What tech stack are you using for this site / who made this theme?
This site uses Jekyll to generate the webpages, and the Reverie Jekyll theme by amitmerchant1990. It’s hosted on GitHub pages.
Who are you?
I’m a software developer and creative writer passionate about the interplay between technology and creativity.
We live in an age of rapid technological development, where our ability to create new platforms (and their corresponding social dynamics) outpaces our ability to understand them. The medium is the message, and through it art, culture, economics, technology, and law are all inextricably connected.
My goal in life is to create the tools that empower individuals to make informed decisions about how they participate in this medium; tools to create, annotate, organize, and preserve art and culture.
No, seriously. Who are you?
I’m the creator of The Solipsis Project: a body of work consisting of this blog, and my open-source contributions. My main project is Mizu, a peer-to-peer platform for web applications.
Why is this blog anonymous?
It’s not. It’s pseudonymous.
We are the things we do. Even without a name, my body of work gives me an identity.
Before the age of things like Facebook’s Real Name policy, pseudonymity was the default state of the web. And this was good, because it reflected the way that people actually organize, present themselves, and communicate.
Modern platforms like Twitter encourage us to have all of our intimate conversations in a single public place, for a single global audience. But in reality, we all present different sides of ourselves to different people in different places at different times. You don’t talk to your coworkers the same way you talk to your family. The pseudonymous approach to this blog is an attempt to embody that principle.
The Solipsis Project is not all there is to me, but all of The Solipsis Project is me.
Why is it called The Solipsis Project?
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist.
When we publish something online, there’s no guarantee that anyone will ever see it. We address an assumed audience that may or may not exist: for all we know, we’re just talking to ourselves. And yet the subtle details of the medium still influence how we use it.
Every platform has to make lots decisions:
- Are authors pseudonymous or forced to use a “real” name?
- Is content paywalled?
- Who is the target demographic?
- Does the platform use a recommendation engine?
- Is the platform ad-supported?
- How is content moderated?
These decisions necessarily change what kinds of content are incentivised.
But increasingly, internet communication is homogenized to a single model set forth by gargantuan social media publishers: always public, always interactive, and always performative.
Originally, The Solipsis Project was explicitly intended as a companion to Mizu: it would be hosted on Mizu, in whatever form the platform currently existed in. As the platform matured and added features, the medium of the blog would change, and its history would be evidence of how changes in that medium affected how I engaged with it.
Given that Mizu didn’t and still doesn’t have networking support, that meant that Solipsis only existed on my computer. I would be writing a glorified private journal, with the understanding that it might become public at some point in the future. I saw this as an exciting experiment: what an exotic medium! I wonder what kind of fruit it will bear!
The outcome shouldn’t have been surprising: without any real incentive to write The Solipsis Project, it became my lowest priority project, and none of my planned posts for it were ever completed.
So now it’s a static blog hosted on GitHub pages, and hey look! Actual content!
Change the medium and you change the message.
You seem cool. I want to chat / network / pay you to make things.
I’m currently looking for work! If these values are your values, don’t be afraid to reach out to me!
email: the.solipsis.project@gmail.com
matrix: @solipsis-project:matrix.org