This is my first ‘person’ page. And, of course, h0p3 has been doing this for a very long time and I am only copycatting. His are ‘light-hearted plain-web d0xxings’ or somesuch—email, address, phone number, links to conversations. Mine are just that person’s words and my thoughts in summation—which is far more of a calling card to me, particularly after these other identifiers have expired.

As with most things, though, I am still playing catch-up with him. (He is the premiere modern Public Self-Modeler, in an age where such a thing is possibly dangerous, uncomely and, well, selfie-stickish.

He says in Find the Others:

I believe that by honestly uploading my mind into my wiki, we both have access to an enriched network of references for generating accurate theories of each other’s minds.

Ahh, dear me, so then it takes much more than a page—this entire endeavor is sunk. There can be no eulogy or summation. It would take a massively overloaded TiddlyWiki to accurately describe such an one as this…

To some non-trivial extent, the labels, attributes, characteristics, properties, and models I generate about a person help form a kind of name.

In reply to this, our friend Sphygmus^[1] writes:

I want to talk about the vocabulary of “modeling” another person as well. I think I have observed that people don’t understand what you mean when you say you clearnet doxx them in order to better model them. For me, though, that was one of the most intuitive things you say. When I was in college the first time, I worked as an ILL student worker and loved it, largely because it sent me wandering through the stacks to pull out such a varied selection of books. One of the books I pulled that really stuck with me discussed how we form mental models of people in our heads and rehearse conversations with those people at various times, and the ways in which those rehearsals could be helpful or not. If I remember correctly, there were even worksheet-like questions for shaping mentally rehearsed conversations in a more helpful way. Sadly, I can remember exactly where I pulled the book from in the library but I’ve been unable to figure out the title – I wish I could go back and read it again!

Of course it also has to do with the problem of other minds and the unbridgeable gap between me and the outside world. Inevitably we only know others through our construction of them within our own minds.

After a discussion of the merits of psychometric tests between the two, h0p3 says:

I am inevitably forced to use labels, adjectives, etc. to model (boxing things in is what makes it computable information at all for us).

Ah, well—so this page is my box. And these are the things I put it in it.

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(If you meet someone—someone with ASCII glasses on, say—and they purport to be a ‘madman in the desert’—then put this page straight away. FOR YOU NOW have the genuine artifact in front of you!)

(However, if you are uncertain, you can do one more thing: you can tell the man a joke. Like: a homunculus and a dark triadic memetic walk into a bar. He will stop you. ‘Let me stop you right there. Before you finish, please know that I am quite literally autistic and your elegant form of advanced humor which you are so carefully deploying might end up lost in my limbic system somewhere. Forgive me, please, and tell your joke, and thank you for saying it is a joke—k0sh3k will laugh at me later for this, but I will test out three interpretations of the joke with you now and then have her review the transcripts later…’)

(These overwhelming feelings of endearment and admiration and sheer pity that are now coming over you will now materialize in the form of laughter. The joke that was designed to pique the curiosity has now been outpiqued by a new curiosity: one in ASCII glasses that has gone to such great extent to analyze the joke that has been placed on the table—and, now look—this analysis has expanded everything in sight. You look at the joke and see that it is much bigger. And the conversation is now expanded, it is bigger. And the table—the table is much bigger, too!)

(Ok, now, tell me: did you laugh? Did you feel some endearment and admiration and some pity? I don’t know if you will enjoy or love h0p3 as much as I do, or as much as I purport to—if not, well, then I understand that, too. There was a time when I thought that I would only frustrate him or that he might just annoy me—I was reluctant to say anything or to take the time to read so very many words…)

(But what is life but a chance to expand a joke, to make the conversation a little longer, or to fancy that maybe even the table at which we sit has now grown?)

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I aim to do you justice.

It’s that chivalrous, sensible, steelnivorous h0p3—he steels you up, then it’s all night steel for breakfast!

This short sentence is a trope of h0p3. He ‘aims’—he has a very specific set of purposes in mind for you, good good, his work is a pointed effort. A discovery of truth? A deep sea recovery of some rarified moral sense? I cannot characterize it properly. But to ‘aim’ is truly a bold facet.

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True literature can exist only where it is produced by madmen, hermits, heretics, visionaries, rebels, and sceptics.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

That h0p3 labels himself a ‘madman’, a ‘jester’, a ‘retard’ and so on—well, this is a rich tradition and these are rarified, very colorful and storied appellations. I do think of Zamyatin—who is forgotten to our society, but who was prescient to the disasters of the 20th Century that he lived in. We was a catalyst to the entire utopian and dystopian genres. (I have no doubt that my beloved Vigoleis also saw himself among this rabble.)

This is cause for alarm—and I see this in h0p3’s more dismayed dispatches from time to time—the world will not be kind to him. However, he is a heretic—we know this. He must do his work; it is too valuable.

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I am wet with paranoid anticipation.

Sweating. Strange. Eager. A fork. I imagine him holding a fork. A big fork for grilling? No, a regular fork. Persperating. Eyes a-poppin. Veiny eyes. Saucer veiny eyes. Really sweet, sweet, shiny fingernails, right? Very eager. Heyooo!

Oh, wait. Wet, hahaha, forgot the best part, yeah, wet-t-t-t!

I’m trying to decide whether this codes as just IAWWPA or something more like just being ‘parawet’. THIS IS VALID HONEST WORK.

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1. A friend. What more do you need to know? ↩︎

I’ve been helping a friend with a Discord bot, which has opened my eyes to the explosion of chatbots in recent years. Yes, there are the really lame chatbots, usually AI-driven—I searched for “lame chatbots” and was guided to chatbot.fail, but there’s also the spoof ‘Erwin’s Grumpy Cat’ on eeerik.com.

We’ve also quietly seen widespread use of sweet IRC-style bots, such as Slack or Twitch or Discord bots. These act like incredibly niche search engines, in a way. My friend’s own bot is for a game—looking up stats, storing screenshots, sifting through game logs and such.

So, yeah, we are using a lot of ‘one-line languages’—you can use words like ‘queries’ or ‘commands’ or whatever—but search terms aren’t really a command and something called a ‘query’ can be much more than a single line—think of ‘advanced search’ pages that provide all kinds of buttons and boxes.

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Almost everything has a one-line language of some kind:

• Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube all have search boxes on nearly all of their pages—a single line interface for querying the entire text. (Even general services like text messaging and e-mail have this prominently in their interface.)
• Issuing short commands to voice-recognition machines like Alexa and Siri.
• UNIX tools usually act individually.
• Spreadsheet math done in the fx bar.
• The browser address bar.
• One of my favorites is Pinboard’s URLs, which can be used to find related things using whatever ingenuity you can muster.
• Microwave cook commands.

Humans push the limits of these simple tools—think of hashtags, which added categorical querying to otherwise bland search engines. Or @-mentions, which allow user queries on top of that. (Similar to early-Web words, such as ‘warez’ and ‘pr0n’ that allowed queries to circumvent filtering for a time.)

It’s very interesting to me that misspellings and symbolic characters became a source of innovation in the limited world of one-liners. (Perhaps similar to micro.blog’s use of tagmoji.)

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It seems that these ‘languages’ are designed to approach the material—the text, the tags, the animated GIFs—in the most succinct way.

I wonder, though, if ‘search’ is the most impotent form of the one-liner. It’s clearly the most accessible on the surface: it has no ‘commands’, you just run a few searches and figure out which ‘commands’ work until they succeed. (If they do?)

It also seems relevant that less than 1% of Google traffic uses the I’m Feeling Lucky button. Is this an indication that people are happy to have the raw data? Is it mistrust? Is this just a desire to just have more? Well, yeah, that’s for sure. We seem to make the trade of options over time.^[1]

Observations:

• The more generic the data (the Web as a whole vs. a creepypasta chat), the more generic the language seems to be.
• Could the Web be viewed as something other than a giant container that we have to randomly access?
• For example, many chatbots work like a conversation—they have a memory, such as for storing quotes/memes, and they can be used as Bayesian filters (for kicking spammers).
• Is it possible to build a meta-bot that uses all the niche bots?
• What one-line language could be extrapolated from micro.blog or Pinboard?
• To what degree can cars, Christmas tree lights, video splicing, disc jockeying, playing video games—be driven by one-liners?
• What would it take to get to two lines?

Some sites—such as yubnub and goosh—play with this, as do most browsers, which let you add various shortcut prefixes.

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Oh, one other MAJOR point about chatbots—there is definitely something performative about using a chatbot. Using a Discord chatbot is a helluva lot more fun than using Google. And part of it is that people are often doing it together—idly pulling up conversation pieces and surprising bot responses.

Part of the lameness of chatbots isn’t just the AI. I think it’s also being alone with the bot. It feels pointless.

I think that’s why we tend to anthropomorphize the ‘one-line language’ once we’re using it as a group—it is a medium between us at that point and I think we want to identify it as another being in the group. (Even in chats, like Minecraft, where responses don’t come from a particular name—the voice of the response has an omniscience and a memory.)

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1. It’s also amusing that Google keeps the button—despite the fact that it apparently loses them money. Another related footnote: the variations on I’m Feeling Lucky that Google has had in the past. Almost like a directory attached to a search. ↩︎

My ‘whostyles’ draft—a proposal for styling hypertext that gets quoted or syndicated outside of your site—is here.

Further notes on development will go here.

I am discovering more and more of these—what I am calling ‘link maps’, perhaps there is another name—collections of links that act like an index or a topical guide to a large ‘body’ produced by Hypertexting. You might want to conflate these with wikis—most wikis do act like ‘link maps’—but I am specifically looking at a ‘link map’ and a ‘body’ as being seperate entities. Much like a map and the dungeon or landscape that it maps are separate.

A very similar word is ‘sitemap’—perhaps ‘external sitemap’ is a better term—but I tend to think of a ‘sitemap’ as a complete map, whereas a link map might be limited or contain duplicates (like an index). (For comparison, see the sitemap for Purdue’s writing guidelines or the SuperMemo sitemap as standard examples. Though, I’m not sure how these would differ from a ‘table of contents’. Or a ‘home page’—such as Paul Burgess’ home page, which is a directory to itself.)

Some of my collection:

• The Mother Horse Eyes index, which maps the stories, background, chronology created by Reddit user _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9. (Reddit wikis do function more like ‘link maps’ usually, because they are attached to an arbitrarily-shaped body of discussion.)

• The story index for Alice and Kev, the story of being homeless in The Sims 3. This one interests me because it is a completed blog that has been organized by the writer.

• The Mencius Moldbug topical archive and chronology. Please don’t make me comment on what ‘toxic’ or ‘enlightened’ substance might be in these papers—I have no idea. I am just looking at the layout and possible uses of the link map. (Related: Yvain’s posts on Less Wrong.)

• Index of users banned from the ‘slate star codex’ reddit.

• QAnon Map, it’s crazy to me this polished, almost military-grade skin over a 4Chan. I think this is sufficient proof that the underlying technology doesn’t matter—and it may even be a benefit to be plain, easy to copy-paste—when building a hypertext ‘body’.

• _why’s Estate, collected writings of a programmer who abandoned all of his work.

• Gwern’s home page is a topical guide to the site.

These all seem to follow the collapse or completion of a work—very few maps seem to be made while the ‘body’ is underway. I also wonder to what degree these misrepresent the ‘body’.

This document, however, isn’t a ‘link map’ because I am just linking to a bunch of separate ‘maps’ rather than focusing my links on a single ‘body’ of work.

I will add to this list over time, who knows where it’s going.

‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’

A superset of blogging and wiki creation, as well as movements like the Indieweb and, to some degree, federated networks.

Does it include social networks like Twitter and Mastodon? Sure, depends on what you’re doing. If that network is helping you build a body of hypertext, is keeping you sufficiently ‘linked’ and gives you enough of an ability to format the text, then ‘super’—you are hypertexting in your way.

Although:

Ton Zijlstra:
At some point social software morphed into social media, and its original potential and value as informal learning tools was lost in my eyes.

I hope it goes without saying that Twitter is a limited form of hypertexting. It underutilizes the tech—that’s its whole point, right?

You can compartmentalize your various writings, though.

Jennifer Hill:
And you’re probably all sitting there and you’re like, “This girl wants me to delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… I got a following! I got a brand!”

No, that’s not what I’m saying. You have two selves. You have a career self, who—I’m pretty sure all of us have to use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for work or Medium or whatever other platform in the world you want to use—and then you have your personal self that knows the things that they’re doing. And what I’m speaking to right know is your personal self. You know, I understand you gotta make money, gotta make that dime…

But the point of the term is not to disqualify a certain technology or to try to channel disgust or disdain into something new—that’s exactly why the term is envisioned as a superset. I am extracting this term from what I am seeing develop on the Web.

On Supersets

A superset is the inversion of a subset. So, rather than dividing a topic into further subtopics—we combine related topics into a new ‘super’ topic. By redrawing the lines of the topic, it is possible to discover new subsets within the superset or to work with folks across the topic as a whole.

In this case, the superset seems superuseful since the division lines between the hypertext niches are almost entirely structural. (This isn’t entirely true: some structures imply, for example, centralization. A feed of interleaved user ‘stuff’ is done most simply by a single network housing that data—at least at first.)

I’m not even sure the subsets actually exist. It is already all hypertext that conforms to a variety of possible structures:

The blog (feed) and the wiki (ad-hoc) might not actually be different—despite that we think of wikis as being multi-writer (the original wikis anyone could edit, without respect to any record of permanent trolling demerits) and using a simplified markup that made linking fluid while writing—a blog can do what a wiki can do and vice versa.

By decoupling the hypertext from the implied structure of a wiki or blog, I can now look at these structures as mere arrangements of my hypertextual body.

Advanced Hypertexting

I think it’s worth repeating the criteria of ‘hypertexting’ so that it can be either corrected or remain crystal clear.

1. A ‘body’ of hypertext is being created. Not just a single post or link.
2. Linking is used both within and without the ‘body’. No comment on how this can be done ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. At the very least, though, this allows the body to be anything but merely linear.
3. The formatting of the text is enhanced by inline imagery, charts, emoji, bullets, colors, aesthetics that allow the one hypertexting to communicate in addition to the letters themselves. (The standardization of HTML between us seems like a unique human collaboration that we should take advantage of. To some, this is all a distraction; to others, it is vital.)

There is nothing new at all here—in fact, it’s all becoming very old—but the superset distinction allow us to draw attention to the ‘body’ rather than the blog ‘post’ or the wiki ‘page’ and to ask: ‘what are we creating here?’ The body itself is a superset—and ‘hypertexting’ calls into focus what the work as a whole can be from a higher vantage point.

These three attributes imply an effort that goes beyond writing alone. The first creates a body whose length is practically infinite—no reader will likely consume it all. The second indicates that much research (both external and self-research) is required. And the third gives a sense of bottomless innovation to the publishing interface—in fact, as long as the body is able to remain intact, it can be published by anyone exactly as it is intended, as long as the browser remains compatible, which it has done remarkably well so far.

In addition, this gives us the impetus to preserve the browser’s life and compatibility, such that these bodies are kept alive.

Creating a body this large demands the ability to shape the structure. This is the problem: how do I begin to approach your giant monolith of hypertext beyond just reading your two or three latest posts?

What I would like to highlight is the ability of the author to use the ‘body’, its linking and formatting, to shape the structure. To infoshape.^[1]

Link directories are clearly a part of this superset. Delicious and Pinboard themselves act as hypertexting swarms that work to connect the bodies. Maybe these connections fill holes in the body—maybe they act as introductions between bodies. They are a way to shape the info and annotate it slightly.

h0p3: I’m actually annoyed when people call my wiki a blog, since it is obviously not that to me. Of course, the fool in me starts wondering what exactly on the web doesn’t count as hypertexting? What doesn’t have a single entry point?

The home page is definitely the curated entry point. But it’s not just that entry point that’s important—the points that go deeper from there are important. h0p3’s home page was initially the most important thing to me. But now it’s the ‘recent changes’ page and the bookmarks I have that indicate where I intend to next explore further. Sometimes he is a blog, sometimes he is a wiki. Sorry, man!

So, (tentatively,) let’s look at three aspects of your hypertext:

• Permanent writings: thoughts that build over time into pages that act as storehouses or progressive essays—this page is that way for me.
• Emphemeral links, notes, partial thoughts: materials that either inform the permanent stuff or just act as simple interactions with others, participation in the present.
• Directory and search: ways of navigating the above.

To bring this into practice, here are a few interesting ways I’ve seen this play out:

Zylstra.org: This blog builds on itself day to day. In a way, posts become redundant because Ton is very careful to rewrite the same idea in different ways—to be sure it’s understood. I have read articles from 2008 that are only subtly different from others in 2018. But this makes sense—his message hasn’t been received yet. On top of this, he has a small directory for reading through his writings. I found this perfectly useful. You can do this kind of thing by hand, if you need to.

h0p3: I guarantee you’ve never seen a wiki used this way—as a backup for physical letters, as a way of messaging people, of writing drafts in public, of keeping detailed link logs, chat logs—it’s all in there. Links are used liberally throughout everything, so that you can track h0p3’s growing nomenclature.

More than half of hypertexting is the reading behind it—because if you are hypertexting in isolation, then you are missing out on a world of links.

Ton:
I treat blogging as thinking out loud and extending/building on others blogposts as conversation. Conversations that are distributed over multiple websites and over time, distributed conversations.

Discovering New Ways

What you might think of as ‘advanced hypertexting’ simply allows the shaping of the hypertext. Could we go beyond that?

• What pieces are the hypertext broken up into?
• How does one interchange or embed or inter-relate these texts?
• Can these pieces be composed into—not just texts—but shapes for the text?

To me, this is a great advantage of the superset. If the platform could see itself less as being a blog or a wiki or a directory, but as a collection of hypertexts that can be shaped, perhaps by hypertexts themselves. (Wikis—and TiddlyWiki in particular—have long had this abililty to make a page that displays the other pages as a blog. And some wikis allow you to include pages in other pages.)

The advanced hypertexting doesn’t end with the wiki—it’s just one way. I think Tumblr was initially on to something—aesthetic and piece layout are important here. Now add the ‘advanced’ hypertexting and what do you have?

TODO

(This is an unfinished steno—it could use a survey of the hypertexting field here. And it will be interesting to see where things go over the next six months. I will have to revisit this after I learn more.)

(I think the other missing discussion is how ‘ephemeral’ fragments fit into this. See also: Blogging.)

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1. The other side of this coin is Infostrats—the reading of hypertext. ↩︎