I write here about security, mathematics, and, sometimes, whatever happens to be on my mind.
People say that writing somewhere that offers no feedback is like talking to a wall in solitary confinement. Maybe that’s true for some people—for those who aren’t allowed to leave comments, perhaps they really are no different from a wall! As if you have to be able to talk back to someone in order not to be a wall yourself.
Others say that writing in a space where dialogue is no longer possible reveals the writer’s selfishness. Maybe that’s true of some people, too. Apparently, even if people voluntarily choose to listen to someone speaking one way, it is still the speaker who’s a dictator!
But there’s no need for everyone to set up a miniature democracy in every corner they occupy. If they don’t, we’re not going back to the days of Mao. Nor does freedom of expression have to be secured through instant chat. Some of the boldest criticisms exchanged among twentieth-century intellectuals took the form of essays: days could pass between the publication of an original text and a response, sometimes printed in another city altogether. Yet people followed those exchanges, and the back-and-forth itself became thought. We don’t even have that now.
Nor should we see progress as dependent on online arguments, as though every time a discussion is shut down somewhere, a stone is thrown into the gears of progress. Let’s not kid ourselves. From Facebook’s early days, when serious dialogue between opposing viewpoints began to take root, to the present day, what truly significant contribution have we made to the kind of progress we so often talk about? Those who were angry back then are still angry, and those who argued for fun are still doing it, still having fun. We should stop assigning an illusory value to the time we’ve all wasted—and continue to waste—on these arguments.
Has online interaction had effects on many of us that we ourselves consider positive? Of course it has. But we shouldn’t exaggerate its scale. Besides, a person’s private journey can be almost entirely disconnected from the course of society. Since 2019, I’ve personally rolled over and changed direction seventy times. How many times has society?
So even if a hundred more people like me leave these spaces, retreat into solitude, and so on, two things will not happen at once: the millions who use social media for entertainment won’t even notice we’re gone, and the slow train of idea-making won’t slow down—because it never even left the station.
So please, Don’t mourn the death of something that was never truly alive. There’s no reason to be disheartened by the fading of ideological conversations that resemble a nightclub on social media. What should dishearten us is the absence of thought and ideas. If there’s a little less noise in the desert, it hardly matters. It’s still a desert, and there’s still no water.
We have active minds, and we express opinions, talk, write, and react to keep them active. We also follow what other people are thinking so that, even if we don’t get ahead, at least we don’t fall behind. All of this is natural, and it will continue to be. That is especially true in the one-voiced, centralized, totalitarian environment of our country, where an opposing opinion stops being merely an opinion and becomes a banner of identity. We need plenty of those banners.
But activity is not the same as progress. Take technical debt in software development. We have spent decades discussing bad architecture, fragile code, and the long-term cost of postponing fixes. The problem is well understood, the warnings have been repeated countless times, and the solutions are hardly a secret. Yet when it comes to actually changing the way we work, we remain remarkably incapable of acting on what we already know. We can diagnose the problem endlessly; what we struggle to do is fix it.
Our minds are active, and we try to keep them that way. We follow the activity of other minds, too, in case we can’t get ahead, at least so we don’t fall behind. We shouldn’t attribute anything more than that to all this content—including my own writing.