The murmur of the snarkmatrix…

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Unforgotten
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I’ll admit it, I didn’t want 2015 to pass without at least saying hi to you, Snarkmarket. The proximate nudge for this particular greeting is Hossein Derakhshan’s Guardian essay about how the internet had changed for him when he was freed from prison in Iran, an edited, updated version of his post from earlier this year at Matter1:

The Iranian blogosphere was a diverse crowd – from exiled authors and journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clerics, and war veterans. But you can never have too much diversity. I encouraged conservatives inside Iran to join and share their thoughts. I had left the country in late 2000 to experience living in the west, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at home. But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.

There’s a story in the Qur’an that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep and wake up under the impression that they have taken a nap: in fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food – and I can only imagine how hungry they must have been after 300 years – and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realises how long they have been absent.

The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web – a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

It’s a familiar complaint. Blogs like this one are speakeasies now, not raucous pubs. I don’t actually know if fewer people are “reading blogs” or if it’s that the web has grown so much larger that the boutique communities of yesteryear merely feel less significant. But I will say, I find enduring and immense value in this place, in the fact that you’re here, reading these words, however you’ve found them. Speakeasies can be marvelous spots.

For my birthday this year, my beloved Bryan took me to a performance called “Then She Fell,” staged in a humble building in a quiet part of Williamsburg, late-ish on a Sunday night. Bryan and I, along with 13 other guests and a cast of actors almost as numerous, spent the next two hours together walking through a delightful and thought-provoking story loosely based on Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland. A few of us had a tea party with the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbits and the queens. I was pulled into a brief but intense conversation with Alice about true love and the value of obedience. The two hours I spent enacting my part in this play were two of my favorite hours of the year, but this, essentially by definition, could not be an experience for “everybody.” It was a performance for and with a couple dozen people, and that very smallness and intimacy was its essence.

So it is with this, and you.

I’ve marked my years through Snarkmarket. It’s been ten years since the second, and last, version of EPIC, a.k.a. the Googlezon video.2 Ten years ago, I recorded a reminder to myself on Snarkmarket to go check out what was in Howard Dean’s sealed records from his time as governor of Vermont.3 A decade hence, I trust this leaky rocketship will still be cruising somewhere beyond Pluto, and that you’ll be here, watching. I promise to pour us a drink.

May 2016 bring you more life than any year before it. And if it is now long past 2016 for you, may the worst of your years lie long in your past, and may the best of them lie ahead.


1 At Matter? On Medium? I’m self-conscious about my prepositions and my objects.

2 The occasion didn’t go entirely unremarked-upon, happily; the Internet loves few things more than an anniversary peg.

3 I did remember to check on this last year, after Dean’s archives opened to the public. From the accounts of local reporters who trawled through the records, there was really nothing revelatory in the files. Perhaps one day when I’ve got lots of spare time, I’ll make a fuller accounting.

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