The Local Yarn

∞ · Wed Feb 19, 2014 · 1 Notes

I found out about the ‘Your Verse’ Apple advertisement from this tweet by Prominent Designer Frank Chimero:

Well, this pisses me off. http://t.co/LVtnVhELiX Ripping off Malick & hijacking Whitman/Dead Poets Soc to sell iPads. Perfect hate vector.

— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) January 13, 2014

I’m a fan of Frank’s, so of course I tried to hate the ad, too. But I couldn’t. Of course you could be upset that timeless humanistic values are being subsumed into a sell-product context¹ — or you could rejoice in a depiction of technology clearly subservient to human values, and a wonderful apologetic for poetry — poetry, of all things! — broadcast to a worldwide audience. Indeed, the real pity is that something like this ad wasn’t produced with public funds first. Frank would probably agree about that, but for me, considering the poetically impoverished times we are living in, close is good enough.

Whether due to the ad or not, the film Dead Poets Society is also being talked of again. Kevin Dettmar published a review of the movie in The Atlantic today: ‘Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities’. On a phsychological level, Dettmar loathes this movie in much the same way I once loathed orange-flavoured chocolate: it rubbed him badly the wrong way 25 years ago.

We went to the movie and watched, often swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy (the real-life St. Andrew’s School, Middletown, Delaware). But I walked out horrified that anyone would think that what happens in Mr. Keating’s classroom… had anything to do with literary study, or why I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House: because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive.

I sympathize with Dettmar — computer hackers are no strangers to having their professions caricatured on screen, either. But unless someone can point me to an example of a really great (or even watchable) drama about professional literary study that is also non-misleading to some degree, I can’t approve of his criticism.

Dettmar’s main fret is that “passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis, is empty, even dangerous.” But he confuses the proper use of the film — to arouse inspiration — with the proper work of the real-life educator, who has the much more prosaic job of teaching analysis and criticism. In fact he comes very close to realizing this, having just said “That’s how I was taught, in high school especially. I’m an English professor today because I had Mr. Hansen in ninth grade, and Mr. Jackson in eleventh.” That’s right: Dettmar himself is an English professor because he was exposed early on to a relatively fluffy but attractive passion for literature! Sure, the movie gets the poems wrong; but it gets the passion right. Subject matter experts too often complain about inaccuracies in popular depictions of their fields, and miss the guiding lights that brought them into that field in the first place. A movie, and especially a drama, need not provide more than this attraction in order to be valuable; in fact, if it tries to do more it usually becomes a failure.

Because he would prefer the movie to have been a documentary rather than a drama, Dettmar cheers for its villains rather than its heroes. Which makes perfect sense — after all, in a real-life educational setting, the rigourous, unexciting academic is far more likely to be the actual hero — but it misses the larger point:

And while too cynical by half, the headmaster’s response is one with which I sympathize a good deal more now than I did back then: “At these boys’ age? Not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline. Prepare them for college and the rest will take care of itself.”

No, actually, both Dead Poets Society and the Apple ad got this one right. Ignite a magnetic curiosity towards the arts, and tradition and discipline will take care of themselves. Not a sufficient principle in the classroom, probably — but in the theatre, definitely.

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∞ · Tue Feb 11, 2014

I woke from my nap. There was a man standing at the end of the couch; I did not know him. And there was a water pump handle and spout coming out of my stomach.

“Your wish has been granted,” said the man.

I sat up and worked at the pump for a few seconds. It was hard going, but eventually from the spout in my stomach I extracted a small dribble of cloudy water, in which floated tiny wriggling things, and which tasted vaguely of minerals and sulfur. “Use it wisely,” the man said, and left. (I thought he would have vanished, but no, he just walked out the front door.)

I was excited. I love a good glass of water; I’d just been drinking my way through the Norwegian classics. Perhaps the water was always like this at the start; perhaps one day I’d be famous.

But I soon found that the pump was awfully hard work. I grew tired if I worked at it for any length of time; half an hour felt like a day. Very often I was convinced I had run dry, and many days I was too lazy to pump at all. On the other hand, if I went too long, the water built up: I would feel too full to concentrate on work, on conversation, on anything. And quite frequently the stream would drip or pour out unexpectedly, when I wasn’t even pumping, the precious water disappearing into the carpet or the gutter.

As I grew stronger, I would occasionally start to hit a rhythm. I took to keeping spare cups, pots and jugs of all sizes — my “drafts” — scattered throughout the house, with little labels on them.

“Come to bed,” my wife would say. “I’ll be right there,” I’d say, “Just have to finish filling this cup.”

I had once dreamed of being able to produce and brew my own water; many people had grown famous that way, and quite wealthy. But I had always imagined it more as thing you could turn on and off when you needed it, like a super power that you keep in your back pocket; instead, it turned out to be a basic biological need. We all have the need to eat, sleep, make love, get sunshine; now to this list was added, for me, the joyless activity of laboring at this silly pump-handle. Very often I wished I had been content with the original list.

What to do with the water was its own separate problem. None of it tasted any good right after pumping. It had to be boiled off, chilled, combined with other draughts, filtered, siphoned — I tried all kinds of things in infinitely varying degrees and sequences in order to get the water to look and taste “right”. And until I could get the attention of a bottling company I’d have to design my own bottles and labels for it. I threw a lot of water away, always with great reluctance and self-doubt.

∞ · Mon Feb 3, 2014 · 1 Notes

The Oxford comma, is not a rule; it is merely a thing — and I have a most ingenious and undeniable proof of this.

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∞ · Tue Jan 28, 2014

The site is awash in traffic just now, after Rob Meyer of The Atlantic gave my poem Patch Notes a very kind mention in his technology column, and it was picked up from there by The Verge. A slice of the visitors from those articles are poking about to see what else is going on here, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to welcome you all, and to acknowledge the backslapping from long-time friends and readers.

The Local Yarn is about more than just having a place to write; it’s a place where we cultivate beauty and thought. It tries to be something more than a just a blog-style stream; more like a garden with a stream running through it.

This being a garden, my practice of writing is to scatter seeds, and some of those seeds take months or years to germinate and flower. But after fourteen years, it’s getting to the point where there’s almost always something in season. And in recent years I’ve become highly interested in allowing visitors to plant seeds of their own, which is why comments are used differently on this site. I hope you’ll find your exploration is rewarded.

∞ · Wed Jan 22, 2014 · 1 Notes

I think we should develop new payment protocols, so that when you’re using a web browser, it’s a lot easier to pay for things.

-- Tim Berners-Lee, January 2013

A little over a year ago, The Magazine launched, and shortly after that "Subcompact Publishing" became a big deal.¹ Some of the enthusiasm for subcompact publishing seemed driven by its design and UI aspects, but from where I stood the biggest reason people were interested in subcompact publishing was economic opportunity. Suddenly it seemed like there might be a way for writers and publishers to make money again. From the very beginning, Marco framed the promise of his experiment in exactly these terms: "The Magazine supports writers in the most basic, conventional way that, in the modern web context, actually seems least conventional and riskiest: by paying them to write."²

The Magazine took off like a jetpack, and suddenly subcompact publishing seemed like a perfect win-win-win for readers, writers and publishers. There was hue; there was cry. Money and words! Yoicks! Talley Ho!

But the money and words soon led us all round the hedges. The upshot became: We need more tools for publishing periodicals on top of these privately-controlled, device-specific marketplaces. Craig Mod, for example, envisioned a new wave of tools "by which anyone could launch a Newsstand app like The Magazine -- for minimal cost with minimal complexity." Such a publication, in his view, need only "touch" the open web; the main distribution and payment structure would take place inside of Newsstand's walled garden.

That approach, I think, is proving to be a quagmire. Now a year later, development on subcompact publishing tools continues here and there, but boy has the discussion died down. Apple and Amazon developed these new marketplaces that create opportunities for writers and readers, and The Magazine showed us how to take advantage of them, but the reality is that trying to publish across all of these proprietary channels is inherently expensive, inefficient, kludgy and frustrating.

But people keep trying to do it, because those channels are the ones that know how to handle money.

It turns out that when you put people in a place where 1) it's easy to find good writing, 2) the reading experience is clean and clutter-free, and 3) it's easy for money to change hands, people don't mind paying for writing. Those first two are easy for the open web³, but that last one is completely missing. As a result, the web publications that have thrived tend to be the ones that have adopted an advertising-heavy model.

Amazon and Apple built their own content stores -- Newsstand, iBooks store, and the Kindle store -- on top of the web. Really, everything that these stores do could have been done on a normal website, except that they have payments and subscriptions built right in to their protocols, rather than being bolted on as an afterthought. The Kindle store was the first such experiment, and it brought magic results. Newsstand confirmed this almost by way of counter-example; for a long time, publishers failed to deliver the clean reading part of the formula, but once The Magazine showed them how it's done, all three components were in place, and The Magazine became an obvious success.

There's no theoretical reason the open web can't have all three. What's lacking is a low-level mechanism for payments, built right into the fabric of the web. And there's a growing awareness of this need among the web's architects.

We need to make it much easier for information to be expensive... There are different ways to do it. But this function needs to integrated with the web at a low level.

-- Matthew Butterick, The Bomb in the Garden

Upgrading the Web

We're going to need a new protocol -- a replacement for HTTP, actually, or at least an extension of it. When your browser makes a request to a web server, it does so using HTTP, the basic language of the web. The problem is, this language has no words for money. It has words for "Give me the thing" and "Yes here's your thing" and "No your thing isn't here, it's been moved" but it doesn't have words for "Sure you can have it, that'll be ≥ $0.05 please".

Along with a new protocol, we'll need new software that knows how to speak it: a new breed of web browsers, and a new breed of web servers. Each will have to know how to hold money, or at least initiate money transfers, in some secure fashion.

Note that I'm not talking about DRM here; there's no good reason for DRM to have a seat at this table. Every experiment -- from the Kindle and iTunes stores to The Magazine -- has shown that when discovery is convenient and the price is fair, most people are happy to buy their own legit copies of stuff.

What the Next Web Looks Like

Suppose you start a website of your own. You should be able designate that certain resources -- the front page, say -- are free, and set up minimum prices and even soft paywalls for other pages. This information is encoded at the filesystem level or as near to it as possible. As soon as you start attracting attention, change starts trickling in. You have no need for ads or sponsors to clutter your design and compromise your incentives -- which is something both you and your readers will definitely appreciate.

In short, simply by publishing a website, you have your own The Magazine.

On the consuming end, the new web browsers would have a way of dispensing change in response to server pricing for non-free content. Perhaps any demand under a certain amount (talking sub-pennies here), or from regularly-visited sites, would be automatically paid, with others requiring "IAP style" approval⁴. Either way, when you opt to continue accessing for-pay content, the user agent (browser, podcast catcher, etc) triggers a request to initiate a payment⁵ to the site's web server -- which in turn regularly distributes payments to addresses on record for content owners.

Waiting for Disruption

In the closing thoughts of his Subcompact Publishing manifesto, Craig Mod wrote:

The winter of 2012 will be the first holiday season where a broad swath of consumers will have both an awareness of tablets, and several good enough options to choose from (occupying multiple price points). If 2013 doesn't prove to be an inflection year for digital publishing -- and particularly for the non-incumbents -- then I don’t know what market circumstances would be necessary to make it so.

I don't know about you, but looking back over 2012 and 2013 I don't see any major inflection points for digital publishing. I do think, however, that I know what market circumstances were both lacking and necessary: an open web that knows how to ask for and take money at a very basic level. The open web, by itself, should be the platform for everything we now understand Subcompact Publishing to be: not just its UI/design aspects, but the promise of a lively and sustainable market for writers and small-scale publishers.

In the short term, we'll probably continue trying to build a better printing press on top of multiple shifting, private marketplaces. These efforts will continue to be stymied, not just by these markets' incompatibilties with each other or by their inherent opacity, but by the neglect of their corporate stewards.

Replacing or extending HTTP to include payments seems a ridiculously huge task; I know enough about coding and standards to know I'm talking about several years of effort. But it is a goal that is worthy of the web's promise, in the same way that the years-long campaign for web standards in the early 2000s was worthy of the web's promise -- and that sentiment would seem to be shared by others, including the inventor of the web himself.

It's an ironic twist of events, but making information "expensive" again will may well prove to be the way forward to making the web "free". Once the citizens of the web can exchange cash between themselves, they'll be able to make themselves directly felt in the writing market, without the intermediation of corporate, ad-supported silos.

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∞ · Tue Jan 21, 2014 · 2 Notes

(Based on actual patch notes for The Sims. Andrew Losowsky had the link, and the idea — all hail his canny eye)

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