Warning.

Warning: This blog might be turning into a tech blog. I'm at a stage in my career where I need to set the "read at whim" philosophy aside for a while and make myself a little more generally useful. This will probably mean more blogging: if I'm denying myself pleasure reading, I'll probably do some writing. I don't know what the balance of content will be, and I may do some of the following:

• change blog platforms
• spin off a secondary blog, if I'm clearly writing in two categories
• choose a less public way of getting writing to people (e.g., e-mail)

I'd also like to put some work into making it a little bit faster for me to get finished posts posted. Right now I do almost all of my writing in Notepad++, a free Windows text editor with some nice extra features. Then I copy what I write into a browser window and fuss around with formatting for a while.

It'd be great if I could submit posts directly from the draft files on my hard drive, and even better if I could just write in Markdown and have it work on the blog, but this may be tricky with Blogger. (Another thing I really should have done by now is install the spell-check plugin for Notepad++... I'll do that after I publish this post.)

Progress.

Pritcher had watched the phenomenon of Lens Image expansion before but he still caught his breath. It was like being at the visiplate of a spaceship storming through a horribly crowded Galaxy without entering hyperspace. The stars diverged towards them from a common center, flared outwards and tumbled off the edge of the screen. Single points became double, then globular. Hazy patches dissolved into myriad points. And always the illusion of motion.

-from Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

There's nothing like old science fiction to make you feel like you're living in the future. Here, Asimov has a character in the far, far future be unnerved by what's basically that old Windows starfield screensaver.

I recently found out what Twitter is for.

I was on Twitter for a long time before I had any idea what it was for. I don't think it's quite this...

Freddie deBoer:

"I am angry, because Avent didn't just dismiss my essay without argument. He instead decided to attack my field. [...] This is what Twitter is for, and this is indicative of the entire operation of prominent bloggers: socially and professionally connected people who defend each other no matter what, excluding and marginalizing dissent, ignoring unpalatable arguments that they can't answer, and in every way undermining as illegitimate criticisms that don't operate from a position of privilege and social authority."

To blame this all on Twitter is a little much. It's less "what Twitter is for" and more "what prominent bloggers and media personalities use Twitter for."

What I'm using Twitter for:

1. Sharing links, punning, and brief inspirational quotes can all be done comfortably within the space of a tweet. I could put these things on the blog, but I think it saves time for everyone if I just drop them in the
2. Short, troll-free conversations with bloggers. Easy questions and further links are easy to get, and unwanted, uninteresting, or unhelpful responses are easy to cut out of the conversation, and even blocked if need be. This is as opposed to comment sections on blog posts, which get flooded to the point of uselessness on websites of any size. It's also nice to have all these conversations in one place, rather than distributed across a bunch of websites you have to hold open in tabs.
3. As for the troll filter: yeah, this cuts both ways, and can be used to exclude unpopular perspectives, especially if you've got a ton of followers. But, oh my goodness, the spatial metaphor is so much nicer. I've really grown to hate the entitlement complexes of trollish commenters on unmoderated blogs. Would you come into my house and say these things?

In summary, I use Twitter to cover functions of the RSS reader and the comment box, and I do my best to stay positive. It works all right.

Facebook offers to write your own personal "Look Homeward, Angel."

Well, it looks like Facebook is making another decisive move in the direction of being a site that "help[s] tell the story of your life," in Mark Zuckerberg's words, and then analyzes "the story of your life" with reference to the stories of your friends' lives and offers you stuff you might like to buy. I wrote about earlier movements in this direction back at the League over a year ago.

The problem with a service that offers a comprehensive "story of my life" is that it gives me two options:

1. I have to manage that story carefully and make all sorts of constant little decisions about what I'm telling people.
2. I let Facebook manage most of that stuff for me, algorithmically.

Option 2 is out of the question. Option 1 isn't natural for me, since I'm used to a public-private distinction that Facebook wants to discard, and it looks like it's going to take up more and more time to adjust to changes. For a while now, Facebook has been a service I wouldn't sign up for if it were pitched to me fresh.

Of course, I'm not mad about anything, and I don't think I'll particularly miss "the old Facebook." But this stuff is going to come up again and again for the rest of our lives, and it's worth thinking about our choices in this new networked world.

Practically, I think I'm going to deactivate my account. There's no great reason to delete it permanently; I might rather be able to get back into the system to adjust settings the next time the site makes a huge perverse data-sharing move.

Pocket diary.

In the Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov writes:

As early as October 28 (New York, Hampshire House, room 503) I find the following plan penciled in my little book: "a novel, a life, a love--which is only the elaborate commentary to a gradually evolved short poem." The "short poem" started to become a rather long one soon after the Queen Elizabeth ("Buy dental floss, new pince-nez, Bonamine, check with baggage-master big black trunk on pier before embarcation, Deck A, Cabin 71") deposited at Cherbourg on November 7. Four days later, at the Principe e Savoia in Milan and then throughout the winter in Nice, in a rented flat (57 Promenade des Anglais) and after that in Tessin, Valais, and Vaud ("Oct. 1, 1961, moved to Montreux-Palace") I was absorbed in Pale Fire, which I finished on December 4, 1961.

Today I'm starting a "little book" of my own. Though there are certainly Internet- or computer-based options for this sort of thing, I think the portability and simplicity of the small notebook wins out for now. Even if I had an iPhone (and I'm sure there are nice apps for this sort of thing, or ways to integrate it in a calendar), it's nice to not have to worry about an inability to transfer the data to some future gadget. You can't export from a notebook, but on the other hand you don't need to worry about it going haywire and refusing to let you read it.

I hope that this will pay off, and that years down the road I'll be able to follow Nabokov's example and bask in details that my brain has long since left in the fog.

Alert: I'm a linker.

"William Writes" is just a blog. I post something if I suspect I'll want to remember it later, or if a friend might enjoy it. Blogging has also been a nice way of finding kindred spirits.

I'm neither a coolhunter nor a curator.

No gadget in the middle.

I have a thought that I can't quite fit into a tweet. It has something to do with Ned Resnikoff's post on e-books, and Freddie deBoer's response. But not directly.

Lurking behind the question "Is the printed book dead?" is an assumption that the e-book has the power to kill the printed book. We've all seen formats kill other formats: the DVD killed video cassettes, and streaming video could easily kill the DVD. The CD killed vinyl (sort of), and MP3 and streaming audio could well kill the CD. And so one might think that, just as digital music and movies displaced analog, digital books will replace physical books.

But CDs, vinyl records, video cassettes, and DVDs all require some mediating piece of technology, and nobody wants to maintain a whole bunch of these devices. So when our CD players break, we replace them iPod docks. Books (codices, to be specific), don't require a mediating gadget — anyone who can read a book's language can just pick it up and use it — so printed books aren't as easy to displace. A both-and solution for e-books and p-books is therefore much more plausible than it is for audio and video.

140-word reductions of this post will be welcomed.

Robot library.

This is really cool. I've never seen a reading room that didn't have any bookshelves in it; most of the special collections I've been to have had locked shelves or reference works in the main space. I'd love to stand in that room and see if it feels right for reading. Also interesting that, with this setup, “browsing” can only happen in the browser, so to speak. Everything but the reading has been pushed back behind a computer interface. Not that this is too different from non-robotic closed stacks from the patron's perspective.

(Via Alan Jacobs, of course.)

"Petrol" is British for "gas."

Want to be a little bit more depressed about the United States? Try this article from the Economist about our national transit policy. Highways grow ever more congested, passenger trains shamble slowly along freight lines, and flying gets more difficult and more expensive at the same time. And we fund projects stupidly:

The federal government is responsible for only a quarter of total transport spending, but the way it allocates funding shapes the way things are done at the state and local levels. Unfortunately, it tends not to reward the prudent, thanks to formulas that govern over 70% of federal investment. Petrol-tax revenues, for instance, are returned to the states according to the miles of highway they contain, the distances their residents drive, and the fuel they burn. The system is awash with perverse incentives. A state using road-pricing to limit travel and congestion would be punished for its efforts with reduced funding, whereas one that built highways it could not afford to maintain would receive a larger allocation.

Formula-determined block grants to states are, at least, designed to leave important decisions to local authorities. But the formulas used to allocate the money shape infrastructure planning in a remarkably block-headed manner. Cost-benefit studies are almost entirely lacking. Federal guidelines for new construction tend to reflect politics rather than anything else. States tend to use federal money as a substitute for local spending, rather than to supplement or leverage it.

It's hard to imagine transit funding structures becoming a popular issue, so I guess we have to offer this one up to the lobbying process. A friend recommended looking at Transportation For America, a transit lobbying group, for a comprehensive national transit program.

Blog stats.

Conjecture: Number of pageviews divided by number of non-author comments is a better proxy measurement for quality than pageviews or comments alone. (If there are no comments, don't try to divide because you're sure to regret it.)

Not that I'm saying it's a good idea to try to measure quality with blog stats in the first place. Just that long comment threads skew pageviews.

"I am not playing a game with you."

This epistolary narrative / photoessay at Triple Canopy is great; it works as a short story and a meditation on desire in the internet age.

"Although this life is a game, I am not playing a game with you - I'll give you everything - my love, my body, my mind and my entire life, be sure I know how to be faithful!"

-ketybell

Mushrooms/microchips.

A commenter at the League pointed towards a consideration of the word “technophile” from Ran Pieur, who has a much darker view of highly organized human societies than I do. Nevertheless, I think the point about technophilia is a fine one:

“I love technology! A fungophobe is someone who fears all mushrooms, who assumes they're all deadly poisonous and isn't interested in learning about them. A fungophile is someone who is intensely interested in mushrooms, who reads about them, samples them, and learns which ones are poisonous, which ones taste good, which ones are medicinal and for what, which ones are allied to which trees or plants or animals. This is precisely my attitude toward technology. I am a technophile!

“Now, what would you call someone who runs through the woods indiscriminately eating every mushroom, because they believe ‘mushrooms are neutral,’ so there are no bad ones and it's OK to use any of them as long as it's for good uses like eating and not bad uses like conking someone over the head? You would call this person dangerously stupid. But this is almost the modern attitude toward ‘technology.’ Actually it's even worse. Because of the core values of civilization, that conquest and control and forceful transformation are good, because civilization ‘grows’ by dominating and exploiting and killing, and by numbing its members to the perspectives of their victims, it has been choosing and developing the most poisonous technologies, and ignoring or excluding tools allied to awareness, aliveness, and equal participation in power. It's as if we're in a world where the very definition of ‘mushroom’ has been twisted to include little other than death caps and destroying angels and deadly galerinas, and we wonder why health care is so expensive.”

I don't look at human social organization as just another natural phenomenon, so I'm not on board with trying to consider civilization from the perspective of nature. But the point about real something-philia being attuned to both blessings and dangers? It's worth keeping in mind.

A human-centric internet.

“The architecture of the internet must support a global, universal micropayments capability. In this way, anyone could charge for information made available online, whether it is music or a program for a future robot. A silly YouTube-like prank might generate a windfall for a silly teenager, while a scholar’s writing might be only occasionally accessed, but over a long period might still generate enough income to be of use. People could then re-create the best social formula that has been achieved thus far in human experience. Middle class people could own something- the information they produce- that would give them sustenance as they have children and age.

“In order for this scheme to work, there would have to be some structural changes introduced gradually, as I explain in the book. This direction is the only way to create a human-centric internet, instead of one that serves the cultists who believe in information more than people. It would not attempt to make information free, but instead make it affordable. It is worth noting that this is exactly how the web would have developed if the initial design proposal for it, dating back to the 1960s, had been carried out. (This was Ted Nelson’s vision.) It is the obvious way to design the network if people are your top priority.”

-Jaron Lanier

I read Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget last night. It has me thinking pretty hard about what I want to use internet tools for. Lanier imagines a different web ethic than the one we have now, with a primary difference being that creators are compensated for their work instead of expected to give it away and make money on knicknacks. Though I’m not sure I buy everything Lanier has to say about the need to get away from the command line or the sorry state of music (though he’s certainly right about the sorry situation of musicians), it’s a book that demands critical thinking about the technologies we have so often uncritically adopted.