Wandering the wide worth with Fuss this morning I realized the blogger kerfuffle in the previous post flies in the face of my own love of the real and suspicion of our Inevitable Distributed Network Future. I think of this blog as a couple of things it isn't- real, and mine. Just because I've been working on it for however many years, and it hadn't, up until yesterday, denied me access or lost any of my writing. But as demonstrated, it is neither- or rather, both states depend on variables far outside my control.
Maybe that's the skeleton to hang my real/distributed tirade on- personal control. A book I have quite a bit of personal control over, a record ditto. Things can happen to them, or to me, but I have direct input and responsibility. This blog, I don't really have any control over. I guess I can make local backups and whatever, write in a word processor and upload...but the computer is only marginally more 'real' than the worldwide hive-mind it connects with.
If I were a true revolutionary, I'd compose all this stuff longhand in a journal and type it in directly. Or at least as much of it as possible- there's a whole range of posts that'd be pointless minus the 'internet language' this format allows me to dabble in.
What's most likely is that I'll keep doing what I've been doing because it's just much more convenient, which is probably the same reason other people keep leasing music from Apple or leasing books from Amazon. It's made to be easy, and set up so you mostly won't notice its intangibility unless/until something big goes down.
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