Phew, I just saw this! Should be a fun session on the link between blogs and (personal) wikis.
Month: April 2020
This is an epic set from Aphex Twin from Manchester last year. Great visuals too with the embarrassing crowd interaction. Thanks to Sophy for the tip!
This is really interesting from CJ Eller on the potential of crossposting. Interesting to think about how it fits in with the IndieWeb ideas of owning your own content and POSSEing (publishing on your own site, syndicating elsewhere).
I’ve thought of POSSE before more as a means of transitioning away from the big platforms (the bit tyrants) while they still have the network effects. But this is more about your stuff existing in various locations as a means to enable new creative uses of it.
I’m glad something good came out of that industrial estate in Warrington.
Listened to this interview discussing the book “Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley” with Rob Larson on Rev Left Radio. The bit tyrants here being the 5 big ones, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.
The discussion touches on the “two guys in a garage” origin myth of lots of big tech, and the narrative that these new corporations are somehow better than the oil and steel monopolies of old, that they’re ‘good capitalism‘ with no violence. But there’s plenty of violence and exploitation – just hidden away somewhere in the supply chain.
They also talk about how they got where they were mainly from network effects built off of the back of research from the public sector.
The proposed solution of “online socialism” seemed a bit barebones – just focusing on organising and unionising of tech workers. Probably expanded upon more in the book, but here at least there wasn’t any mention of building or using alternatives.
Also its apparently one chapter at the end of the book. Fair enough, it’s good to have scene-setting and an evidence-base of what the problem is, but I’m more interested these days in ideas for the solution.
I don’t really like likes. On the big silos of the social industry they have become weaponised; a kind of social Taylorism, where the craft of building social relationships has been reduced to unskilled labour – just another way of automating us.
Even on the open web, where they are not designed to distract, likes are still a bit of a weak form of interaction. I think they have their place, but I want something a bit more. Something more than comments below a post, too. They’re a bit constrained – in hock to the main body of text above.
Blogchains
I came across the idea of blogchains the other day, on Tom Critchlow’s blog I believe. The word is from Venkatesh Rao, and the very tl;dr is that it’s a string of short, ad-hoc blog posts that build on a theme. That’s cool, and tied in with a wiki is kind of how I see me builing up ideas over time.
But where the idea gets really interesting (for me) is when it extends to cross-site blogchains and open blogchains. These are more open-ended, involving two or more people conversing and building on a theme, simply by posting to their blog about it and linking the posts together. Kind of like a webring, but for posts rather than sites.
There’s definitely something to be said for the long-form, turn-based conversation. One of the best conversations I have had recently was a long email chain. And some of the thoughts that have stuck with me the most are ones I’ve written as a long reply to someone else’s open question or musings on a topic.
Hyperconversations
The blogchain thing reminded me of something Kicks wrote about a few months back – hyperconversations. It’s a chat between friends, conducted across blogs and wikis. Less formal than a blogchain – no predetermined theme.
It’s very informal and fluid. It’s completely simple: just leaving messages for each other on our sites.
Conversations that last
I think what they’re both getting at, is using social software to have distributed conversations that last more than just an hour or two.
Chris wrote about the temporality of social media.
Taking this a level deeper, social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless.
Shallow conversations disappear off the timeline and out of our minds pretty quickly. As mentioned, I don’t think this is true just for Twitter and Facebook though. It’s more a problem of the medium.
Relatedly, contemporary fediverse interfaces borrow from surveillance-capitalism based popular social networks by focusing on breadth of relationships rather than depth. […] What if instead of focusing on how many people we can connect to we instead focused on the depth of our relationships?
Not to rag on likes and reposts too much. I do them plenty. There’s a time and place for everything. And I’m not saying that I want to have to sit down and write a 500 word blog post every time I want to say hi to a friend. But! I would definitely like some more conversations that last.
So who’s up for a blogchain, or a hyperconversation?
Nadia Eghbal, someone who obviously loves writing, writes about writing a book. It sounds less… enjoyable than you might think.
What I hated most about this past year was feeling unable to seriously think about anything besides this one thing. Everything I read or talked about was in service to the thing. There was nothing but the thing.
Afterwards, I expected to feel a satisfying sense of completion, but mostly I just felt relieved. I didn’t think of it as having finished a manuscript so much as having expelled a virus from my body.