Tag: open web (page 1 of 1)

January 16, 2025

you don’t have to be there

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”

The title of Warzel’s article is “Beyond Doomscrolling,” but it’s really about things you can do, useful apps you can download, in addition to doomscrolling.

When Musk started dismantling Twitter, I thought it might be an opportunity for people to discover that “irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information” is not in fact “irresistible” — it can be resisted. (Also, you could delete “in moments of disaster” from that sentence: infoconsumption doesn’t go up all that much in times of crisis because so many people are doing it every day — though, perhaps, redescribing every day as a crisis or a disaster to justify their habit.)

People: you don’t have to “watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem.” Nobody is making you. And it doesn’t do you any good to watch.

But when Twitter became intolerable people decamped first for Mastodon and then Threads and then Bluesky, or went all-in on Instagram. The Twitter habit, it seems, will long survive Twitter.

I know I’ve said this many times before, but once more for the late arrivals:

I read news once a week, mainly when the Economist arrives in my mailbox on Monday. If you live in a bigger city than Waco, Texas you’ll get it earlier, but a day or two one way or the other does not matter in the least.
The sites and writers I want to read more regularly I subscribe to in my RSS reader, and that includes a handful of Bluesky and micro.blog accounts. Except in very rare circumstances, I don’t visit bsky.app or micro.blog directly. I don’t have a Twitter account any more, I haven’t had a Facebook account since 2007, and I only visit Instagram once every couple of weeks to see what some friends are up to. (I devoutly wish they were somewhere other than Instagram, but I’m not the boss of them.)
Likewise, RSS is how I read the reporters and columnists I especially value. I read Ross Douthat and David Brooks and Ruth Graham, but I never visit the NYT home page. Ditto with the Atlantic and several other periodicals: read the people you know you want to read and ignore the rest.
There aren’t many worthwhile things on the internet that I can’t get via RSS, and for those I rely on email newsletters.

So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do.

Now, having established these habits, when I read a piece like Warzel’s I think: Why do people live this way? I’d rather pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And I bet if any of you, dear readers, would ditch the doomscrolling habit for three months you’d never go back — you’d wonder why anyone would ever go back.

October 4, 2024

writing for money

A while back I wrote a post about my financial history as a writer, situations in which I have made money, situations in which I haven’t made money, etc. Phil Christman does his version of that post here, and adds a taxonomy of writers based largely (though not wholly) on the results they get from shakin’ their money-maker. It’s a great post and an example of why Phil’s work is worthy of your support.

At one point he writes:

When I look at what I do on this newsletter, and then compare it to the amount of worthwhile writing that someone like Alan Jacobs or Adam Roberts gives away for free, I feel like I’m opting to be part of a decivilizing trend by charging people money for what is basically focused blogging.

I have some comments.

First, there is no one like Adam Roberts. Not remotely. So I’m going to factor him out of this discussion, while strongly recommending his blog, for instance this terrific recent post. But you can support that blog financially if you want.

The same is true for me, because I have a Buy Me a Coffee page. You can pay for what I write on this blog if you want, and God will surely bless you if you do, but you don’t have to. IIRC, I have suggested to Adam that he’d be a good candidate for Substack, but I don’t know why he hasn’t done it.

As for me, I haven’t gone to Substack for three reasons:

I am an enthusiast and advocate for the open web — see that tag at the bottom of this post — and want to write here if I can possibly manage it.
By any reasonable standard I am well paid. I am a “Distinguished Professor” with an endowed chair, and while my salary wouldn’t go a long way in Cambridge MA or Brooklyn or Palo Alto, it goes pretty far in Waco, Texas. I can afford to make my online writing free.
What I do, in contrast to Phil’s work on his Substack, is unfocused blogging, and I would feel bad charging directly for it.

So I’m sticking it out here on the open web. But Phil deserves to get paid for his writing, and it’s not “decivilizing” of him to say so. If the publishing industry were properly functioning Phil would be making a decent living from writing essays and reviews, the way Elizabeth Hardwick and Dwight Macdonald did back in the day.

However, I will — when I get out of the Slough of Despond I am in — be changing how I write here. The big thing I have learned from emails I’ve received in response to this post is: Even people who really like my writing miss a lot of what I do here. Especially the series I write — like the one on the City of God, the one on Babylon, the one on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — get very few readers who track them from beginning to end.

Now, I like writing the series, because they enable me to take my time in thinking through a topic. But if people aren’t reading them, what’s the point? So when I have time to write here again, I’m going to write fewer but longer posts — I won’t post something until I have achieved a complete arc of thought, or nearly so.

So stay tuned.

April 16, 2024

rewilding

The essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on “Rewilding the Internet” is absolutely essential — and you might know that I would think so if you read my essay from a few years back on “Tending the Digital Commons.” (See also my reflections on “manorial technocracy” and the tag, visible at the bottom of this post, “open web.”) Our metaphors are slightly different but our theme is the same.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that those of us who care about the internet and love the best versions of it tend to think ecologically.

Farrell and Berjon:

Ecologists have re-oriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.

Just as a diverse “pocket forest” is the surest way to regenerate urban vegetation, a global network with multiple different ways “to internet” is the best insurance policy for future innovation and resilience. We need to rewild the internet for the future, for our freedom to build tools and spaces, and to share knowledge, ideas and stories that haven’t been anticipated by the internet’s current overlords and cannot be contained.

This is precisely why this blog is on the open web rather than on Substack or any of the other walled gardens. To be sure, I can afford to do it this way, with the occasional contribution from my Buy Me a Coffee page — I have a day job and don’t depend on blogging to feed my family and pay my mortgage. If I were utterly dependent on this blog I might do things differently — but only after I had tried every way possible to make it work on the open web.

I really do think that the internet, in its original open form, is an amazing thing and a genuine contributor to human flourishing — but the occlusion of the open web by the big social media companies has been a disaster for our common life and for the life of the mind. My plan, and my hope, is to keep going here long after I have lost the ability to publish anywhere else. This is my home on the web and also the place where I can most fully be myself as a writer. And that’s worth a lot.

April 13, 2023

unstacked

Over the last few days I have received several emails from Substack telling me that I have new subscribers. Wait … what? I don’t have a newsletter, and I have never commented on a Substack post. But it seems that my Substack profile is public, and I guess anyone who searches for my name will find me — and the newsletters I subscribe to. I had no idea.

Now, it seems that I can choose which of my subscriptions to show on my profile — though the default is to show all of them, and you have to toggle that off one at a time — but there appears to be no way to make my entire profile private. I say “appears” because I cannot find a help document that addresses this issue, and Substack makes no email address available to those who need assistance for matters not covered on their help pages.

All of this is really bad form, I think, so: account canceled. I might start a new account (with a different email address) to see if I can build in more privacy from the start, but I dunno … I’m getting closer and closer to an “open web or nothing” position.

February 27, 2023

a better way

I’ve often written in praise of RSS — see the tag — as a Better Way to read stuff online than any social media platform could possibly be. There are a thousand ways to use RSS, but if you happen to have a Mac an especially good one is NetNewsWire, the app that, many years ago, introduced me to RSS reading. NetNewsWire is free, and here’s a post from its developer Brent Simmons explaining why. I also like the document on NetNewsWire’s Github page — it’s open-source — explaining what you can do to support the app, since you can’t pay money for it. Excerpt:

Write a blog instead of posting to Twitter or Facebook. (You can always re-post to those places if you want to extend your reach.) Micro.blog is one good place to get going, but it’s not the only one.

Use an RSS reader even if it’s not NetNewsWire. (There are a bunch of good ones!)

Teach other people to use RSS readers. Blog about RSS readers. And about other open web technologies and apps.

Suggest apps for macopenweb.com.

Write Mac and iOS apps that promote use of the open web.

Donate to charities that promote literacy.

Tell other people about cool blogs and feeds you’ve found.

Support indie podcast apps.

December 30, 2022

“Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of” – The best brief overview I’ve seen of the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of the decentralized social web.

October 27, 2022

Manton Reece – Dear Elon Musk:

I agree that we shouldn’t be stuck in our own bubbles of misinformation. But the part Elon gets wrong is the premise that there should even be a “common digital town square” controlled by a single company. I reject that idea.

The common digital “square” should be the entire web, with a diverse set of platforms. There should be common APIs but many communities with their own rules, goals, and business models. Concentrating too much power in only a couple social media companies is what created the mess we’re in.

May 10, 2022

zine!

Julia Evans makes really cool zines for people who want to know more about computer programming, or, more generally, about being a power user of computers. Her most recent zine is called How DNS Works, and it’s excellent — plus, there are some leftover pages about registering and maintaining your own domain. For example:

Buying domain

Other images with more detail here.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of owning your online turf — or coming as close to it as you can get — for reasons I explain in detail in this essay. Evans’s zine-within-a-zine about domain registration and maintenance does a great job of explaining exactly how it works — and in the process, I hope, makes it seem less intimidating than it otherwise might.

February 5, 2022

tenants

Megan McArdle:

Zuckerberg had shifted his company away from the open platform of the browser and onto a closed system where Apple set the terms. For a long time, that was a very good deal for Facebook — but when Apple decided to alter the deal, Facebook didn’t really have much recourse.

There’s a lesson in that, even if you aren’t planning to launch a media site, or a social media platform. Our ferocious arguments about who should be kicked off Spotify, or Twitter, are fundamentally about the same problem: So much of our public life takes place on a handful of technology platforms, where what we see and whom we reach is determined by policies set by some faceless programmer in Silicon Valley. We are all of us tenants of the digital manor — even, it turns out, some of the lords.

See also my brief reflection on our manorial elite.

The lesson Megan identifies is one I am always seeking to internalize. For the last few years I have been trying to move more and more of my life out of the control of our tech overlords. I read less on the Kindle and buy more codexes; I stream less music and movies and buy more CDs and Blu-Rays; I hang out on the open web and avoid the walled gardens. (I really enjoyed Jonathan Goldstein’s podcast Heavyweight but when it went Spotify-only I cheerfully gave it up.) I don’t want my access to art I love and ideas that interest me to be determined by the whims of the Lords of the Manor. Of course, this means that I have to be more discriminating: I can’t buy everything I might want to read or watch or listen to, so I have to make a point of buying what I think I stand a good chance of experiencing repeatedly. Which is also in itself a win for me, isn’t it?

January 20, 2022

Jamie Zawinski, formerly of Mozilla: “Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100% a con. There is no legitimacy.” Elsewhere he says: “Cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster, and a greater-fool pyramid scheme, but are also incredibly toxic to the open web, another ideal that Mozilla used to support.” Admirable clarity from JWZ.

August 23, 2021

bookmarking

Since 2009, I’ve been keeping my bookmarks online in service called Pinboard. It’s a service that displays your bookmarks — with tags and text excerpts, both very important for me — in a simple and readable form. Obviously I wouldn’t have used it for so long if I didn’t like it, but two things have consistently bothered me. One is that it has never had a responsive design: though some gestures in that direction have been made recently, if you want to look at your bookmarks in a mobile device your best option is to manually add the letter “m” and a period before the URL. The other says more about me than about Pinboard: I bookmark too many pages. Way too many pages. The result has been that I forget almost everything that I have there, including the things that I really want to remember. Yes, search is available, but when faced with a wilderness of bookmarks it can be difficult, for me anyway, even to understand what to search for.

Nevertheless, when, a few months ago, the owner of Pinboard asked longtime users to make a contribution to the ongoing maintenance of the site, I agreed to do so. After all, I had paid once, twelve years ago, and had been using the site ever since. It seemed a reasonable request. But then, very soon afterward, I started having problems with the site and wrote to ask for assistance. Those emails have not been answered. I have to say, it’s just a little bit annoying to have tech support fall silent right after you give the company money, but this is the world we live in. Still, despite my stoic resignation, it struck me that this was an opportunity for me to rethink my bookmarking practices. After all, as Manton Reece reminds us, “The only web site that you can trust to last and have your interests at heart is the web site with your name on it.” Pinboard is on the open web but it could still disappear today and I would have no recourse.

So here’s my plan: I will bookmark-with-excerpts less often, but when it happens it’ll happen here on blog.ayjay.org, where I already have a tagging system in place. After all, I am equally interested in what I say and what others say on any given topic; and comparing my thoughts with theirs is a useful exercise.

A new semester starts today, so I won’t be doing as much blogging blogging as I did over the summer. But this site may be even more active, just in a quotey sort of way. Caveat lector.

Finally: I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter — a new issue went out this morning.

January 12, 2021

Manorial Technocracy

This morning I have a post up at the Hedgehog Review on “Our Manorial Elite.” The core idea, as you’ll see if you click through, comes from Cory Doctorow, or rather a historian friend of Doctorow’s. “[Bruce] Schneier calls [our current arrangement] ‘Feudal Security,’ but as the medievalist Stephen Morillo wrote to me, the correct term for this is probably ‘Manorial Security’ — while feudalism was based on land-grants to aristocrats who promised armed soldiers in return, manorialism referred to a system in which an elite owned all the property and the rest of the world had to work on that property on terms that the local lord set.”

What the rabble who stormed the Capitol building have unwittingly done is to consolidate (a) the social power of the enormous transnational tech companies and (b) the intimacy of those companies’ connection with the United States government. Given the recent usefulness of Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon to the currently dominant political party, what are the chances that a Democratic Congress will pass legislation curbing their power, or that, should some such bill emerge, a Democratic President would sign it into law?

So let me bang this antique drum one more time: You need to own as much of your turf as you can. I explain why and how, in detail, in this essay. Avoid the walled gardens of social media, because at any moment they could appeal to digital eminent domain and move the walls somewhere else, and if they did you’d have zero recourse.

Now, to be sure, even when you “own your turf” you don’t really own your turf — as the people who run Parler have recently discovered: they didn’t just lose their access to Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and their data storage account with Amazon’s AWS, they lost their text message and email service provider. I was reminded of just how vulnerable my own digital presence is last year when there were plans to sell the .org domain to a private equity firm. That situation has been avoided for now, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but there are no guarantees going forward. When I’m on the open web, I own my data — which is a big deal, since the owners of the walled gardens also own your data — but I don’t own the power to share my words and images with others.

I hold no brief for Parler, which I am glad to see shut down — it has been a foul thing by any reasonable measure — but as I note in my Hedgehog post, the big social media companies are making up their rules as they go along, and in so doing setting the standards for other, smaller companies to follow. So are the other big companies: As Glenn Greenwald points out, the planning for the assault on the Capitol wasn’t done on Parler, it was done on Facebook — yet we don’t see Apple banning Facebook from its App Store, do we?

The smaller, the more vulnerable. If I were to say something controversial enough, my own hosting company, the wonderful Reclaim Hosting, could give me the boot. It’s not at all likely, of course, but my point is that it’s possible. I could be fired by Baylor, Google and Apple could shut down my accounts, I could probably be cut off by my ISP. I think the only thing left would be a landline phone, which, if I’m not mistaken, we in the USA still have fairly strong rights to use. But I don’t have a landline. (Maybe I should remedy that?)

It’s possible, then, for any of us to be not just shamed or dragged on social media but really and truly digitally shunned — to be completely cut off from every possibility of electronic discourse and community. I don’t see how you can’t be concerned about this possibility. So even a lawyer for the ACLU — which has in recent years explicitly refused to support speech that it doesn’t approve of — says, “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”

Until that neutrality in enshrined in law, we are all at the mercy of our manorial technocracy. But if we stay outside the walled gardens, we are safer and more free. I would encourage all of you to ditch Twitter, ditch Facebook (including Instagram), ditch all of them and learn how to live once more on the open web. The future of our democracy just might depend on it.

July 23, 2020

more on the Dish

Since I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s renewed Dish, Andrew has reported that subscriptions are near 60,000 — probably over that mark by now — and David Brooks has weighed in with a smart take. As always, David is hopeful:

Mostly I’m hopeful that the long history of intellectual exclusion and segregation will seem disgraceful. It will seem disgraceful if you’re at a university and only 1.5 percent of the faculty members are conservative. (I’m looking at you, Harvard). A person who ideologically self-segregates will seem pathetic. I’m hoping the definition of a pundit changes — not a foot soldier out for power, but a person who argues in order to come closer to understanding.

And as always, I’m a little less hopeful than David — or maybe I place my hope in slightly different places — in ways that I can explain by quoting another passage from his column:

Other heterodox writers are already on Substack. Matt Taibbi and Judd Legum are iconoclastic left-wing writers with large subscriber bases. The Dispatch is a conservative publication featuring Jonah Goldberg, David French and Stephen F. Hayes, superb writers but too critical of Trump for the orthodox right. The Dispatch is reportedly making about $2 million a year on Substack.

The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling. A young, talented heterodox thinker doesn’t have to worry that less talented conformists in his or her organization will use ideology as an outlet for their resentments. The next good thing is there are no ads, just subscription revenue. Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.

Is it really true that there’s “no canceling” on Substack? I think we’ll only know that in time. We’re about two weeks, by my reckoning, from #BoycottSubstack becoming a prominent hashtag on Woke Twitter. It would be stupid for Substack to care. But in the past year or two a whole lot of organizations have been stupid enough to fold in the face of a few red-faced social-media scolds.

So maybe there will be canceling on Substack — but there are many alternatives to Substack. And the really good thing about all this is that newsletters are built on email, and email is transmitted through a series of open protocols that no one controls. It would be perfectly possible for people like Andrew and Matt Taibbi and other independent thinkers, if they got canceled by Substack, to hire someone to build out their own distribution system and continue as though nothing had ever happened.

The woke mobs are apoplectic, but not always stupid: they have reliably gone straight at the gatekeepers of culture, and the gatekeepers of culture, faced with a handful of people with plenty of spare time and no rhetorical restraint, have reliably folded like a cheap tent. So what’s the point of reading, much less paying for, a magazine or newspaper where, as Bari Weiss has rightly said of the NYT, “Twitter is the ultimate editor”? You know that almost everything you read will have been vetted to ensure that it conforms to the Authorized Narrative, so why bother? Even if you actually believe in the Authorized Narrative, do you really need to pay money to have your opinions confirmed, day after day?

No; I think even some of the woke, or at least the wokish, will send their money to venues,and writers, who say what they actually think. What a concept! And what makes this possible is the open web and the pre-web internet. How cool is that?

One of the greatest things about the open web and the pre-web internet is that they work at any scale. There is no difference, from the reader’s perspective, between reading a newsletter with 250,000 subscribers and reading one with ten subscribers. As I wrote a while back,

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace…. Whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

And in case you don’t know, my own little contribution to the Republic of Newsletters may be found here.

July 17, 2020

return of the Dish

I’m really glad to learn that The Dish is returning — especially in a form that will allow Andrew to write fewer but longer pieces than he did in the old days, and, I trust, by such means to retain his sanity. The former Dish was pedal-to-the-metal every single day, and even Andrew, the hack than whom no sharper can be conceived, couldn’t over the long term flourish at that pace, either emotionally or intellectually.

A slower-paced Dish of his own is surely the best venue for Andrew, who is the most independent of thinkers and therefore a constant threat to the “safety” of any colleagues whose mental cabinets have just two pigeonholes, Correct people and Evil people. (Apparently at New York most of his colleagues were two-pigeonholers.) I subscribed instantly, and I know I won’t regret it.

But Andrew is not the only thoughtful and unclubbable journalist who’s going indie these days, and that poses a problem for me. In that introductory message I linked to above, Andrew mentions the similar Substack-based endeavors of Jesse Singal and Matt Taibbi, and while I think both of those guy as are superb journalists, if I were to subscribe to their work as well as Andrew’s that would cost me 150 bucks a year. I still might do it — but that’s a lot of coin for three voices.

There’s an economies-of-scale problem here. At a newspaper or magazine, writers share an editorial and technical infrastructure, so costs of production are distributed. Those who go it alone don’t get to benefit from that, and neither do their readers. So the cash outlay for those readers can escalate in a hurry.

On the other hand, it’s nice when the money you send to pay the writer actually pays the writer (minus Substack’s cut, of course). I have long wished that places like the New York Times and Washington Post had tip jars for the good writers — if I subscribed to the damned things I would have to subsidize the clueless, pompous, self-righteous, yappy-dog incompetents who dominate those once-distinguished institutions.

One hand, other hand, one hand, other hand. The work of the subscriber-supported solo practitioner doesn’t get seen by nearly as many people as something on the open web — but maybe that’s a feature rather than a bug! Fewer morons to insult you without reading what you write.

Given the hostility of our major media venues to anything that even resembles thinking, there’s no easy solution to this problem. Perhaps some kind of non-partisan, non-ideological journal of ideas will eventually emerge — Lord knows there are enough tech zillionaires to fund one — but in the meantime what does a reader do? This reader is gonna look for some fat to cut from his media budget and pay one or two more writers.

June 12, 2020

getting back to the open web via micro.blog

I was a Kickstarter backer of micro.blog and an early enthusiast, but I eventually drifted away from it because I was having trouble getting it to do what I want it to do. In some cases there were bugs in the system — it’s still a new platform, after all — and in some cases my brain was just not getting in sync with it. But I have continued to pay my monthly fee and to cheer it on, and micro.blog’s founding genius Manton Reece has been working away at improving the platform and extending its capabilities. Now I’ve decided to come back. Here’s why:

My micro.blog page is part of my own domain — it’s on my turf. My data belongs to me.
I need, for the usual professional reasons, to have a Twitter account, and the frictionless cross-posting from micro.blog allows to me to do so without stepping into the minefields of Twitter itself.
I used to have an Instagram account, but I hated having even a tiny place in Zuckerworld, and micro.blog offers easy and clean image posting, plus a dedicated page for all my photos.
Also, I devoted many years to using Pinboard as a bookmark manager, but (a) I was saving too much stuff; (b) the site has only been minimally improved over the past decade — it still lacks a responsive design, which is a crime in 2020; and (c) it’s not on my turf. Why not use micro.blog to post links with brief quotes?
I’ve been thinking about doing — well, not a podcast as such, but occasional short audio, posts, microcasts one might say. The ability to do that is baked into micro.blog.

So basically micro.blog is a way for me to put everything I do online that is visually small — anything small enough not to require scrolling: quotes, links, images, audio files — in one place, and a place on my own site. The only weird thing about this setup is that it will make me look like I’m super-active on Twitter when I’m barely ever on Twitter. But that’s a small price to pay for moving my stuff out of the walled gardens and onto the open web. And maybe when I don’t have a new book to promote I can deactivate my Twitter account — again.

I’ll continue to use this particular wing of the ayjay.org empire for occasional longer posts, but most of the action will be happening over there. Oh, and it has its own RSS feed too — I recommend that in preference to finding my microposts through Twitter.

December 20, 2019

on not owning my turf

When I bought this domain name I joked that the “.org” in this case stands for “organism,” because of course I’m not an organization. But that may not matter to the private equity firm that wants to buy the whole .org domain.

I have to confess: I didn’t know that this was possible. I thought the various domains were administered by the consortium that runs the whole Web — I didn’t know that entire top-order domains were for sale on the open market. I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog and elsewhere counseling the wisdom of owning your own turf, but this is a strong reminder to me that of course I don’t own my turf — I only have use of the domain name for as long as I am willing and able to pay whatever a private equity firm (should the sale go through) decides I ought to cough up. If they tell me that I can keep ayjay.org for $5000 a year, then this won’t be my turf any more.

It’s sobering. Similarly — and this I did know — if my hosting company, or any other hosting company I might use, decided that as a Christian I am an intolerable bigot who cannot be allowed to sully their good name, then I might still have temporary title to the domain name but would be unable to make any of my writings public.

I have written against the walled gardens of social media and in favor of tending the digital commons, but maybe “commons” was a bad metaphor. Maybe the open web is more like a public park that the city government might at any time sell to developers who plan to turn it into a high-rise. Absence of walls is not presence of public ownership.

I own my computer and the files on its hard drive. That may be all, in the digital world, I own.

August 1, 2019

here and there

As some of you may have noticed, I’m not posting here very frequently. I think for the foreseeable future I’m only going to be using this blog for longer reflections — long by internet standards, anyway.

From day to day you’ll find me posting to my micro.blog account — and if you haven’t checked out micro.blog, please do! People sometimes describe micro.blog as a “Twitter replacement,” but that’s not quite right. It may be better to think of it as what services like Twitter and Instagram could have been if they had been devoted to the open web and not subservient to the demands of venture capital. It’s a great place for low-key connection with others, and the best possible way to get started in blogging. It’s not free, but then Twitter and Instagram aren’t free either — those services just make you may in currencies other than money. Micro.blog serves no ads, respects your privacy, and allows you to own your turf. Try it!

I continue to post bookmarks — with useful excerpts! — at my Pinboard page, which I have been using for … [checks site] … ten years and two weeks.

Finally, I think my newsletter is pretty fun — a bit of a break from the incessant seriousness of our political moment.

May 20, 2019

indie web in the New Yorker

As a consistent and perhaps obnoxious advocate for the open web — see here and especially here — I was thrilled to see this article by Cal Newport, and more than thrilled to see the shout-out to micro.blog. Please come check it out, along with me.

Just one point for now: Newport writes, “Despite its advantages, however, I suspect that the IndieWeb will not succeed in replacing existing social-media platforms at their current scale.” This is precisely right, but as I commented a few weeks ago, that’s a feature, not a bug. Scale is the enemy.

January 23, 2019

social media, blogs, newsletters

Tim Carmody:

The blogs I’ve written for (Kottke notwithstanding) have only had so much ability to retain me before they’ve changed their business model, changed management, gone out of business, or been quietly abandoned. They’re little asteroids, not planets. Most of the proper publications I’ve written for, even the net-native ones, have been dense enough to hold an atmosphere.

And guess what? So have Twitter and Facebook. Just by enduring, those places have become places for lasting connections and friendships and career opportunities, in a way the blogosphere never was, at least for me. (Maybe this is partly a function of timing, but look: I was there.) And this means that, despite their toxicity, despite their shortcomings, despite all the promises that have gone unfulfilled, Twitter and Facebook have continued to matter in a way that blogs don’t.

I’d very much like to dismiss what Tim says here — but I don’t think I can. He’s probably right. (And the asteroid/planet metaphor is an especially fertile one.) In light of Tim’s account of his experience, I’ve been reminded that my own opting-out of social media is a luxury — and I am therefore all the more grateful for that luxury.

I wrote in a recent edition of my newsletter,

On Tuesday morning, January 22, I read a David Brooks column about a confrontation that happened on the National Mall during the March for Life. Until I read that column I had heard nothing about this incident because I do not have a Facebook account, have deleted my Twitter account, don’t watch TV news, and read the news about once a week. If all goes well, I won’t hear anything more about the story. I recommend this set of practices to you all.

After reading the Brooks column I checked in on the social media I have access to, and I cannot readily express to you how strange the commotion seemed to me. The responses of people to this issue struck me as — this is going to sound very strong, but I promise you that it’s precisely how I felt — it struck me as the behavior of people in the grip of some manic compulsion, of some kind of mass hysteria. There are no rational criteria in light of which what happened between those people on the National Mall matters — none at all.

And then I was filled with relief that I hadn’t got caught up in the tsunami — which, if I had been on social media, I would have been as vulnerable to as the next person, I’m sure — and filled with determination to make my way to still higher ground. Maybe you can’t do that, but if you can you probably should. (And, to be perfectly straightforward, there are a great many people who say they can’t disconnect from social media who in fact just don’t want to, or are afraid of what will happen if they do.)

Relatedly: I was chatting with the wonderful Robin Sloan about these matters earlier today, and Robin expressed his hope that “a tiny, lively, healthy Republic of Newsletters is possible — it really is!” I love everything about that formulation: Republic of Newsletters, yes, but also that it’s “lively” and “healthy” — and tiny. Numbers, metrics are not what matters here. What matters is relation. What matters is “Only connect.” I replied to Robin,

I think so — I really really do. Opt in, read or don’t read as the fancy strikes you, and if you have a comment or a question, hit reply. What could be simpler? (As you and Craig Mod commented in that recent WSJ piece, email may be the Tom Bombadil of internet communication: last, as it was first. Well, you didn’t use that metaphor, I admit. But it’s fascinating that the pattern, for some of us anyway, seems to be internet to open Web to walled gardens to open Web to internet.)

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace. We’ve moved a long way from Tim Carmody’s planetary metaphor, which, as I say, I feel the force of, but whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

August 31, 2014

Create systems that are ambivalent about the open or closed web. If I create a tool that’s good at posting content to Facebook and Twitter, it should also post to RSS feeds, which exist outside the context of any corporation. Now other generous and innovative people can build systems that work differently from Facebook and Twitter, using these feeds as the basis, and the investors will have another pile of technology they can monetize.

If you don’t like the way the algorithms in Twitter and Facebook work, then this is how to counteract that. Re-create the level playing field we used to have. Stimulate the open web. Give us something new to play with. It isn’t “either/or” – it’s “and.”

The key point is this – in everything we do we must treat the open web as equal to the private networks. Maybe we don’t have to depend on the government to do this for us, maybe we can be a bit more systematic about encouraging the wild chaos of the open network, knowing that it leads to new tools and new opportunity to profit.

— How to stimulate the open web