The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed.
P.S. Something I find myself doing more often these days: snapping a passage out of a book with my phone’s camera and emailing it to myself. Now if only Gmail had a little built-in OCR module…
P.P.S. I seriously want to build one of these things.
Hey look!
My new short story, The Writer & the Witch, is now available on the Kindle (and the Kindle iPhone app, too, of course).
More details here. I’m using the ransom model for this one; after 100 Kindle copies are sold, I’ll post the free web version. So grab a copy, or tell a Kindle-owning friend to check it out.
It has been indicated, correctly, that I am in possession of two (2) copies of The BLDGBLOG Book. How this came to pass, only Etaoin Shrdlu knows. But two copies is clearly too many for one man; the double-dose of enthusiasm and imagination threatens to consume me.
Therefore, a contest: SNARKMARKITECTURE.
The premise is simple. Imagine Snarkmarket as a physical space. What is it? Where is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like to walk through or around it?
I’m intentionally leaving this open-ended—maybe it’s a gleaming HQ, maybe it’s a storefront, maybe it’s a feral house of Detroit. Maybe it’s like one of those taco trucks…
Leave your pitch in the comments. Focus on creativity and brevity. It can definitely just be a sentence or two—though, by all means, if you want to Etaoin Shrdlu it up, I’m not going to stop you.
The contest ends Sunday, August 9 Monday, August 10 at midnight EST. (Update: I wanted to accommodate non-weekend-readers.) I’ll choose my favorite comment and send its creator a copy of The BLDGBLOG Book. (Be sure to use a real email address in the comment form so I can contact you if you’re the winner!)
Snarkmarket co-bloggers are not eligible to win but they are required to enter.
Snarkmarket as a physical space. Go for it.
Lots of people seem to think Starbucks’ new “stealth stores” are creepy…
A Seattle outlet of the 16,000-store coffee behemoth is being rebranded without visible Starbucks identifiers, as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.
Two other stores in Starbucks’ native Seattle will follow suit, each getting its own name to make it sound more like a neighborhood hangout, less like Big Coffee, a Starbucks official told The Seattle Times on Thursday.
…but imagine that this was playing out differently:
What if Starbucks was offering up a Starbucks API—a set of hooks into a vast, efficient coffee shop support system with incredible economies of scale? You, the local coffee shop owner, simply plug in, and wham, your costs drop by thirty percent because you’re leveraging Starbucks’ insanely optimized supply chain. You can use as much or as little as you want.
The NYT cites the Huffington Post…
You can imagine where this un-branding campaign could lead. A little neighborhood burger place run by McDonald’s? A little neighborhood hardware store owned by Home Depot? A little neighborhood five-and-dime operated by Wal-Mart?
…and I find myself thinking, uh, yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? Swap out “run” and “owned,” and put in “powered” and “supported.” Wal-Mart’s back-end is as innovative and important as its front-end. Why not offer it up to indie retailers?
I know it’s a stretch, but consider the analogy: Amazon’s web services have been absolutely transformative in the startup world. You can store files and spin up servers without buying, or committing to, anything. It’s easy to try things and cheap to fail. The notion of plug-in infrastructures just as flexible for other businesses—real-world businesses—run by other goliaths isn’t unsettling. It’s exciting.
And yes, I realize that’s not what Starbucks is doing here. But it’s what they should be doing!
I was just on New Hampshire Public Radio, live, talking about New Liberal Arts. Sure to be the buzz of Manchester this morning!
Unboxing. The public documentation of possession. There’s an essay waiting to be written about what it means—about consumption, sharing, voyeurism, recognition of personhood in the face of mass production, blah blah blah—but I will not be the one to write it.
Instead, I will simply report: It is totally awesome to see people unboxing something you made!
Here’s Jon Hansen’s snap, which has the distinction of being the first one posted.
Here’s Kiyoshi Martinez—looking, as a twitter-pal pointed out, sort of like a 17th-century Dutch oil painting. The dark glimmer!
And here’s Snarkmarket favorite Howard Weaver, who displays New Liberal Arts in context. Look at all those books!
Here it is on another bookshelf—”attention economics” contributor Andrew Fitzgerald’s, in fact. Wow. Good company there.
Whoah! Only 41 left! All gone. Look for the PDF tomorrow!
Thanks, everyone — we sold out in eight hours.
Listen, I think you are really going to like this book. It’s a distillation of so many of the themes we orbit around here at Snarkmarket, presented through the prism of many minds, all very different, and all wrapped up in the form of a slick, slim volume that you’ll be happy to hold in your hands.
And again—I don’t want to give anything away, but—there’s a secret that can only be unlocked if you possess the physical object(s).
New Liberal Arts is $8.99 if you want a copy (or three) and you can snag it here. Update: All sold out, but you can now grab the PDF.
Keep in mind: This project isn’t over! Really, it’s only now that it can begin. We’ve collectively created a coherent piece of work worth sharing with the world. But, as New Liberal Arts itself tells us, ahem, on page 41:
Ideas succeed not by being good or bad, but by being sold effectively.
As it happens, I think we’ve got some really good ideas in here—but we do need your help selling them. And there is a lot you can do to pitch in. Blog this, tweet about it, Facebook-share it, or best of all, recommend it directly to a friend (or three) who you think might like it.
Together, we’ll sell these books, by hook or by crook*, and then—here’s the fun part—together we’ll ask: What next?
*Or in eight hours, apparently.
It’s here.
A project that began earlier this year now bears fruit: slim, rectangular fruit.
New Liberal Arts, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collabo, is 80 pages long, with 21 pitches for new liberal arts from some of the smartest minds we could find. The pitches range from attention economics to video literacy; you are gonna love what you find in this book.
It goes on sale tomorrow at 9 a.m. PST, so be sure to check in early—there are only 200 copies. Each one is $8.99. The idea is that after we sell those, we’ll release the PDF, so when you buy a book, you’re also buying a little slice of free for everybody. Or something like that.
But bear in mind: New Liberal Arts has a secret—one that can only be unlocked out there in the world of atoms and new-book-smell, not here in the world of pixels and PDFs.
To warm you up, we’ll be posting a few new liberal arts this week. It breaks my heart, because they look so lame here on the blog, without Brandon Kelley’s wonderful design—but I do want to give you a taste.
The first, micropolitics, is from Matt. He was the most prolific contributor to this book, with 3.5 entries to his credit, and I have to tell you, each one is an E.B. White-worthy gem—compact, lucid, thought-provoking. I’d pay the cover price for his contributions alone.
I agree with Nav; this post by Emily Gould is terrific. Less for her strong rebuttal of an errant “the internet is vulgar” argument — which is so silly it requires no rebut — than for this description of the internet itself:
Kunkel’s experience of the Internet bears no resemblance to my experience of the Internet, but then, that’s the funny thing about the Internet, isn’t it? No one’s Internet looks the same as anyone else’s, and it’s that exact essential fungibility that makes definitive assessments like Kunkel’s infuriating. The Internet isn’t a text we can all read and interpret differently. It’s not even a text, at least not in most senses of that word. The Internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to. If you are looking at the Internet and expecting it to be a source of fleeting funniness, unchallenging writing, attention-span-killing video snippets, and porn, then that is exactly all it will ever be for you.
On one level, you might just say the internet is just a technology, and broad claims about content on the internet exist at the same level as broad claims about things printed on paper. On another level, you might say the internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to, and man, I want to be on that level.