The following came from ctheory.net. I’ve simply made it a little more meaningful:
The insurgency represented by web publishing in general and blogging specifically is the representative journalistic form of what Heidegger’s Nietzsche described as the age of “completed nihilism.” In this interpretation, blogging in its mature (nihilistic) phase — sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will — desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing center of nihilistic blogging flows a strong historical monism — the New Journalism — that will not be suppressed. To blogging’s empty formalism, to liberal humanism’s (emotionally) ineffective proceduralist ethics, to the empire’s cybernetic equations written in violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New Journalism provides a singular historical purpose — the crusading spirit of the pamphleteer which is reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated — backed up by the semiotic purity of the foundational work of the pioneers of the form, Rebecca Blood, EatonWeb, and of course Dave Winer.
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