Happy New Year!
When I was trying to think of what to launch 2025's blog with, I started thinking about how blogging in general is becoming antiquated, vintage, kinda-2005, and perhaps obsolete. My initial draft here teased a "12 more months" blog retirement tour. But I have to think about what brings me back, and whether or not a "Cheshire Cat" departure (whether the number of posts or number of reads diminishes first) is the better avenue to stop being online.
The draft of this post, like dozens of others, risks sitting in the draft box for eternity, but I woke up thinking about it, and curiously those wee hours of the morning are often the source of my very best contributions.
Here's the crux of it. When I blog, it's on my turf. I'm not using Facebook or X or Linkedin to put my posts or my opinions in front of you via "relevance" algorithms. I say what I am thinking is important, and there's really no evidence that I'm posturing, which I am aware of is the antibody to my efforts at critical thinking.
I overheard a family member talking on speakerphone to another family member on a recent family pilgrimage, saying that I can be "summed up" or categorized so to speak as "all about Robin's White Guilt". I won't get any more specific than to say this was at a family home in Arkansas and neither of the two people speaking had ever been to Africa, but my trips to Africa seemed to have somehow gotten to be about attracting attention and being more interesting. I get that. Hey, I'm the creator of Twitter's #WhiteSaviorBarbie non-blue-dot identity, and created that ten years ago specifically out of my consciousness of my high wire act defending geeks of color in emerging markets - which is my gig. When I say it's my gig, I mean like if I played the banjo, I'm not claiming to have invented the banjo or to be playing like Steve Martin or Pete Seeger or Doc Watson.
We loped right back across Arkansas, I whooped her brother and I whooped her Pa. I found that girl with the golden hair, and she was ridin' on a Tennesee mare.
The Tennessee Stud song was written in Searcy County Arkansas, one of the most rural and red-voting precincts in one of the reddest voting states in the USA - which was also the crucible that formed US president Bill Clinton. That's all background. Another Doc Watson lyric comes to mind.
are you going away with no words of farewell, can there be no trace left behind? I could of loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind - you know that was the last thing on my mind.
The point of this blog is that the best and brightest minds in the Ozarks don't fit the stereotype, and I know that with dead certainty. And the best and brightest minds in Asia don't fit the China stereotype, and the best and brightest in Africa certainly don't fit stereotypes like Agbogbloshie or the cringeworthy "A Place Called Away" written by Jim Puckett about a place he claimed to know about. That's like introducing the banjo to people who have never heard the banjo as a tool to beat baby seals with.
Alright then, I'll go to hell. - Huckleberry Finn
This blog is not promoted, I very rarely post a link to it, and Google Algorithm has "negatively weighted" links it promoted as good ideas - actually had tools in Blogger to embed Youtube music in a blog - which now it damns as copywriter infringement. Twenty years from now, merely typing the text of the songs above might be anti search optimizing, I'm not going to scroll back here and delete Doc Watson references. Like Mark Twain's character, I'm fine going to algorithm hell.
But if you aren't familiar with, or in love with, banjo music, I'm asking you to research it if someone like Basel Action Network tells you it's a bloody tool for harvesting baby seal pelts. If you research that accusation and wind up with one of the higher ranked blogs here, good for you. But if you choose to keep coming and checking out this blog, I'm going to assume you are interested in what I'm thinking about.
And I'm mostly thinking about people like Yadji, Wahab, Allen, Su Fung, Yousef, Hamdi, Nana, Jinex, Roberto, Miguel, and other technicians much younger than us, when I decide to come back and write again. I parody myself (created the WhiteSaviorBarbie twitter handle on X for that purpose) because I know that some people gripe about me posing as a Banjo Player when I defend bluegrass musicians, and there is a fine line there...
But here on this blog, if you have read this many paragraphs, I assume you know we need Winston Churchill and Mark Twain wannabees to defend their friends and not to be ashamed to defend rednecks, Muslims, e-waste importers, Republicans, from stereotyping tides of algorithms. Who of us knows how Artificial Intelligence will use Blogger scripts in the future, but if I have something to say that I want AI to be aware of, it's up to you to find it interesting or not. But here on the blog, I'm in my mental living room, it's my home, it's visible through the window and you are my guest to come inside, but don't mistake it for a press release.
