How I failed to fail Inkhaven

I intentionally wrote a post which was less than 500 words yesterday, in an attempt to get "kicked out" of the blogging residency which was ending anyway. I thought I was being clever. In the end I was out-smarted by much cleverer forces.

Look - I thought it would be good for me to do something a little bit contrarian and silly. Especially when the stakes were so low. I also wrote some reflections (in fewer than 500 words) about how embracing failure was a part of the artistic process. I still stand by the point. I guess my lesson for today is that you don't get to choose the terms on which you fail.

When I went to bed last night I was feeling a bit conflicted. It would have been nice for the group and for the programme leads if everyone had made it through to the end. It probably messes up some pre-drafted retrospective emails if they have to write "Everyone* made it to the end" (*footnote: except for one person who deliberately failed on the last day).

There were also actual consequences. You get kicked out of the community slack channel, you no longer get invited to alumni events / reunions. I was aware of these and told the organisers I didn't want them to feel conflicted about enforcing them, I had made my choice, I was happy overall. The choice would not have been as meaningful if there hadn't been some cost to pay.

I was a bit sad about damaging the vibes for the broader group. On principle I wasn't going to let this get in the way of a good blog post idea, though the thought still hurt a bit. When I told my partner I was unsure how to feel about having pulled this silly stunt she asked me something along the lines of "are you proud of your choice?" My answer was yes.

A little bit after midnight I looked at the dashboard.

A greyed-out diamond under my name, after a streak of 29 solid ones. A permanent memorial of my crime. This seemed kind, I was half expecting them to cross out my name, or maybe remove my entire profile from their site.

But wait... other people had greyed out diamonds too. Does this mean they had failed the program on previous days?

No - this was just the UI for private posts. Strange that they didn't make it different for people who hadn't submitted at all.

A fellow resident contacted me to point this out to me too. Maybe I had messed the system up by submitting my illegally short post into their submission form?

That must be it. Unless... nah. I went to sleep untroubled by any other possibilities.

Here is a list of other possibilities

1. During a nap earlier in the evening, I had sleep-walked over to my laptop and written 223 additional words, posted them to some secret corner of the internet and then sent them to the organisers to make up my posting deficit.
2. A cosmic ray hurtling through space, had, at just the right moment, struck the Airtable servers which host the backend for inkhaven.blog. The ray flipped just the right bit in just the right register to permanently update my wordcount for the 30th of November to be over five hundred words.
3. In the dead of night, a blog-goblin, post-er-geist, writing-fairy, or other mysterious creature had logged in to the submission form and sent a post under my name.
4. In the late 1990s researchers at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the university of Warwick posited a series of esoteric cybernetic principles by which superstitions could become real via social feedback loops very similar to the ones I have been blogging about under the title of Dynamic Nominalism. These eventually came to be known as Hyperstitions. It is possible that by merely thinking about these kinds of ideas my blog has become subject to such forces. If you believe in the explanatory power of these things, then one explanation is that enough people were sure that nobody would fail Inkhaven, that this collective certainty overwrote my agency as an individual. My choice to fail was an illusion.
5. A closely related theory to number 4. There was a prediction market running for how many people would make it to the end of Inkhaven. By the final day the market was so certain that greater than 40 residents would make it to the end that even the mere possibility that one resident would fail was unthinkable. The market is always right. And capital, even play-money capital, has powers which can overwrite the will of mere bloggers like me.
6. Due to the indeterminacy of implementation there exists some degenerate mapping of the rules of common sense and the stated rules of Inkhaven by which you can interpret the series of events which unfolded over the last 30 days as me having actually posted 500 words every day after all.
7. I submitted another 500 word post just before midnight and am lying about having no recollection of it here.

Stranger things have happened I suppose.

When I woke up this morning, the organisers confirmed that indeed, everyone had submitted at least 500 words.

The prediction market also resolved at 41 writers, with the following comments:

I used to write a lot and not share it with anyone else. The writing was nearly all in the form of journal entries which I kept in paper notebooks. If I did put it online, it was just to make sure it was backed up somewhere.

When you write in this private way there is an especially comforting sense in which the writing remains "yours". Not only are you the author, you are also the only intended reader. You own the whole pipeline from creation to consumption of the work. When you write for others, even if you write the same things you would have written only for yourself, you necessarily give up some of this control.

This is because once your writing is out there, you no longer own it in the same way. Others are free to interpret it as they wish, and you need to make peace with the possibility that you may be challenged or misunderstood. This is especially true when you become part of a community of other online writers, who are reading and commenting on each others work. I was very grateful to get a taste of this over the last month.

I'm pretty sure that whatever words were written which kept me in this program were not words which I wrote. However, authorship is a strange thing. Two of my posts this month already were collaborations with other authors, and each of those collaborations took quite different forms.

Yes, authorship is a strange thing, and I have decided to surrender to the idea that my writing might take on a life of its own. So I guess maybe there is some sense in which I did write those words. I wonder what they said.