Meanwhile #216

Authentic twiddling in the dark forest.

Fantastic talk by Erin Kissane at this summer’s XOXO Festival (via Kottke), in which she talks about going offline, her time with the Covid Tracking Project and how we need to to fix the social internet:

A lot of us remember what it was like to live and work on an internet that was  deeply flawed but not systematically designed to burn our emotions, time, and safety for fuel. Whether we’re network builders, designers, writers, or video game makers—the  people who make networks better just by their presence—we all have a role in making or  enriching networks that are genuinely better for all of us. There is a real crack in the  foundations of the current order right now, and I genuinely believe that if we each  brought our weird talents and gifts to bear on this problem and treated the problem  of making better networks like our problem—not something we’re just hoping someone else will  figure out—we would have this in the bag.

She mentions the Dark Forest theory of the web, a metaphor I was unfamiliar with but has helped illustrate/crystallise a lot of my thoughts on the web (as exhausted digital immigrant and terrified parent). Maggie Appleton gives a pretty succinct overview:

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

Written two years ago, she goes on to say how the forest is going to get so much darker and more dangerous thanks to the relentless infection of Ai, and oh boy was she on the money. Once reliable cornerstones of the web are falling away – as well as Google thrashing around in the snake oil and churning out ridiculous non-results to search queries, Wikipedia is now fighting a battle against an onslaught of “unsourced, poorly-written, Ai-generated content”.

I’m reminded of that Ryan Britt’s post about how most citizens of the Star Wars galaxy are probably illiterate¹ – he suggest that they’ve come to rely on technology (i.e. droids) to such a degree that they no longer need to read or write anything beyond basic pictograms. But maybe it was more than that; maybe the written word could no longer be trusted, so they simply abandoned it and resorted/reverted to folklore. Is that where we’re headed? Everything will become a rumour or a whisper or simply fade away.

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Anyway, Adobe have launched a new content authenticity app, perfect for adding creator credentials to your photo of a stable door closing behind a bolting horse.

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In this week’s Things I Don’t Understand Or Need: the new Ableton Move. I totally get the tactile appeal of synths – we are the generation that grew up watching people twiddle colourful knobs on spaceships and now it’s our go but the future arrived and it’s all flat and glass and boring. Let us twiddle.

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Volume are crowdfunding Margaret Calvert: Woman at Work, the first book dedicated to the work of a pioneer of design for public service, a groundbreaking typographer and recipient of this year’s New York Type Directors Club Medal.

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This week in science: redheads feel less pain.

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Some wise words Austin’s typewriter interview with Chase Jarvis:

Most photographs fail to connect with the viewer because they are too complicated/they have too much going on, Capturing a single subject in a simple story in a single frame is (or ought to be) the goal. But most people don't capture or compose their images with this in mind – and so the results, story, and intended outcome rarely lands. … Another surprising thing is that photographic competence has very little to do with technology or gear. A photo is a is a single frame: story that simply relies on 3 key elements: composition, connection, and light. If you focus (pun intended)on these 3 things you'll be surprised at how quickly your photography improves.

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New work by yours truly for The New York Times, illustrating some pretty horrifying witness reports from doctors, nurses and paramedics in Gaza.

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Threads knows it has an engagement bait problem … the main one being Meta not engaging with all the people shouting LET US HAVE CHOOSE FOLLOWING AS DEFAULT. Seriously, it’s underminging the whole platform, not least because it discourages genuine engagement. I like asking the mob for advice/wisdom/opinions (especially now that search engines are going down the pan), but doing so will almost certainly be met with a dismissive Rockatansky.

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Thirtieth anniversary edition of Green Day’s Dookie is being released on obscure, obsolete and inconvenient formats – including toothbrush, wax cylinder and Teddy Ruxpin. Yeah it’s a gimmick, but given that half the people who buy vinyls don’t even have record players, sure, why not, physical media is physical media.

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The White House briefing room has been taunting us with hilarious kerning and three upside-down Hs since 2007 and it must be stopped. End this madness.

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That is all.

1. Perhaps some of Britt’s theory have been addressed by the many films and tv shows that have appeared since he wrote it in 2012 … or perhaps not? The only instance of literacy I can think of is the appearance of the sacred Jedi texts in The Last Jedi, and they’re almost immediately torched by Yoda, who even mocks Luke for letting them gather dust. Pile, to be read, hmm? or something along those lines.