(2022-03-13) Kramer Sloan Describing The Emotions Of Life Online

Josh Kramer interviews Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online. What's interesting to you about books as technology?

It was astonishing to me when I learned, or when I kind of got hit over the head with the reality that books are not eternal

they have been, at every stage of their development, totally disruptive. I mean, really, like radically rude and transformative. (disruptive innovation)

I would say that when it comes to Manutius, in particular, I was really, really struck by his innovation, which was to make books smaller and more personal

That speaks to something we're always trying to get at with New_ Public. We are really interested in this idea that the current state of social media is not the inevitable way that social media has to be.

it would be very reasonable for a late skeptic to ask, “okay, yeah, but you know, haven't books stabilized? Aren't they finally done?” And the answer, of course, is: No, not at all.

The ways that books are made, the ways they're literally put together, that stuff is all changing all the time. When you realize that's the case, I think that it helps you understand that the same has to be true for everything else, including the internet and all the platforms that we know.

I want to dig into one of my favorite parts of the book (Mr. Penumbra). There's a scene where Clay and Kat and Neel are in New York together. And its Kat's first trip to the big city. Neel observes her trying to work out an algorithm for how the city works, and he warns that there are no logical rules, and “you don’t have enough memory.”

Yeah, and think back to that time, 2010. I could be sort of mis-dating this, but in my memory, there was a lot of thought and excitement about sort of “structured information” and the sort of semantic web stuff, finding ways to structure relationships

You could just map it all out, right?

And I think that time has revealed that to be just absolute folly.

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

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.

I've noticed that you're not really on social that much anymore. And I'm just wondering, what changed?

I changed. The world changed. The internet changed.

it was always so clear that those decisions being made at Twitter HQ were not the most important thing for the future of that network. They weren't driving what Twitter became. Instead, there was something quite organic about it.

something that made it feel truly like a living thing that was going through these phases of its own accord

But the kind of corollary of that is that they're always changing. And so it shouldn't be a surprise that a person who loved Twitter or loved Instagram or, I don't know, loved LinkedIn five years ago might not love it today because it is a different thing

I actually deleted my Twitter account, I'm not on Twitter at all. And, that was just my reckoning with that feeling of like, I'm tired of it. I don't want to spend time here or spend time doing this anymore.

Speaking of change over time, in your essay Fish, you describe how we rarely spend time closely investigating things on the internet, and “on the internet in 2012, reading something twice was a radical act.” 2015-05-08) The House That Fish Built Newsbound Medium

To go back to something, it's got to have some sense of stability and reliability. Of course, this is like one of the great powers of the print book

*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*

In your recent newsletter “Notes on Web3,” you write, “I am a BIG fan of deletion, an operation basically antithetical to Web3. What do we lose when we lose deletion?” So, and maybe this is the opposite of what we’ve been talking about. ((2021-11-11) Sloan Notes On Web3)

earlier, invoking the epilogue of Penumbra, we used the word “care.” Work done with care. And it's odd actually, both Facebook's abandonment of this nice formatting on this product they offered, and this sort of relentless addition of the Ethereum blockchain, to me, stand in opposition to care

Whereas to me, this connects back to homepages. Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. (digital garden)

Well, I guess what I'd like to end on is: What tech, either new or often returned to, are you excited about now?

Well I remain excited about books, or print books, which of course are some of the world's great technology. And, I will say that I do not take for granted 2022's offering of being able to play Roblox online with my nephews, while I video chat with them at the same time from my little rinky dink laptop

there's still plenty of space on the internet for new protocols

people are trying to make it work all the time. It's really hard. It's a lot easier to launch a website. But, I am, these days, pretty excited about protocols, and thinking about protocols and wondering like, what would it mean maybe to invent a new one.