More than twenty years ago, I tried to become a blogger.
It was around the year 2000, when the word “blog” still sounded experimental and slightly futuristic. I did not fully understand what it meant. I only knew that I wanted to write, and that somehow I wanted my words to exist beyond my room.
There was one small problem. We did not have internet at home.
Or rather, we used to. The bills were too high, so my parents did the sensible thing and turned it off. Just like that, our house went offline. Not for a few weeks. For almost a year.
So I improvised.
I wrote my posts on our family computer, offline, listening to the quiet mechanical hum of a machine that felt heavier and slower than anything today. When I finished a piece, I saved it onto a floppy disk. A thin square of plastic that could hold 1.44 megabytes. At the time, that felt limitless.
Then I put the disk into my pocket, got on my bicycle, and rode seven kilometers to the nearest town.
Seven kilometers felt far back then, especially when you were carrying something that mattered. I sometimes worried the disk might corrupt itself during the ride, as if bumps in the road could shake the data loose. I would arrive, sit at a computer with internet access, upload the file, and watch my words slowly become part of the wider world.
That was my blog.
Offline writing. Physical transport. Manual upload. No notifications. No metrics. No algorithm deciding whether I deserved visibility. Just intention, effort, and a bicycle.
Eventually, the internet came back home. Faster. Cheaper. Permanent. Floppy disks disappeared. Uploading no longer required distance or momentum. Everything became instant.
And then something else happened. The blog dissolved into social networks.
Platform after platform appeared, each promising connection and reach. What I once called blogging turned into microblogging. Status updates. Short posts. Fast thoughts competing in endless feeds. It was not necessarily worse. It was simply compressed. Shorter cycles. Faster reactions. Less friction. More noise.
Somewhere in that compression, something changed. The deliberate act of writing something long, something not meant to disappear in twenty four hours, slowly faded. Instead of building something steady, we began feeding something constant.
Now, a quarter of a century later, I am starting a blog again.
This time there is no diskette in my pocket. No seven kilometer ride. No fear of exceeding a monthly data limit. I can publish instantly, from anywhere, on infrastructure that would have seemed impossible to my younger self.
The world has shifted dramatically. Kids today do not even know what a floppy disk is. They have never heard the metallic negotiation of a dial up modem. They have never waited minutes for a single image to load. They have never physically carried data across distance just to make it public.
They live in permanent connection.
And yet, starting this blog feels less like moving forward and more like returning to something fundamental.
This is not about chasing reach or optimizing for algorithms. It is not about building a content machine. It is about reclaiming intention. Writing something thoughtfully. Publishing it deliberately. Letting it exist without needing to perform.
The technology has evolved. The infrastructure is cleaner. The bandwidth is infinite. But the impulse remains the same as it was in 2000. To write something and carry it into the world.
Maybe I no longer need a bicycle.
But I am still uploading.