A year of new avenues

It’s so pow­er­fully obvious to me, it might as well be written in ten-foot let­ters of flame: the plat­forms of the last decade are done.

I said it in April 2022, and I believe it even more today: their only con­clu­sion can be abandonment; an overdue MySpace-ification.

This is … tremendously exciting! Some of you reading this were users and/or devel­opers of the internet in the period from 2002 to per­haps 2012. For those of you who were not, I want to tell you that it was exciting and energizing, not because every­thing was great, but simply because any­thing was pos­sible.

The con­crete hadn’t set.

Now, after a decade of stuckness, the pave­ment is cracking — crumbling — and I want to insist to those of you who lived through that time, and those of you who didn’t: we all have a new opportunity.

Here’s my exhortation:

Let 2023 be a year of exper­i­men­ta­tion and invention!

Let it come from the edges, the margins, the provinces, the marshes!

THIS MEANS YOU!

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 is 2003 again. Facebook, Twitter, and Insta­gram haven’t been invented yet … except, it’s also 2023, and they have, so you can learn from their rise and ruin.

This doesn’t mean you ought to start a company.

As the plat­forms of the last decade crumble, we might put “founder” cul­ture back on the shelf. Startup finance works fine for building a busi­ness of a very par­tic­ular kind; and, like, thank you for Shopify! Seriously! But, for a decade, this very par­tic­ular kind of busi­ness had a lock not only on internet commerce, but internet cul­ture, too, with only ill effect.

I want to insist on an ama­teur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and ven­ture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.

It’s plain that nei­ther the big tech com­pa­nies nor the startup financiers are going to pro­duce the “ways of relating” that will matter in 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.

We should say: thanks for the browsers. Thanks for the seam­less global slabs of compute, avail­able for pen­nies and less. We’ll use them.

A whale dies in the ocean, and its car­cass feeds a whole ecosystem for decades.

The browsers: let’s dwell there for a moment. Because “browsers” doesn’t just mean Chrome, Safari, and Edge; every oper­ating system now offers a triv­ially avail­able web canvas to which you can add any­thing you want. Aldus Manutius, who printed the first pocket-sized books in Venice at the turn of the 16th century, would have wept to pos­sess a “page” of this kind.

Next, he would have crit­i­cized it. But first, the weeping!

All along, from the frothy 1990s to the per­co­lating 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been growing and maturing, sprouting new capabilities. From my van­tage point, that growth has seemed to accel­erate in the past five years; CSS, in par­tic­ular, has become incred­ibly flex­ible and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.

For people who care about cre­ating worlds together, rather than get­ting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What incred­ible luck, that this open, decen­tral­ized “way of relating” claimed a posi­tion at the heart of the internet, and stuck fast. The web is limited, of course; frustrating; some­times maddening. But that’s every cre­ative medium. That’s life.

Okay, so, what kind of exploration? What kind of invention? I have some rough (and per­haps only mar­gin­ally useful) notions for new avenues, which I will type out below.

First, though, I want to acknowl­edge that inventing new things, par­tic­ularly new “ways of relating”, is a lonely task. In the beginning, it’s just you, or, at best, you and your tiny gang of col­lab­o­ra­tors. You can only HOPE that per­haps a few dozen other people start to pay attention. That doesn’t feel like any­thing real. It’s difficult.

And … that’s just the way it goes!

The good stuff is always lonely in the beginning. Nothing mean­ingful will get made if its poten­tial makers all wimp out too soon, because they get scared by the sparse crowd, the empty room.

You have to take on the loneliness. You have to strengthen that muscle.

Here are those avenues.

Try the new new new thing

Spend some time with Arc, the new browser from The Browser Com­pany of New York. It’s an opin­ion­ated appli­ca­tion that’s con­stantly flexing and mor­phing as the team embroi­ders fresh ideas. Using the app at this stage in its devel­op­ment feels almost like fol­lowing the new season of a TV show.

The orig­inal web browsers, back in the 1990s, sug­gested new activities, new problems, new opportunities. Does this next-generation web browser sug­gest any­thing new? I’ve only used it for a little while, and already I think the answer has to be “yes”. (Don’t miss the uncanny cutouts of live web pages avail­able in Arc’s “easel” function … )

Arc is cur­rently avail­able only for Mac, and there is a waitlist. (If you received this newsletter via email, go check the copy in your inbox for an invite link.)

Think deeply about discovery

How might you help people find new things on the internet? How might you give new things on the internet a mean­ingful audi­tion, without turning it all into a game that can (and will) be hacked and mastered?

I suspect the best answers are grounded in good old-fashioned human recommendations, but who knows? Maybe TikTok has it right; maybe every­body deserves one (1) audi­tion with the capri­cious god-algorithm of the realm. Maybe there’s some­thing to be iso­lated and improved there.

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.

Climb into an overlay

The deep struc­ture of the internet stymies peer-to-peer pro­tocols; I wrote about this ear­lier in 2022.

In response, some people are turning to simple, secure overlay net­works that make peer-to-peer addressing easier, or indeed, even pos­sible at all. ZeroTier and Tailscale are the leaders here, and they’re both very impres­sive ser­vices. A few years back, I set up a ZeroTier overlay net­work just for my own com­puters (laptop, desktop, Linux box, cloud instance) and it has been a tiny rev­o­lu­tion in my technical work.

I am 100% con­vinced there are inter­esting new “ways of relating” waiting on these overlay net­works, these pocket internets. They might require con­fig­u­ra­tions beyond what’s cur­rently supported, but these com­pa­nies are suf­fi­ciently young and flex­ible that, pre­sented with a com­pelling idea, I get the sense they’d just … implement it!

Maybe you should set up a ZeroTier or Tailscale net­work with a few friends or col­lab­o­ra­tors and … see what hap­pens?

Go digging in the crates

What half-forgotten old pro­tocol might be revived and repurposed?

Con­sider the example of RSS. Designed for blogs and news web­sites, its greatest suc­cess had nothing to do with those formats: RSS is the pro­tocol that powers podcasting, all of it, under the hood, invisibly.

Where else is the wiring already in the walls? What new sig­nals might you send?

My own avenue of exploration, a new pro­tocol called Spring ’83, takes direct inspi­ra­tion from the internet of forty years ago, in par­tic­ular the hilar­ious sim­plicity of RFC 865, the Quote of the Day Protocol. I think there’s a lot of energy still coiled up in those early RFCs.

Make a thing with which you can talk about the thing

I feel like this is a common pattern: a com­mu­nity is building some­thing new, and they talk about it … on Twitter. Maybe Discord. That’s fine, obviously, but there’s a sense in which it gives away the game on the first move.

Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging. If that sounds exhaust­ingly meta, well, yes — but it was also SUPER generative. When the thing can describe itself, when it becomes the nat­ural place to dis­cuss and debate itself, I am telling you: some fly­wheel gets spinning, and pow­erful things start to happen.

This is related to my opinion that the very best movies are about movies, the very best books about books.

When the meta con­ver­sa­tion hap­pens elsewhere, it’s like a little energy leak. Maybe that’s the energy you need.

Make exemplars before services

Remember that a single exem­plar of a new format can be a pro­found contribution; in art and cul­ture, maybe the MOST pro­found. These are the works that found genres.

Blogs are a useful example. The first blogs were static web pages, edited by hand, with new posts appended to the top. It was only after the format was proven out that other people — different people — came along and built soft­ware and hosting ser­vices expressly for blogging.

If you want, you can be that first example! You can edit by hand!

Work with the garage door up

Less an avenue, more a way of approaching an avenue:

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 cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas.

It’s been a decade of products, smooth and sleek; apps with cham­fered edges. I am inter­ested now in visions, compulsions, provocations.

Patrick Tan­guay on 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.

I am inter­ested in some­thing to cite!

Don't settle for Mastodon

I suppose this is an anti-avenue, because: Mastodon is not it.

When you tell me about Twitter vs. Mastodon, I hear that you got rid of the flesh-eating pira­nhas and replaced them with fed­er­ated flesh-eating pira­nhas. No thanks, I’m still not swim­ming in that pool!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t enjoy fun, per­co­lating con­ver­sa­tions on that platform. I’m just saying that it does not, to me, rep­re­sent a suf­fi­ciently inter­esting exper­i­ment, because it accepts too much as settled.

The time­line isn’t settled.

The @-mention isn’t settled.

Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again!