The Infinite Expansion of the Unsaid

It is a well-known fact, or at least a fact that has been shouted loudly enough in pubs to be mistaken for one, that the Universe is big. Really big. So big that it is almost impossible to imagine the sheer scale of it. But, as it turns out, the Universe has a rival in the scale of sheer, unadulterated “bigness,” and that is the Blogosphere.

In the early days of the cosmos, everything was very hot, very dense, and remarkably poorly organised. Then came the Big Bang, an event which physicists describe as “the moment everything started happening at once,” and which the rest of us describe as “a bit of a mess.” This is exactly what happened to the internet around the turn of the millennium. One moment, the digital landscape was a quiet, orderly place consisting of three university servers and a very lonely man in Idaho cataloguing types of moss; the next, there was a sudden, violent expansion of personal opinions.

This brings us to the Hubble Constant of Blogging. In cosmology, the Hubble Constant tells us that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us. In blogging, the principle is much the same: the more niche a blog’s subject matter is—say, the socio-economic implications of 14th-century clog-making—the faster it recedes from the possibility of being read by anyone other than the author’s confused aunt.

The comparison doesn’t stop at expansion. Consider, if you will, Dark Matter. Astronomers have spent decades trying to figure out what Dark Matter is, because they can see its effects even though the matter itself is invisible. They know it’s there because it holds galaxies together, but it refuses to show up on any of the equipment.

Blogging has its own version of this: The Unread Post.

Every day, billions of words are typed into content management systems by people who firmly believe they have something vital to say about the design of the new MacBook charging cable. These posts exist in a state of quantum superposition. Until someone actually clicks the link, the post is both a masterpiece of cultural commentary and a rambling sequence of typos that would make a drugged chimpanzee blush. Since the clicking of the link happens so rarely, the internet is essentially held together by a vast, invisible mass of content that nobody is actually looking at.

Then there is the phenomenon of the Black Hole. In space, a Black Hole is a region where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape. On the internet, this is known as the “Comments Section.” You may enter with the brightest, most illuminating intentions, carrying a torch of reason and a suitcase full of well-cited facts. However, the moment you cross the event horizon, the laws of physics—and basic human decency—cease to apply. Time dilates. You think you’ve spent five minutes explaining why a particular film director isn’t actually a herald of the apocalypse, but when you finally look up, your children have graduated from university and your tea has achieved a level of coldness previously only theorised in laboratory settings.

Finally, we must face the inevitable Heat Death of the Universe. This is the point at which entropy reaches a maximum, all the stars have burned out, and the cosmos becomes a uniform, tepid soup of nothingness. In blogging terms, this is what happens when every single person on Earth finally has a “platform.”

When everyone is broadcasting, no one is listening. We will reach a state of perfect information equilibrium where the total sum of human knowledge is distributed so thinly across so many “Lifestyle and Wellness” blogs that the entire internet will simply stop. It will be a quiet, polite end, punctuated only by a final, automated post titled “10 Things I Learned While Watching the Universe Dissolve (You Won’t Believe Number 4!).”

But until then, we continue to type. We broadcast our signals into the void, hoping that somewhere, on a distant planet or perhaps just in a flat in Coventry, someone will pick up the signal, read our thoughts on sourdough starters, and conclude that we are, after all, mostly nothing to worry about.