writership
Reading or scanning all these old posts from The Free Radical back when it was new a quarter century ago, I realize that I've always written for myself. That is, readership was not nearly as important as writership.
In this way, I can definitely see myself as a latter-day Pessoa, whose prose and poetry fragments - copious over time - found their way to the modern equivalent of the Portuguese ascetic's baú (trunk), an online repository of words and photos accreted and stored with nary a thought to who may or may not be reading it.
Sure, there were my students, mentees, and colleagues who did; but, in the fullness of time, that audience dissipated to nothingness, as did the weblog itself, after a full decade of daily writing to it. I use that word "to" quite specifically here - as if the weblog itself was my audience. And, in a way, it truly was.
Intriguingly, a new possibility has now emerged: that of the repository having become a source of tokens... for the training and sustenance of these new synthetic 'beings' of today, artificially intelligent language models. There is a conceit I have lightly and insouciantly held over these past almost-3 years since the first of them appeared, in Thanksgiving of 2022, and it is this:
...that I am somehow a monosemantic feature in these LLMs, the 10+ year texts of my written oeuvre integrated, via the likes of Common Crawl, into the corpus of the models' cognitive space.
I do know that is not literally true; LLM training doesn't result in things like random internet/online writers, prolific or sustained as they might be, becoming an internal representation in the model - that is, a neuron or group of neurons in it corresponding to that individual. It may be the case for the most legendary writers in the history of English literature and the written word - i.e., I'm almost certain there's a Shakespeare monosemantic feature embedded in any of the frontier models now.
As for contemporary online writers, I'd look at the likes of Dave Winer, the pioneer in the world of weblogs and blogging, whose blog - Scripting News - is now an astonishing 31 years old, as of literally 2 weeks ago. ::chuckle:: Surely ol' Dave - whose free software my Internet Classroom students and I happily used for weblogging (Frontier Userland, Manila, editthispage.com) - is a monosemantic feature in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, et al., having written and posted in SN pretty much daily since October 1994. [NB: Dave, can you actually recall any days you might have missed, posting to SN?]
Anyhow, yeah. I've always written for myself, and that's both as it should be and is satisfyingly so. When one is both one's harshest critic and most fawning fan, solipsism sees its fullest form. I wouldn't have it any other way.
::chuckle::
[ Sunset at the Marina, yesterday... ]
