Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/18/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback
1/
@pluralistic I suddenly feel the urge to re-watch the prisoner... 🤣
@pluralistic rotfl that illustration image. 6 years, i see what you're doing there.
@aj @stf @pluralistic That's not a man that's Rover
@pluralistic POV you are a tee.
@n8chz It's one of those jokes that made me laugh enough that I ran with it, even though it's totally obscure. That's "Number 6" from The Prisoner, with my face matted on.
@n8chz It's one of those jokes that made me laugh enough that I ran with it, even though it's totally obscure. That's "Number 6" from The Prisoner, with my face matted on.
The link didn't work for some reason, perhaps this will https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/
@valehippi Fixed, thanks!
I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn't writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in *some* fashion.
Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am *so* satisfied with how Pluralistic is going.
2/
I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a *massive* database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I'm now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I've thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this "The Memex Method":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
3/
"Memex Method" is also the title of an essay collection (from this blog) I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but it keeps getting bumped because of *other* books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's *Enshittification*. I'm now fully *two* books ahead of myself, with *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI* coming in June, and *The Post-American Internet* in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection).
4/
Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.
Blogging is - and always has been - a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.
5/
@pluralistic "it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take": It sounds kinda like "basic research," and exemplifies why that's worthwhile.
One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history - 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).
6/
The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.
7/
