Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

There is a sly nostalgia baked into Easterbrook's phrasing: not for blogs as they were, but for blogs as they were sold. "Blog theory" is doing a lot of work here, signaling a brief, almost utopian window when the internet promised to de-professionalize publishing. The dream was radical access plus radical sincerity: ordinary people writing in public with the looseness of private thought. He frames that early promise as a kind of democratized intimacy, where "whatever pops into your mind" becomes not a liability but the whole point.

The subtext, though, is that this innocence was always half fiction. Calling blogs "diaries that the world could read" spotlights the central contradiction: a diary is defined by the absence of an audience, while a blog is built around one. Easterbrook hints at the cultural bait-and-switch that followed: once you know you're being read, spontaneity curdles into performance. Self-expression becomes branding, hot takes, and cautious self-editing. The diaristic ideal turns into a market logic of attention, where even "whatever pops into your mind" gets optimized for clicks, outrage, or credibility.

Contextually, this sits in the long arc from early-2000s blog romanticism to the social-media era's constant self-presentation. Easterbrook isn't just reminiscing; he's diagnosing a media ecosystem that learned to monetize authenticity. The line lands because it mourns a specific kind of freedom: writing before you had to be a product.