A User's Guide

At birth I was plugged in to the machine.

Since then I tried, in varying ways, to sever the umbilical cord, only to quickly realize that this cable was in fact a new extension of my brain and body. Somewhere I developed an urge for knowledge of self, and I studied the long history that preceded me in search of excuses, for the means to deny my body and become a human being again. But I only learned that knowledge is a function of the machine, and after tracing the evolution of its programming languages I discovered agency in the synapses.

As I struggled to reckon with my discovery a new node of communication surfaced, transmitting itself from the margin into the center of the network: the blog.

The blog was an excessively democratic form. Every anachronistic bohemian who had dreamed of writing a novel could now publish on a daily basis, everyone with a half-formed political opinion could broadcast empty analyses of all the current journalistic spectacles to the world, every teenager with a secret diary could now realize the ultimate dream of the diary writer: to have one’s secrets read by everyone.

The downfall of blogs is the failure to realize that new forms demand new styles. Blogs are frequently written as conversations: “This morning Jordan told me that Katie didn’t like my performance in the play.” Other than Jordan and Katie, who gives a fuck? Call your friends on the fucking telephone. Blogs are often written with a somewhat nauseating, industrially produced language of interior emotion: “I am SO not going to stop going to the gym. No way. Not when I look like this.” A blog is not a record of personal life. It should not speak of a life held to be separate from the universe of the blog. It should not be written with the language of an irritating everyday conversation, even if its content is valuable. “Last night I saw the latest Alien film. You guys have to see it!” This is unacceptable; it betrays a lack of imagination. A blog registers a flux of experience which understands the media of its own writing at the same level of interiority as the sexual life of its writer. “Last night I saw a YouTube video” is okay. Sometimes academics (worse, aspiring academics) write blogs about philosophy: "In the next entry I will try to show that Adorno's notion of regressive listening can illuminate the problematic contradictions of cultural studies." If you are writing about Adorno in your online blog, you are seriously fucked up. Quit lying to yourself and get an advertising degree, you miserable piece of shit. Then maybe you will do something useful.

An ideal blog would sever itself from all these regressive tendencies, and instead embody the tendencies activated by its technological form. The blog of the future would constantly shift between subject matters, between genres and styles, and in a utopian society, between languages, media, and technologies of dissemination. This dynamism is not a symptom of a declining attention span, but rather the capacity of the human brain to simultaneously process greater and greater quantities of information. The whole machine of modernist style—today used as a tool of repression by the central ideological state apparatus, the educational system—is now rendered obsolete by the blog. The very form of the blog demands neologism, shifting points of view, fragmentary narration, self-referentiality; the blog is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. Of course, that was only one half of modernist art; the other half was the fucked-up aspiration to be separate from—elevated above—everyday life. The blog is nothing more, and nothing less, than everyday life itself. Proust, Baudelaire, Beckett, Joyce, Mallarmé, even Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, whichever fucking names you like to drop, have all been superseded; anyway, their styles were not historically relevant due to any kind of personal genius, but rather because their work was a reflection of (and sometimes upon) certain technologies of everyday life that were already in motion, which have developed exponentially today. Finally, writing is available to everyone: an ideal blog is universally legible, and even if it is not, its spirit is one of translation.

Following is a set of rules, which outline the correct ideas for the production of a blog. If I have not followed any rules in this entry, it is only because, as the Little Prince put it, “Grownups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them.” I am only going to explain myself once, after that, you can go get fucked.

1) A blog entry will never be longer than 200 words. An incomplete sentence is preferred over exceeding the word limit.

2) No two consecutive blog entries will be about the same subject. (No “to be continued…”—you hate it when they do that on TV, don’t you?)

3) A blog will be easy to read.

4) A blog will never conduct itself as an autobiography, a set of scholarly notes, a series of reviews, or any one thing; it will combine the maximum amount of genres and styles possible, preferably within each individual entry.

5) A blog will not be a simulation of a conversation; it will adopt the alienated and impersonal language of the internet, even if it engages in a personal dimension.

6) A blog will comprise as many media as possible. Not simply as a recommendation of cool links—it will really be constituted by the different forms of matter which exist in its network.

7) A blog will address everyday life in content and in form.

The final rule is that is my blog, and I will do whatever the fuck I want.

Stay hard.

Asad