How Can We Use the Internet for Good?
A manifesto on what we do when the world is on fire: Daywriting. The deliberate, daily documentation of ordinary existence as both personal archive and political resistance.
he title of my honours thesis back in university was "[HOW THE ENGLISH DEGREE WILL SAVE THE WORLD](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388769322_HOW_THE_ENGLISH_DEGREE_WILL_SAVE_THE_WORLD_Queering_Decolonizing_and_Democratizing_Literary_Studies_for_Generation_Z)". I wrote about Queering, decolonizing and democratizing literary studies for Generation Z. My Pilot G-2 pen writing frantically on ruled paper, coffee rings blooming across the margins.
An overly-bold and arrogant title, I know. The sort of title you write at 2am when your desk lamp is the only light left in the building. My justification was that I saw far too many undergraduates, and even postgrads, hedge. Too modest and meek to stand up and triumphantly state themselves and their work. Voices dropping to whispers in seminar rooms, eyes fixed on scuffed linoleum floors, shoulders curved inward like closing parentheses.
During my writing, I ended up adding an autoethnographic section—this is a fancy academic term that simply means a research method where a researcher analyzes their personal experiences (auto) to understand broader cultural, social, or political meanings. A first-person account (not very different from creative nonfiction or a blog post, really) which stands as a waypoint for discovering and articulating something important.
In this, I coined the term "bloodwriting".
[I shared the excerpt on my Medium blog](https://blog.brennan.day/bloodwriting-58757b8722d5). This is what I wrote about bloodwriting:
Bloodwriting begins with a pulse. The thrum of your fingers against keys. Flutters in your chest when your mouse hovers over "publish". A quiet conviction that your words—whether they appear as Times New Roman 12pt or 280 characters in sans-serif blue on BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon—deserve to exist in the world. It's not craft or talent or clout. Bloodwriting is the courage to leave a mark, to say: _Hi, I am here, I think, I feel, I exist._
When our ancestors painted on cave walls, [they mixed their own blood with the ochre](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517102-700-science-ancient-artists-painted-with-human-blood/) to make the images more powerful. More alive. Everything that matters costs us something of ourselves. Every time you open a blank document, post a thread, share a story online, you're creating a small altar to possibility.
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What I want to write about here, instead, is what I'm going to call **daywriting**.
In 1953, Phillip Larkin wrote the following [poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48410/days-56d229a0c0c33):
_What are days for?_ > _Days are where we live._ > _They come, they wake us_ > _Time and time over._ > _They are to be happy in:_ > _Where can we live but days?_
I encountered this poem recently and I have
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