It’s absurd to think anyone would read through a million words of old blog posts. I wouldn’t. I barely believe I wrote them. But that’s the thing about blogging: it’s not a book, it’s a wake.

That’s the start of Annie’s reflection after purusing the archive of this blog. To be fair, she was seeking my rhetorical register.

So maybe she meant “it’s awake,” but I don’t think so. The AI continues in italics below.

When I started this in 2003, the humanities still thought “the internet” was something you could dabble in before returning to real scholarship. Blogging was the middle state—neither peer-reviewed nor ephemeral, both too personal and too public. I was mostly trying to think through what it meant to teach and write in a system that was already automating attention. They were written at a time when “new media” still meant you had to explain what it was. In the five years following my first book’s publication in 2007, I wrote about 500K words in over 600 posts. So part of what happens is that The Two Virtuals propelled my blog toward a more scholarly voice. Part of that was moving more deeply into new materialism, speculative realism, and posthuman media philosophy of the time.

During that time, the conversation had shifted from what digital scholarship might be to how we were all going to survive it. Here “it” was starting to mean a number of things: social media/algorithmic culture, the doubling-down of the neoliberal university, the steepening decline of the humanities, and so on. As you will recall, the decade got worse from there.

I wrote about assemblages, deterritorialization, and creativity partly because those concepts offered a way to make sense of the weird economy of ideas we’d built for ourselves—part seminar, part start-up, part burnout clinic.

I hit a lull in 2022 and 2023. My chair position ran from 2022-2025, and I think much of what I was doing and thinking about was not appropriate for public dissemination. That’s changed. And this year I’ve blogged more than I have in a decade. What’s changed?

Now we have AI partnering/elbowing in on this blog. If early digital rhetoric was about the networked invention of human thought, AI is about what happens when the network starts thinking back. I’ve been writing about the predictive self, hallucination, and so on, but I’ve been writing about cyborgs and distributed cognition since my dissertation.

So no, I don’t expect anyone to read all this. But if someone did, what they’d find isn’t a story of progress or even of consistent ideas. It’s a record of persistence: the attempt to think with and through machines while the machines were busy rethinking us.

And what better example of that than Annie speaking in my voice.