Posts by Robin

Okay! My short story, “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store,” is available now on all platforms in all universes!

It’s a 6,000-word story about recession, attraction, and data visualization. The keywords on Amazon are: books, book stores, cryptography, dating, the economy, Google, San Francisco.

“Customers who read this item also also read: the internet.”

Get it for your Kindle here.

Get it for your computer screen (or printer) here.

But I have to tell you: It looks gooood on the Kindle.

Finally, you’ll enjoy this bit of background: The seed for the story was a tweet! Back in November, Rachel wrote: “just misread ’24hr bookdrop’ as ’24hr bookshop’. the disappointment is beyond words.”

That’s the kind of phrase you copy and paste into your idea-file, if you’re smart. Then, you rediscover it months later, and what does it turn into? Go find out.

Thanks to MorBCN for the CC-licensed source image.

Coming Tuesday to Kindle and the web.

I’m pretty excited about this. I did a test download onto my Kindle and, wow! It really feels like you published something!

Bit of a surprise, though: I tried to make it free for Kindle download, but Amazon wouldn’t let me. Ninety-nine cents is the minimum. And yet, there is stuff in the Kindle store priced at zero cents. If you know the secret, and share it with me before Monday afternoon, I will price my story at zero cents. Otherwise, $0.99 it is.

On my Google Docs dashboard, I have a folder called NLA Book.

In that folder, I have 24 entries, from 21 different people, on subjects that include: home economics, micropolitics, journalism, reality engineering, coding and decoding, creativity, media literacy, negotiation, play, brevity, inaccuracy, mythology, mapping, attention economics, photography, translation, urbanism, futurism, and design.

If this sounds like a book sent back in time from some slightly-wacky future, I think that is exactly the point.

The entries are quite heterogeneous, with a wide variety of voices and approaches. I think you’re going to enjoy reading them all together, and deciding which are your favorites.

We’ll use the rest of this week to finish editing the entries and begin the design of the book. Next week we’ll design in earnest, and find out about all the production details we can’t anticipate ahead of time.

And then… we print! The book is going to be between 4″×8″ and 6″×9″, a slim paperback. We’ll post the PDF, and give it a CC license so you can do interesting things with it, but there will be a couple of really good reasons to buy the book, even above and beyond the pleasant physicality of it.

I’ll keep you posted as production gets closer so you can pre-order, and/or tell your nerdy friends about it.

It’s been an exciting week as the entries have come rolling in. I wish you could see my Google Docs interface as I do right now: It’s a long list of smart collaborators (all fellow Snarkmarket readers!) whose names keep blinking to life beside their entries as they dip in to make changes, leaving funny time-stamps because they’re halfway across the world, or up all night.

Here’s a pitch: The three great democratic arts are law, education, and journalism. You need skilled practitioners in each, free to do their work openly in the public sphere, in order to have a healthy democracy. Specifically a meritocratic democracy with true social mobility.

I’ve seen the phrase “democratic arts” plenty of times, but never attached to a list like this — though it’s possible I’m unconsciously cribbing it from somewhere. I like these three because, besides being concrete and important, they’re each fun.

Have people always talked about creativity this much? I mean the details of it — craft, process, practical wisdom. My memory says “no,” but then, my memory is short.

Everybody’s been pointing to Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on the culture of creativity and genius.

Ze Frank has been thinking out loud about creativity and collaborative projects.

Imogen Heap sits in her home studio in vlog after vlog and talks you through her creative process — insecurities and all. (This is my favorite example because it’s not just reflective, it’s real-time.)

Argument: It is the responsibility of the artist in the 21st century to speak and write like this. Sure, you can still lock yourself in your studio and indulge in the agony and ecstasy of isolation if you want, but that’s sooo 20th century. The new world favors the public artist, the artist brave enough to speak plainly not only about ideas and inspiration, but about fear and hesitation as well.

Sometimes a single detail makes an entire story. I think that’s the case with Jodi Kantor’s profile of Richard Holbrooke:

(Many people have personal trainers; Mr. Holbrooke has a personal archivist.)

Awesome.

I was actually thinking about archives this morning, after reading this bit from Tim’s Whitman post:

But Whitman’s notebooks at this time are filled with images, just jottings, of these people, what they’re doing, what they look like, what their names are.

Cross-reference with Michael Bierut’s wonderful stack of notebooks. I love the idea of keeping a durable, written record like this… but I am congenitally incapable of using and keeping notebooks. I’m way more comfortable with digital notes — emails to myself, short little Google Docs, etc.

What’s a good compromise? Is there some easy way to physical-ize those notes? Maybe I need an app that literally scans my stuff for certain kinds of documents, saves them, and prints ’em out en masse.

I mean, until I get a personal archivist, anyway.

Wow! We’re off to a great start towards a book on the new liberal arts. How do I know? My scrollbar gets teeeeny-tiny when I click that link.

We’re talking about potential NLAs like archiving, attention economics, branding, collaboration, home economics, mapping, micropolitics, photography, play, urbanism, writing for computers — the list goes on and on. And I’m realizing that we’re going to have to get good at a bunch of these new skills, fast, just to make this thing.

So what comes next? Starting this weekend, we’ll reach out to some contributors from the comment thread on that original post; then, we’ll all spend the next week writing and editing. The deadline for copy will be Monday, February 16.

After that… we design the book!

Then, of course, there’s printing; we’re thinking hard about that step. If you have any tips, insights, or leads related to that part of the process, we’d love to hear them. You can leave a comment on this post or send an email: Is there a printing company you love? Some new print-on-demand scheme that we should know about? Elephant poop paper? Etc.

Look for another book update early next week. And, if you haven’t yet suggested a new liberal art of your own — now is precisely the time! Jump in.

Seriously, look at that scrollbar. It’s barely there.

Ha! Alessandra Stanley does my work for me: This was a day best captured by image, not narrative, she says.

In all this talk of narrative and database (here and here) I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned one of the most familiar kinds of databases: the photo gallery!

All the way from LIFE’s breakthrough use of rich, stand-alone photography to TIME’s avalanche of online galleries and (of course) the Big Picture, there’s a rich tradition here. And the best of ’em aren’t linear sequences that tell a story from start to finish; they’re collections of contrasting moments that, together, deliver a gestalt.

Photo galleries have been one of my favorite ways to track the entire election, and I think there’s truth to what Stanley says about today:

Anchors, compelled to say something, reached for trite metaphors and hyperbolic expressions of wonder (“Our secular version of a miracle,” according to one CNN commentator) that didn’t begin to match the reality unfolding live behind them. The best narration was wordless.

I’ll extend that critique to printed commentary, as well. The flurry of op-eds over the weekend, all packed with world-historical language trying to Put It All In Perspective, fell flat. Just give me the image.

Not even Obama’s speech — which I liked — could match the raw image of him, uh, delivering it. William Gavin, a former speechwriter for Nixon, said this over at the NYT (emphasis mine):

But the setting — the first African-American standing there in the bright winter sunshine as our new president — had an eloquence all its own. I think we will remember this occasion more for the man who gave it than for the words he said. He could have stood there for 20 minutes of silence and still communicated great things about America.

I claim the image for the Team Database. Your move, narrative.

More on narrative from Lev Manovich, circa 2001:

Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases, or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases. In new media, the database supports a range of cultural forms which range from direct translation (i.e., a database stays a database) to a form whose logic is the opposite of the logic of the material form itself — a narrative. More precisely, a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself which would foster its generation. It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape. What is more surprising is why the other end of the spectrum — narratives — still exist in new media.

That’s a better articulation of what (I think) I was trying to get at: You can map narratives onto our weird web-world, but it’s something fundamentally different underneath.

From The Language of New Media via Kasia.

I’m just gonna throw this one out there and let it simmer a bit over the weekend: What if narrative thinking is on its way out?

Here’s a starting point: Google is the anti-narrative king of the web.

Classic Yahoo! was narrative; it was all paths and branches and journeys. Google was, and is, a story that happens all at once. Faced with the search box, you have the entire web in a sort of quantum superposition; anything could happen. Then you search and, wham, one thing really does. But you don’t really know how, or why.

In general, we’re finding that the way people use the web is less narrative and more random than we ever expected. It’s probabilistic. The table of contents — the navigation bar — gets smaller. The search box gets bigger.

On the web, we don’t understand, consider, and act; we stumble.

Think next of WIRED’s “the end of theory” and of Wolfram’s a new kind of science. Both propose a new, more probabilistic way of doing science — and yes, I know, both are almost entirely rejected by mainstream science at this point. But even so, they give our assumptions a healthy twist. What if you could arrive at useful conclusions without knowing how you got there? Doesn’t this actually happen a lot already?

Think, finally, of news. Think of the kind of story we’re confronted with these days: 9/11, Enron, Iraq, the money meltdown, Mumbai. Sure, you can build a really revelatory narrative around something like 9/11; you can almost make it seem inevitable in retrospect. You can tell a story about a giant pool of money.

But how closely do those narratives map to reality? Sometimes I think events today more closely resemble a giant wall of sticky notes. Draw lines, make clusters, add more facts as you find them; do your best to hold it all in your head. But it doesn’t all add up. There are contradictions. But hey, that’s the world — and maybe we need better tools to understand it that way.

We argue: Stories are those tools. It’s stories that allows us to understand these things at all: “Once upon a time, this happened, then that happened.” Our brains are wired for narrative.

But I don’t buy it. Our brains are constantly changing, and I think the internet is a bellwether: We are not using the web in a narrative way. We’re using it in some weird, new way that we don’t have good words for yet. It’s all juxtaposition and feeds and filters, searching and stumbling and sharing. And importantly, it’s starting to make sense. It’s not gut-churning chaos out here, unmoored from the safe haven of story. It’s actually getting kinda comfortable.

So does that new way of thinking start to infect everything else? It’s not just a superficial perspective, but almost a new operating system entirely; I think it’s going to go really deep.

How do things change? The internet’s leading the way. New media follows close behind — video games, new forms of music, movies, theater. What about journalism? Science? Medicine? Law? Relationships?

I’m pretty obsessed with this idea lately, so expect to hear more about it. I’m curious to know what it cross-connects to in your brain; not like, “please comment directly on the thesis of this post” (though I am sure there are some sharp debunkings waiting for me), but rather, what does this make you think about? What’s related?

P.S. It was this old essay by Chris Crawford that got me going, but the more I read it, the less it makes sense to me, so I decided to mostly skip. Credit where it’s due, though. Found it via 2mm.