Ouzo, Snow, and the Internet That Still Meant Something

My personal lawyer Sonja and I were somewhere in Berlin past midnight, a bottle of ouzo between us and cheeseburgers in hand, when the first snow started coming down. One of those nights where you can feel the city changing temperature around you—the sky going that particular yellow-grey that means everything is about to turn soft and white and quiet. And for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about blogs.

Nothing on the internet is made with as much raw personality as a weblog. Not a social profile, not a newsletter, not whatever platform is currently eating everyone’s attention. A blog is someone refusing to optimize—writing about love and sex and the search for a parking spot because they want to, because it’s theirs, because the alternative is silence. At their best they work like those letters you find tucked inside secondhand books: addressed to no one in particular, surprisingly intimate, proof that someone was alive and paying attention.

This journal has been running long enough that I’ve watched good bloggers arrive and disappear. Some burned out. Some moved on. The web got louder and faster and started rewarding different things, and a lot of the weird creative energy that made the early internet genuinely strange got slowly optimized into something blander. But not all of it. The people worth reading are still out there, building something that belongs to them.

The snow was heavier by the time Sonja and I called it a night. I had the ouzo warmth in my chest and the city going still around me, and all I could think was: the internet should have more of this. The weird, uncommissioned, unoptimized, slightly drunk kind.