Wordyard

If it’s not on Facebook it didn’t happen

January 19, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Rob Horning in the New Inquiry, July 10 2015:

“Much like cable television narrows our exercise of choice amid the field of possible information to flipping channels, Facebook narrows it to the single action of ‘scrolling down’ through the programming it has seen fit to algorithmically supply….So the problem is not that Facebook users have insufficient control over the algorithm that displays content; it’s that users are willing to use Facebook as their primary gateway to the world, a kind of television with the minor improvement that the local news always includes reports on people you know. This leads to seeing the world only as so much content that Facebook can sort and prioritize and reify and sell. Facebook becomes (much like television had been before it) the medium that confers reality on experience. Until the News Feed algorithm has processed something, revealing its overall significance in our social graph, it really doesn’t properly exist. The moment the algorithm assimilates it is the moment when something actually happens.”

Stolen, the problematic app that lets you “buy and sell people” on Twitter

January 16, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Stolen is an app that let you buy and sell people’s Twitter accounts — not access to the accounts, just a kind of bogus claim to ownership — in a play marketplace. With no opt-in or grant of permission. The developers seem to have been thinking “trading cards,” but that’s not what it felt like, and people began sounding the alarm very quickly.

Holly Brockwell of Gadgette interviewed Siqi Chen, CEO of the company behind the app, during its brief, two-week run; Stolen is now shut down.

We don’t say, ‘Oh, I own you now,’ like, that’s not in the app. That’s not a thing that we want to do. It’s gross.

Well, it is in the app at the moment, because obviously it says, ‘You own this person now. This person belongs to you.’

We don’t say that. We’re just saying, like, ‘This card belongs to you.’ That’s the intention of it right now.

I’m looking at the screen right now. It says, ‘Boom, Holly Brockwell belongs to you now.’ That’s not a card, that’s me as a person.

Yes. That- we need to fix that.

On seeing things that aren’t there

January 15, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

The Illusion Machine That Teaches Us How We See — Erika Klarreich in Nautilus on a Japanese mathematician whose program generates 3D models of visual illusions:

The human brain routinely throws away many possible interpretations of the visual data it receives from the eyes. Given the brain’s limited resources and its need to interpret visual data quickly, it can’t afford to entertain every bizarre interpretation—it simply goes for the explanation that seems most likely, based on its past experiences and built-in visual processing machinery. For the most part—though not always—this explanation comes close enough to reality for all practical purposes, says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, who runs the illusion contest with her colleague, Stephen Macknik. “It would be much more costly, from an evolutionary perspective, to be right 100 percent of the time”…. If robots do learn to see through evolution, they may inevitably be subject to the same illusions humans are.

On that Mast Brothers chocolate story

January 14, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Helen Rosner in Eater, Dec. 23 2015, on “What the Mast Brothers Scandal Tells Us About Ourselves”:

One of the ascendant virtues of the new culinary landscape is the murky, poorly defined quality of authenticity. It’s an idea that means wildly different things depending on who’s saying it and what they’re applying it to, but in all circumstances it boils down to a fundamental notion of quality by fiat: if something is authentic, it is necessarily good. Authenticity implies a purity of history, a purity of purpose — in short, if something is authentic, it isn’t enjoyed because we’ve been barraged with external indicators that have instructed us to enjoy it; it’s enjoyed because it is inherently enjoyable. Inauthentic things need to be marketed and positioned and sold. Authentic things simply exist, and are perfect, and in their perfection they handily sell themselves.

Rushkoff: Digital media’s either/or dynamic

January 12, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Douglas Rushkoff on his blog on “How the digital media environment enforces boundaries”:

Thanks to the discrete bits and binary logic of the digital age, as well as the frightfully alienating spectacle of beheadings on social media, we are becoming obsessed with divisions… Everything has been made discrete (not discreet, but distinct). That’s why we’re either Americans or Mexicans, Canadians or natural born citizens. Red states or blue states. Where pixels are getting mixed up, well, that’s where we have to build better walls. Get Supreme Court decisions that something is one way or the other. All the wiggle room, the undefined nooks and crannies that may have created ambiguity but also helped soften the edges of our societies, is taken away.

Remember, the “social web” was born with the question: “Friend or not-friend?”

Bowie: “Sincere about his insincerity”

January 11, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Bill Wyman on David Bowie in 2013:

David Bowie—indigestibly arch; unfailingly cerebral, distant, and detached—was always sincere about his insincerity, but never insincere about his sincerity. At the time, this distinction was as crucial and confounding as the highly sexualized, polymorphously perverse demimonde he celebrated. He mocked rock seriousness, even as he delivered some of the most lasting songs of the era, all the while carrying himself like a lubricious aristocrat, drawing, with a sort of kinky noblesse oblige, strength from his audience’s adulation and in turn bestowing his blessing: E pluribus pervum.

Linkflow in 2016

January 10, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Sharing links keeps evolving. Today your Facebook feed rules, but it’s not going to be that way forever (ask any teenager). Blogs began largely as a way to share links, and though the form evolved beyond that, it never resolved the tension between “linkblogging” and diary-keeping or opinionating.

What’s the best way to share links in 2016? Twitter, mostly, is what I’ve been using, and it’s fine, it works, but there’s a certain dust-in-the-wind quality to it, an even-deeper-than-digitally-normal futility. Links in tweets are atoms in the void; there’s little-to-nothing you can do with them to organize them as data. Also, if you like to share quotes or excerpts, you run out of space fast — and I will not do the “post an image of a block of text” thing, on principle. (It took years to win the war in web design against text-in-images, and I’m not going back.)

The other popular and effective link-sharing strategy today is — hilariously, this being 2016 — email. And it works pretty well, too! Particularly for publishers and intelligent curators. But many email-newsletter services now hide the real URL of a link behind some sort of tracking code. That’s great in terms of them knowing where you go, lousy in terms of you knowing where you’re going. The best purveyors of email links either don’t do this at all, or make a point of IDing the link fully within the body of their message. Too often, though, an email link is a blind link.

How else do links travel today? Within Slack, for sure. On Reddit and Hacker News and similar forums, still. And on some interesting new channels like This., where you are encouraged to share only one link a day and make it count.

For years now, I’ve been collecting links on the ever-mutating theme of authenticity in the digital age. For a while when I was posting daily here I included a link roundup once a week. But I wasn’t thrilled with that format and stopped.

As an experiment at the start of this new year, I’m going to play around with a more promiscuous link-sharing strategy. Here’s the plan right now:

Roughly one link each day
The topic is digital authenticity, broadly defined
A mix of new finds and oldies
Quoted, documented, credited, of course
Presented in a variety of venues
Freely experimenting with different formats and channels

At the start, I plan to post here as home base. I’ll tweet the link, too. I’ll put it on Facebook. I’ll put it on This. And I’ll email a digest once a week. I’ll add to and subtract from this distribution approach as feels right. And I’ll try to report back with anything I learn from the process.

Repetition ain’t the way

November 12, 2015 by Scott Rosenberg 16 Comments

I pretty much stopped writing on this blog about a year ago, and never wrote up why.

Last year I relaunched Wordyard as “The Wordyard Project” with a new design, lots of energy, and a focus on the topic of identity and personal authenticity in digital media. I felt like I had a lot to say that I’d stored up during the years I spent editing Grist, and I began writing. I had fun! In particular, I was obsessed with writing one piece I’d been thinking about for ages — about Lou Reed, the song “Sweet Jane,” hearing Reed play that song at the Web 2.0 conference a decade ago, and how all of that related to life on the Internet as I’ve lived it for the past 20 years.

So I wrote that piece. Then I kept writing. But I lost steam. It seemed to me I was repeating myself. Looking back at the posts from that period now, I don’t think I was. But that’s how it felt.

That was the personal dimension. At the same time, in the wider world, I understood that blogging was a very different beast in the mid-2010s than it had been a few years before: not “dead” but less and less an environment where writers were congregating and software developers were innovating. I didn’t want that to be true, but it was: The conversational aspect of blogging had largely been assumed by Twitter and Facebook. If you aimed to build traffic on a blog today, you had to treat it like a publishing venture — keep pumping out lots of posts and promote them tirelessly on social media.

All of which, at that point, felt to me like more repetition.

One of the first things we learned about publishing online from the earliest days — when Hotwired ruled, Suck.com flourished, and Salon (a “Web ‘zine”!) fledged — was the imperative of repetition. I remember my colleague Andrew Ross talking about how the Web was a little like radio. He meant you could be a little more casual; you could, when news broke, just ring up an expert for a quick Q&A without waiting to assemble a more definitive story. He was right. But it was also like radio in the way you needed to remember that people were probably tuning in and out all the time, and you were going to have to repeat yourself a lot to be heard.

I’ve been writing reviews and news stories and features and columns and blog posts all my life. There are times when cranking it out is effortless, and other times when it just feels impossible. When I go through a spell of those impossibles — as I did toward the end of my days writing theater reviews, and again toward the end of my years as Salon’s managing editor, and again in autumn 2014 — I know that the best thing for me to do is to move on, change things up, try out something new. That works. But when I do it, I’m also always gnawed by the suspicion that maybe I’m just running away from what I Should Be Doing.

It’s a tough one: On the one hand, as David Byrne once sang, “Say something once! Why say it again?” On the other hand, that song is titled “Psycho Killer,” and maybe the narrator is…unreliable.

So I put Wordyard on hold, where it’s been ever since. Around the same time I also started writing some reasonably ambitious pieces for Steven Levy at Medium’s Backchannel, and those kept me busy, and felt rewarding in a different way, and let me focus on simply writing as good a piece as I could without also thinking about how to get people to come read it.

Am I going to return to any kind of posting schedule here? I honestly don’t know. I’d like to. I’m a big believer in the IndieWeb movement’s “POSSE” principle — publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere — meaning, you have a site that you own and cultivate and then you share your work in all sorts of other venues as you wish. I dream of software to make that even easier than it already is. (I like what the folks at Known have accomplished in this direction already.) I have all sorts of ideas for experiments in this area. Let’s see how far I get.

In the meantime, what I am doing today is taking that “Sweet Jane” piece and reposting it on Medium, where maybe a somewhat different bunch of readers might see it. It still says so much of what I want to say.

You can make a quick trick block stack

January 14, 2015 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

I’ll admit that throughout my research on the dauntingly complex topic of the blockchain, I kept having Fox in Socks flashbacks. Yeah, it was a fave of my sons when they were toddlers. At one point in my life — thankfully long past — I’d read it so many times I could recite the whole thing from memory.

That said, I’m very happy with the response to this piece! (It went up yesterday at Backchannel.) People who are deeply immersed in the Bitcoin/blockchain stuff seem to view it as a fairly skeptical take, whereas people who are new to the topic are telling me they find it mind-blowing and surprisingly hopeful. So maybe I found a way to walk the ever-tricky line between hype and cynicism. (Or maybe I was just totally incoherent.)

Also: Kevin Kelly commented, “This is the best tech article this year (so far). Newsy, with context.” Kelly’s 1994 book Out of Control was one of the key texts that shaped my understanding of the future of the Internet 20 years ago, and his ideas and work have provided a steady source of inspiration ever since, so thanks — that means a lot to me.

What am I doing writing for Medium after being so vocal here about the importance of independent blogging and taking control back from corporate platforms? Good question. The answer’s pretty straightforward: Colleagues, reach, and income. It’s great to work with journalists of the caliber of those who run Backchannel and those who write for it. It’s nice to reach a wider audience (by 10 or 100x) than I reach these days from the Wordyard site. And we all need to pay our bills one way or another.

Yes, Medium is a platform, and a (somewhat pervious) silo. Still, as platforms go, it is, at the moment, uniquely good both for its terms, its design, and the care and thought that have gone into it. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty great, and it keeps getting better.

Don’t worry: The whole independent-Web, let’s-break-out-of-the-silos thing is still dearly important to me. I’ll keep writing about it as it continues to develop. But I’m also not going to be “all or nothing” about it. I’m giving myself some latitude to work in more traditional ways, which continues to have some advantages.

In any case, it’s kind of amusing to consider Medium as in any way “traditional,” isn’t it? I guess it depends which direction you’re coming to it from.

Me, where, what, huh?

January 13, 2015 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

“Sorry I haven’t been blogging” posts are the worst. But an absence of this duration does seem to call for some kind of acknowledgment. So here’s what’s been up with me!

I’ve been freelancing. Most exciting: contributing writing to Steven Levy’s Backchannel on Medium. The chance to work with Steven, and the other great journalists he’s assembled for that effort, was irresistible. (If The Soul of a New Machine was the book-in-the-back-of-my-mind as I wrote Dreaming in Code, then Steven’s epochal Hackers served as the equivalent inspiration for Say Everything.)

The pieces I’ve tackled so far have been ambitious and kinda time-consuming, but fascinating and absorbing. Today we posted There’s a Blockchain for That, a deep dive that lays out the dream of rewiring the Internet along decentralized lines using the technology that powers Bitcoin. If you missed it, last month I took a look at the rise of new programming languages like Google’s Go and Apple’s Swift, laying out the technological and cultural implications of creating our software with corporate-shaped tools. Also: I spent a weekend at a “Comedy Hackathon”; the resulting piece is Furby Does Python.
I’m still putting in a decent number of hours each week editing stories for Grist. Working with the gang there is a steady pleasure. The stuff Grist is covering is as urgent as ever, and I’m proud to continue my association with it — even if I can’t say I miss the Seattle round trip.
I’ve been toying with some ideas for a new writing project…but nothing has jelled to the point of being able to talk about yet. Stewing in progress.
I woouldn’t think of abandoning this blog, but I’m definitely in “pause” mode with the Wordyard Project. You see, I started rethinking a couple of small things, and that steadily snowballed, as sometimes happens, until I was rethinking everything. And then I got distracted by all sorts of other demands. And before I knew it, three months had passed. So: The rethinking will continue, but the radio silence, having been broken, will cease.

In the meantime, happy new year! And thanks, as always, for reading.

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