Blogs, a lot of them, millions of them, as agents for change

23 October 2025

Elizabeth Spiers, writing at Talking Points Memo:

The lesson for me, from the early blogosphere, is that quality of speech matters, too. There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.

As Spiers says, it might be possible to manipulate the CEOs of large media companies, but doing the same to a million independent publishers, may not be so easy.