Happy Birthday, Jason
Today is Jason’s 50th birthday. Ten years ago, Aaron Cohen and I surprised Jason by rounding up as many Kottke.org guest hosts as we could find and taking over the site for the day.
If I’d planned further ahead, I would have done something similarly spectacular, like all of us (and there are even more guest hosts and friends-of-Kottke now) arriving in Vermont to take him on a party train to Montreal. (We need more party trains. We rented a party train — technically just a private car — for my wife Karen McGrane’s 50th birthday, and it was amazing.) But we will just have to settle for this short solo tribute.
Jason runs the best blog on the planet, and he’s been doing it for half his life. But blog posts rarely go viral any more, and Jason’s style was never about controversy or provocation or any of the things that lead to virality, even novelty. Jason has cultivated an audience of dedicated readers who help make other things go viral.
I’m sure there are casual Kottke.org readers, but most of the ones I’ve encountered in my thirteen years writing for the site are unusually devoted to it, and to him as a writer and editor — again, even though Jason himself does not do most of the things that inspire that kind of charismatic devotion.
Jason puts the internet first and keeps himself at arm’s length. So you get peeks and pieces of his face and his character, but mostly it shows through his interests rather than his confessions.
I’ve been lucky that Jason’s been my friend and counselor and frequent collaborator now for many years. And we’re lucky to have him. We’re lucky that he and a few others from the beginning of blogging/posting are holding it down for RSS and the open web. We’re generationally lucky that so much of Gen X’s contribution to this still evolving form has a steadfast representative — even though again, Jason is not especially well-characterized by most of the stereotypes about Generation X!
We’re lucky that as the fortunes of online advertising for independent sites have waxed and waned, Jason has still found a model that has let him keep doing what he does full-time. And we should celebrate that and keep it going. (It would make an excellent birthday gift.)
Ten years ago, when we took over the site for a day, we asked each of the guest hosts to say something about their favorite Kottke.org post. I wrote a short essay called “Computers Are For People,” which riffed on a 2009 post Jason wrote called “One-Handed Computing with the iPhone”. You can read both pieces to find out more about why September 27th is important to me, for reasons only tangentially to do with Jason. But it ends like this:
Jason is important to me because Jason is always writing about how technology is for human beings. He doesn’t bang gavels and rattle sabres and shout “TECHNOLOGY IS FOR HUMAN BEINGS!” That’s partly because Jason is not a gavel-banging, sabre-rattling sort of person. But it’s mostly because it wouldn’t occur to him to talk about it in any other way. It’s so obvious.
The thing that tech companies forget — that journalists forget, that Wall Street never knew, that commenters who root for tech companies like sports fans for their teams could never formulate — that technology is for people — is obvious to Jason. Technology is for us. All of us. People who carry things.
People. Us. These stupid, stubborn, spectacular machines made of meat and electricity, friends and laughter, genes and dreams.
Happy birthday, Jason. I hope you’re surrounded by people you love today. Here’s to the next 50 years of Kottke.org.*
* It could be a family business! The Ochs-Sulzbergers did it! Why not Ollie or Minna? Dream big, kids.
Update: Oh man, thank you Tim! And also to the Swedish Chef! What a lovely and touching surprise. I was going to write a bday post this morning — something about how the only thing I want for my birthday is for you to support kottke.org with a membership, buy a Squiggle t-shirt, etc. — but it seems like Tim’s got that covered. So, I’m gonna take the day and I’ll see you back here tomorrow. I’m gonna get changed, grab my bike, and head out to the trails. 👋 -jason
P.S. You should check out Tim’s new gig: he’s producing a weekly newsletter about AI called The Batch.
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