It's a little bit safer to say nothing, be nothing. But I posted my way into my first communities, jobs, identities, conflicts. I read a lot of interviews with artists and writers who say they write for themselves. I really can't relate! Writing for me is a bid for connection with the world. I first heard about working in public from the BERG London blog, posts by members of the experimental London-based design studio that would seem almost out of touch in today’s content-scape. Hawking nothing, no polish, not a listicle, not even a point. Just describing work in progress and studio vibes. I still remember a Snarkmarket post articulating what was so special about BERG's weeknotes: they “worked in public, but revealed nothing”. Projects were discussed in codenames. Money was never discussed and neither (to my memory) was any intractable conflict. Another way I've heard it described is "working with the garage door open", but I find the mythologizing reference to silicon valley startup culture a little cringe. Currently I'm most inspired by TILs (an acronym for Today I Learned). These are mostly by programmers as a kind of personal reference posted directly to Github. The best example I’ve seen is from the prolific Simon Willison. TILs are somebody else’s notes-to-self. Reading them gives me the same feeling I get when a friend shares a notes file of their favorite places in a city I’m thinking of visiting. Direct, useful, specific even just to one person. The other working-in-public that I’m most inspired by these days is @RingoHospitality. It’s basically a liveblog (well: a twitter account, multiple handmade websites, a newsletter, other social media that I don’t follow) about re-opening a small hotel under new management, and all the extremely weird details you could never imagine. And (crucially!!) the vibes. (In this case: lobby vibes.) (I'm getting the weirdest feeling that I've written this post before. Maybe even twice. It reminds me of posts apologizing for not blogging. I'm sure I've linked to that Tomorrow Museum post in the past too.) Working in public has felt different at different times in my life. Different now than it did as an art student and in the decade of creative drift that followed. Notes, links, shitposts, juxtapositions were everything and somehow took me everywhere I was trying to go. It feels different now that I’m married. (So much of my day-to-day and even where I see myself in 5 years isn’t mine alone to share — it’s intimate!) It also feels different working inside a big corporation. (I’m caught off guard again-and-again when banal regurgitations of industry knowledge or even universal truths are understood to be trade secrets.) Some places where I’ve fallen down in my own occasional weeknoting (besides my naughty compulsion to overshare) have been: Feeling too emotional about writing: obsessed, embarrassed, indecisive, regretful, anxious, guilty, overwhelmed. (It's a little bit safer to say nothing, be nothing.) And of course nobody cares, but in that case there is also the anti-climax to worry about. When some earthshaking revelation apparently resonates with absolutely zero people on the internet??? Or writing becomes performative. At some point I came close to buying an "I'M BLOGGING THIS" t-shirt. At that point it becomes a little bit like a lens that you can’t stop looking through. How you’ll post it. Some kind of predecessor complex to creator culture. Another problem was always just taking too long. Like that Beckett play where he spends the latter half of his life re-listening to recursive recordings of past decades. Or I think of Robert Caro saying he spent more years writing a biography than were spent living it. That’s ….weird!?! Is that a life well-lived? For autobiography, probably not. So, yeah, there were times where I was really just tapped out on a creative practice but I couldn't stop even though I didn’t really want to go on. A weird creative chore/routine/momentum formation. The whole crux of a quarter life crisis! (Which reminds me: One thing I sorta hate about newsletters is the expectation of a schedule. Unscrew the reverse chronology from its hinges! Unscrew the date fields from the CMSes! I have chronology on here because I’m trying to share something every day to see how that feels, but wikis are actually pretty hard to coerce into a chronology.) The less I post, the smaller my world becomes? ![[IMG_0465.jpeg]]