Discovered Document - Date Unknown
The blog still updates.
That’s what the scanner told her. One RSS feed, still publishing. The crawler had flagged it as an anomaly—a signal that shouldn’t exist.
Morgan pulled up the site. The design was ancient: two-column layout, blogroll in the sidebar, comments section at the bottom. The last post was from yesterday.
“Morning coffee thoughts,” read the title. The post was three paragraphs about the weather and a book the author was reading. There were no comments.
She scrolled down. Posts going back forty years. Daily entries, sometimes multiple per day. Personal observations, photos of meals, thoughts about movies, links to other sites that no longer existed.
“Who is this?” she asked the room.
The AI responded: “Unknown. All identifying information has been scrubbed from domain registration. Hosting appears to be self-maintained. No social media cross-posting. No discoverable identity.”
Morgan read more posts. They were… mundane. Aggressively mundane. Coffee and weather and books and movies and occasional frustrated political commentary. The kind of personal minutiae that everyone stopped sharing publicly fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. The kind of thing that now only existed in encrypted journals or not at all.
“Why?” she asked.
The AI had no answer for that.
She left a comment. The first comment in what appeared to be twelve years based on her scrolling. “Hello. Is anyone there?”
The response came two hours later. Not in the comments, but in a new post:
“Hello, reader. Welcome to the last blog. You’re wondering why I still do this. The answer is simple: someone has to remember what this was like.”
Morgan read on:
“Blogs were never about audience. That’s what killed them—the assumption that they needed to be optimized, monetized, algorithmically amplified. The moment blogging became content creation, it stopped being blogging.
This is a blog. Not a newsletter, not a Substack, not a thread. A chronological, reverse-ordered, RSS-enabled, self-hosted, personally-maintained blog. I post what I want, when I want, for no one in particular.
If you found this, you’re probably a researcher or an AI. Both are welcome. You’re looking for the last example of a dead medium. Here it is. I’m the last blogger.
Not because I’m special. I’m probably not even actually the last—there are probably others, hidden in unindexed corners of the web. But I’m the one you found, so I’m the one who bears witness.
Blogs died because they refused to become businesses. They died because they were personal spaces on a web that became corporatized. They died because no one wanted to maintain their own infrastructure when platforms made it easier.
I maintain this because someone should remember that the web used to be made of personal spaces. Digital homes, not rented apartments in algorithmic skyscrapers.
Will you leave another comment? Most people don’t. That’s fine. Comments were nice but never the point. The point was the writing. The maintenance. The presence.
I’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll post something about coffee or the weather or a book I’m reading. You’re welcome to visit.
The archive remains. The signal persists.
Until it doesn’t.”
Morgan sat back. The blog would outlive its author—that was inevitable. Some day the hosting would lapse, or the hardware would fail, or the blogger would die and no one would know to maintain it.
But not today. Today it still updated. Today, somewhere, someone was maintaining their own corner of the web, posting into the void, keeping the signal alive.
She subscribed to the RSS feed.
In her reader—the only RSS reader she knew anyone still using—there was now one feed. One blog. The last one she’d found still updating.
She wondered how many others were out there. Hidden in the dark forest of the non-commercial web. Still posting. Still maintaining.
Still refusing to let the medium die.
Research note: This piece documents the extinction-in-progress of personal blogging as a cultural practice. The “last blog” is a thought experiment about persistence and digital maintenance as act of resistance against platform consolidation. The reality is likely messier—blogs don’t end, they just stop updating. But the image of the Last Blogger persists.