Unpublishable.txt

Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file.

The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so many of us do in the digital age. I regularly open this document and add a few lines and close it quickly, assuming that’s as far as they will go — safely out of my head and into no one else’s. Keeping this file feels risky. Even though it’s on a physical drive, not in the cloud. Even though it’s encrypted. I still worry that The Unpublishable will, somehow, be published. What a nightmare that would be.

Most of us who write anything substantive online probably have the equivalent of an unpublishable.txt file. I have a tag in Ulysses named “struck” that gets applied to everything I’ve decided doesn’t need to see the light of day. I’m not encrypting files like Butler, and it’s safe to say that keeping the files local is not a “the better part of valor is discretion” kind of thing. Most of these shelved thoughts are not incendiary, but they are just ones that I decided were better unexpressed in public.

I wrote recently about TikTok and decided, after getting it proofread, not to publish. It was accurate and fitting but came across as harsh in some of its criticisms. I had to remember the words of my patron saint, Seraphim of Sarov, who said, “You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other.”