A Year of New Avenues
Metadata
Highlights
- I am thinking specifically of experimentation around “ways of relating online”. I’ve used that phrase before, and I acknowledge it might be a bit obscure … but, for me, it captures the rich overlap of publishing and networking, media and conviviality. It’s this domain that was so decisively captured in the 2010s, and it’s this domain that is newly up for grabs.
- It’s plain that neither the big tech companies nor the startup financiers are going to produce the tools we need for the next decade. Almost by definition, any experiment that’s truly pathbreaking and provocative is too weird and tiny for them to suffer. They are trapped in their stupendous scale; lucky us.
- For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, permissionless system claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; sometimes maddening. But that’s every creative medium. That’s life.
- Either way, this is a big deal. Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.
- Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging. If that sounds exhaustingly meta, well, yes — but it’s also SUPER generative. When the thing can describe itself, when it becomes the best tool to talk about itself, some internal flywheel gets spinning, and interesting things start to happen.
- This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page.
Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go. Our “work”, in an important sense, is to get into each other’s heads; to blast out the cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas.
It’s been a decade of products, smooth and sleek, with chamfered edges. I am interested now in experiments, visions, compulsions, provocations.
- Umberto Eco:
[Eco] uses Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Curtiz’s Casablanca to show that cult classics are cults “precisely because they are basically ramshackle, or ‘unhinged,’ so to speak.” It’s their imperfectness, the disjointed parts, that gives fans something to attach to, something to remember, something to cite.
- The cotton gin, a canonical example of automation, perversely increased the demand for slave labor because it made cotton growing so much more profitable.
So, the obsolence of a particular human task is, like, the LEAST interesting thing about these processes, and cackling about the end of task X or job Y is like staring at a spot on the carpet while they rebuild the whole house around you
- That last question will, on the timescale of decades, turn out to be the most important, by far. Think of cars, the great automation of movement … and then, think of how dutifully humans have engineered a world just for them, at our own great expense. What will be the equivalent, for AI, of the gas station, the six-lane highway, the parking lot?
- Automation isn’t really about the end of task X or job Y; it’s about remaking the world to fit a new machine, for better and for worse.
title: “A Year of New Avenues”
author: “robinsloan.com”
url: ”https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
A Year of New Avenues
Metadata
Highlights
- I am thinking specifically of experimentation around “ways of relating online”. I’ve used that phrase before, and I acknowledge it might be a bit obscure … but, for me, it captures the rich overlap of publishing and networking, media and conviviality. It’s this domain that was so decisively captured in the 2010s, and it’s this domain that is newly up for grabs.
- It’s plain that neither the big tech companies nor the startup financiers are going to produce the tools we need for the next decade. Almost by definition, any experiment that’s truly pathbreaking and provocative is too weird and tiny for them to suffer. They are trapped in their stupendous scale; lucky us.
- For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, permissionless system claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; sometimes maddening. But that’s every creative medium. That’s life.
- Either way, this is a big deal. Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.
- Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging. If that sounds exhaustingly meta, well, yes — but it’s also SUPER generative. When the thing can describe itself, when it becomes the best tool to talk about itself, some internal flywheel gets spinning, and interesting things start to happen.
- This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page.
Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go. Our “work”, in an important sense, is to get into each other’s heads; to blast out the cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas.
It’s been a decade of products, smooth and sleek, with chamfered edges. I am interested now in experiments, visions, compulsions, provocations.
- Umberto Eco:
[Eco] uses Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Curtiz’s Casablanca to show that cult classics are cults “precisely because they are basically ramshackle, or ‘unhinged,’ so to speak.” It’s their imperfectness, the disjointed parts, that gives fans something to attach to, something to remember, something to cite.
- The cotton gin, a canonical example of automation, perversely increased the demand for slave labor because it made cotton growing so much more profitable.
So, the obsolence of a particular human task is, like, the LEAST interesting thing about these processes, and cackling about the end of task X or job Y is like staring at a spot on the carpet while they rebuild the whole house around you
- That last question will, on the timescale of decades, turn out to be the most important, by far. Think of cars, the great automation of movement … and then, think of how dutifully humans have engineered a world just for them, at our own great expense. What will be the equivalent, for AI, of the gas station, the six-lane highway, the parking lot?
- Automation isn’t really about the end of task X or job Y; it’s about remaking the world to fit a new machine, for better and for worse.