Technology – at its most essential – allows us do more with less ; which is precisely why writing,[i](#footnote_0_34121 “What’s “writing”? MP in 2014 probably said it best: writing is as much art as painting, and beauty emerges from the written page as well as from the painted toille, and more importantly, perhaps most importantly, the page to be written, the yet blank page has a resistence all of its own. This has nothing at all to do with the friction of pen on paper and nothing at all to do with the soft coils of the keys in the keyboard. It has everything to do with the power of empty space to resist meaning much in the way the vacuum between the stars resists heating. “) blogging,[ii](#footnote_1_34121 “What’s a “blogging”? My own answer from 2014 seems to up fairly well: Blogging is …
Technology – at its most essential – allows us do more with less ; which is precisely why writing,[i](#footnote_0_34121 “What’s “writing”? MP in 2014 probably said it best: writing is as much art as painting, and beauty emerges from the written page as well as from the painted toille, and more importantly, perhaps most importantly, the page to be written, the yet blank page has a resistence all of its own. This has nothing at all to do with the friction of pen on paper and nothing at all to do with the soft coils of the keys in the keyboard. It has everything to do with the power of empty space to resist meaning much in the way the vacuum between the stars resists heating. “) blogging,[ii](#footnote_1_34121 “What’s a “blogging”? My own answer from 2014 seems to up fairly well: Blogging is a platform for growth; at once public and permanent. It’s a space that one fills with one’s ever-evolving self. It’s a space designed quite specifically for that ever-evolution.
A blog, then, is a space filled with one’s portent of possible portmanteaus, sack of silly syllogisms, assemblage of astute anecdotes, panoply of philtered phrases, wealth of wicked whelps, tent of tangential tirades, and basket of bumbling brainfarts. Blogging is that enlightened glimpse into another person’s world, and occasionally, a glimpse into another dimension entirely.
This is what design is all about. This is what life is all about.
This is blogging: that finder of boundaries. “) journaling, or whatever you want to call the Straussian scribbling is one of the greatest gifts Young Pete could ever give his future self. Socrates and his indeterminate pessimism be damned.[iii](#footnote_2_34121 “Socrates would go in the Plato-Aristotle quadrant obviously, via Peter Thiel’s 2013 SXSW lecture:
“)
Some 20 years ago, when this project unwittingly began on the scattered pages of blank notebooks, the object was simply to still my sizzling, swirling, post-graduate consciousness as it wrestled with its earliest autodidactic liberal arts curriculum, itself enacted to stave off leg-gnawing boredom during my “patent office” years working for government. And it worked. So I kept it up. Pretty consistently too.iv
And I’m not stopping now. There’s still more work to do and I’ve not yet perfected my blade (nor am I persuaded that such completion is possible in this life). Even in the K-shaped future that’s revealing itself before our very eyes – wherein net-zero spin-cycles tether untermenschen to terra firma while untethered übermenschen liberate their consciousnesses with christic rockets of hyper-production towards tyrannical freedom – there’s still value to doodling on these algorithmically-demoted margins of the internet.
But why? Well Timmy, I’m glad you asked, because writing is the encoded practise of sustained clear thought, which, per Samo,[v](#footnote_4_34121 “
https://twitter.com/SamoBurja/status/1980468314506998116
“) is what drives basically all technological and scientific progress – indeed the only kind of progress that can properly be said to exist. It also, incidentally, and in no way diminishingly so, drives the growth of the writer-thinker himself: inevitably forcing him to test his theses, strengthen his convictions, and forge the blade of his mind into ever-sharper exactitude, one hammer blow at a time.
So it is that those of us so capable – or otherwise selected – must continue to hammer together disparate strands and seemingly uncorrelated threads, forging a synthesis of the world as we see it in that moment.[vi](#footnote_5_34121 “Just ask Goethe: Briefe gehören unter die wichtigsten Denkmäler, die der einzelne Mensch hinterlassen kann.
Letters belong among the most important monuments an individual can leave behind. “) Etching it in stone. Freezing it in ember. Artistically, and hopefully not too autistically, engineering words into thoughts, and back again.[vii](#footnote_6_34121 “Like entrepreneurship, and really most things, this practise is not “science” but rather kunst. Perhaps what makes “science” science is the empiricism of it, but stylistically I think it’s actually more productive to think of most creative works as “art.”
Don’t take my word for it either, just ask Dr. K:
https://youtu.be/FNrOWWSbz3A?si=ZbtQNlBsw7OEOC7E&t=302
“) Because indeed engineering is very much possible with language. If we take the kabbalist’s perspective, words are in fact the underlying fabric of reality, and of sacredness itself.
Words therefore have the capacity to be the ad astric ascendancy of the up-and-to-the-right renaissance: the positive-slope of the upper-right portion of the letter K. We might not have much time left, but we have the technology ; we have the words.
- What’s “writing”? MP in 2014 probably said it best:
writing is as much art as painting, and beauty emerges from the written page as well as from the painted toille, and more importantly, perhaps most importantly, the page to be written, the yet blank page has a resistence all of its own. This has nothing at all to do with the friction of pen on paper and nothing at all to do with the soft coils of the keys in the keyboard. It has everything to do with the power of empty space to resist meaning much in the way the vacuum between the stars resists heating.
- What’s a “blogging”? My own answer from 2014 seems to up fairly well:
Blogging is a platform for growth; at once public and permanent. It’s a space that one fills with one’s ever-evolving self. It’s a space designed quite specifically for that ever-evolution.
A blog, then, is a space filled with one’s portent of possible portmanteaus, sack of silly syllogisms, assemblage of astute anecdotes, panoply of philtered phrases, wealth of wicked whelps, tent of tangential tirades, and basket of bumbling brainfarts. Blogging is that enlightened glimpse into another person’s world, and occasionally, a glimpse into another dimension entirely.
This is what design is all about. This is what life is all about.
This is blogging: that finder of boundaries.
- Socrates would go in the Plato-Aristotle quadrant obviously, via Peter Thiel’s 2013 SXSW lecture:
- At least one published article on these pages per week for the last 11 years straight? Not too shabby. ↩
Here is a key secret in the Thielian sense for 2025:
Sustained clear thought is what drives technological and scientific progress.
— Samo Burja (@SamoBurja) October 21, 2025
- Just ask Goethe:
Briefe gehören unter die wichtigsten Denkmäler, die der einzelne Mensch hinterlassen kann.
Letters belong among the most important monuments an individual can leave behind.
- Like entrepreneurship, and really most things, this practise is not “science” but rather kunst. Perhaps what makes “science” science is the empiricism of it, but stylistically I think it’s actually more productive to think of most creative works as “art.”
Don’t take my word for it either, just ask Dr. K: