The Music Of The Spheres
The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is a philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of music. The theory, originating in ancient Greece, was a tenet of Pythagoreanism, and was later developed by 16th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler did not believe this “music” to be audible, but felt that it could nevertheless be heard by the soul. The idea continued to appeal to scholars until the end of the Renaissance, influencing many schools of thought, including humanism.
I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era. And what has emerged to take its place is not the blogosphere (and really shouldn’t try to be), even though parts of it have tried to claim the word.
It’s a thing, I suppose, that we humans do: when an era for us ends surely it must be the end of an era writ large.
That Rao laments the end of the blogosphere when he’s been blogging for 17 years tells you one thing that long ago should have been obvious: there’s never been a blogosphere. The one he remembers and was a part of isn’t the one I remember and was a part of before 2007. Blogospheres pop in and out of existence like particles from the quantum vacuum, fusing and splitting, crossing paths and diverging.
Rao’s blogosphere existed during the rise of social media predominately through Twitter, whereas the precursor one didn’t have any such global, shared, water-cooler landscape. We didn’t have Twitter. We just had Technorati. Blogs themselves were the social network.
Then, the rise of centralized social media platforms came with declarations of the end of the blogosphere. Now, with the apparent or at least potential demise of those centralized social media platforms and a resurgence of interest not just in blogging but in creating new systems for it, it seems like a very peculiar time indeed to declare the end of the blogosphere yet again.
My blogosphere was one of personal journaling, internet activism, and writing yourself through the alien landscape we found ourselves in on 9/11. Rao’s apparently was one of… shitposts? (It’s a word he uses five times when describing the blogosphere he says is dead.)
Rao:
I quit actively posting on Twitter when Musk took over. Not directly related to the ribbonfarm story, but a key adjacent subplot. In the moment, it felt like a tactical reaction to the (political and cultural) writing that was clearly on the wall, and I’m glad I quit when I did. But in hindsight, the Muskening was not an independent story. It was just another chapter in the larger story of the rise and fall of the blogosphere and public social media.
This is important because it underscores what I said above: his blogosphere was one that existed in tandem with and in a symbiotic or sometimes parasitic relationship with social media. The original blogosphere did not. It only ever had itself.
None of this is to say that blogging hasn’t changed, isn’t changing now. Of course it has, and of course it is. This idea, though, that because the blogging you knew appears to have faded, that surely if you’ve decided to call it quits, the thing itself must not exist anymore, not really?
Madness.
It’s true that blogs as they are encountering themselves and each other today aren’t really driving the political or cultural discourse, but so what?
So what?
So fucking what?
Even if you agree that any sense of blogosphere so named and considered, or any particular instance of such, is gone, blogging itself quite obviously isn’t—and yes: it really is enjoying a resurgence. I’ve wondered in the past if the problem for the blogging doomsayers is that there’s a kind of elitism at work. I only can assume that what some bloggers often call their “wordvomits” simply don’t count to those who decree the comings and goings of spheres.
For many OG bloggers, be they still at it or not, and for many or most newfangled ones, some sort of cultural primacy wasn’t then and isn’t now the aim, nor is the aim to reach the weirdly nonsensical goal of virality. The goal that’s been the same, the goal that has been here all along whatever blogging airs the intelligentsia or the blognoscenti were putting on, is the simple act of proclaiming one’s existence, one’s presence, one’s matteringness. Blogs never died, and they are the great empathy engine of the web.
I am here. So are you. The music of the blogospheres resonated before you, it resonates still, and it will resonate after you.