(2020-02-24) Rao A Text Renaissance

Venkatesh Rao: A Text Renaissance.

The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are:

• Roam, a hypertext publishing platform
• Substack
• Static websites, built out of frameworks like Jekyll or Gatsby
• And finally, Threaded Twitter (Twitter Thread)

it’s going to be a sprawling, messy hot take on the State of Textual Media

The text renaissance is an actual renaissance. It’s a story of history-inspired renewal in a very fundamental way: exciting recent developments are due in part to a new generation of young product visionaries circling back to the early history of digital text, rediscovering old, abandoned ideas, and reimagining the bleeding edge in terms of the unexplored adjacent possible of the 80s and 90s.

Roam

On the surface, Roam looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and a note-taking tool like Evernote. It’s not. It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterly transform the writing experience at the finger-tips level

So you can write, structure, organize, refactor, bundle/unbundle, all in a single subconsciously learnable flow.

I met up with Roam founder Conor White-Sullivan last week

He’s also nailed the essential message-of-the-medium use case of Roam: conspiracy theories. Or alternately, extended-universe building (world building) We’re in a fake-news world and we might as well get good at it. Good in both senses of the term.

Substack

Email has now decisively reclaimed its dominant role as the last mile of push communications.

email appears to be unkillable. For a while it looked like Slack would do it, but sadly, Slack went too corporate to realize that possibility.

Email today is now less a communications medium than a communications compile target. It’s a clearinghouse technology. It’s where conversations-of-record go, where identity verification happens, where service alerts accumulate, and perhaps most importantly for publishers, where push-delivered longform content goes by default. It is distributed and federated, near universal, and is not monopolized by a single provider.

The publishing side though, has always been rather janky

The reversal began with TinyLetter, but that got bought out by Mailchimp (and began to be viewed, correctly, as business-model compromised).

Enter Substack

By offering a seamlessly integrated email, payment integration (Stripe.com is a big part of all these revolutions), and no-design-needed opinionated web presentation, Substack managed to basically resurrect a zombie category of text media that hadn’t really existed in this kind of pure form since the 90s.

Last week in San Francisco, I also dropped by the Substack offices to chat with founders Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best. As with Conor at Roam, I came away with the impression that they knew what they were doing, and had the right opinionated attitude towards it. They are also (wisely) hedged against email as the last mile, and are paying as much attention to the web experience as the email experience.

Static Websites

This website, for instance, runs on a hosted WordPress platform called WPEngine that costs an arm and a leg (more on that in a bit), but is high-performance, secure, includes a seamlessly integrated CDN, and doesn’t crash under big traffic spikes like the one I just experienced with the Internet of Beefs article

The new static webpage model takes a fundamentally different approach. The name is deceptive. Though the page delivered is a clean, simple static page, the backend is, if anything, a hyper-dynamic stream.

Frameworks like Gatsby (founded by my longtime friends and new clients Kyle Matthews and Sam Bhagwat) essentially assemble pages together on the fly from all over the place, via a just-in-time compilation stream piping into React. The result is blazing-fast websites that can be changed easily, but look static

It is an alternative in a real sense: it is a new medium from the publisher point of view, and you have to learn how to create content for it.

I see several promising young writers already moving away from the blog as the main vehicle for online written expression, and building bespoke sites with weirder, more experimental structures, using Gatsby and its kin as the foundation

this goes beyond such geekery for the sake of geekery. Now it’s geekery for the sake of creative optionality.

right now, though it is exploding in popularity, Gatsby is primarily being used by serious programmers, often in corporations or design shops

Interesting Times will ensue. The WordPress monoculture will start to shift and many more weird structures will begin to flourish.

Threaded Twitter (Twitter Thread)

While the unwashed masses flock to non-textual media like TikTok, we Very Online cognoscenti know that Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons/digital public as we’ll ever get.

At some point Twitter grudgingly started supporting threading as a feature (and in the process took control of how threads were displayed, an annoying but reasonable move). Services like Threadreaderapp emerged to turn threads into longform documents.

In December, I accidentally instigated what ended up becoming an entire festival of threading, which I retroactively dubbed Threadapalooza 2019

If you’ve been thinking Twitter is a cesspool of civilizational decay, prepare to change your mind. It’s pretty much the center of the renaissance.

a sort of meta-event emerged... It began with Dorian Taylor writing a script to 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

The Enablers

Technology

Machine-learning driven technologies that can really soup up text are almost here. Two in particular are worth watching:

Automated transcription

Machine-generated text: GPT-2 is a genuine breakthrough in text-generation

Economics

Stripe is important because it allows content technologies and media to be built ground-up with monetization philosophy in place at the foundational level.

Culture

thanks to the toxicity of the Internet of Beefs, and the rise of what I’ve called the Cozyweb, the zeitgeist is very friendly to content technologies that don’t attempt to “democratize broadcast reach” as it were. (social warrens)

The Eighth Death of Blogging

The biggest reason is operating cost at larger scales

I use one such service, the Cadillac of such services in fact, WPEngine

One way or another, you’ll pay for the privilege of being a blogger.

The huge spike is the Internet of Beefs article

A decade ago, I’d have been over the moon about it. Now I’m like, dammit, this screws up my operating cost structure and I don’t give a shit about the exposure anymore. The spike cost me $324 in overages last month alone

The second/third order payoffs of exposure, consulting gigs etc. is not as worth it as you’d think. And it’s really not as easy to scale this sort of operation as you might think. Between sites of ribbonfarm scale, and the lowest tier of “professional” media sites that are effectively magazines with a writing staff, there is a nightmare zone where monetization is janky and hard, business models are unstable and ugly, relationships with audiences are in a Patreon-ish badlands zone of crowd-sourced thought policing, and the technical administrative work involved in keeping the whole thing going is annoying and unrewarding.

Books, eBooks and Zines

I have self-published one print book (Tempo), and 9 ebooks for the Kindle. Together these net me a few hundred dollars a month in royalties

books have become an increasingly unattractive medium for writers like me who primarily developed a voice online ((2018-11-15) Books Vs Tweets)

More importantly, I don’t quite enjoy the experience of retreating for long periods to write 35k-100k words in open loop mode. I think my limit for open-loop writing is about 14k words

The whole point of that 35k-100k open loop mode is to target print books, which have unit economics that lend themselves to 35k+ word dead-tree containers

Are books worth it? Ebooks for sure. They allow for a kind of ludic reading experience that browsers and apps still don’t deliver.

I want to throw in a mention of zines. That’s one print format that does interest me. It seems like an intriguing new medium

Zines are on my watchlist as an interesting medium. I have zero interest in the artisan production and fulfillment experience as a producer, but there’s something very zeitgeisty going on there. The message of that medium is interesting.

Text in a Hypermedia Context

Right now, the mainstream technological frontier lies in encrypted p2p messaging (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram) and short-form video (TikTok).

VR, AR, deepfakes (as a creative medium), and natural-language text-generation (in particular the deep learning algorithm known as GPT-2) are inching ever closer to the mainstream.

Podcasting is approaching a sort of maturation plateau with the rise of both sophisticated toolchains and maturing automated transcription technologies (such as otter.ai).

See also: Digital Garden, Tools for Thought