about

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.