If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30. Which will mean that every single day for three decades Dave’s blog will have been stirring things up.
He’s 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 an “outliner”, which computerised the hierarchical lists we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but which were up to then scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but now you find outliners built into almost every kind of software for writing. There’s even one in Microsoft Word, for God’s sake!
In 1983, Winer founded a company, Living Videotext, to develop and commercialise the outlining idea, and six years later sold it to Symantec for enough money to enable him to do his own thing for the rest of his life. One of those things involved playing a leading role in developing RSS (really simple syndication), a tool that allows users to keep track of 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 had become common, someone had the idea that audio files could be attached to them, and Dave implemented the idea with a nice geeky touch – attaching a song by the Grateful Dead. 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 present at the creation of some cool stuff, but it was blogging that brought him to a wider public. “Some people were born to play country music,” he wrote at one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of 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 forthright. His formidable record as a tech innovator meant that he couldn’t be written off as a crank. The fact that he was financially secure meant that 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 web.
Like many of us, he realised that what came to be known as the blogosphere could be a modern realisation of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to all, everything was discussable and social rank didn’t determine who was allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and comprehensiveness that tech corporations such as Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically curated while the speakers were intensively surveilled and their data mined for advertising purposes.
In my experience, most journalists failed to understand the significance of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr Johnson, they thought that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, and so bloggers must be weird. (Which is hard for those of us who happen to be both bloggers and hacks.) But it was mainly because mainstream media was hypnotised – and blind-sided – by the vertiginous rise of social media. Journalists came to assume that the blogosphere must be old hat, a relic of the past, a meeting place for cranks, nerds and ponytailed men wearing 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 well and thriving. In fact it’s where much of the best writing – and thinking – of our era is to 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’s no such thing as information overload: there’s only “filter failure”. And there’s no excuse for ignoring the blogosphere.
What I’ve been reading
Centenary celebrations
Jimmy Carter was 100 this week and James Fallows — who had once been his speechwriter — wrote a generous appraisal of him on his Substack.
Look ma, no hands…
Our Unevenly Distributed Future is a striking blogpost by Allen Pike wondering whether self-driving cars might become mundane.
The truth on monopolies
The Antitrust Revolution: the title of a fine essay in Harper’s by Barry Lynn on democracy’s awakening to the dangers of corporate power.
