What does it mean to write in 2026?

I've been writing for something like 50 years now. I started by scribbling letters on paper as a child because I was fascinated that these expressed meaning. I wrote a lot for school, for university, for work, and privately. I wrote letters, emails, posts on social media, articles, papers, documentation, diaries, opinion pieces, and presentations. I've been writing my blog for more than 20 years.

Writing always has been a way for me to connect to the people, to the community, around me, communicating with my tribe. It also has always been a way to express, refine and archive my thoughts, a bit like building a memory of insights. It also has been a way to record some of my personal history and the history of the projects I'm involved with.

My writing has changed over the last couple of years. I'm writing less publicly and more focused on specific projects. It feels like it has become less personal and more utilitarian.

Part of this is that the Internet has lost a good part of its strength as a neutral platform to reach the world. For a long time I knew where to reach the people I wanted to address and had control about my content and how it was distributed. Nowadays social media platforms act as distributors, but we are prey to their algorithms. So while publishing content is still simple, it's much harder to get it to your audience without compromising to the mechanisms which make the algorithms tick.

Another part is the disrupting advance of AI writing capabilities. While I have relied on humans to give me feedback in the past, to get into a conversation on the topics of my posts to refine the thoughts in them, now there is this all-powerful-seeming assistant in my editor who is eager to take over those roles. And it would even write for me in my own style. So what's the value of writing in 2026? Is it even worth bothering with trying to express your thoughts in writing, when a machine can produce content which looks the same, much faster and in much larger quantity? What does this do to readers, do they still care about what I would write?

My feeling is that it's still worth to put in effort to create genuine, trustworthy, truthful writing. The format, the tools, the channels might change, but the values don't. The challenge will be to figure out how to create a signal which transports these values.

I have always liked the format and style of a blog, as a stream of thoughts, coming from a personal perspective, but focused on topics of relevance to others. I enjoy reading this from others and I enjoy writing in this style. And I don't have to rely on a platform I don't control, but can use my own.

So it looks like this blog won't go away, but will channel my thoughts in 2026 as well.