I started johnrector.me in 2015. For most of the next eight years it was dead.
I never really used it. I would think about writing something, and then I would not write it, and that went on for years.
It was not for lack of ideas.
I was having the ideas constantly — in conversations, in office hours, in meetings, talking to people who wanted to work something out. That was where all of it lived. None of it ever became anything you could go and read.
The reason was simple and unglamorous. The amount of energy required to turn one of those ideas into a published article was just too costly.
The blog was not empty because I had nothing to say.
It was empty because saying it cost too much.
What actually changed
Not the ideas. The price of turning one into an artifact.
Of roughly 3,400 articles and essays in this ledger, about 2,800 now sit on that same blog — the one that spent eight years nearly empty.
And they have been extraordinarily useful. Clients, students, people I am working through a problem with, people I have never met. An idea I would previously have explained out loud four times a year is now a thing I can hand somebody.
Writing for other people
The federation does not only write for me.
Through Blacc Ink, several hundred articles — approaching a thousand — have been written for other people. Some of that is straightforwardly commercial: businesses that need to be found, and search still rewards organisations that have said something.
But a good portion of it is there for exactly the same reason mine is. Somebody has an idea. They understand it perfectly well. They are never going to write it down, because writing it down costs more than they have.
Now it exists in written form, and they can hand it to somebody.
The artifact itself got richer
The other thing that changed recently is what an article can be.
My blog runs on a WordPress installation that has been there forever, and the federation now publishes into it with custom HTML — and increasingly with interactive HTML. An article can carry a diagram you can manipulate, a model you can run, a structure you can move through rather than only read.
The page you are reading is that same thing, one step further along.
What is actually mine
This is the hardest category for the authorship question, because writing is the one thing here I could always do myself.
So the honest accounting: what is mine is deciding the thing is worth saying, knowing which idea has not been put properly yet, the argument itself — the claim, its structure, what it rests on, where it is weak — and the decision to publish, which is the only irreversible step.
What is increasingly not mine is the sentences.
The sentence is not the unit of authorship. The claim is.
The test I apply to a draft is not whether I would have written it that way. I would not have; that is the point of another prediction machine. The test is whether the claim is one I will stand behind, and whether anything in it asserts something I do not actually believe. A sentence phrased differently from my habit is fine. A sentence asserting something false is not a style disagreement.
The honest accounting
This is not my most economically valuable category. Images earn. Calls earn. Articles mostly do not.
It is the one that has mattered most to me personally, and it is not close.
The reason is not volume. It is depth. These are genuinely complex ideas — attention, prediction, sovereignty, what an entity is — and there is a limit to how far you can carry one of those in conversation. Writing is where an idea finds out whether it holds together.
For eight years I could not afford to find out. Now I can, several times a week, and the thinking has gone considerably deeper than it ever went in a meeting.
I did not start having ideas in 2023.
I started being able to afford them.