/reader

 

We built small thoughts in little boxes,

Stacked them high on shifting sands.

The tide swept in, and still we gathered,

Chasing echoes, clutching hands.

• It’s Actually Sort of Sad
• On The Blog:
• Permanently Moved
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

It’s Actually Sort of Sad

There’s been a wave of people writing about their exodus from Twitter and the supposed joy they’ve found on Bluesky. Not to sound too hipster about it, but I can confidently say it’s nowhere near as good as last year when we were all stuck in the Hell Thread with an AI-powered OwO duck, relentlessly spamming cursed cuteness into the void. THAT was an era.

I wish I could tell you that Bluesky is a utopia of digital rainbows, a thriving garden of new connections and ideas. But honestly, after a this week, I’ve realised something—it’s kind of… sad. Not sad in a tragic way, but in a melancholic, quiet sort of way, like wandering into an old pub where everyone is trying to rekindle a vibe that’s already burned out.

It’s wild to me that after 15 years of playing the same game, people are still eager to pick up where they left off. The rules haven’t changed:

Please read this

Pass it on

I have more

And yet, here we all are, moving to a new table in the casino, hoping it’ll somehow feel different this time. It doesn’t and it wont. It’s the same old game with slightly different aesthetics. I know I’ve been harping on about “the rules of the game” for a while now, but it genuinely makes me sad. Sad that we’re so quick to rebuild the same dynamics in new spaces, instead of imagining, or even behaving differently.

I wrote 10 Tips for Leaving Twitter way back in 2022 and I still stand by everything I said.
The first tip? Have some ambition. Whatever you choose to do after leaving Twitter—or any platform—make it count. Be bold.

Whatever you decide to do after leaving Twitter, I hope it’s ambitious

The average Twitter user spent 5 hours a month there. Just 10mins a day

Some of you are leaving after regularly spending 15 hours or more there a week

Remember, according to the place you are leaving, tweeting three to four times a week made you a heavy user

Posting just 1200 characters was apparently enough to make you a meaningful contributor to our collective culture

It did not

Those little text boxes didn’t build the culture; they just grazed its surface. And yet, here we are, setting up shop in new ghettos for the same fleeting dopamine hits. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads—they’re all competing to corral the same user base of Millennials and Gen Xers, people who grew up on SMS and are too nostalgic (or stubborn) to let go of that particular flavour of communication. Meanwhile, Gen Z moved on years ago to short-form video. TikTok has them hooked. And Gen Alpha? They’re already in the actual metaverse, voice-chatting with avatars in 3D spaces. The energy has shifted, and short-form text posts feel increasingly like an artefact of a bygone era.

I tried to share my 10 Tips on Bluesky, but: nobody clicks on links anymore. Link culture, once a pillar of the open web, has collapsed under the weight of endless scrolling.

My broader view is that lots of people are tired of short-form text as a medium. As I said in a Discord conversation recently: Little Text Boxes lead to Small Thoughts. You can’t say anything other than a slogan in 280 characters. All you get are quick takes and shallow discourse. And if you’re like me—sick of playing the same game—it’s time to opt out.

Opt out and start a blog. Write a newsletter. Or leave social media entirely.

Your Attention Is Sovereign.

Have some ambition. Write something long. Something messy. Something sprawling and ambitious that refuses to fit into a timeline. I know it’s not very popular thing to say but i think people should take up space online. There’s a reason 8 hour long deep dives into a video game or whatever get millions of views on youtube, and 3 hours podcasts have become the leading genre. They reject the brevity and ephemerality of the kind of media we’ve been encouraged to consume over the last 15 years.

Blogging isn’t just an act of defiance against the homogenising forces of social media; it’s a way to contribute something lasting to the web. Something that can be stumbled upon years later, still fresh, still resonant.

The internet desperately needs more independent voices—people building their own corners of the web, away from the walled gardens of corporate platforms. We don’t need another social media clone; we need a renaissance of personal sites, of thoughtful writing, of real creativity.

Social media has conditioned us to think small: short posts, quick reactions, instant validation. But we don’t have to play by those rules anymore. So, whether you’re leaving Twitter, Bluesky, or wherever else, my parting advice is the same as it was in 2022: Have some ambition. Take the time you used to spend doomscrolling and build something worthwhile instead.

We all deserve more than what those little text boxes can offer regardless of what network we chose to type into them on.

Speaking of which, why not follow me on Bluesky? and get updates on what i’m posting here. lol

On The Blog:

Nov 24 | Accessions

Recent acquisitions to thejaymo industries library – Nov 2024

Permanently Moved

The Processing of Words

In 1984, author Ray Hammond reminded readers that ‘the computer has no power to write words.’

As large language models (LLMs) reshape writing today, it’s worth reflecting on the last seismic shift in creative technology: the rise of the word processor.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/11/17/2429-the-processing-of-words/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

Support 💪

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Includes Handmade Zine ✉️

Subscribe

Or wherever you get your podcasts

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Another writing session on PROJECT FORK. Goals and deadlines in place now.
• Slowly chipping away at some admin and copy for PROJECT DIVE
• Back on PROJECT ENTRY, check in calls, correspondence, started on next phase of research
• New codename began – PROJECT COLLECT is going well doing a quick 20mins every day in the mornings to keep momentum up
• Finished part 2 of my newest zine. lots of editing and re-writing required. Hope to go to print by end of Nov

Terminal Access

The good Patrick Tanguay over the fantastic newsletter sentiers.media wrote nice things about my blog and shared recent post about Knowledge Objects:

It’s been almost four years since a great post by Jay Springett, Discord, DAOs, and the DWeb, and it still comes to mind once in a while, I still wish Discord had built it. This new piece on knowledge objects in the prompting of AI and how they could be part of the UI goes right along with it and will also be popping in my head with regularity, I expect.

In this framing, “knowledge objects” are “a book, or big PDF [dropped] into an LLM’s context window, it has a sort of gravity — like how objects with high mass reshape space-time — drawing the model toward specific ideas and reshaping the entire context landscape.” If you’ve done quite a bit of prompting and conversing with ChatGPT and the like to write texts and/or extract information from them, you’ll recognise this effect, these kinds of “objects.”

Check it out and consider subscribing to the newsletter. It’s one of my Favs.

Dipping the Stacks

Neural Media

It’s easy to see why so many creatives view generative AI as disempowering, and I think much of that fear is warranted. However, I also think there’s an opportunity to consider that computing is evolving in a way that’s calling us to engage with it not merely as a communications medium, but also as a creative medium.

Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine

teaching people to favour the consistency of imaginary worlds may also teach them to vilify disagreement and the entire practice of interpretation.

George-Peterland

Five eight-year-olds founds the imaginary world ”George-Peterland”. A dreamy forest land with cute chickens, to which you can travel by just shutting your eyes. When rules takes over the imaginary world, it becomes a nightmare. YOU SHALL NOT EAT CHICKEN. YOU MUST LOVE YELLOW. YOU MUST BELIEVE IN THE CHICKEN GOD.

CARI | Aesthetic | Utopian Scholastic

This reliance on this style of collage is predicated on two factors in the era; the proliferation of stock photography collections, and the development of desktop publishing & graphics-editing software in the 1980s.

The Internet Was Never for Us — rm

This headless, agent-first internet isn’t a bug. It’s the endgame. The internet doesn’t need us anymore, and maybe it never did.

Reading

Still reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan,

As per this weeks podcast, I finished Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

Not content to be slowly making my way thought above I’ve also started reading Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and the Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by the poet David Whyte, and i’ve started working my way though This Is What Matters: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Identifying Your Values, Priorities, and Path Forward after a Crisis by Perpetua Neo

Despite having the above FIVE books on deck. I smashed though Lazarus: Enmity’s Edge by Gary Kloster. I just needed some Warhammer Brain Rot to zone out to.

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Jyocho – Lament the Passing of Spring

Japanese Math Rock legends Jyocho have a new single out. Presumably named for the Basho poem (it’s semi fresh in my mind as I read Jane Hirshfield’s book “Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry” not that long ago)

Anyways. Lament the Passing of Spring is a wonderful track. Technical, lush, and very cinematic. I say this every time I listen to them but their dummer is amazing.

Remember Kids:

Prefer Email? 📨

Receive my Weeknotes Newsletter and new podcast episodes directly to your inbox

📥 Subscribe Now

The post Have Some Ambition appeared first on thejaymo.

 

November 17, 2024

|

AI 🤖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Software 👨‍💻 | Writing ⌨️

In 1984, author Ray Hammond reminded readers that ‘the computer has no power to write words.’

As large language models (LLMs) reshape writing today, it’s worth reflecting on the last seismic shift in creative technology: the rise of the word processor.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/11/17/2429-the-processing-of-words/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

Support 💪

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Includes Handmade Zine ✉️

Subscribe

Or wherever you get your podcasts

The Processing of Words

I have come to a realisation: I am not a writer.

I have friends who are – creative craftsmen with a natural affinity for narrative, or the shape of arguments. They know how to let words flow one after another, forming a coherent whole. 

My writing on the other hand happens in the edit. I don’t write words I process them. Battering at them like a lump of clay. Cut, Copy, Paste, Highlight, Delete, Overwrite, Move, Drag, and Drop.

Words are a medium, to be processed.

I’ve come to this conclusion after reading Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. It’s an amazing book about the creation and adoption of word processing. A technology that has profoundly reshaped not just how we write, but the structure of our own thoughts. As we face a new revolution in literary technologies with LLMs, learning more about earlier revolution felt pressing.

I was born in 1985. I first encountered word processing software at school when I was about nine or ten. For me, and anyone younger, it’s hard to grasp how revolutionary the adoption of word processors was. We take it for granted that words are fluid behind polished glass. But for those who lived through it, followed immediately by the advent of the Internet, the impact was monumental. 

Until reading Track Changes, I hadn’t realised the sheer hostility word processors faced—especially from the creative class. There was outright vitriol. Processing was for vegetables not words went one refrain. Some writers even hid their use of word processors to avoid suspicions of automation or inauthenticity.

In 1984 Alan Hollinghurst, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement, worried that “style deteriorates … people write more laxly”. Others dismissed word processors as inefficient or even harmful tools.

A 1982 Writer’s Digest feature on writing novels with computers triggered an avalanche of angry letters. “Typing made easy with personal computers, not writing,” one person fumed.

Meanwhile, sci-fi writers like John Varley joked about using only “natural ingredients” like typewriters and creativity, while evangelists declared word processors as revolutionary as the printing press. Looking back, those hypebeasts were onto something—our lives today revolve around processed words.

One concern at the time was that people might mistake draft-quality work as finished, given the polished look of typeset text. Iris Murdoch lamented that staring at a glowing screen separated writers from their thoughts, giving them a “premature air of completeness.”

The history of word processing is tightly entwined with management consulting and workplace misogyny. The early word processors of the 1970’s were marketed as business tools, not creative ones.

IBM’s marketing team coined the term ‘word processor’ to describe the function of its new machines. But the concept quickly became tied to a reductive view of secretarial labour. 

‘Mad Men style’ management consultants in the late 1970’s pushed hard to dehumanise the secretarial role. Arguing that typing should be a mechanical input-output activity done by a type of worker, rather than individual secretaries who – shock horror, might have opinions and advice after working so closely alongside male executives in the workplace.

The original word processors were women behind typewriters. 

It’s disturbing to read how consultants actively worked to strip secretaries of their agency and autonomy in the workplace, seeing their work as something to measured by word count, accuracy and typing speed. Moving them out of the bosses office and into soul destroying typing pools.

Some fears about word processors, though, have come true.

In the 1984 the author Ray Hammond found it necessary to remind his readers that “the computer has no power to write words.” Many authors feared that readers would not understand the technology and instead would think the computer had ‘written the book for them’. 

The invention of the word processor didn’t just change how writers think in text. It also shifted the labour of writing and publishing. Authors in the 1950s hammered out their manuscripts on typewriters, and sent it off, leaving the task of correcting grammar and spelling to literal copy editors. People who copied the first draft into a cleaned up text.

Word processors mostly pushed those tasks back onto the authors themselves. 

By the late-1990s, most objections to word processors had subsided. Personal computers became the default tool. But it’s worth noting, that word processors were never designed for creative writers – they were business tools first and foremost. We still call them documents. It wasn’t until a later generation of software—like Scrivener—that word processing became more attuned to the needs of writers. And we still lack true hypertext first writing software.

I suspect we’ll see a similar evolution with LLMs. Right now things are being built for business, with a huge push to replace workers. But eventually we’ll get new creative interfaces, new tools, and eventually, new norms about how we think about the production of creative work.

Before anyone objects, it’s worth noting there was also a backlash in the 90’s against tools like spell check and grammar suggestions – tools that are now seen as essential.

Lastly, on a somewhat related note: I recently showed a retired boomer Stable Diffusion. It was their first time seeing image generation in action. They shrugged and said they assumed that’s what people using Photoshop had been doing for the last 20 years. lol

Maybe the fears of the past weren’t so unfounded after all. Or maybe, like before, we’ll adapt, evolve, and thrive in this new era of creative tools.

Start Select Reset 📑

Start Select Reset Zine (SSRZ) is a quarterly physical newsletter, sent via snail mail to paid subscribers

Join the Mailing List
From £5/month 💌

Subscribing supports my work and brings you the joy of receiving real mail, not e-mail 🤗

The post The Processing of Words | 2429 appeared first on thejaymo.