(2025-05-01) Sloan Zine Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail

Robin Sloan has a print-Zine out titled "Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail". In 1792, during George Washington's first term, Congress passed An Act to establish the Post-Office and Post Roads within the United States

Later in the bill, Congress decides that postage for newspapers will be powerfully subsidized

In Philadelphia at that time, artisans earned about a dollar a day. That puts the value of 1½ cents, in 2025 terms, somewhere be-tween 50 cents and two dollars, while the full-freight 25 cents was (you guessed it) a quarter of a day's wages.

The volume of First-Class mail delivered in the United States-envelopes & postcards-peaked in 2001, at 103 billion pieces of mail. (The population was at that time about 281 million, which works out to one letter per person, per day, all year long)

In the quarter-century since, the volume of First-Class mail has declined dramatically-to 44 billion pieces delivered in 2024

In 2022, Congress passed the Postal Service Reform Act with huge margins in both chambers.

The number of virtual worlds, of competing infoscapes, of mad digital dioramas, is infinite.
The number of physical worlds is one.

Inspired by (1) the confidence of the physical & (2) the invitation of the First-Class stamp, I propose a two-pronged program.

The first part is: a return to the physical world, with renewed appreciation for all its powers and features. The rumors of print's death are greatly exaggerated!

The parallel gambit: improve digital space so it shares some of the best features of the physical, including: beauty, speed, reliability, privacy.

Every platform for communication is a little model world, super simplified, with its own assumptions about which species of connection, which ways of relating, are most important

If the medium is the message, your platform is your politics.

These past several years, I have spent a lot of time using the platform that is the United States Postal Service

If the mail seems creaky-if, at the post office, you do not feel the slippery ease that makes your phone so appealing-it is only because the postal service does it all, everywhere, at eye-watering scale, & because reality has a surprising amount of detail.

The key is to absolutely deny twee nostalgia. Any return to the physical must be innovative and imaginative, rough and ready. It must be unprecious, even disposable. We have things to learn still from the art form that was the printed newspaper.