After a year and a half, give or take, it’s finally here.
A year and one day ago I published “Is the internet dead? Are we?” as one of the first real posts on this blog. In the year or so of intervening time I’ve been refining and reworking that idea into a real argument, with some evidence to boot. That creation is now officially done, and it has been for a little while now. I just today received my confirmation of graduation from the University of Calgary, so I felt it was good timing to put something together, and share the final document.
You can access it here, in the U of C’s archives.
I have a lot of feelings about this project, and I don’t think I can really capture them all here, in part due to a lack of skill, but also a lack of perspective. Some of these feelings haven’t appeared yet, I know this will feel a lot different in a year or so from now. At the moment though, I do feel very proud of this project, and very proud to have made something as big but as cohesive, and moreover meaningful as this. I do genuinely believe I’ve put to paper an actual meaningful account of, at least in part, why the internet is the way it is now. I’m very proud of the theoretical perspective I’ve assembled here, I think it is very structural and powerfully explanatory, but also just arcane and weird enough to satisfy that part of me that loves Fisher and Borges and Gibson.
I’ve also felt some rather odd imposter syndrome like feelings surrounding it, the persistent fear that someone will say, well this is all wrong, or this isn’t really that much of a statement. Those things might even be true, but at the same time, I labored over this thing for more than a year, and the people who signed off on it were very smart and trustworthy, I think at least. And at the end of the day, where’s your thesis pal? If you do have one then well fair play, you win.
If you do read it, thank you it means a lot. I put a lot of myself into it, and its interesting to see those parts of myself in it as I read it back. A big goal for 2025 for me is to self-publish this thing as a book, my own little pirate press with me and my friends, so keep your eyes and ears peeled for that development. Anyways, thanks for reading this far, its been a pleasure.