A year of new avenues: a fantastic post by Robin Sloan, just fizzing with ideas. Here are the ones dancing in my head like a vision of sugarplums:
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t have fun, percolating conversations there. I’m just saying that it doesn’t represent a sufficiently interesting experiment, because it accepts too much as settled.”
