(2022-12-06) Sloan A Year Of New Avenues

Robin Sloan: A year of new avenues. It’s so pow­er­fully obvi­ous to me, it might as well be writ­ten in ten-foot let­ters of flame: the plat­forms of the last decade are done...we all have a new opportunity. ­Here’s my exhortation: Let 2023 be a year of experimen­ta­tion and invention! Let it come from the edges, the margins, the provinces, the marshes! THIS MEANS YOU!

am think­ing specif­i­cally of exper­i­men­ta­tion around "ways of relat­ing online"

This doesn’t mean you ought to start a company. (start-up)

I want to insist on an ama­teur internet; a garage internet; a pub­lic library internet; a kitchen ta­ble inter­net. (Indie)

nei­ther the big tech com­pa­nies nor the startup financiers are going to pro­duce the “ways of relat­ing” that will mat­ter in the next decade. Almost by def­i­n­i­tion, any exper­i­ment that’s truly path­break­ing and provoca­tive is too weird and tiny for them to suffer

“web browsers” doesn’t just mean Chrome, Safari, and Edge; every oper­at­ing sys­tem now offers a triv­ially avail­able web can­vas to which you can add any­thing you want

For peo­ple who care about cre­at­ing worlds together, rather than get­ting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future

Okay, so, what kind of exploration? What kind of invention? I have some rough (and per­haps only mar­ginally use­ful) ideas for new avenues, which I will type out below.

First, though, I want to acknowl­edge that invent­ing new things, par­tic­u­larly new “ways of relat­ing”, is a lonely task. In the beginning, it’s just you, or, at best, you and your tiny gang of col­lab­o­ra­tors. You can only HOPE that maybe a few dozen other peo­ple start to pay attention

Try the new new new thing
Spend some time with Arc, the new browser from The Browser Com­pany of New York

Think deeply about discovery
How might you help peo­ple find new things on the internet?

I suspect the answer has to do with good old-fashioned human recommendations, but who knows? Maybe Tik­Tok has it right; maybe every­body deserves one (1)audition with the capri­cious god-algorithm of the realm

Climb into an overlay
The deep struc­ture of the inter­net stymies peer-to-peer pro­to­cols

some peo­ple are turn­ing to simple, secure over­lay net­works that make peer-to-peer address­ing easier, or even pos­si­ble at all. ZeroTier and Tailscale are the lead­ers here

Maybe you should start a ZeroTier or Tailscale net­work with a few friends or col­lab­o­ra­tors and … see what hap­pens?

Go digging in the crates
What half-forgotten old pro­to­col might be revived and repurposed?... RSS?

Where else is there wiring already in place? What new sig­nals might you send through it?

My own avenue of exploration, a new pro­to­col called Spring ‘83, takes direct inspi­ra­tion from the inter­net of forty years ago

Make a thing with which you can talk about the thing
I feel like this is a com­mon pattern: a com­mu­nity is build­ing some­thing new, and they talk about it … on Twit­ter. Maybe Discord.

Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging. If that sounds exhaust­ingly meta, well, yes — but it was also SUPER generative.

Make exemplars before services
Remember that a sin­gle exem­plar of a new for­mat can be a profound contribution; in art and cul­ture, maybe the most pro­found. These are the works that found genres.

Work with the garage door open (Work With The Garage Door Up )
Less an avenue, more a way of approach­ing an avenue: This isn’t a time for “products”, or prod­uct launches

Ignore Mastodon
I suppose this is an anti-avenue, because: Mastodon is not it.

it doesn’t rep­re­sent a suf­fi­ciently inter­est­ing exper­i­ment, because it accepts too much as settled

Now, a com­ment on the fizzing thing of the moment! ChatGPT

I guess I’ve been using these AI tools long enough that the “wow” has worn off, so I’m left with the “what now?”

I have a direc­tory burst­ing with images cre­ated using Sta­ble Diffusion. They were fun to make, but/and … what are they for? So far, the answer is “my amusement”. That’s fine; I like being amused. But amuse­ment is not what’s sten­ciled over the door at OpenAI. They want to remake the whole econ­omy over there.

it leaves out every­thing about the process that’s actually inter­est­ing.

here’s a les­son from my work mak­ing olive oil. In most places, the olive harvest is mechanized, but that’s only pos­si­ble because olive groves have been replanted to fit the shape of the harvesting machines. A grove planted for machine har­vest­ing looks noth­ing like a grove planted for human har­vesting. (Seeing Like a State)

For me, the inter­est­ing ques­tions sound more like
What new or expanded kinds of human labor might AI systems demand?
What entirely new activities do they suggest?
How will the world now be reshaped to fit their needs?

That last ques­tion will, on the timescale of decades, turn out to be the most impor­tant, by far.

I have to confess: even con­sid­er­ing ChatGPT’s prodi­gious capabilities, I’m skep­ti­cal that any of this will hap­pen very quickly

It is telling, though, that its pub­lic appli­ca­tions all have to do with the mass prod­uction of medium-quality text … which wasn’t exactly rich ter­rain even before GPT-3 came on the scene

The mile­stone that will impress me, honestly, is an AI agent with a bank account. Obvi­ously that will also ter­rify me. But/and, maybe this is Sloan’s def­i­n­i­tion of arti­fi­cial gen­eral intelligence (AGI): given a bank account and a few bucks to start, can this AI agent make it in the world?

For me, ChatGPT’s fluency with code is its most impres­sive feature. If you spend any time with it, try ask­ing politely for “some cool CSS code for a blog”, or “a JavaScript func­tion to iden­tify an email address in a string”. It’s really some­thing!

Finally, here’s my tech­ni­cal ques­tion.

it is not presently pos­si­ble to sync localStorage between the mul­ti­ple instances of Safari or Chrome that a user is logged into

My sec­ond ques­tion, the real one, is: what’s the next-best thing? Is there any­thing sim­pler than a remote func­tion, cre­ated and main­tained by me, to which I get and set a copy of my localStorage?