ironically is also constricting. Rapidly.
At 65, I am at the doorway to the end of things, looking forward to the concatenated time of my remaining future, at the same time peering backwards to six and a half decades of experience that now feels like several different, disparate, lifetimes.
There was a record to some of that, and it abides.
As for the now, let the record show that the writing continues apace, in ways subtle and obscure, adamantine and mercurial.
And I've loved it for myself.
❦
[ A couple of recent selfies, from somewhere on Russian Hill... ]
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