There is a moment before a post. Before the algorithm wakes up, before the counters begin to tick, before a compulsion starts tugging at your sleeve. Post Zero lives there. It’s the un-numbered space, the pause that doesn’t ask for attention. In a world trained to reward immediacy (or outrage), that pause is quietly radical.
Social media didn’t invent conversation, but it did industrialise it so as to commercialise it. What was once messy, local, and slow became ad-optimised: timing, tone, thumbnail, hook. The result is not dialogue so much as throughput, activity. Posts don’t so much speak rather compete for illusory and vanishing attention. And the algorithm—blind to place and memory—does what it’s built to do: amplifies what will amplify ad revenue, not what belongs.
A very local, very retro news blog doesn’t win that race. It is not meant to. Its value is not reach but texture: names that recur, paths that cross, arguments that cool and warm again over years, not minutes. It’s the opposite of the typical amorphous content slop that is blindly posting something or anything to get attention. It’s record-keeping with opinions.
Post Zero is a refusal to perform. It says: start with nothing; publish because it matters here; accept that silence is sometimes the right metric. No optimisation. No engagement bait. No performative urgency. Just the old discipline—write something that would still make sense if read late, out of order, or by the wrong person.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s maintenance. Communities don’t need more velocity; they need continuity. They need places where not everything is up for auction to attention, where disagreement doesn’t have to trend to exist, where memory isn’t wiped by the next refresh. A small blog can do that precisely because it doesn’t scale.
So here’s a new year proposal: begin again at Post Zero. Maybe write less and read more.
Let some things sink rather than spike. If it travels, fine.
If it doesn’t, that may be the point.
