A Text Renaissance

The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are...

Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries... looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and ... Evernote. It’s not... block-level addressability, transclusion ... and bidirectional linking ... utterly transform the writing experience... collapses high and low-level thinking... you can write, structure, organize, refactor, bundle/unbundle, all in a single subconsciously learnable flow...compiled down to finger-tip skill...

eschewing ... MarCom... focusing on writers people actually wanted to read... Instead of trying to scam people into giving you “permission” to send them emails, Substack said, why not charge them to subscribe...seamlessly integrated email, payment ... no-design-needed opinionated web presentation... Substack is now a serious part,,, of my income....

any modern webpage... an unreadable mess of javascript, html, and weird shit ... Frameworks like Gatsby... new static webpage model ... is a clean, simple static page, the backend is.... a hyper-dynamic stream... assemble pages together on the fly from all over the place, via a just-in-time compilation stream... moving away from the blog ... building bespoke sites with weirder, more experimental structures... geekery for the sake of creative optionality... The WordPress monoculture will start to shift and many more weird structures will begin to flourish...

Threaded Twitter ... Threadapalooza 2019... challenged people to do 100-tweet threads... 1 like = 1 tweet protocol... A lot of the content was genuinely spectacular...a wonderful outpouring of deep reserves of creativity and knowledge... scrape the threads into a data hairball, which many others used to create visualizations...Threadapalooza could become the template of a whole new kind of virtual conference...

this is happening now... interesting enablers are emerging simultaneously... Machine-learning driven technologies that can really soup up text are almost here... Automated transcription... Machine-generated text... Stripe ... allows content technologies and media... with monetization ... at the foundational level... crypto ... going to take another 5-6 years ...

all four horsemen of the textopia... trade quantity for quality ...

If blogging is a cat with nine lives, this is probably the eighth death...no longer a cheap, indie-scale technology past a fairly modest success bar. One way or another, you’ll pay for the privilege of being a blogger...