Super sweet spots

It’s a cold, clear day, nothing on the calendar, so I thought I’d take the oppor­tu­nity to send out a newsletter col­lecting some things that have lately caught my eye.

Elyse Flayme and the Final Flood, my short story for MIT Tech­nology Review, has come out from behind the magazine’s paywall. It’s a weird one, and I’m proud of it! If you read it, I’d love to hear what you think. I would also, of course, love to link to your Elyse Flayme fan fic­tion … 

It’s always a total sur­prise to see how projects like this get packaged/pre­sented, and I love Stephanie Arnett’s work here; I imagine the top image as a broken, dis­torted map of Elyse’s world of Arrenia … 

A big new publication: The Fat Gold Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil, free for all, with mate­rial suit­able for olive oil neo­phytes and griz­zled gour­mands alike. With this guide, I’m trying to model the kind of resource I want to encounter on the web: well-designed, packed with media, but/and also lightweight, super simple.

There are good deals to be had in the shop, too!

Jesse Solomon Clark and I have pub­lished new “liner notes” detailing the production, using AI tools (mine) and human talent (his), of two tracks from our album Shadow Planet. I happen to think these are extremely fun documents, with audio clips that trace the evo­lu­tion of our album’s sound as it bounced on cas­sette tapes from Jesse to me (and my AI) and back.

Here’s the liner note for Magnet Train, “the catchy one”, and Sonant, “the dra­matic one”.

Shadow Planet is on Spotify and Apple Music, of course.

New_ Public, a mul­ti­far­ious dig­ital civics project, just pub­lished an inter­view with moi. I really enjoyed chat­ting with the newsletter’s editor, Josh Kramer. Here’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tive bit:

New_ Public: I love the line in the epi­logue [of Penumbra], “There is no immor­tality that is not built on friend­ship and work done with care.” I really do hope that one of the ver­sions of the internet that we might build in the future has much more friend­ship and care. I feel like that’s really rel­e­vant to what we’re talking about.

Robin: I keep coming back to this activity, this little mini project, of trying to iden­tify and talk about feel­ings, and the new feel­ings asso­ci­ated with tech­nology, specif­i­cally things like per­sonal com­puters, the web, data centers, the vast­ness of the internet.

This is just my opinion, but I think there ought to be more. There’s so much writing and thinking about tech­nology through sort of eco­nomic terms. And that’s impor­tant. But I think the emo­tional part of it is actu­ally what mat­ters in our day to day life. And I think when you artic­u­late things, that helps you under­stand them and your life better, but I think then by pub­lishing it you can help every­body under­stand what’s going on.

It is December; I am hunched low over my laptop for the third day in a row. Kathryn glides past and, eyeing my screen, she says: “Oh, your annual web­site redesign?”

“Yeeesss,” I hiss, goblin-like. My dark mid­winter ritual.

The changes won’t be too evi­dent reading this newsletter, but the home page is transformed, and I now present most short sto­ries in my Per­fect Edi­tion format. (Here’s The Writer & the Witch, for example.) Let me know what you think of the pre­sen­ta­tion, and, of course, tell me if you spot any dis­play glitches.

Good old-fashioned web pages!

Rooting around for an obscure novel, I was deliv­ered by a search engine to the online store called A Good Used Book, and I am floored. It’s won­derful.

The pre­sen­ta­tion of the mer­chan­dise here is, in my opinion, perfect: books as sov­er­eign phys­ical objects, not abstract ~product listings~. The way each one “flips over” when you hover your cursor — it cap­tures the spirit, exactly, of inspecting a book in a real used book­store. So clever! So great.

Into my cart went the obscure novel; into my cart went a vin­tage paper­back titled Water: The Mirror of Science; into my cart went six more.

The example of A Good Used Book, along­side 50 Watts Books (which like­wise shows off new arrivals in a very phys­ical way), gives me great con­fi­dence that it IS pos­sible to operate alter­na­tives to Amazon and even Bookshop — the latter of which I like fine, but liking isn’t loving, and wow, I love these places.

They’ve done it, somehow: cap­tured the deep spirit of the book­store on the web!

I am HYPED for my friend Kiyash Monsef’s debut novel, titled Once There Was. It’s the story of a girl whose father was secretly a vet­eri­narian to mag­ical creatures. I’ve had the plea­sure of reading a couple of drafts of this book, and I loved its parade of the classic sil­hou­ettes of world mythology, celebrating/subverting all your favorites. The best part, though, is Kiyash’s total mas­tery of “the storyteller’s voice”, with its patient clarity and deli­cious inevitability.

I’ll be cer­tain to remind you about this one when it’s pub­lished, about a year from now.

Maya is doing some great, classic blog­ging on a beautiful, hand­made web­site.

In a post about crochet, she writes:

A lot of dif­ferent fiber arts work seems so clearly tech­no­log­ical in an inno­v­a­tive way and yet entirely anonymous — it’s impos­sible to sit with two sticks and string and think your­self capable of rein­venting it all, and yet we don’t have records of so much that (par­tic­ular, individual, named) women came up with over the cen­turies.

I also enjoyed her parable of the pythons, which “rhymes” a bit with my argu­ment over at platforms.fyi.

Matt Webb is unmatched in his ability to take in an idea, spin it up like a top, then send it careening back out into the world. Here is a recent exemplar of his method: a post that glis­tens with imag­i­na­tive condensation, each droplet a whole sci­ence fic­tion story.

You can receive his blog posts via email, turning it essen­tially into a newsletter — one that has my highest recommendation.

Here is a great story about typing Khmer vs. speaking it; really, about dif­ferent kinds of literacy. Totally cool and fas­ci­nating.

From the same web­site (a good one, and new-ish), here is a story on the global trans­lator shortage. I didn’t know about the tech­nique of “Eng­lish templating” for sub­ti­tles, in which (say) a Korean TV show’s French sub­ti­tles are trans­lated from an inter­me­diate Eng­lish trans­la­tion rather than from the orig­inal Korean. I under­stand the prac­ti­cality of that flow, but the idea of the Eng­lish language’s expres­sive­ness (or lack thereof) as a uni­versal bot­tle­neck is pretty deflating.

I have said this before: all hail the trans­lators, THE essen­tial cus­to­dians of global politics, business, and culture. There is, in my opinion, no job more impor­tant to the present and future of this planet.

I loved the latest edi­tion of Joanne McNeil’s newsletter, which includes a com­pelling pre­dic­tion about the aes­thetic trend that is, or ought to be, coming next.

Where newslet­ters are concerned, as with so many other things, your body knows the score; which ones do you open imme­di­ately, eagerly, upon arrival? Which do you let linger, not out of any par­tic­ular aversion, just because, hmm, maybe later? I open Joanne’s emails the moment I see them. I read them straight through.

Here is a simple ques­tion with a fas­ci­nating answer: “How did the gold stan­dard work? I mean ACTU­ALLY work?”

I have been inter­ested lately in the ~intel­lec­tual region~ roughly where finance meets sociology. I watched sev­eral lec­tures from Perry Mehrling’s course on the eco­nomics of money and banking and found myself ener­gized by his approach, which he calls “the money view”; I guess I’d describe it as “taking seri­ously what bankers actu­ally do”, rather than waving them away as execu­tors of some abstract eco­nomic function.

Mehrling’s work also offers the useful reminder that money is “made” on many, many levels — not only, or even chiefly, by cen­tral banks. Here’s more on this point from Daniel H. Neilson, a former stu­dent of Mehrling’s whose newsletter I’ve come to depend on.

I watched a doc­u­men­tary series on the his­tory of China and one episode dwelled on the tran­quility and appeal of life during the Song Dynasty, roughly 1000-1300. I always appre­ciate these iden­ti­fi­ca­tions of places and times it was pretty great to be a human. China in the year 1100, per this doc; Rome in the second century, per Gibbon; the Bay Area in the year zero, per The Ohlone Way.

All of these claims can be contested, of course. The point is just to think about what it means to live a good human life, the com­forts and capa­bil­i­ties required; to resist on one hand “the arrow of progress points for­ward” and “agriculture ruined everything” on the other. Iden­ti­fying these super sweet spots in his­tory doesn’t, for me, feel valedictory; rather, I find them destabilizing. Good cause for humility.

The doc­u­men­tary had a nice sec­tion about a scroll pro­duced in this period, showing the scrum of life along a river during a festival. It is appar­ently one of the most famous images in all of Chi­nese his­tory, so, I feel chas­tened never to have heard of it pre­viously.

Here’s a very small sec­tion. The red dots are annotations, which, in this viewer, you can acti­vate to under­stand what’s being depicted. It’s great:

I appre­ciate the way these looong scrolls chal­lenge the pre­sumed uni­versality of our dig­ital rec­tangle viewers. It’s basi­cally impos­sible to take in a work of art like this on a laptop or phone; but hang it in a room, on a wall, and it becomes totally graspable. You can wander its length, peering at all the won­derful details.

There’s really so much that does not fit in a square-ish rec­tangle!

On this web­site, there’s an adap­ta­tion of the same scroll, much more colorful, pro­duced cen­turies later. So many of the people depicted are so clearly having a great time; it’s bracing and, again, humbling!

Here is a useful syn­thesis of con­tem­po­rary Chi­nese intel­lec­tual ecology from David Ownby, whose Reading the China Dream project I have rec­om­mended before. Seriously: if you stop reading all Anglo­phone op-eds about China and start sub­scribing to David’s newsletter, with its clutch of new trans­la­tions every couple of weeks, you will imme­di­ately be 1000X better off.

Again, the thing about trans­lators!

Over the past six months, I’ve been reading and viewing a ton of mate­rial about the early days of the internet. It’s all so inspiring.

Here’s a fun exchange from an oral his­tory with Butler Lampson, a founding member of Xerox PARC:

Alan Kay: But I wish that you had been at CERN on a sab­bat­ical when [the Web was being born].

Butler Lampson: I prob­ably would have been a disaster.

Kay: I don’t know. But I think you would have made a slightly better … 

Lampson: No. No. No. No. No. No. What Tim [Berners-Lee] did was perfect. My view about the web is that it’s the great failure of com­puter sys­tems research. Why did com­puter sys­tems researchers not invent the web? And I can tell you the answer. It’s because it’s too simple.

Kay: It is too simple.

Lampson: If I had been there I would have mucked it up. I swear to God. The idea that you’re going to make a new TCP con­nec­tion for every mouse click on a link? Madness! The idea that you’re going to have this crusty uni­versal data type called HTML with all those stupid angle brackets? We never would have done that! But those were the things that allowed it to succeed.

Out of that same line of inquiry, I enjoyed this inter­view with Hansen Hsu, who left his job as an engi­neer at Apple to study his­tory; he got a Ph.D. and is now a curator at the Com­puter His­tory Museum. I really appre­ciate sto­ries like these: sharp pro­fes­sional breaks, resets, reinventions; gentle reminders that any­thing can happen.

Here is Hansen’s pre­sen­ta­tion on the his­tory of inter­ac­tive computing. Super cool.

Here is a demon­stra­tion of William Blake’s inno­v­a­tive printing process. If you have ever won­dered what I mean when I use the term “media inventor”, this is your answer, definitively. Blake was totally ver­ti­cally integrated!

I am an infre­quent but long­time cus­tomer of Comixology, the dig­ital comics store with a nice reader app. It was an odd expe­ri­ence to nav­i­gate to the web­site the other day and find it … gone? Amazon pur­chased the ser­vice years ago, but hadn’t changed it much; now, all at once, it has been digested. Comixology’s URL redi­rects to a generic-looking Amazon storefront.

Searching for an explanation, I dis­cov­ered that this change hap­pened about a month ago and was widely bemoaned. For my part, I think it’s abysmal, but/and also useful, because it really under­scores the fun­da­mental prop­erty of the dig­ital, which is that it has no fun­da­mental properties. There is nothing that cannot sud­denly change. The dig­ital slips out of your grasp. It changes its shape when you look the other way. It is ghostly.

Con­trast the real phys­ical book and comic book; also, the table and chair; the cast-iron pan and cheese grater. All the steady, reli­able objects that mirac­u­lously keep their end of the bargain.

Meanwhile, the dig­ital is con­stantly wrig­gling out of the deal.

It’s a gen­uine puzzle, because there are good rea­sons for dig­ital ser­vices to change. New capa­bil­i­ties emerge; designers learn new things about their cus­tomers. I get it! My ideal world is not a bunch of ser­vices pre­served like bog people.

Then again … bog people are pretty cool. What if there was a way to develop and upgrade dig­ital ser­vices that kept all pre­vious ver­sions run­ning in some state? That might sound fan­ciful and/or stupid, but among developers, there’s a rich body of work around “reproducible soft­ware artifacts”. What if cus­tomers want those, too? I sure wish I could repro­duce Comixology’s old reader app; it ran right here in the web browser. Gone forever.

That sense of unre­li­a­bility and slip­page is, of course, related to the mes­saging app I built for, and with, my family. Two years later, its great fea­ture is still: its lack of new fea­tures.

This is clearly a hot theme for me; I brought it up in that New_ Public inter­view, too:

Robin: And just to offer one example in that infinitude: A couple years ago, I wrote a short story I really, really love. I still love it. And part of the premise of the story, or the conceit, was that it was posted as a Face­book Note. I love how it turned out. Lots of people read it. The fact that it was pre­sented in a slightly cryptic Face­book Note format was def­i­nitely part of its success.

Fast for­ward a few years later, they have dep­re­cated that whole part of their platform. And now my story looks like shit. The [cover] graphics are gone, the font is fucked up. It’s all kind of crammed together. They basi­cally were like “oh, Face­book Notes haven’t met our growth objective, so we’re now dep­re­cating the fea­ture,” with the result that I pre­sume that all the notes that everyone had made now kind of look like garbage. Whatever, I get it. That’s the pre­rog­a­tive of platforms. That presents a real chal­lenge to the enter­prise of returning to things that you love and spending time with the things that deserve it.

That’s it for this newsletter! The sun is still high in the sky and I’ve just ordered a pizza from the place down the street that makes them with a sour­dough crust. The Bay Area in the year zero was, for the Ohlone, a kind of paradise. In 2022, it’s far from paradise … but I’d still call it a sweet spot.

Might even make it to super some day, if we can get our act together.

From Oakland,

Robin

March 2022