A Text Renaissance

• What People Are Saying vgr
• source:: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/02/24/a-text-renaissance/
• Quotes
  • There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are:
    • Roam, a hypertext publishing platform best understood as a medium for composing conspiracy theories and extended universes.
    • Substack, a careful and thorough ground-up neoclassical reconstruction of the age-old email newsletter.
    • Static websites, built out of frameworks like Jekyll or Gatsby (full disclosure: a consulting client).
    • And finally, Threaded Twitter, a user-pioneered hack-turned-supported feature that has wonderfully revitalized the platform.
  • I want to take a stab at lightly theorizing this renaissance. And also speculating, in light of this renaissance, about what might be the eighth and penultimate death of blogging. And the future of books. So it’s going to be a sprawling, messy hot take on the State of Textual Media. Or at least a simmering take, since I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a year on the backburner.
  • The text renaissance is an actual renaissance. It’s a story of history-inspired renewal in a very fundamental way: exciting recent developments are due in part to a new generation of young product visionaries circling back to the early history of digital text, rediscovering old, abandoned ideas, and reimagining the bleeding edge in terms of the unexplored adjacent possible of the 80s and 90s.
  • I imagine, to traditionalists already bemoaning the slow decline of print-based media like books, newspapers, and magazines, these technologies I want to talk about might seem like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. But whether they strike you as renaissance or apocalyptic technologies, they’re here, so let’s meet them.

  • Roam _

    • Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries like Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now. It’s a revelation what a thoughtfully implemented version of a powerful vision can do to unexpectedly transform something you think you understand deeply at a Fingerspitzengefühl (finger-tips feeling) level, like I think I do writing.
    • On the surface, Roam looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and a note-taking tool like Evernote. It’s not. It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterly transform the writing experience at the finger-tips level. You end up organizing high-level structure as you work at fleshing out low-level chunks of information, because the UX collapses high and low-level thinking into a single behavior.
    • So you can write, structure, organize, refactor, bundle/unbundle, all in a single subconsciously learnable flow. You don’t have to think consciously about this: it gets compiled down to finger-tip skill as you use it. This is the sort of product I was dimly groping around for, and trying to build at Xerox 10 years ago. I wasn’t smart enough to pull it off, and back then, the technology wasn’t there either anyway. Now the tech is there, and there’s someone on the scene smart enough to pull it off.
    • I met up with Roam founder Conor White-Sullivan last week in San Francisco and had a nice long walk-and-talk chat around the Mission with him. People who pull off impressive feats of visionary product engineering often don’t quite recognize what they’ve done, but that’s not the case with with Conor. He knows what he’s doing, he knows the history (aka idea maze) of the product he’s built, and he’s got the opinionated approach I look for when adopting a commercial product. He’s also nailed the essential message-of-the-medium use case of Roam: conspiracy theories. Or alternately, extended-universe building. We’re in a fake-news world and we might as well get good at it. Good in both senses of the term.
    • It can also do note-taking, workflows (like kinda-sorta competitor Notion), and wiki-like knowledge management, but those use cases are not as interesting to me. Conspiracy theories and extended universes, in the best senses of those terms — escaped reality construction might be the general category — is what Roam wants to be about.
    • The name, incidentally, is a play-on-words joke apparently. As in Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  • Threaded Twitter

    • Threaded Twitter is perhaps the most interesting and weird of the Four Horsemen of Textopia.
    • While the unwashed masses flock to non-textual media like TikTok, we Very Online cognoscenti know that Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons/digital public as we’ll ever get.
    • A big part of the reason Twitter has ascended to this position is threading. The idea (originally known as tweetstorming) was invented as a simple workaround hack by Marc Andreessen back in 2014, to get past the 140 character limit. But a bunch of young pioneers rapidly turned it into a creative medium in its own right. Visakan Veeraswamy is among the best known at this point (he’s publishing a whole book of his threads which I suspect is a first for the medium), but there are several others. At some point Twitter grudgingly started supporting threading as a feature (and in the process took control of how threads were displayed, an annoying but reasonable move). Services like Threadreaderapp emerged to turn threads into longform documents.
    • In December, I accidentally instigated what ended up becoming an entire festival of threading, which I retroactively dubbed Threadapalooza 2019. I basically challenged people to do 100-tweet threads (optionally, in the case of mutuals, based on prompts from me), using the popular 1 like = 1 tweet protocol (which I didn’t invent, though many people assume I did). Here’s a meta-thread of 100 threads that I compiled. A lot of the content was genuinely spectacular. There were excellent threads on architecture, macroeconomics, Trump, trauma and healing, and all sorts of other topics. Go browse the meta thread and read a few. If you’ve been thinking Twitter is a cesspool of civilizational decay, prepare to change your mind. It’s pretty much the center of the renaissance.
    • My prompt went sort of viral, and several hundred more threads were created by people I don’t know. All in all, it was a wonderful outpouring of deep reserves of creativity and knowledge, the likes of which I haven’t seen online in a long time. Several participants turned their threads into blog posts, and in one case, an actual newsletter (on Substack!), so I’m kinda proud of what I managed to provoke.
    • It’s hard to convey what the hell happened during the two weeks the event was live, if you weren’t on twitter. But with a spot of Tom-Sawyerish whitewash-the-fence flattery, bullying and cajoling, I got a bunch of people to join me in adding some meta-structure to the event, so on top of the threading frenzy, a sort of meta-event emerged.
    • It began with Dorian Taylor writing a script to scrape the threads into a data hairball, which many others used to create visualizations.
    • Then Our Man in Russia, Artem Litvinovich, got in on the act and made a video showing how the action unfolded.
    • Then Ian Johnson, d3 maven, created this really nice navigable dashboard-like view of the event.
    • link
    • Andrew Benson created a pretty consolidated visualization of the race:
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    • Lars E. Schonander did some crunching to create a whole bunch of more wonky visualizations of what happened: rate of Likes, Likes to Tweets ratio, a moving leaderboard etc. Here’s a sample:
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    • My own contribution to the meta-event, besides being the whitewashing-the-fence instigator and compiler of threads, was to do ongoing cheerleading featuring the mascot of the event, Ascii Text Critter.
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    • This is the current state of the art. Threading is clearly a very rich and complex medium, with a huge amount of potential.
    • We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. If an almost-accidental event with some random volunteer hacking can lead to such a rich expression of creativity in both content and container, there’s a lot more to explore and develop here. All the hacks people pulled together suggest that if the technology comes together in the right way, Threadapalooza could become the template of a whole new kind of virtual conference. If I were 20 years younger, I’d be trying to create a startup to build such a product.
    • Given Twitter’s track record though, I’d bet that the threading revolution will not actually unfold on Twitter itself. There’s a 50-50 chance they will do something boneheaded to mess up the potential, and starve out any products that attempt to build anything good on the quicksand of insecure attachment that’s the Twitter API.
    • So other products will actually take this energy places. But one way or another, the future is going to be threaded.
    • My own personal attitude towards Twitter is one of continued bewilderment, though I’ve been on it since 2007 and have 4 accounts on it (the largest, @vgr, with >30k followers at this point). I think I’m fairly good at twitter, but I still don’t quite know what I’m doing there or why. Perhaps that’s for the best.