Never feel guilty for cluttering up the web.

The Internet is a network of millions of people letting anyone check out the stuff on their hard drives. It is not a failure for people to share things that don't interest you or a sin for you to share things that you don't think will interest anyone else.

Anything could be useful sometime; everything is useful somehow. Dictionaries don't leave out boring or redundant or embarassing words. The Internet is a live encyclopedia of culture: put everything on it.

Small things should be modular, spare, and definable. Medium-sized things should be elegant, complete, and structured. Big things should be multiplex, generalized, and flexible. These are basic concepts, following smoothly from the idea of size, but having seen this you can hardly complain that the Internet is full of junk. Sure it is! Everything big is! It's not an annoying side-effect, it's part of the natural wholesome goodness of big things. The Earth is full of junk, the genome is full of junk, the library is full of junk — they couldn't not be.

And even so, junk DNA isn't junk, it's scraps. Some of the stuff in our genome is self-replicating and thus almost a seperate species, not parasitic but symbiotic: un-called-for routines for forgotten diseases that haven't forgetten us. If we could comb, cut, and wash the genome to be only the information for the physical processes you're using right now, homo sapiens would be gone within one hundred years. Junk DNA is not junk, it's only unused.

Big hairy things with lots of redundancy can be the Right Thing. The English language is full of sillyness (spelling, irregular verbs, and gender), but look at our poetry. The human body is full of confused and silly things like appendixes and a single cavity for breathing, eating, and talking, but we've run 4-minute miles and colonized Antarctica. Any healthy ecosystem is horribly self-entangled and full of competition, but as a whole it's efficient and stable — and the Internet too is not a park for grooming but a jungle we can live in. So what if you don't like its proportions? People in programming and blacksmithing say that a great tool is one used for something its creator had never heard of; don't keep knowledge to yourself just because you don't know how to use it.

No personal site bothers me per se until it apologizes for being a vanity site. Talking about yourself is not vanity, it's introspection, and to be let in on another human's self-reflection is an honor. Always assume your readers are interested; if they weren't, they wouldn't be your readers. I visit your website to see who you are and what you do; you're insulting us both if you complain about what you write and I read. I'll decide for myself whether it's good and I like it. In your writing, you have no responsibility to me besides honesty. I'm not paying.

Maybe you do have one other responsibility -- to make things public in the first place. It's food for our culture. Writing is a way of taking live thought and freeze-drying it. We write to put our ideas and feelings outside us, far enough away to focus on. The value of text is that it is quantifiable, inflexible, and sterile; any life it has is in the reading and writing. We take our intangible things and throw them into the exformation, the culture, the media, the shared experience, the outside world, because that's where they belong. You can't clutch creativity to yourself.

Art is abiotic, but it changes and grows with us. Long after you've forgotten why you put something in words, someone will find in it something that you don't even understand, something prophetic or descriptive of something you never cared about. When we fling art into the Outside, it composts. This poem lands on that technical reference and inspires someone idly wading in the Culture -- and what is better than an inspired human? Not everything useless is trash, and most trash is recyclable somehow; imagine the fun you could have with your neighbors' garbage. Information is even better, because it moves at the speed of light and contains no bacteria. Throw your scraps away, but not in private.

Let it all go. Artists are media, not creators. You are not the things you create. Writing is letting fruit fall. Never be scared to write anything down: never be ashamed to ask, never be embarassed to tell: we can never lose knowledge, it only increases. Make a full backup of your consciousness onto the web. Write that dumb thing down, be smarter tomorrow, don't regret. Everything is in the past, everything; you will never catch up with your self in writing, only in being.