constructions in magical thinking
In a few weeks I’m going to become a dad. I’ve been feeling a new urgency to imagine what life might be like for a person born native to this weird atemporal era. But what that really means remains speculative until, well, she arrives. So in anticipation for this new world of a person entering my life, and in the spirit of this month’s timely Refactor Camp exploring the fertile side of Escaping Reality, I thought it’d be fun to imagine: what would living in a culture of Worlding feel like?
So far we’ve been discussing Worlding as an art. One that an individual creator can engage in on their own. As Venkat suggested, we are already living in an emerging Worlding culture replete with examples, from superhero franchises, to blogamatic universes, to people as channels of their own lives. It made me think it’s worth zooming out for a post to consider: what possesses a person to want to make a World? What reward does Worlding offer over all the other drives competing in an artist’s mind? Who Worlds in there?
In the midst of the creative process, the artist experiences a jumble of voices and competing directives. To an untrained ear, this seems like the undifferentiated expression of an inner monologue that can’t make up its mind. But if you listen carefully, you can begin to hear distinct voices fighting to be heard. It took me a long time to realize that an artist is not one unified person, but something like a crew of sub-personalities or mental demons. Each with their own motivations, sense of opportunity and threat, and unique filter for relevancy. What if we could learn to identify each of these demons? What if we could become more aware of who is speaking, understand what each cares about, and begin to strategize how and when to use them?
Hi, I’m Ian Cheng. I’m an artist. Over the last six years, I’ve been creating a series of simulations that explore an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent — the emissary — whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of a simulation. In the process, I began to see the edges of a new layer of artistic activity. One that could organize my base ingredients — deterministic stories and open-ended simulations — into something more than the sum of its parts. Something meaningful yet alive, bounded yet transforming. I’ve been calling this activity Worlding.
At Venkat’s invitation, I’m contributing to Worlding Raga with the hope of further developing a literacy around Worlding. As a tourist of this part of the blogosphere, I’ve been drawn to the spiritual dimension of Ribbonfarm again and again. It is the side of Ribbonfarm that is hungry to identify phenomena in the wild that don’t seem to die, and to name them so that they are enduring tools for others to see and act anew. This voluntary desire to surf chaos, metabolize it into new order, and then do it all over again, is sometimes called “walking with god.” Maybe it’s more like slouching with god around here. Either way, it is a spirit I resonate with and one that I believe is highly suited to Worlding.
First things first. What is a World?
This is a guest post by Chenoe Hart
After you have stared at your computer screen for a while, it’s recommended that you give your eyes a break to refocus on a more distant outside view. In past years when our monitors looked more like boxes than tablets, you might have already been looking into such a space. The perception of digital content on the screens of CRT displays was inextricably accompanied by the additional perspective lines of the monitor enclosure extending behind it. Expanses of beige plastic stretching past the foreground of your observation might make the eyes operate in a slightly different manner compared to our modern condition of viewing flat panels whose minimal depth renders them closer to two-dimensional apparitions. We always knew that the internet was an ephemeral entity presented in translation from abstract code into pixels on our screen, but our immediate sensory feedback perceived it to be the front of a three-dimensional box possessing further physical extension.
Construction photograph of the interior of the Statue of Liberty, from the U.S. Library of Congress.
Many of the words we commonly used to describe the early emerging internet reference an implicit dimensionality: “cyberspace” was non-ironically used as a descriptive term, we explored it those spaces through “web portals,” and the act of “surfing” the web implied negotiating the surface of a physical mass which contained further inaccessible fathoms underneath. The “-tron” suffix marketing the electron gun technology used in those CRTs became the name of a film in which our computers contained an alternate universe of extending light grids. Before “the cloud” gained popularity as an ephemeral metaphor abstracting away the details of how we store our data in other people’s computers, The Matrix rendered the physicality of the internet as a dark enclosed underworld of forbidden knowledge.
Today marks the 10th birthday of ribbonfarm. I launched this blog on June 13, 2007 (with a book review). The first comment rolled in a few weeks later, organically, on July 4. That was also the day I formally “launched” the blog, by spamming my email address book.
To commemorate and memorialize the historic occasion, our resident alpha hacker Artem Litvinovich put a bit of birthday graffiti on the bitcoin blockchain. Notice the pair of leading 42s on the transaction id? That required some special low-level uber-hacking. It’s not something standard bitcoin applications can do. In his words, “You need to control the innards of the ECDSA signing code to do something like that.” I have no idea what that means, but I’m very pleased to get a special bespoke-magic-engineered birthday card here.
Two 42s is actually kinda nice. One for Douglas Adams, one for me. I was a clueless 32-year-old when I started this blog.
So here we are now, 10 years later.
618 posts later. 9797 comments later. 5 Refactor Camps later. 17 repeat contributors later. 20 guest writers later. 2 blogging courses later (well, 1.16; the second one is underway and will conclude next week).
Hundreds of Facebook discussions later. Thousands of tweets later. Multiple slashdottings and hacker-news-front-page-ings later. Dozens of meetups and couch-surfings later. Thousands of road-tripping miles later. I could go on.
If Google is to be believed later, 4 million sessions later, 2.5 million visitors later, 12 million page views later. 3 books later.
1,346,678 words later. At an average of just over 2179 words.
983,764 words by me. 102,983 by Sarah Perry. Just under 260k by other contributors. And I’m not even counting the comments. There’s probably several hundred regular commenters who’ve been with us off-and-on over the entire decade, dropping pearls of add-on wisdom in the comments section.
There are also words themselves. Dozens and dozens of useless neologisms, gleefully unhelpful abstractions, time-wasting archetypes labels, a steady stream of gratuitous insultings, entire bunny trails lined with thoughts nobody should waste time thinking, and so on.
And don’t forget pictures. A steady parade of ugly illustrations, collages, and cartoons (and a few pretty ones) has kept the torrent of words company.
And where have we arrived? I have no idea, but I think there’s a there there 🙂.
It took long hours, years of sweat and selfless toil and….alright who am I kidding, it took none of that.
I hate to disappoint people who like to see gritty toil behind long-evolving projects, but to be honest, in many ways, this has been the most effortless and entirely self-indulgent thing I’ve ever done. Play that worked, as I put it in a recent Breaking Smart newsletter. I just started writing one day, and forgot to stop. Everything else followed. Like they used to say about the British Empire, the Ribbonfarm Empire was created in a fit of absent-mindedness.
And speaking of Breaking Smart, there’s also a messy, rhizomatic sprawl of half a dozen domains, and a complex slum of infrastructure behind this rolling Internet carnival.
Over the last decade of high-ADD discursive wandering, ribbonfarm has steadfastly refused to have a focus, and outlasted hordes of blogs (and blogs about blogging) that earnestly advised everybody to “find a niche” and “focus.”
Nuts to that. ADHD ftw.
(nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!)
So what do we have ahead of us for the next decade?
There is a ton of stuff staged and kinda hanging around, waiting to be rolled out over the next few months, to help set the course for the next decade. I’ll be posting more about all those things in next few weeks to months.
But for now, Happy Birthday to us!
This is a ghost post by Nolan Gray
“Fuck You I won’t post what you tell me” – Rage Against Deus Ex Machina
Be aware that when accessing the internet, the panopticon of the online world sees you slogging your Smartless™ baggage through the Terminal. Your online personality is like a suitcase without wheels dragging behind you, scraping and scratching through the veil of security. We all sit at the bar watching your avatar self wander by with your assumptions bag over packed for a two day trip that turns into a lifetime. Taunted by the gatekeepers of the ungrounded world their signs designate that you are only allowed to bring the approved personality items in specified sizes. 3oz of snark, No liquid optimism, a single liter of judging disapproval and nothing that looks like humility through the machine. It’s for your own safety and those of others sharing the flight from AAS* to ACD*. These traits are tightly regulated. In the security line we see the humiliating items hidden in your baggage on our monitors. You too, while waiting for coffee or bored in the yoga lounge can see our embarrassing items on your personal screen every time we log on to the social media wing of the Terminal.
The antihero is exciting because he is transgressive. Most of us color within the lines, but antiheroes rip pages out of the book. (Villains do that too, but then they set the pages on fire. Antiheroes make paper airplanes.) The antihero’s behavior upsets staid assumptions about virtue — he muddies “good” and “bad” in a way that mimics real life.
Drawing by the author.
Despite their troublesome ways, antiheroes are performances, safe for audiences to enjoy. We can relish morally complex characters without having to bring mess and conflict into our own lives (or without having to admit the mess and conflict that we don’t know how to handle). Antiheroes allow us to externalize our own grapplings with selfishness, loyalty, and altruistic bravery. They give us a relatable avatar, complete with id as well as superego. Watching the antihero’s antics can even be cathartic.
So, given that women are roughly 50% of the human race, where are the antiheroines? Why are they so outnumbered? Could they be hiding in plain sight? [Read more…]
Art is a technology. If you did a Casablanca / Law & Order double feature you might notice that although Casablanca perhaps has more ‘artistic value’ (that horribly vague phrase), Law & Order tells its stories with a mind-boggling efficiency that vastly outstrips the former. Some time after 1960 filmmakers learned how to tell more story with less. They learned how to convey more information in less time and without losing depth. If this kind of compression is one example of artistic technology, in other words, we’ve gotten so much better at it that even the workingman filmmakers that produce network television can do it. It’s artistic electricity. Literacy.
According to this model, you could call some artistic movements technological inventions. Or even technological revolutions. Painting realistically, non-linear narrative, or syncopation are all examples of things that had to be invented. And these practical inventions reflect more systemic, abstract inventions that could better be described as ‘ways of thinking.’ The invention of realism, for example, changed the scope of things art could (or should) be about from what was moral or pleasurable to what was truthful. Modernism, in turn, suggested that what was truthful could be approached by methods other than object-level realism. And so on, and so forth.
My interest in art as a subject is not because of philosophical fascination on its own merits. My interest is fundamentally practical: I want more art that is good. I write about art because of the sneaking suspicion that on some level ‘artistic value’ is a technology too. That ‘good’ is a technology. That it’s something that can be in some way broken down or optimized. That it’s something people can be literate in.
Every few months, one of my much more successful friends will get frustrated by my apparent lack of aggressive hustle in service of my own work, and declare that I could be 10x better known and make 10x as much money if only I did x. The unstated assumption is that I am perversely being a precious snowflake by not doing x.
Every few weeks, I also have a different kind of conversation, usually sparked by a particularly poignant email from a youngish reader who has been persuaded by something I wrote to “go sociopath” (a la Butters going Professor Chaos). Typically, my new best friend will express a desire (and seek my help) to pursue some creative mission of personal, soul-enriching significance, without getting eaten alive by some species of shark in their waters. These emails often strike me as precious (as in snowflake, as well as in every other sense of the term).
We need a term for an anti-snowflake. I propose clod.
If you view someone as a precious snowflake, they necessarily view you as a clod. This post is about the clod-snowflake dynamic. All culture arises out of it.
