Wired just canceled Bruce Sterling's long-running blog

For the last 18 years Bruce Sterling has been writing an unpaid blog called "Beyond the Beyond" for Wired. But now, writes Cory Doctorow, "Beyond the Beyond is done. Wired publisher Conde Nast is in such deep financial trouble that they're realizing minuscule savings like those to be gleaned from shutting down an unpaid blog."

Bruce just posted his farewell column at Wired.com:

I'm even proud and happy that I managed to spare the readers so much of my own mental compost in this blog. The chosen, curated material that made it on to this blog was maybe one percent of the vast heaps of rubbish I was overturning. I could have stuffed this blog with two hundred times as much content," and if I'd lived for two hundred years, I would never have lost interest in my sky-blackening sandstorm of off-the-wall topics. Every day was a gift, and full of grist for the mill.

In conclusion, people may wonder what next" - well, I'm still active, or even hyperactive, on Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, Medium and Ello. But those platforms are not my weblogs" - they're social media, or image-sharing sites. I find them cozy mostly because I'm indolent, and they're not as much work as a weblog. It's easier to quip about the same-old same-old than it is to explore the frontiers.

If I was a young person, and starting over today, I would not experiment with a weblog supported by a West Coast US technology magazine. Instead, I would try something more youthful in spirit, less conventional, more beyond-the-beyond. This blog was an experiment when I started it, but in modern conditions, it's technically archaic; I've got a blog here that's old enough to vote.