ideas
The personal and the national
This just chimed like a bell in my brain:
The only way to raise national identity to respectability is to plumb its innate connection to personal identity, and the ground on which the personal and the national meet is art.
That’s George Konrád in The Melancholy of Rebirth. I like it.
Explosions in the sky
I love constellations. Therefore, I love this post from Liz Danzico. It’s got me thinking: Isn’t the spangling of stars in the sky just basically random noise onto which we’ve projected patterns and then stories? And if that’s been successful—and it toootally has—doesn’t it imply that you could do the same with just about any kind of random noise? What sort of weird wacky stuff could you spread across your desk to tell stories with?
Stakes in the ground
I love the ideas page on Frank Chimero’s new site. There’s a good discipline on display here: you decide what you believe most, and you post it in public. (Of course, the fact that it’s beautifully designed doesn’t hurt.)
I wonder what an ideas page for Snarkmarket would look like?
That train don’t stop
I absolutely love this: a bullet train that doesn’t stop at stations. It’s both elegant and evocative. Just imagine: “Oh, the blue line? It hasn’t gone below 200 miles per hour in ten months.”
The secret origin of hello
Enjoyed this little bit of greeting history from Clive Thompson, by way of Liz Danzico. I’m now imagining a world where people shout “ahoy!” into their phones as a greeting, and I love it.
New collectives
I really liked Ryan Sholin’s Q&A with Rex Sorgatz not only because I like Ryan and Rex, but because it surprised me! It’s less about internet media and more about organizations, and Rex’s experimental new model.
I’m reading this mind-blowing book on the history of capitalism right now, and of course a big part of the story is the rise of a bunch of weird new forms of human coordination. Reading Ryan and Rex, I feel a little itch at the back of my brain: it’s happening again.
Also, at one point Ryan says…
I’m trying to go all Robin Hood’s merry men with the metaphor here, but it sounds more like an all-star posse of Robins.
…to which I reply: it is all about an all-star posse of Robins!
Show me the internet
In a fit of curation and ingenuity, Noah Brier whips up a gallery of visualizations of the internet. And no, it wouldn’t be complete without The Net, circa 1995. Wow.
Noah points to this piece over at The Baffler which poses the same question—what does the internet look like?—and ends with this bit of disenchantment:
The problem isn’t really that we don’t know what the Internet looks like. It’s that what it looks like is so horribly ugly: not a glistening Tootsie Roll pop, not an open freeway, not a shimmering clear pool of chlorinated water nor a siren-littered sea, not even a chiseled movie star, but giant, hulking factories dotting the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and the Eastern Seaboard, covering old landfills, sprawling, like dozens of Costcos smashed together, stacked with metal and diesel generators and powerful cooling systems, crossed by power lines that deliver 2 percent of the world’s energy to the so-called cloud, where your tax returns and credit card statements cross paths with Medicare files and corporate budgets and your old love letters and the photos of Jennifer Aniston’s newest boyfriend.
So, I totally disagree.
I think the internet is the screens. Without the screens, who cares? Without the screens, it’s just a bunch of derivative-trading-bots talking to each other. The screens make it interesting—they’re the magic portals, the magic mirrors. My visualization of the internet ignores the server-farms and the network spaghetti. Instead it’s a mosaic of all those screens, some on phones and some on laps and some on walls, but more and more of them over time, all getting bigger and brighter.
Yeah, actually, I think my internet might be the Transparent City.
Stock and flow
I was an economics major in college, and I’ve been grateful ever since for the few key concepts it drilled into me: things like opportunity cost, sunk cost, and marginal cost. I think about this stuff all the time in my everyday life. Sometimes I consider the marginal cost of, like, making myself another sandwich.
But one of the biggest takeaways was the concept of stock and flow.
Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha. There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy.
But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:
- Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
- Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.
But I’m not saying you should ignore flow! No: this is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after long months or years with your perfectly-polished opus. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisitely-carved marble statue of Boba Fett is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (here it is!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find them all again next time you emerge from your cave.
Here’s a case study: my pal Alexis Madrigal here in SF has got the stock/flow balance down. On one end of the spectrum, he’s a Twitter natural and a Tumblr adept. Madrigal’s got mad flow; you plug in, and you get a steady stream of interesting stuff every day. But on the other end of the spectrum—and man, this is just so important—he’s working on a deep, nuanced history of green tech in America. He’s working on a book intended to stand the test of time.
You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein.
And the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. It’s the hybrid strategy.
So, okay, I was thinking about stock and flow while I was doing the dishes just a second ago, and wondered: Wait. There are all these super-successful artists and media people today who don’t really think about flow. Like, Wes Anderson? Come on. He’s all stock. And he seems to do okay.
But I think the secret is that somebody else does his flow for him. I mean, what are PR and advertising? Flow, bought and paid for. Messages metered out over time. But rewind history and put Wes Anderson on his own—alone in the world—and I don’t think you get the same result. His stock is strong stuff: hugely compelling, utterly unique. But how does he tell people about it?
So if you are in the position to have somebody else handle your flow while you tend to your stock: awesome. But that’s true for almost no one, and will (I think?) be true for even fewer over time, so you need to have your own plan for this stuff.
Anyway: this is not a huge insight, I know. Mostly I just wanted to share the lingo, because it’s been echoing in my head since my first microeconomics course. Today, whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, I’m asking myself: Is this stock? Is this flow? How’s my mix? Do I have enough of both?