p. 9. “Webloggers understand that people will regularly visit any website that reliably provides them with worthwhile content, even when that content is on another site. As counterintuitive as it may seem from an old-media perspective, weblogs attract regular readers precisely because they regularly point readers away.” (This is one way that I feel blogs have returned to an ‘old-media’ perspective - people are much less likely to link externally in 2019. Most Medium posts or recipe blogs or coding tutorial posts - you don’t see so many links any longer. I think this a combination of a lot of things - links now have a decent monetary value due to affiliate linking and they also became a liability due to SEO rules. (See Linkfarmville.) As a result, I don’t think we can call this an ‘old-media’ perspective any longer. I think you could even safely call it the ‘new-media’ perspective! )

p. 11. “The new information space includes a website devoted to the adoration of Converse’s popular ‘Chuck Taylor All-Star’ sneaker, a site detailing the exploits of two friends who photograph each other attempting to match the appearance of strangers they happen to see, and one that seeks to elucidate an artist’s curious obsession with young women holding celery.” Okay, had to track these links down! They are: The Chucks Connection (still up), Dean & Nigel Blend In (defunct), and The Art of Frahm (also, still there, just as it was!) It’s interesting to me though, that the conceit of these websites would probably still work in 2019 - so though the ethic of ‘new-media’ in the 2000s has died, the creative concepts haven’t. In fact, I’m sure that they’ve cannibalized the ‘old-media’ creative concepts.)

p. 12. “For everyone, the great task of the future will not be to gain access to more information, but to develop avenues to information that genuinely enhances our understanding, and to screen out the rest.” (Yes, ok, here we go. I think we can all agree with this. And this makes me think of the ‘layers’ I mentioned in Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002) - layers of reading, layers of writing. Social media is too raw - it’s all random snippets of text, no summaries. I need high-level views of the information, then the ability to zoom into the details. A ‘layer’ is a level of detail - and it includes both a measure of polish and quality, as well as a measure of intimacy with the topic or person.)

p. 12. “Even the man who turns first to the Sports section of the paper version of his hometown newspaper is exposed, however briefly, to the front news page; and an interesting headline in the Living section may catch his eye when he puts down the rest of the paper.” (Ok, here we see the value of directories when compared to a search engine. Even ‘awesome’ directories are this way - you start to wonder, “What else is in here?” I think that even social media and Reddit give you this adjacency exposure - but perhaps it’s too random. The underlying assumption of this analogy is that the man values the newspaper as a whole.)

p. 12. “Read a good filter-style weblog for even a few days, and you will never doubt the value of an astute human editor. Because he evaluates content rather than keywords, a human editor provides his readers with more relevant information than the most sophisticated news aggregator ever can.” (This has definitely been my experience with Andy Baio. He has plugged me into better links over the years than any algorithm has. I mean algorithms have done some good work, too, but I think that they owe a lot to human editors downstream who initially bring some attention to a link that then gets picked up by an algorithm. So the algorithm relies on Andy Baio, too!)

p. 17. “With the addition of a comment system, many weblogs actively solicit ideas and opinions from their readers.” (This is one line that really struck me as being in stark contrast to today. Blog comments are seen as being synonymous with ‘cesspools’. I have not personally had that experience - but I have never had many readers and I am not a target for some reason. Large websites are obviously a target because they give a random commenter a large audience. Nevertheless, there is no question that people want feedback. For some, I think they would be happy with just measuring ‘likes’. But I think this is what the Indieweb gets soooo right - there are no ‘comments’, only blog posts interacting with each other. However, it’s clear that there are ‘readers’ who just want to send an e-mail, rather than having to write, edit and publish a blog online.)

p. 18. “I would go so far as to say that if you are not linking to your primary material when you refer to it—especially when in disagreement—no matter what the format or update frequency of your website, you are not keeping a weblog.” (What a prescient, clear-headed sentiment! This is something we still need to integrate into our ethic today.)

p. 29. “Writing short is hard—and very good for you. Seeking to distill your thoughts to the fewest words, you will find out what you really think, and you’ll work even harder to find the precise term to express your meaning. Paradoxically, writing short also spurred me to write longer pieces. Finding that I sometimes had more to say than I could comfortably fit in a weblog entry, it was natural to turn my comments into an essay. Rather than distill my thoughts, this longer form required that I flesh out my ideas and more fully support my conclusions.”

p. 30. “The weblogger is privy to the entries she posts and those that she does not: I think I’ll blog that! followed a moment layer by No. . . . Acutely aware of what she does not type, the weblogger more clearly defines her own boundaries. Reviewing what she has written, she catches glimpses of her less-conscious self.”

p. 40. She doesn’t mention how to set up any specific services, saying, “Even if I had a favorite, software of this type comes and goes.” It makes me very grateful that she wrote this book, despite the trouble with keeping it current.

p. 48. “When I look at an unfamiliar weblog, I always take note of the names listed in the sidebar. The first question I ask (still) is ‘Am I listed?’ Pathetic, isn’t it? I don’t think you ever outgrow it.”

p. 56. “I knew of one weblogger who told no one he knew about his site. His audience developed when the sites he linked found him and linked back.” It’s interesting to see my blog explained in two sentences. It’s cool that this still works twenty years later. (This section of the book focuses on the value of using a psuedonym. Kind of like with blog comments, I think people have rested on making generic claims (i.e. the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) and dismissed the valuable tradeoff that they offer.)

p. 68. “Write some linktext or a personal entry in the voice of another weblogger, using your own material. Then try using that technique once a day for a week or two to whether it suits you.” (I’m unsure as to whether this suggestion is a kind of A/B testing or if it is merely a game. I’m noticing in these next sections that there are some sales and marketing type strategies discussed. This fits inline with the idea that bloggers had to adopt the roles of editor and publisher. And promoter I guess. While I feel like there is discussion of ‘old-media’ vs ‘new-media’ writing approaches - but not so much ‘old-media’ vs ‘new-media’ publishing and promoting (whatever that may be.))

p. 69. “The audience of one is the single most important principle behind creating a website—or anything—that is fresh, interesting, and compelling. Consult your own taste, and then consult your audience—but only in regard to your presentation of the material.” (This seems a misnomer to me. I would think this would be ‘a creator of one’ rather than ‘an audience’. Look: this book, these notes I’m writing, every blog, every thread comment on the Internet, is written to the audience of humans out there. So I don’t think it’s useful to say that your audience is just yourself - if so, it would change the voice of the writing. For instance, you wouldn’t feel a need to explain anything. You wouldn’t take the time to write out your background on a topic. Even h0p3 sometimes writes in an explanatory voice and other times in a shorthand - like in link logs, where there are often short, cryptic comments in bulleted lists. Perhaps these varieties of voices also play into hypertext ‘layering’ - need a better name for it…)

p. 70. “Take your time. Think as you write, and be willing to rewrite until each sentence of each entry says exactly what you want it to.”

p. 72. “You will most enjoy writing your weblog if you approach it as your private sandbox. If, after writing and rewriting an entry, you can’t quite articulate your objection to current foreign policy, post it anyway. You’ll have another chance to try tomorrow or next week or next month.” (Again this is where ‘layering’ - ‘hypertiering’, ‘tearing’, ‘funneling’ - gaaa I don’t know what to call it - this is where it comes in. Having parts of your site that are less accessible and more personal and rough, alongside more public surface material.)

p. 74. “I would encourage you to embrace all the elements at your disposal. Experiment with different forms of linktext, different lengths of entries, much commentary, no commentary. Write short. Write long. If you are so inclined, play with the design of your site. If you love to code, your site can be a project that expands as your skills grow; if you don’t know anything about coding, your site may become a fantastic impetus to learn a little bit about HTML or cascading style sheets. Add photographs. Write essays. Hone your Web searching skills and publish the results. Tell stories. Be willing to experiment. Play.” (This is a photograph of the feeling towards one’s blog in 2002. This seems very basic now. However, most people have lost access to this freedom I think.)

p. 75. Linked article: “Adding value to your links.” This is still a solid bit of advice for writing directory entries.

p. 80. “GLBT bloggers…” (Didn’t realize this acronym had some shuffling occur. Good to see the lesbians prevail. Makes sense to me.)

p. 85. “You may choose to follow and participate in only one or two threads a day or week; you may find that you gain more from the community by lurking than by actively posting; and you must always remember that your words are the only measure other members have of you.” (There is good advice in the etiquette section here, but I am sure that anyone who needs the advice won’t take it.)

p. 87. “Some webloggers regularly provide coding tips, free postcards, or desktop wallpaper. If you feel that you are an expert user of a particular weblog tool or other commonly used software, consider offering tutorials on your site or providing advice in user forums.” (We’re past this, right? I think we’ve moved past this.)

p. 90. “[Linking to others] is probably the single most effective strategy for politely announcing your presence as a new member of the community.” (It’s interesting how this has changed subtly with @-mentions becoming the primary way on social media sites. I like how Webmentions have cleaned up this ‘strategy’ and allowed mentioning to become more nuanced. I wonder if ‘likes’ are a good way to announce your presence. Like I wonder if people generally check their likes for ‘others’.)

p. 92. (wrt to ‘cross-blog socializing’) “Be aware that if your weblog largely consists of comments to other webloggers—even two or three a day—you will severely limit your potential audience.” (Again, funneling.)

p. 95. “Every experienced weblog reader knows that the best way to find good weblogs is to follow the links from the sidebar of their favorites.” (The lost art that ‘friending’ killed!)

p. 102. “Weblog clusters emerged as webloggers converted their sidebars from more general lists of ‘other weblogs’ to ‘other weblogs like mine.’” (I don’t connect with this portrayal of the blogroll sidebar AT ALL! To me, it’s a chance to advertise my favorites - the tultywits. Admitting this is terrible - because it may hurt someone’s feelings that they’re not on my list. That’s the hard part of the tradeoff. But what can I do - I need these on my list to survive. Go focus on your list, make it good - and just don’t put me on there, I’m fine.)

p. 103. (wrt the word ‘attack’) “I don’t mean a respectful disagreement with her opinion on U.S. foreign policy; I’m talking about outright attacks that seem grounded in a personal dislike for the victim.” (Is an ‘attack’ an ad hominem argument? Is it using a derogative name? To accuse someone of an ‘attack’ - is that also an ‘attack’? It’s strange to live in a society where now I hear all the time in personal conversations with friends or neighbors: ‘[Person] attacked me on social media.’ Part of the trouble is knowing whether I can affix those intentions of ‘personal dislike’ to the other person. I get that this is unsolvable - part of my point is that we’re too wrapped up in conflict. People seem to collect it, categorize it and make rules around it, as if it were the loveliest game in the whole world.)

p. 104. “Again, I’m not counseling against thoughtful criticism of another weblogger’s political opinions or her editorial stance on the proliferation of trees with fuzzy pink flowers in her part of town. A public site invites scrutiny. Most people who offer opinions about current events are interested in, or at least not offended by, a respectful dissenting view.” (This is a perfectly rational view. But I try to stay away from criticizing someone publicly. I hope none of my thoughts here are perceived as looking down on Rebecca Blood or rejecting her work. I think this is a fantastic book - that’s why I’m talking about it. These are rough notes where I’m just using her statements as a springboard. I am probably wrong, up and down, left and right.)

p. 105. “My policy on dealing with weblog flamewars is simple: Ignore them.” (I get this. But this often feels like high-horsing. It feels arrogant to just ignore something completely. I think it’s fine to just say: ‘This hurts my feelings’ or ‘I’m not in a good state to reply to this’. People also seem to demand apologies and have become experts at dissecting apologies, as if you can get to the truth of something so subjective and surface-level. So silence doesn’t really cut it in many situations anyway.)

p. 134. “I focus my weblog on the ideas I find interesting, not on myself.” (Wonder about the PSM take on this.)

p. 144. “I don’t know if the ex-webloggers miss their weblogs. I don’t know if they ever wish they still had their little spot on the Web, a place to share stories, tell a few jokes, learn a little HTML. I think that I would miss those things, but I wonder if that might someday change.” (Would be interesting to ask Rebecca about this.)

p. 148. “Those first webloggers soon discovered a community of parallel sites that called themselves E/N pages (for ‘everything/nothing,’ a description of their subject mater). Though they used the same format (dated entries, newest at the top), their focus and sensibility was completely divergent from that of the emerging weblog community. Members of both communities agreed that though the format was identical, the sites, some how, were different.” (Hah, wow!! I missed this one. See here. Then here. I love how low the ratings are on these. I do think this is closer to what the Web has turned into, rather than blogging. Really appreciate that Rebecca pointed this out!)

Study of E/N pages also led me to Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything book. Here is an essay with some of the basics. To review later I suppose.

6 Jan 2020

I have a bit of time today, so I’m going to work on holding up my end of the chat here—however, I’m gone for a week starting Wednesday, so I’m not going to be great at getting back to anyone until after that. I’m also struggling a bit with motivation to write on this blog in general. I’ve been catching up on reading novels over the holiday and find myself almost entirely happy just doing that. I’ve also been writing some short stories—which is about the most pointless thing a person can do—but I am enjoying it, perhaps because it’s so pointless and carefree.

24 Dec 2019

Ok, never mind the timeframe. I personally feel like the discussion is just getting going. I’m really enjoying this and don’t want to just pour more words onto it. I’m definitely feeling a stupid self-satisfied British feeling (yes, the feeling is ‘chuffed’) at what good chatmates I have here. Everyone adds so much, it’s fucking great.

I hope I’m not sitting on my replies too long. I keep stirring my replies around in my head, unsure how to lay them out. I think that’s been the main thing for me this chat: I don’t want to poorly communicate a response or an idea that could cause the chat to go off into clarifications. But I also really trust you all to have replies that get high marks from me, so it probably doesn’t matter. I probably just want to hold up my end with solid contribs.

10 Dec 2019

One of the surprising parts of the chat so far has been that personal 1-to-1 conversations have emerged and seem to coalesce naturally into the rest of the chat!! I expected that we would throw out prompts and everyone would respond as a group, like you’d see when a band gets interviewed by a magazine, then we would move on to the next batch of prompts.

But this is almost like a forum with a bunch of panelists who field questions, then discuss between each other - except that side conversations can happen simultaneously, which would be impossibly noisy in real life. (This is a real problem: a panel is not only limited by time, but if a certain set of panelists takes the conversation in a new direction, there is often no chance - or desire, probably - to return to the original question with a new set of panelists.)

I’m also very heartened that there is so much longform writing occuring. I wasn’t sure how everyone would feel comfortable responding. And, if the chat is to happen naturally, it shouldn’t be needlessly gimmicky. We don’t want to just use hypertext like we’re pressing vinyl records. It should be used because it is worthwhile. But it’s like a dream - conversing over a broad time span, low-key, exploring each other’s side thoughts, ducking in and out of those newly found corridors - and I feel like I am getting to know everyone better. I’m bracing myself for a downside here.

We should set a end date - like end of December? Earlier?

There should also be a new prompt later this week perhaps. To give the group a central point again. Wondering if it should be a new prompt or a natural next segue? Maybe both - and if one is ignored, we leave it behind.

1 Dec 2019

Many of the ‘features’ of hyperconversations (drafting in public, heavy footnotes, branching discussion, more-is-more) seem to be attempts to break through possible communication problems by providing an excess of communication to draw from or to replicate the kinds of real-life annotations (body language, grunts, pointing at things) that we give in-person conversation. When someone is drafting a letter publicly and recants some words - or an emotional sentence evolves from reflexive disgust or confusion to a sentence of rationality - you catch a peek at the mind, much like you might in the corner of someone’s eye.

So, since hyperconversations continue to push toward an attempt at a ‘transparent’ view of someone’s side of a conversation or an early revelation at their motives^[1] - I’m going to lay out some of my intentions for doing this chat and everyone can fix me from there.

One of my main goals from the start is to see what editing and human curation can bring to a chat (or threaded discussion). While formulating Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002), I noticed that one of the prevailing notions of the book was that blogging improved on journalism (and presumably op-eds) by simply removing editors and publishers from the process and letting the audience decide what is good.

But this reasoning does not hold up - blogging doesn’t simply make everyone’s writing better. (It would be harder, right? New medium?) Sure, it may produce more public writing, with some very high quality at the top end - but someone still has to weed through it all - and that’s a tough job that most people don’t want or know how to do in their spare time!^[2]

I have a hunch that there could be some remaining value in weeding through a hypertext conversation and polishing it, as a service to readers. I don’t see myself removing any of it - I think the job could be to simply highlight parts of it into a running conversation, moving the rest out of view, but still accessible. I don’t think all readers will appreciate this - some will want (and deserve) the raw text. But I think having an initially truncated version to read can help the reader get into it a bit easier and help them decide if they want the full dump.

This also seems to tap into some design skills - and I think it’s possible that an editor/designer hybrid craft could come out of a project like this.

h0p3:
I’m excited to learn how to write in this format. I’d prefer to think inside this tiddler, but it takes a while for a message to settle sometimes, so please wait until I have a timestamp and ‘draft’ lock is dropped before quoting me.

Just to set you at ease, nothing will be finalized until the chat is over. So I won’t begin wrapping it up until everyone has pulled their stuff out of ‘draft’. Yes, this gives you a chance to edit yourself and mess with old chats - I’m not sure what you all think about the ethic of that - but I’m great with that, we can accomplish more if we trust each other.

As for quoting you while you’re drafting - since we’re all drafting, too, it seems fair game, right? As long as we source YOUR final quotes from YOUR finalized wiki, right? And if certain quotes don’t add up, we’ll footnote it and maybe it’ll add to the fun of the sprawl.

1) In Charge of Apple Inc

It would actually be hell to run Apple - because a) it’s stupid, past its prime b) it’s a corporation, who knows what monumental effect it has on the world, for good and ill, running it has got to be paralyzing c) it has shareholders, which is stupid, and d) if NeXT or BeOS or Amiga was still around, I’d be talking about them instead.

So what I actually mean is running Apple as if it was SimCity or something. Like if I didn’t have to constantly brace myself about Foxconn employees jumping, I’d love to just chill and design computers, tablets, operating systems, programming languages and the whole ecosystem. In a way, I think I do all of my design with this goal in sight. I need to interview Nathalie Lawhead and ask her about this, because I feel like she’s this way - probably a lot more than I am, of course.

Realistically, this isn’t possible - I never went to school for it and haven’t been through the ropes. If someone offered me a job I wouldn’t take it because of (a)-(d). Building my own company like this - well, I’m not much of an entrepreneur.

I think I’ve figured this one out tho - I need to continue with my designs and projects along this line and post them here - much like h0p3 does with his p2p designs - and that would be the SimCity-like approach. And maybe some things will become realized - like Fraidycat is beginning to.

2) Run a Puppet Theatre In My Neighborhood

I admire little-known but amazing neighborhood attractions - like the Zymoglyphic Museum or neighborhood junk houses and esoteric museums. The marionette theatre in the Jardin du Luxembourg is just the kind of thing I would want to do if I live to be retired. It’s great - they bring in novel stuff like costumes that change themselves and smoke bombs. I think this kind of thing makes your ‘home’ even more of ‘home’ for you and the people around you. It begins your burial in that place, so that you are woven into the very grass.

It might be that putting this here dooms the aspiration - because this seems like the kind of thing that you should keep secret and avoid talking about because it could be quashed by outside negativity about its preciousness or by your own oversharing about it - at the same time, I need to plant some seeds of commitment in myself and just say it.

3) Return to Teaching, This Time First-Grade

I taught for two years and it was the best. At first, I treated it like a research project to try to sort out how to improve public education. But I’m not sure that any ‘system’ can automate teaching - we just need quality teachers and they need resources. (What I mean by ‘quality’ is - at the very least, you shouldn’t intimidate students - and, beyond that, hopefully you can heyfey to some degree.)

This kind of alt-education stuff is also starting to feel like min-maxers who just want real characters to try their hands at. But it’s like - the whole thing is already min-maxed.

I still spend a lot of time at the school, but I hope to just go back to basic teaching in like seven years, when I’ve stabilized my life. The elementary school is like the epicenter of our society (or should be) and it’s a damn sacred place. I no longer see the appeal of ‘changing the world’ compared to ‘helping thirty kids’ have a good experience during their daylight hours.

28 Jan 2020

@chameleon:
I’d like to pre-emptively avoid lumping in “activists” with those types of people.

Yeah, ok, I need to fill that in a bit. I’m not making a judgement here. I’m not putting them all in a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category. There are good and bad trolls, good and bad activists.^[5] (Although sometimes I wonder if centuries from now we’ll look back and see the pursuit for humor as being far more virtuous and generous than the pursuit for political ground. Maybe slightly - eh probably not.)^[6]

My grouping here is more a matter of directionality or something. Hypertext 2010 was an effort in isolation - or solipsism, as you say - impossible to intrude upon (without hacking it) - so quite unsuitable for a troll or activist, whose fuel is targets, people to trigger or people to sway. We don’t really have those directional targets. I mean I’m cool if people join us, but it’s not essential.

In fact, I think, for me, the directionality is inverted. I’m here to read. I’m not trying to own or gather up a bunch of Winnie Lims. I just want to read what she’s got and see what happens.^[7] Maybe I want to be owned and gathered. No, that’s not it - I mean perhaps in the moment of reading, I’m happy to be destroyed by it - but I’ve got my own thing I’m doing, it’s just going to be less dramatic. The directionality is just: I want to collect some of these cool stickers you’re offering. It’s like the pleasant capitalism that happens at the level of coins rather than cash.

It’s possible that ‘hypertext 2020’ continues to be hermetic, ‘staying under wraps’. But, no, I think that while trying to articulate this directionality, I want that inverted movement. Perhaps it’s like a vacuum tube where the pressure got too hot. So now a hole broke and everything is getting sucked inside. It’s a nice breeze. Time to break some glass.

Agreed on the mainstream - just on principle. My back is turned.

21 Jan 2020

Ok, thank you - the answers about ‘funneling’ or ‘iceberging’ or ‘shitpiling’ or whatever you want to call it are all really interesting. I really like Chamy’s take on drafting as another layer. I hadn’t considered that kind of granularity at all.

I guess we can start to wind the discussion down - I think the last thing I want to ask about touches on the ‘culture wars’ and the surrounding online warfare that we find ourselves in. Specifically: the ingroup/outgroup dynamics that plague the Internet, the trolls and activists that stoke the fire, and the norms that are being established around how one should talk and write publicly. This is already a topic in the discussion - the personal/private distinction we’ve discussed indicates where we stand in defending ourselves, the topic of doorways into our icebergs is somewhat about who to invite and how to set the right note - and h0p3 just went into how the funnel can ‘bounce’ trolls and vampires. (Which troubles me, because I like to meet trolls and vampires, too. For sure I’d love to meet vampires! I’m not sure I want them to bounce as much as to rattle around inside.)

So this topic might kill the discussion - I feel like it’s more enjoyable to just allude to the conflict rather than to take it on - not that no one’s talking about it, it’s like everyone is talking about it all of the time. And I think it goes without saying that the shape of our ‘cozyweb’ is due to these forces.

I guess my question is: to what degree do you feel the four of us are being shaped by the culture? Or are we attempting to reshape it in miniature? Because ‘hypertext 2020’ isn’t really a complete discussion without some vision for how our smaller landscape could function. We have some good ideas for how the craft of hypertext might progress in 2020. How can it possibly work culturally?

7 Jan 2020

I’d like to propose this question as our next point of conversation: “what on this massive highly-interlinked website might I want to start reading?”

Yeah, ok - let’s get into this. What has really inspired me about all of your wikis - and some of the newer personal websites I’ve run into - is this layering of the hypertext. h0p3 has the ‘about’ page, people might have a timeline or a ‘now’ page on their site, even Twitter with its ‘pinned post’ - you don’t just have to have a blog that drops you into chronological posts.

But it goes much deeper that this. I’m starting to think of it as funneling, having layers of hypertext that become progressively more personal, or which become more detailed, or perhaps even more (or less) ephemeral as you go through the layers.

I think part of this is an evolution of the fragmentation that has happened in social networks. People may use Twitter for a certain self-image or community, then Facebook or a blog for another mode, and people have become very accustomed to using each network as a separate outlet. And there’s a nice advantage to this - because you can address groups differently and not expose certain groups to overly personal material or control the image you project in each network.

In a similar way, I see this with Nadia Eghbal’s site - she has a newsletter for offering a monthly summary of her work, or there is the blog where you can read essays when they are published, and then she has a raw notes page that isn’t tied to any notification system (like RSS even), so you have to go out of your way to visit the page to catch anything new. So rather than having separate networks, there are different avenues to how you can approach her work.

Your wikis accomplish these layers using titling conventions. Usually ephemeral stuff is marked with a date, letters marked with ‘@’, permanent content is plainly titled. But this is also related to your front page material - you all know where to hide on your wikis the more personal material that you post and how to surface the things that are more central to your dialogue with the rest of us. (Sphygmus’ page coloring is a very interesting approach here.)

So I think of this as a kind of inverted funnel - where you have these entry points to your wiki - might be an ‘about’ page or it might be one of your sidebar directories or some intermediate topical page - and pages are situated somewhere in this conical area, perhaps you are even aware of how far a page might be from the doorway when you post it. Or which series of doorways reach it.

(I’m wondering what you think about this concept - what I’ve got wrong or if I’m characterizing your process correctly.)

kicks, I think you already address this in your FILE_ID pop-up - would you say more about how you thought about what to put there?

Well, that file is kind of my personal website, but it’s hidden inside of a little square. I like my site to be disorienting to happen upon, because I think it demands a bit of curiosity as an admission fee. (I think you do this too with your KEEP OUT notebook. It has lips on it, which soften the sting.)

But I’m so big on directories - it occured to me that I could evolve the ‘pinned post’ into something like a mini-directory. h0p3’s ‘root’ page is much more detailed - it’s five pages in one - and each page is terrifically long. I just tried to think about what a mini-directory or cover page would look like.

I also like to hide it because talking about myself is very uncomfortable. I feel very insignificant - but I like it that way - to have to feel that my own ideas or personality or opinions are very valuable - that would be too much to handle. I’d rather have little ideas and wrong ideas of my own - and just be a random person living life and no need to size up what I’m saying against the great ideas of history - no need to establish some track record of being right or upstanding.^[8]

So sometimes I think about getting rid of it - it seems like an advertisement for myself. But I hold out hope that I can make it a mini-directory and eliminate the self-promotional aspects. (On the other hand, I want to encourage other people to self-promote, so I don’t know why I see it as so shameful to write that way - when I like for other people to do it.)

I think the biggest discovery that I’ve made with ‘funneling’ is to have my /all unfiltered page and then to have a main page. To describe it in TiddlyWiki terms, it’s as if I’ve taken my ‘recent’ sidebar and curated it on the home page. And, rather than using titling conventions to do it, I use metadata - so that some entries are marked ‘hidden’ or ‘draft’ and that keeps them off the home page.

Are there things us wikis could be doing to better serve readers? Is it important for us to attempt to provide something like this for readers? Should it look like Gwern’s index, or is there a more wiki-native solution that might be more ideal?

I don’t know - the thing I’ve really enjoyed about your public wikis is that I’ve had to learn your conventions before getting into them. I think you require something from your readers - and I think that sets up a really healthy relationship that the rest of the Internet has struggled with. It’s not their place; it’s yours. And that’s abundantly clear. But when I became comfortable in your wiki, you may have trusted that I had done sufficient work to be worth interacting with.

But then again, I like funneling and there would be no cone without the point. Yours is a static image - but it’s also the colored tags to the side. I think you set the right mood for what it is you’re doing. Sometimes I wish I was structured more like a wiki - but stylistically I’m trying to evoke a turn of the century blog - and aesthetic is important to me, because it surrounds everything else. It accomplishes something that can’t be expressed or done any other way.

Are we modeling fictional characters or not? Does it matter?

h0p3:
We face infinigresses here; in a sense, it can’t be satisfied by us, it can only be sought.

I’m having a very difficult time replying to this (and the remarks that follow it.) Not because it’s not well-written or because I don’t agree - simply because I want to expand on it, but haven’t the language to do it.

But, to begin, I think there is something about ‘now’ which I think is important. We can’t satisfy the modeling of ourselves in a moment (‘now’), but we can’t develop something over time.

Who we are can only be understood through dialectics with others, and at least sometimes that occurs through dialectics with imagined characters. Of course, certainty cannot be achieved, (h:cba. Of course, certainty cannot be achieved, and any time you posit a limit, you posit something beyond it.) and any time you posit a limit, you posit something beyond it. (h:sbi. and what is beyond that limit is sometimes only something which fiction can initially explore.)

Similarly, if I sought after your model, I couldn’t achieve it ‘now’, in an instant. It would become assembled over time, as if it was a gigantic LEGO castle.

But what I wonder is: are the old models relevant to the ‘now’ model? Can I render all models useless in an instant? Perhaps, in modeling, I look back and see the model of me - and suddenly want nothing to do with it. Or perhaps it’s more light-hearted than that - it’s time for a drastic change. Or I’m just embarassed - that seems likely!

I’m not suggesting that the models are flawed - all the people I know who have gone through the death of many family members at once, this model becomes quite precious. For the memories it holds, but also because you don’t want to lose who you are through the process. You rely on the history of yourself to help you not lose yourself to an internally destructive force that wants to kill you.

But then - there are things from ourselves that we can’t take with us always. Ideas become outdated, of course. And then, like losing someone who we’ve had plans with, who suddenly is gone, any of our plans or projects might not survive in the present.

This also relates to the discussion about clarifying ‘wonderful’.

The process of clarifying who we are, including what is valuable to us, (fantastic Socratic anecdote, tyyyy) appears to be at least part of the treadmill of generating our models, and they ought to be. Our brains are constantly modeling the world (including ourselves); there’d be no intentional consciousness without it.

I may think something is wonderful in the ‘now’ but that could change. (I try to resist that, though - and to always be grateful for the things I’ve loved from the past. This helps me to guarantee that I will always love philosopher.life!) But I can’t always nab (in the instant) why I love something. And I feel that even attempting to can be foolhardy. In the moment, I can usually only assemble a tiny LEGO flower of an impression. And it often seems better to hold off and try to assemble something more. Although: flowers are dainty and beautiful in their own right and I can still later surround them with LEGO cabbages and LEGO motorcycles and minotaurs and to build the fine scenery that I mean to.

And I also think that my LEGO flower (in this case) would be the phrase, “I love it because it makes my life worth living.” And to avoid the rational dissection of it is to grant it real life for the moment.

(Of course, I’m not opposed to the conversation with Socrates, I would have it in an instant. “Because drinks are more seasonal to me,” I say to him. “Drinks can’t be more seasonal,” he says, “because they have no seasons.” I say, “Oh yes, they do. They hover right above the liquid…”)

10 Dec 2019

(h0p3: Apologies I don’t have a response yet.)

Sphygmus:
Kicks, do you ever deal with information overload? Like, you’re browsing and surfing and discovering personal websites and interesting articles and now you’ve got 10, 15, 20 tabs (tb: 100s?!i??!) open and they all seem like cool rabbit holes and you’re not quite sure where to go next? Or what it all means anymore? (maybe that’s just me.)

I have experienced this in the past - and I still experience this with books. Although I’m not sure it’s the same. What I experience is gah, I’m not spending enough time reading all the things I want to read, finding all the things I want to discover, given how much there is!! And I assume that’s what people mean when they say ‘information overload’. (Your image of so many tabs.)

Is it actually ‘overload’? Or is it that there is infinite information (and there was even a century ago) and you’re feeling some inability to approach it? Which, in my case, has usually been about losing my discipline for a time span.

But I am spending the right amount of time reading online right now - and I have a very long list to work through that is in a sensible order. (I no longer have tabs open - I do have a link list, so that has helped.) I am not spending enough time reading books. If I spend enough hours each week, I feel like I am at least methodically working through the infinite mass and I feel healthy.

If yes, what do you do with that feeling? Does curation help? Like you’re specifically looking for cool people doing cool things in obscurity and you want to let us folks in your corner of the world – so does the endless array of cool people doing cool things feel overwhelming or invigorating or? (I get the sense it might be the opposite, that you feel like it’s hard to find cool people doing cool things. correct me here!)

It’s so cool to me that you care to ask me a question like this! That, alone, makes me feel like there are plenty of ‘cool people doing cool things’. Even if it was just you and me - that would be enough.

No, I feel like there are many more cool people than I can possibly be aware of. I worry sometimes that I have no sensibility. I honestly find something amazing in almost everyone I discover. If they are working in hypertext, it feels like I can count on it. And yeah – it’s invigorating.

I do wish I was aware of more black writers. I know there is a tendency to do this out of guilt or political activism. But I simply feel like black writers have an unusual angle. I think this is why black artists are popular in mainstream culture - subconsciously we know that they are outliers and can show us what it means to be human in a totally unexpected way. I mean I am definitely interested in anyone out there, regardless of their race - but among Americans, I think black artists have shown that they are always on the avant garde of cultural movements.

So, at the same time, it is difficult to find certain subcultures that you may want to find. (I would also love to find a really sweet fitness goth blog. Especially if it was a .onion site.)

When I do find someone that I really really REAALLY connect with - then I greedily spam that link wherever I can - in my notes, into Fraidycat, I recite it in my mind. I am so afraid of losing it. And it means that I begin to visit that site very frequently, to try to read everything that I can. When I found Ton’s blog, it was like that. And I was very appreciative that I could tell which posts were ephemeral and which were polished, finalized essays.

This is also what helped get me into h0p3 (and you and chamy, because you follow the same conventions): because you clearly mark dated, temporary notes vs longer, central nodes or essays. So it is very easy to know where to ‘start’. Which is appreciated when I am discovering someone and want to move from the polished stuff down to the day-to-day stuff.

(Thinking more about your other questions…)

Chameleon:
The subtitle is “things chameleon knows” and I feel like that encapsulates it. To me this is a website to throw my ideas to the wall and see what sticks. It’s obviously not every last thing I know, but it covers a broad spectrum of my interests and ideas.

Yes, this seems like ‘self-modeling’. Keep going. Why do it publicly?

3 Dec 2019

Open question: while we’re all here - what do you personally want to talk about? Like do you have any topics you want to pitch?

sphygmus:
Perhaps it’s about feeling — when the wind is warm but just a little sharp, and blows that feeling of longing straight through your bones — if one empathizes with that feeling, resonates with it, then perhaps they’ll resonate with my work as well.

(First off - great quotes! The low-key Nadia quote is unexpected, but very refreshing.)

I actually think your wiki is an ‘artist statement’ without needing to explicitly state that - and I think that’s why h0p3 could capture your essence so clearly. Maybe he inferred it from all the pieces?

With h0p3, I think I am more curious about the ‘self-modeling’ part of the phrase - but with you I definitely wonder more about the ‘public’ part. And you kind of answer that here. It sounds like you’re looking for kindred spirits. But you also keep a lot of things private - and you do explain this from a curatorial angle:

Perhaps it’s confusing to stumble upon a website where everything is mashed together — the mundane details of what I ate yesterday right alongside finished letters, notes on projects, and my drafting of this response.

How do you decide what to reveal and what to make public? (I ask because I haven’t resolved this for myself either - whereas I think h0p3 has made this line very easy for himself.)^[9]

h0p3:
I take it that you don’t see yourself as a PSM, kicks. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I see more self as a conduit. I really get into finding people and connecting people (and saying hi to them). I don’t have a desire to preserve myself or to catalog myself. But having the dialetic does make some of that worthwhile. And maybe I do model myself in other ways: in pixels, in code, in colors flickering.

I mean - you’ve all influenced me a lot and I find myself mimicking some of your conventions. This leads me to think that part of PSM-ing helps a human function day-to-day. (Talking through, remembering, clarifying thoughts.)

I wish I understood better whether ‘modeling’ meant a self-‘styling’, self-‘bending’, self-‘constructing’ vs just trying to represent yourself as you are, ‘the plain picture’ in Bob Dylan’s meaning. Maybe it’s all of it, somewhere between, or simply not possible. Are we modeling fictional characters or not? Does it matter?

h0p3:
Why do you have sites like yours on the web, what are they for? What is anything for?

To me, it’s the same - I act as conduit for discovering wonderful things. To me, wonderful things and wonderful people make life worth living. (How do I know if it’s ‘wonderful’? — Because it makes my life worth living.) (To prevent you from asking me to clarify - it ends there - an instinctive feeling of simply ‘this is worth it to me’.)

h0p3:
You have the chance to reason about whether or not I’m trying to do the best I can with my pile of puke.

Hahah! We’re all standing around examining each other’s sick. I like this interpretation. I think that if people could begin with this image, use it as the basis for their consensus, they can admirably proceed with the dialectic. There’s a lot less picking things apart if you cut the whole conversation some slack. (But I’m also glad that you asked me to clarify - and that you dug into the response - sure, why not? It’s all doodoo - but still worth rooting in, on the chance of some swallowed gems…)

h0p3:
[…] my wiki allows me to re-use my data to understand what is salient in the world (including myself).

This is a great point! I forget that you are already employing a lot of self-editing and self-curating. (And what you do with us - making a tiddler for Sphygmus that curates her, in a way.) So this is starting to lead into my next prompt, what you refer to here as ‘the chain’ (but which I also think of as hypertext ‘layers’)… let me think how to articulate this and I’ll get back to you. ‘Soup to nuts’ is one way of putting it, but it’s imprecise, it’s not just a linear progression toward ‘the end’ - or it doesn’t have to be, I guess.

h0p3:
I keep almost mindlessly answering: 42 or 42ness, which is almost vacuously true, but I’m still not showing my work well enough to you.

I think this is probably your most useful analogy to helping me comprehend self-modeling. This goes in the final.

1 Dec 2019

(This steno is something of a scratchpad. I put the latest comments I have that relate to the current point of discussion in the top box - historic stuff is below.)

Sphygmus:
expert public self-modelers, oh my! and is that the first prompt - where to go in the next decade? no gun jumping here, I think it’s all fizzy excitement. mic check at will!

@hypertext-2020 Whoa whoa - how bout let’s back up to ‘public self-modeling’? (Seems like we’ve had an adequate mic check.) For yourself, personally - is this an adequate shorthand? Or do you think of yourself in any other terms that can help someone understand your work?

h0p3:
As a habitual wall-of-texting sprawler, I feel some of the claustrophobifying tweet-syndrome creeping into me here.

Looks like we have a formidable antipleonasmic analysis on our hands here.

h0p3:
Adequate shorthand for what?

An adequate shorthand to describe you, your wiki, your work there. I feel like the phrase was an attempt to wrap all of that up into a shorter name so that you can refer to it briefly - and perhaps so people can understand from a glimpse. Or even so you can understand or remind yourself of what you are doing.

So, my first question is just to look at the phrase again. Seems like a good starting point. Is it that to you? Where does it function today?^[10]

h0p3:
I’m giddy+nauseous at the thought of how to maximize a hypertexter’s autonomy and expressivity while still packaging it up for a securely scaled mesh.

You can fully expound - that could be a virtue of this style of chat. You could footnote off into a new tiddler, if you need. Or you can simply link in an old one if it represents your answer still well enough. Carry on. (And on.)

30 Nov 2019

@chameleon @h0p3 Tentative title for the chat: ‘hypertext 2020’ - where is an expert wikier supposed to go in the next decade? But yeah - just rip into what is going to be hot techs and paradigms for expert public self-modelers in this future timeline.

If we get Sphygmus on, I’ll do a mic check and then we can start. Hope I’m not jumping the gun - just pitched this idea today…