Is blogging "retro" yet?

I’ve been away awhile. 

I made a brief attempt in fall of 2022 to return to blogging, and did finally set up my new personal site (3sxp.com). But – some things happened.

In brief:

• I had two young children, and family life consumed every scrap of attention I could spare and several more on top. 10/10, would do (and probably will do [the consuming attention part]) again. One of the strengths of the internet is its ability to, to some extent, transcend time as well as space.
• I got covid in fall of 2023 at last, and that led to a year-ish long journey culminating in a genetic connective tissue disorder diagnosis. I will have much to say about this.
• I found myself working for a company that is in the news every day, working on a technology that’s turned out to be a lynchpin in the fourth industrial revolution. This takes up a lot of mental space.
• I’m… not totally sure how this all works anymore? This “internet” thing? It’s where I grew up, but it feels like watching the Shire turn into Mordor lately.

But! We moved to Seattle! And this actually fixed a remarkable number of things. Or maybe the germinating seeds we planted long before this started to flower, and this was the most visible contributor in the complex system, the mushroom that popped above the surface. Anyway, Seattle’s great.

There are things I’ve wanted to talk about, and they’re tipping over into things I need to talk about. In one of my last good bursts of thinking I put together this talk called “The Middle Information Age” and delivered it as a keynote at the Georgia Game Developers Conference. I tend to link to the slides and not the video of the talk because I don’t think I delivered it very well, but I’ll certainly keep crediting the conference for giving me the space! And then in 2023 – before I got covid – the infinitely patient doctors Celia Hodent and Rachel Kowert helped me create “Games that Let Go: Thriving in a Decentralized Future” for their new ACM journal. I am deeply appreciative to all three of these folks (Celia, Rachel, and Andrew Greenberg) for spurring me to advance this work. And recently I’ve been invited to give a keynote at Something Digital (in Australia 😱) where I’ve been given permission to advance it again.

In brief: I think that The Fourth Industrial Revolution describes a theory for why we are currently in a period of massive global social upheaval. But I’m an applied researcher and engineer at heart; I’m interested in building solutions. Domains include decentralization (and its attendant discovery, understanding, sensemaking, and trust challenges), fixing social media, disinformation (specifically power dynamics in, defining truth, fair prioritization of truth, communicating with nuance), creating environments where creators can thrive, and climate change survival (for humans and the most biodiversity we can preserve). No big deal, eh?

I’m pathologically drawn to big ambiguities, and here lie some big ones. So I want a space where I can think through these issues, where we can:

1. Frame the problem
2. Inhabit the problem
3. Hypothesize solutions
4. Test solutions
5. Socialize findings

If that interests you, I would love it if you would like to follow along. I’ve spent way too much time ruminating over distribution channels. I’m just going to blast on all of them and we’ll see what happens. The central source for my posts will always be 3sxp.com, which I’ll then signal boost through Ghost (like Substack, but without the platforming Nazis thing), Mastodon, BlueSky, and the various hellscapes.

Because I am a whole human and this is my house, I’ll also post about my complex disease journey, my ongoing grief process for the loss of my dad in 2022, Shin Buddhism, the gender agenda, our new puppy, fantasy and science fiction, AI 😬, and whatever else comes to mind. I will try to tag appropriately so you can tune into the channels you want and not the ones you don’t want.

If there are particular topics you’d like me to write about, I’d love to hear about them.

I don’t know the way through this new age of the internet. This will not be incisive investigative journalism, though I’ll try to be as helpful as I can. It will be working and thinking in the open. It will be not-silence. It’ll be a blog.

If you want the main line, subscribe on Ghost! Although I’m keeping my Squarespace site for now, I’m probably being old-fashioned and suspicious; it doesn’t seem to manage subscribers very well. (I have a handful of subscribers there despite telling basically no one about the site, but I didn’t know I had them until I dug through the interface to check just now.) 3sxp.com will probably point to the Ghost site as soon as I get more comfortable with it.

I’m back. I think. Consider yourself warned. :)