(2023-01-28) Sloan Attention Router

Robin Sloan: Attention router. Throughout 2023, this newsletter will be largely devoted to mapping new “ways of relating” online. You can return to the December edition, if you missed it, to get the gist.

we’re entering an auspi­cious season for imag­i­na­tion and invention.

This first lab newsletter of 2023 is very link-y, perhaps a bit raw. That feels like a good place to start, because my main objective this year is to be an “attention router”, brisk and functional, connecting you to some worth­while inven­tions and provocations. And, with luck, contributing a few myself.

I’m very taken with a little wave of apps that allow you to publish and maintain a feed as easily as you’d tweet.

These apps all have a real lightness to them; it’s impres­sive work all around. The question remains: what about discovery?

Val Town is a new platform for tiny cloud functions, and if it’s something different from the apps above, it still seems to “rhyme”, somehow

There are some provoca­tive ideas lurking in Val Town. After creating your tiny cloud function, you can make it public, and other people can call it from their tiny cloud functions, using a clever addressing scheme.

I think Val Town’s console.email is great, too. Can we just add that everywhere?

I always leap to read Jackie Luo’s dispatches

Her recent New Year newsletter artic­u­lates a widely-shared feeling of stuckness:

Although this feeling isn’t only, or even primarily, about the internet, I think it connects to, and fuels, the widely-shared sense of “ … is this it?” that I have discussed in this newsletter. I think it’s important to under­stand the search for new avenues in that context.

Jackie’s “stuckness” makes me think of Zygmunt Bauman, the philoso­pher who saw it all with such clarity, way back in 2000 (Liquid Modernity)

This feeling of stuckness, the inability to get traction, underpins every other link in this newsletter.

Web Browser Engineering is a web book that uses the browser brilliantly. Its subject is: how to make one.

The balance between lightness and inter­ac­tivity here is wildly impres­sive

A collab­o­ra­tion between Pavel Panchekha and Chris Harrelson, this is about as close to a perfect web book as I’ve seen. (The other contender is Rodrigo Copetti’s Architecture of Consoles.