As of 2018, I’ve been blogging for over 14 years now, on and off, picking up platforms and putting them aside. At some point though, the personal blogging fell away. I was writing for the web as part of my work, and my instinct to express myself personally was coopted by social media: commenting and, more often, signalling likes or simple, passive consumption.
But that’s not the web I signed up for. So this site is a return to personal blogging, to making rather than consuming, and to owning content.
I called my first blog Bloodless Coop because I liked wordplay and it spawned ideas I found interesting: that change can happen without violence (I started blogging around the time of the second Iraq war) and that situations we have a firm schema for – a fox around a henhouse – could have different consequences. Is it inevitably farmer versus fox, or is the relationship more rich than simply opposition?
I fleshed that provocation out in the site url*, which is the thing that stayed with me between iterations, the hardy strain that survived, and the name of the blog now and I suspect forever. The legacy versions still sit out there at Blogspot, WordPress and Tumblr.
-
- * It’s interesting how the form of the web allows you to have conversation and contrast between the address of a site and its name. Twitter allows this but facebook deprecates that relationship.