Disquiet

On December 13, 1996, I made one of the best decisions of my life. I purchased a URL, disquiet.com.

I was living in San Francisco, which is where I live now, though between then and now I also lived, for almost exactly four years, in New Orleans. In December of 1996, I was still fairly new to San Francisco, in a full-time sense. I had moved, seven years earlier, from Brooklyn to Sacramento to take a job at Tower Records as an editor on its magazine, Pulse!, and in my time there, I went on to co-found its Classical Pulse! magazine with my good friend Bob Levine, and to found, in 1994, epulse, which was Tower’s first email newsletter.

I visited San Francisco from Sacramento frequently, often weekly, sometimes more than once a week, but living here was different. The biggest difference I felt when I settled into my new job and my new apartment, in the Richmond District, which is where I still live, was a sense of rootlessness, one that had nothing to do with the physical location. For seven years, I had worked for Pulse!, and Tower had provided a focus for my activities in a way my new job, much as I enjoyed it, didn’t. The answer was fairly obvious to me.

So, long before blogs came to be given that name, and long before micro-blogging came to exist, and long before micro-blogging morphed into social media, and long before social media became recognizable as a broader sense of distributed asynchronous public inter-connectedness, I decided I wanted my own home on the digital range. I wanted to place to channel my thoughts, which at the time were largely about electronically mediated sound, and morphed to be about the intersection of sound, culture, and technology.

I already had a small website on some server space that came along with my ISP account, but I wanted what felt, in effect, like a vanity license plate in what we would later call the cloud. I had a few different names in mind for this website, but I was particularly enthralled at the time with The Book of Disquiet by the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), and so disquiet.com it was.

Initially, almost everything I posed to disquiet.com was simply something I wrote elsewhere and then repurposed. At some point it occurred to me that I could write directly for disquiet.com. That might sound obvious, but the internet still felt quite new in 1996. A friend proposed something to me that was not yet the norm, which was to put a dateline on each article, and so I did.

The word blog reportedly didn’t come around until 1999, but that isn’t to say that blogs didn’t yet exist. They did, and mine was one of them. They just didn’t have a name yet. I was not in love with the word “blog” at first. Like “wiki” and a lot of other web terms, it had, to me, at the time, a whiff of infantilization that really turned me off. But I became more comfortable with “blog,” and these days I’d say I am quite actively a proponent of blogging. I won’t get into details here, because I’ve already written about the topic quite a bit, especially back in 2019, which marked the word blog’s 20th anniversary, and then two years later.

Each year when the anniversary of my starting disquiet.com comes around, I try to do the same thing, which is to write a brief memory of the experience, both at the time and over the years, without looking back at what I have written on the subject previously. This year is no different.

I am sitting here at the dining room table on the 28th anniversary of the purchase and the launch of the website, and what is on my mind at the moment is not how much I have written, or the great conversations I have had along with way, or the creation of the Disquiet Junto music community, or the opportunities that this website has afforded me. What is on my mind is how much has changed.

The world is different today in so many ways from 1996, that we can’t really take stock of it all. One of the reasons I enjoy noting the role of sound in interfaces — from voice menu cues to the sonic exhaust of electric cars — is because those interfaces are always in flux. In 1996, the MP3 was only 5 years old. The idea that my laptop could automatically transcribe my voice existed in commercial sense (Dragon Naturally came out the next year), but the ease with which it does today is as comparable as my parents’ refrigerator was to their parents’ literal ice box. Each and every day, sound’s role in our lives evolves, and to me the line between the (largely ambient) music I write about and the role of sound in society gets blurrier and blurrier. I have no idea where it is headed, but I certainly have ideas about it, and I love using Disquiet.com to nudge those ideas ahead, and to pay witness to the changes I hear and see around me.

I said I wouldn’t go on about blogs, but I do feel the urge to close by saying if you’ve read this far and you don’t have a blog, I politely suggest that you start one. Choose a topic that is important to you and start typing, and uploading images, and audio, and video, and code, and whatever other forms your experience of the topic takes. And don’t just cover the topic. Write about your life. Write elements of whatever you would write elsewhere in public — on social media, in comments, in newsletters, on BBS’s, in email discussion groups — on your blog first and foremost. Make everything else — all the places online that you don’t own — ancillary to the central activity of blogging.

We can’t fully take stock of how different today is from 1996, but blog entries are like still frames in an unspooled film canister of the time between then and now. The more we document everyday life, the more control we have over the changes happening around us and to us, the more conscious we are of those changes. I really disliked the word “blog” at first, and then I came to appreciate it, and now more than ever I think of it as, frankly, incredibly important. I find it hard to believe that I once recoiled at the word blog, and now I think the word blog is powerful and beautiful. But like I said, a lot has changed — and it’s gonna keep changing.