Oh internet, you are so generous. I nervously post a messy, holey, unraveled idea like that (see previous post) and you take me seriously! You write me orderly, considered responses and send me links to things I’ve never seen before and I begin to understand a bit more of what it is I’m wanting. You always did that and I am ashamed to be still surprised. Because of you, I am starting to understand how my long ago, initial, uncertain impulse to venture an unfinished thought online was the embryo of this idea of a collaborative, inductive investigation of big sloppy messes of data. I will remember that in general the embarrassment with which I post is in direct proportion to the kindness and generosity of the responses. Thanks, fellas.

All of this started because we all keep talking about the democratization of information, but taken to it’s logical end, it can’t be. Information is no more democratic than money. Shareable information is valuable when it is not shared. Once it finds it’s level, we’re all in the same position relative to one another we were to begin with; though we’ve likely all shifted some against the physical world (probably not in a good way). I thought and thought about that and gradually fell into the frame of mind that makes showering and eating futile because one only gets dirty and hungry again.

But then it occurred to me that when information loses it’s value, it loses it’s menace as well. And it sounds like a little thing, but that was the moment I realized that maybe the important thing is not information itself or the possibility of highly specific answers, but the questions we can ask of it. We want to be able to inquire in a way that doesn’t lose meaning amidst the wash of data.

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

The important thing is not that Elijah might show up someday. The important thing is that the doors are left open in the dark every year.

A favorite from the Archigram archive: The Enviro Pill, for inducing architecture in the mind. “Enviro Pill, it’s my choice!”

Just heard from an Austin friend that Grupo Fantasma is playing with Prince these days! Bravo! I love that story.

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What Khoi Vinh says about Apple’s indifference to typography is true, but horrifying typography is just one of the problems with ebooks. First we pay for a limited experience instead of a shareable object. Second, the experience almost universally sucks, but we suffer though it becuase what’s really important is that Amazon gets to collect marketing data for themselves. I guess we’ll see whether Apple can improve on the Amazon experience enough to make me want to spend money again. Contrary to what I keep hearing about how people buy more ebooks than they ever did paper books, I spend far less on books now than I used to in the days of pretty paperbacks. (Has anyone else noticed that no one’s putting much effort into cover design any more?) The convenience of an elibrary, especially for insomnia reading, is undeniable. But paying for something so halfass gives me hives.

By the way, Amazon (and I know you’re listening), the act of reading is solitary and I like it that way. Don’t try to weasel all sorts of social nonsense into my solitude. The “popular highlights” feature sends me into a frothing rage. I don’t want to be part of a global book club, check in with my “friends”⁰¹ to make sure everything I like is popular enough. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about the pointless notes feature. I can write notes all through my rented book, but I can’t take them anywhere else? Does Amazon think I exist only inside this particular book? It’s as if the designers made a deliberate determination that I have no reason to take my reading related thoughts outside of it and into the rest of my world. It displays an impressive lack of understanding of the way books fit into people’s lives. Amazon conflates the delightful solitude of immersion within a book with the delightful but utterly separate conversations that take place outside of and around books. These two separate things exist because they are separate. Mash them to together to cripple each of them pretty badly.

I am less and less convinced this nonsense is worth paying for. On the bright side, I am reading a lot of classics lately. Thanks Project Gutenberg. You guys are champs.

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However, I am intermittently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost and finding it absolutely lovely. Tangled and delicate and slyly and intentionally bewildering. Just perfect. So I was ready for a small thing Julian Assange said in that fascinating New Yorker article⁰² about living alone in the eucalyptus forest long enough to quiet his internal voice.

“Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

And last, the scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro sees her body begin to fade in the darkness.

The first thing that popped into my head when I played with the iPad was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age (What? I’m a nerd since forever. On the other hand, you should see my new shoes. I look good, New York City. These shoes are both stompy and tall.) After standing expectantly in a storm of dust and debris as everything falls down around us, it is the first widely comprehensible thing visible as the air begins to clear. Hence the fuss. We’ve known that the decay of the pieces of the unwieldy structures of old civilization—science, journalism, media, government, the housing market, is resulting in the most fecund cultural muck in recent history, but it has been hard to imagine exactly what will grow out of it. The iPad provides a glimpse of what books look like in the future. It’s exciting to a lot of different people for a lot of different (dubious) reasons. A depressing amount of traditional publishing is looking to it as salvation. They’re lumbering forward, planning to leap en masse to this new unbaked model. Despite years of preparation, Apple itself, with it’s infuriating attachment to DRM⁰¹ might well be stomping on it’s own toes.⁰² The heaviest organizations won’t make it across (Time tries to charge $4.99 an issue), but why not try; they’re already in the process of losing everything. Those who land intact will transform themselves, diminished as they scramble to their feet. Meanwhile, the abandoned media is momentarily clear for individual humans to appropriate and manipulate at our own scale, sans all the layers of pointless complexity that caused the traditional organizations to buckle under their own weight. Eventually those organizations successful in the new world will realize the error of abandoning the old things so completely; and new, monstrously complex businesses will spring up and block out the sun at ground level here, but for the moment we have the chance to make something idiosyncratic and personal without much risk. We have nothing to lose because we have nothing here at all. It’s a joyful, momentary poverty that has all the crazy mystery of a Halley’s comet sighting. As Ben Terrett put it, the internet says “We have broken your business, now we want your machines.”

Ugh, I can’t believe I just mentioned the iPad. Scrub my (two) typing fingers with soap. Here, have some Shut Up Foodies and let’s pretend that didn’t happen.

Also, quickly, some Edith Stein and The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila. I put these here instead of where they belonged, after the earlier reference to my overweening foot-ular vanity. They are keeping me awake at night, but I am not converting to or from anything any time soon. Let’s have more lives of people who heard directly from God! And even quicklier, have I mentioned how brilliant that biography of Heloise and Abelard by James Burge is? Maybe, maybe not. Brilliant it is. Read it.