Writing Into the Void

Previously published elsewhere 7/13/08

What is writing all about if you have no readers? To blog but receive no visitors, no comments? Well, it did not seem to matter to Kafka, who was not published until after his death, if I have my facts straight. No, something about writing is not necessarily about readers. Would you write and throw each piece in the fire as you finished it? Not personally, but I've heard of it happening.  

I write because I like to write. I write because it organizes my mind. I write because doing so I can avoid taking out the garbage. I write so I can stay up way past my bedtime and feel like I've accomplished something. I am not part of the blogosphere. I'm like the person on Facebook with one friend. I do not debate the issues of the day. I do not advance engage other authors. My work is not subjected to statistical analysis along with another million people to divine the true mood of whatever. The true mood of people with lots of time on their hands.  

It's not quite as bad as if the NSA could transcribe the telephone conversations of the entire country and then feed them through some unimaginably powerful computer filter. What would they have? Gossip? Banality? Garbage? I suspect so.  

People have always talked, well, for 60,000 years or so. Thank God we do not have a transcription of every conversation. Can you imagine the size of God's memory assuming God exists and knows everything? Pretty boring, I'd think. A decent mathematician could estimate the size of God's memory in, say, bits given a few assumptions about how many people and how many words per day. But who knows, maybe the first humans were like Trappist Monks, silent unless it was absolutely necessary to talk. I doubt it. I doubt it because flattery does not come in a condensed version. And flattery, or the attempt to curry favor with a more powerful person, is as old as the race. So my bet is everyone was jabbering along unless enemies were near, in which case you had to be quiet.  

So what we have now is a world full of people with time on their hands who talk with their fingers and whose output is dutifully recorded on magnetic media because storage grows exponentially. Or something like that. Will any of it make a difference? Will some social scientist working for Google make a brilliant discovery by sifting through a pile of data just slightly smaller than infinity? I doubt it. The signal to noise ratio is really, really bad. And consider spam. I read that spam takes up a frightening percentage of internet bandwidth. Google is not all that good at filtering out African "you just got a fortune" scams. So maybe he concludes it's all a scam, the whole internet. Doubtful. People have been getting radio signals through incredible amounts of random noise for a hundred years. But do the collective opinions of bloggers amount to anything? Beats me.  

It is fairly clear that the best University educations do not produce the wisest legislators or administrators or anything else connected with functioning government. You could argue that the best educations create the smartest, most successful criminal class and stand a prayer of defending the argument. So do the collective opinions of slackers with keyboards stack up any better? I doubt that too. Oxford and Cambridge have educated England's elite for hundreds of years. What effect did that have on colonialism? Well, I suppose it could have been worse. But that good old "we're better than you are, so you should listen to us," has been repudiated throughout the past century. Iraq was an inherently unstable British invention created in the aftermath of World War I. It took a generous amount of ruthlessness to keep it glued together. And we went for it. It is not the lack of the right answer that screws thing up so badly. Experts were describing the politics of southeast Asia in 1960, quite accurately it turns out. Describing the consequences long before we got really serious about Vietnam. Debunking the Great Communist Conspiracy. Warning against picking sides in a civil war. Of picking up after the French got their asses kicked out. No, we went for it anyway and 60,000 young people of my generation were killed. Plenty of experts knew how to do things more effectively reconstructing Iraq. Did the Administration listen? No. They sent inexperienced people in to manage things after the war with only "Republican" as a qualification. How can any sane, educated person do that?  

So what effect will the blogosphere have? Well, it seems to be good at raising money. Perhaps it will be good at kicking the current bastards out. So why do I write when no one is listening? Why not? What difference does it make? And why do you care anyway? Perhaps I'm just another yahoo with a keyboard, the only thing saving me from contributing to the general blogospheric mess is that no one is listening. The future gets to decide. The future beyond our imaginations.