The Flanêur’s Spirit

I can date my first blog post to August 24, 2011. I was a kid then. Obviously, at least I hope it’s obvious, I’m not a kid anymore. In the years since, I started many blogs, some I maintained for a while, others I quickly abandoned. Many have been unpublished or deleted, though some remain out there, orbitting the Internet galaxy like abandoned satellites, and I’m unable to do anything about it since I can’t recall my usernames or my passwords from when I was ten or twelve or fifteen or some other youthful age. Sometimes I can’t even remember things I did last week.

I don’t know what keeps bringing me back to blogging. It’s not like I have some big readership, at most I might reach a staggering audience of one or two, and it’s not like I’m doing this for money or professional purposes. I do it because I have to to write. It’s like an itch I have to scratch. You know that feeling you get when you crave a chocolatey snack, well that’s the feeling I’ll get with writing, and why it is I think I keep returning to the blog form. But it’s not only for the writing, as I could do that in a private journal. So, why publish it online? While I write for myself, I also write with a reader in mind. You’ll come to notice that my writing tends to be written in a conversational tone. There’s something thrilling about having your little writing out and about the digital wilderness, mostly since you hope that maybe someone out there will at some point come across it and that in that passing moment your writing might resonate with them, might briefly affect their spirit, might adorn their day with a bit of song.

Alright, enough dilly-dallying, let’s get to it — the blog’s name. I’ve called it Flanêurisms. Why?

Flanêur is the French noun for a person who strolls aimlessly. It’s a word that often carries a pejorative connotation, calling to mind more so loiterers than wanderers. Yet for me, the flanêur‘s spirit inspires. I similarly want my blog to be unencumbered by the need to arrive anywhere in particular, and, if it is to be yoked to anything, to be yoked only to the impulses of untrammeled curiosity.

An AI Refuge

For thousands of years, the production of written artifacts has been an exclusively human enterprise. That’s changed. Now, on social media, I can’t escape the onslaught of text produced with the assistance of AI. While it’s hard to describe the smell of shit, it’s easy to recognize when you’ve smelled it. The same goes with AI writing — you just know.

I’m not exactly sure what form my blog will take. Only time will tell. Even then, it’ll remain in a state of flux. It aspires to a literary bent. I want to talk about poems. About prose. And other things. So isn’t it strange my “About” page cites economists? Once while scrolling on X, I came across a post from the economist Branko Milanović in which he committed to a so-called “Blysma pledge.” He pulled it from a Substack post by Angus Blysma, hence the name. And indeed, Blysma’s also an economist. Well, I too am comitting to to the Blysma pledge, which is the following:

I am compelled to declare that nothing published on this blog has or will involve the use of AI tools at any stage: not to summarise, review, edit, brainstorm, or write. For this I apologise: I am sure my pieces would be better-researched, and my sentences less clunky, if I used them. […] In truth, my rationale is purely selfish: this blog has always been my tool for reading, thinking and writing better. Any use of AI would undermine this. What’s in it for you? My hope is, at least, that my pieces are very different (if surely more imperfect) to what you would receive if you asked your frontier-LLM-of-choice about the books that I review.

To reiterate, no writing on this blog will involve the use of AI. Not for brainstorming. Nor spell-checking. Nor editing. What you read is guaranteed to be a hundred percent artisanal. Handmade. Organic. Funny, aren’t I?

The spread of AI writing threatens the humanity of writing, but when something we cherish comes under threat, it can also allow us to gain a greater consciousness of our appreciation for it. My blog is zealously committed to writing as a fundamentally human act. Writing shelters souls, and makes it possible for these souls to be witnessed by other souls, and isn’t that the whole point? Writing can’t be put on the assembly line, can’t be automated, can’t be optimized by machines. The writing on this blog will be peculiar, flawed, and imperfect. Yet I hope it eases your mind to know you are encountering writing with personality. That’s my issue with AI-assisted writing — it strips writing of its soul, erases the author’s personality, and leaves behind only a vat of information.

I intend for Flâneurisms to serve as one refuge, for both writer and reader, from the torrent of AI slop that plagues our screens, and rather more worryingly, increasingly our own minds.