Still thinking about Permacomputing, and how I was going to write a big thing and made a thread of posts (can we all agree that calling it a "toot" is bad) here instead that took all that momentum.
@hayley I liked it. The whole point of reading argumentative texts like that is to push on one's own beliefs and either strengthen them or change them, and your piece did that for me.
I agree that writing is a big thing is overrated, but for somebody whose identity is all bound up in being "a writer" but who struggles to put words together, sometimes I get in my own head about it.
@hayley In one of my former lives I've had print features run in alt-weekly newspapers. That was before things were like this (*waves around at world and Internet*) and the response was still almost always awful. Shit happens.
It's fine to change your mind, but the writing is where the thinking happens for me, so there's always some value in it even if I hate it after the fact (which I usually do).
@kl you've "spectacled" yourself, it's a problem with social networks sapping energy for actually doing things. That's probably why it's such an efficient tool of control.
@kl "can we all agree that calling it a 'toot' is bad" absolutely not
This is The Twitter Problem in a nutshell: you throw something short and exploratory on social media, comb through responses, shape your thinking that way, and it's exactly like if you wrote the essay--or, usually, you get even more discussion and feedback. It feels like you've done the thing, even though you've just talked about the thing. This is a big reason Twitter is so toxic politically: tweeting *feels* like you've actually done something, but all you really did is post.