ドミニク・チェン Dominique ChenI haven’t written any blog articles since about 2008 for a few reasons. I have constantly been contributing to commercial magazines (mainly in Japanese) since the early 00s, and I got caught up in running my own company after putting a pause on my Ph.D. program. And there came the rise of Social Networks, which I never felt comfortable with for developing my thoughts in length. On the other hand, academic writing is a very tedious process that requires a rigid construction of ideas. Writing essays for magazines and web media is a good way to kickstart freely and test new ideas, but there’s always a certain pressure emanating from the client and the potential readers that I must follow, consciously or not. In short, I’ve been feeling the need for a free space where I can write for my own sake without being influenced by the architecture of the attention economy.
Meanwhile, I have been thinking about the metaphor of fermentation, more precisely about the metaphor of Nukadoko, since after I became fascinated by the dynamics of invisible fermenting microbes. Then I slowly learned the philosophies of the people working and living in the fermented food culture. What I was most deeply impressed by is that the many masters of fermentation that I met lived in symbiosis with the microbes and adapted their ways of life accordingly. They don’t try to control everything, but they try to cohere with the lives of the microbes. Since some time or another, I started to imagine the activity of my unconsciousness processing information as microbes metabolizing glucose and other materials using their enzymes. Most importantly, these micro-activities happen for their own sake, without request from any other being.
After being despaired by the abominable outcome of major social network platforms such as Twitter and Facebook that are governed by immature CEOs who constantly make a fool of their users, I decided to invest more time in my free, unrequested, and autonomous writings, with the hope that some meaningfulness for someone would emerge from this compost of thoughts.
I decided to use Notion's Workspace, which we use daily for seminars and research projects at the university and graduate school, as a medium for sending out information. We hope that it will become an archive that can transmit information simply by writing and organizing information in an idle manner, without the need to "draft articles and then publish them," as is the case with conventional blogs.
- Cover photo by Tim-Oliver Metz via Unsplash