Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks Out Against Israel’s “Segregationist Apartheid Regime” After West Bank Visit. “There’s no way for me, as an African American, to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.”

A Dangerous Conflation. “We are Jewish writers, artists, and activists who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.”

In “The Cave, the Corps, the League,” Tim Carmody looks at superhero stores — back then, I swear, a fairly niche genre — for metaphors about loyalties creative people have to media companies and to each other.

At Snarkmarket, Matt Thompson often wrote about “the Speakularity,” the moment when speech-to-text transcription would become sufficiently perfect that it became benign tech people with sufficient resources took for granted, like a toaster, refrigerator, or indoor plumbing. How close are we to the Speakularity today? Or is it still in the distance?

Robin Sloan’s mantra, circa 2011: “Work in public. Reveal nothing.”

In 2011, Robin Sloan wrote “Blessed Are the Toolmakers.” It’s a (light) rejection of the urge to make general-purpose software and platforms in favor of something smaller yet more productive.

“I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.

“I guess I want fewer aspirational Apples and more Pixar wannabes.”

Two Songs from The Muppet Movie

Tomorrow, November 4th, 2023, is my first wedding anniversary. I married Karen McGrane at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2022. We walked down the aisle to Gonzo’s “I’m Going To Back There Someday.” It was one of the best days of my life.

To celebrate our anniversary, I’m reposting what I wrote shortly after I moved into Karen’s house (which also, somewhat unusually, was the first time we met in person). It’s also the most recent — and since we haven’t renewed our WordPress license, quite possibly the last — post on Snarkmarket.com. I hope Kottke.org readers enjoy it.

Why write a blog post somewhere nobody has published in five years, in a new WordPress interface where you recognize… yeah, nothing? Where somehow you can’t even upload a JPG or PNG file you downloaded from another site “for security reasons” without converting it first? Or get paragraph tags or linebreaks working inside blockquotes? (Really? On Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s own World Wide Web???)

Because sometimes there is no other place to put such things. There is no other place where you want to put such things.

I bought a new laptop late in 2020, one of the new Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pros that was announced just after the election (which was also my birthday). It is easily the best laptop I’ve ever used, let alone owned. I’m typing on it now. (It doesn’t have enough ports; otherwise, it is as perfect a machine as has ever existed until the next one comes out.) Buying that laptop started something for me: a new round of investment in myself after a long period of being fearful and dormant. And shortly after I bought it, I covered it in Muppets stickers.

I’m hardly unique in loving The Muppets; we’re past fifty years of Sesame Street and even longer of Jim Henson’s earlier creations, meaning just about every living generation has been touched by those special creatures one way or another. But the Muppets are a talisman of something I try to guard in myself: tenderness, exaggerated emotion, a desire to experience the world as something new, an urge to creativity and renewal, a fear of rejection, and a sometimes desperate need to be loved in a world where love is often in short supply.

The most famous song from The Muppet Movie is the opening number, “The Rainbow Connection.” It’s sung by Kermit the Frog, as played and performed by Jim Henson himself, and the conceit in the movie is that Kermit is playing and singing the song alone, on a banjo. This conceit is quickly abandoned, at least aurally; a whole orchestra comes in, turning a dead-simple children’s song into something swelling and cinematic. It’s three minutes long, and sung by a puppet, performed by someone who, for all his unbounded talents for voice and performance, can’t really sing. But I think it’s the greatest song ever written for a film. (A surprisingly competitive category!) It’s really worth watching, as many times as you can.

Here is a story about the writing of “The Rainbow Connection.” And here are the lyrics:

[Verse 1]

Why are there so many
Songs about rainbows
And what’s on the other side?

Rainbows are visions
But only illusions
And rainbows have nothing to hide

So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it
I know they’re wrong, wait and see

[Hook]

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

[Verse 2]

Who said that every wish
Would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?

Somebody thought of that
And someone believed it
Look what it’s done so far

What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?

[Hook]

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

[Bridge]

All of us under its spell
We know that it’s probably magic

[Verse 3]

Have you been half asleep
And have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name

Is this the sweet sound
That calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same

I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it:
It’s something that I’m supposed to be

[Hook]

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

[End/Outro]

That’s the whole thing.

As a child, I was taught that this song was about hope in tough times — a rejection of cynicism, an attempt to uphold on the threshold of the Reaganite 1980s something of the idealism of the 1960s, from Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech to the antiwar movement, only somewhat looser and more adaptable (if also more inchoate). The song also had a religious element to it: something of my mother’s highly adaptable (and thoroughly idiosyncratic) Catholicism — a belief there was a magical, spiritual universe both separate from and pervading the one we could see. The Rainbow Connection was not heaven in any proper theological sense, but it was the heaven my mother believed in. And, I think, that she still believes in.

And it is those things — insofar as it “is” anything but a sweet song with a good melody — but it’s also something else. And as you get older, and continue to deal with grief and heartache (as I have, many times), and are dealt reversals and disappointments, the other meaning of “The Rainbow Connection” becomes insistent and impossible to ignore.

It is a song about what you can and can’t believe in after a life filled with missed chances, casual cruelties, and dead family and friends. It’s a song shot full of the melancholy many of us remember most clearly in our own childhoods, an ache to your bones that has never gone away. It is every heartbreak you have ever had, every injury suffered to your body, mind, and pride. It is how you think about friendship and community when your community is broken and your friends are all so very far away. It is not about a cohort of happy dreamers, or lovers. It is about how you care for your child inside when all your illusions are gone. It is the last illusion you keep, because without it, you would have nothing left.

The questions “The Rainbow Connection” asks are genuine questions, with a more ironic edge than Kermit places on it in the song itself:

• “Who said that every wish / Would be heard and answered”? Really ask yourself: who?
• “Somebody thought of that / And someone believed it.” Who thought of it? Why have any of us ever believed it?
• “Look what it’s done so far.” What has it done? Have you actually looked? Where are we? All these years of struggle: what were they for? And what have they done?
• “What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing / And what do we think we might see?” What are we looking for? How would we even know it if we saw it?
• And if not this, then what? What are the alternatives? Lie down and die? Give in to the world’s cruelty and cynicism and make yourself a part of it? Tranquilize yourself and wait for something to change? Could we even do otherwise? After all… it seems like most people genuinely can do exactly that.

Seen from this perspective, The Muppets are not childlike or naïve at all. They are advancing a powerful critique of how we live and what we believe, and how we’ve come to settle for so much less than what we are capable of. There is a utopian element to “The Rainbow Connection,” but it turns out to be a very slight one. A Minimum Viable Utopia, if you will.

The other song that matters the most to me from The Muppet Movie (which, like Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Prince’s self-titled album, was released shortly before I was born) is Gonzo’s “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday.” And this song, too, has multiple layers that are worth unpacking.

Here are the lyrics:

Verse 1:

This looks familiar
Vaguely familiar
Almost unreal yet
It’s too soon to feel yet

Hook:

Close to my soul
And yet so far away
I’m going to go back there
Someday

Verse 2:

Sunrises, night falls
Sometimes the sky calls
Is that a song there?
And do I belong there?

Hook:

I’ve never been there
But I know the way
I’m going to go back there
Someday

Bridge:

Come and go with me
It’s more fun to share
We’ll both be, completely
At home in midair

We’re flying not walking
On featherless wings
We can hold on to love
Like invisible strings

Verse 3:

There’s not a word yet
For old friends who’ve just met

Part heaven, part space
Or have I found my place?

Hook:

You can just visit
But I plan to stay
I’m going to go back there
Someday

I’m going to go back there
Someday

[End/Outro]

This song is somehow even simpler than “The Rainbow Connection,” but it wears its ironies farther out on its sleeves.

The obvious (although not literal) reading of the song is that Gonzo is not talking about any past he remembers, or even really a future he’s waiting for, but about the love and newfound family he’s discovered with his friends now all around him: the Muppets to whom he’s singing the song. Again, as a child, this is what I was taught without having to be told, and for the most part, it’s what I believed.

The second, more critical take on “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday” is that it is a profound confession of abandonment and loneliness in Gonzo’s formative years. It is the absence of anything like the heartsoaring love he is stumbling to find words to describe, and his very early and extremely keen awareness of that absence, even before he knew there was hope of anything different. It is less about loss (you have to have something before you can lose it, technically) than lack.

And while you could say that Gonzo is realizing now that he’s found what he’s long been looking for, the fact that he still puts it in the future tense suggests that he’s still feeling something lacking, either in his companions or in himself. He still feels incomplete, blown apart, alone and lonely, en route to something he does not have and has never had, does not know and has never known — something that he can only describe or define by its absence. A negative theology.

You could take this a step further and say that what “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday” is really about is the fact that such a place does not exist, has never existed, and if it waits for anyone, it does not wait for the singer. Gonzo — Tim Carmody — is so irreducibly damaged by what has happened to him, so thoroughly alone, that he can only think of love and belonging as a return to a paradise he’s never known and will never in his lifetime see.

The trouble with all of this is that sometimes the impossible happens.

Here I’m going to invoke another important text from my childhood, but I won’t take the time to explicate it, because I can talk about baseball (and specifically, this single plate appearance) forever.

It is hard to talk or even to think about miracles, especially if (like me) you have long since relaxed the God hypothesis. The 18th-century empiricist / skeptical philosopher David Hume defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.

The trouble for Hume with miracles is the trouble for Hume with all knowledge (including very basic relationships of cause and effect): the evidence to genuinely believe in miracles is always lacking. It falls apart given the tiniest bit of criticism — and yet, people are inclined to believe in miracles anyways.

In fact, people all over the world, at every age and in every walk of life, may be more inclined to believe in something impossible they believe they’ve witnessed themselves, alone or in a small group, than an ordinary event witnessed again and again by millions of people. Aristotle, too, understood, this irony, writing in the Poetics that (translations differ, but here is the gist) “the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.” And if you can keep God’s hands off the probable impossible, so much the better.

The world Gonzo prophecies in “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday,” that Kermit imagines in “The Rainbow Connection,” is not supposed to exist. It is an illusion, an impossibility, even if it remains a necessary one. And yet: sometimes, somehow, after you have already set aside your own eligibility for such things, and doubted their real existence for others or their cameos in your own past, you nevertheless, to your own total astonishment, find yourself back there again.

On Saturday, February 6th, I moved back to the city of Philadelphia. I made my nostos, not to the city where I was born (Detroit, which will also always have my heart), but the city I chose when I was 22, and where I spent most of the important years of my life.

I am back. I am home.

You can just visit
But I plan to stay
I’m going to go back there
Someday

• Karen McGrane
• movies
• music
• The Muppet Movie
• The Muppets
• Tim Carmody
• weddings

On November 3, 2008, Tim Carmody joined Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson as the third writer/editor of Snarkmarket. “A Concise History of the Future” is a lightly edited chat between the three of them as they got ready to announce the new Snarkmaster (and a new web redesign) to the Snarkmatrix.

The Rise of the Trail Blazers

Somehow Snarkmarket contains no links to one of my favorite essays of all time, “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush. Our esteemed host has linked to it, of course, because Kottke.org is an unparalleled collection of fine hypertext products. But I think it’s worth a repeat. Many people know this essay, but most still don’t.

Bush was part of the Oppenheimer set; he was an engineer whose work was critical to the creation of the atomic bomb. By the time this essay was published, Mussolini and Hitler were dead, and World War II was almost over. He begins from a perspective I find cold and alienating, that of a scientist exhilarated by an intellectual pursuit that has left millions dead and more devastated. He doesn’t reckon with this even as he writes a paean to what science has accomplished:

Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

But then he goes on to outline a problem of knowledge that persists in our time and may have grown even worse:

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Bush goes on to describe a series of technological leaps — in computing capability, optical storage, and more — that build on the state of the art of information storage and retrieval in his day. The advancements he imagines culminate in a written sketch of a machine:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

This essay is often described as presaging the internet. The design Bush sketched for the memex inspired generations of computer engineers, influencing the inventors of things like the computer mouse and hypertext. But what fascinates me about this essay is that the device he describes does not resemble the internet or anything I’ve ever found on it. And the problem Bush imagines the machine as solving — supplementing human memory — hasn’t been aided by the internet so much as worsened by it. (Cue Phaedrus: “You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding.”)

The internet is an exploration machine; there’s a reason we call our portals to it “browsers.” What Bush was describing sounds to me like what you might get if you turned a browser history — the most neglected piece of the software — into a robust and fully featured machine of its own. It would help you map the path you charted through a web of knowledge, refine those maps, order them, and share them.

I don’t think anything like this exists. So Bush’s essay still transfixes me.

But the piece of Bush’s vision that dwells with me the most is the career he describes coming into being after his machine is commonplace. I’ve often called it the most beautiful definition of a journalist in the 21st Century I can think of:

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

• engineering
• memex
• Vannevar Bush

The Future of RSS is Textcasting

Earlier this week, Dave Winer (the inventor of RSS and lots of other notable software, and one of the earliest bloggers) made a podcast for me. He posted it publicly, so it wasn’t sealed like a letter, but it was addressed to me and responding to something I wrote on Threads. I don’t think I’ve ever been the personal addressee of a podcast before: like an @-reply, but in audio.

For some reason, it reminded me of the poet Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” manifesto:

[Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.

But this is a digression. The ideas Dave is talking about in this podcast are serious (even if he is laughing a lot), and he spells them out in text at a site called Textcasting.org. Here’s the philosophy:

• The goal is interop between social media apps and the features writers need.
• What we’re doing: Moving documents between networked apps. We need a set of common features in order for it to work.
• The features are motivated by the needs of writers. Not by programmers or social media company execs.

It’s a proposal to build, using technologies we already have and understand very well, a very simple social media protocol that is completely agnostic about what editor you use to write your posts and what viewer you choose to read it. Writer/authors would have more control over styling, links, media enclosures, etc., and readers would have more control over how and where they consume it. It’s decentralized social media, but without the need to peer through ActivityPub or anybody else’s API and squeeze our toothpaste through its tubes.

Dave asked me to respond to his podcast, and while I thought about making an audio response, a blog post is more my metier.

If this is going to work, I think there are at least four problems we’d have to solve:

• Everyday users need a default writer and reader, preferably in the same place. It would be wonderful to be able to bring your own tools to bear and plug into the endpoints and have it just work. But nobody should need to fish around for that stuff. The defaults should be just opinionated enough (for instance, I like the Mastodon client Ivory, built on the ashes of TweetBot) that people feel like they’re getting a slick, finished UI and UX experience. That’s why people are gravitating to Threads: Meta knows how to put one together. But that’s not rebuilding the electrical grid from scratch. We know how to do that too.
• We need user and content discovery. We have to be able to find each other. And that’s what a lot of the heavy lifting of these other platforms is devoted to: to find people and things you didn’t know you were looking for. Again, this feels like a solvable problem.
• We need metrics. Most writers work for publishers, and publishers want to know whether their content is reaching people. It’s tempting to load this up with a lot of cruft, but impressions, clicks, reposts, quote posts, etc. is doable without a ton of advertising nonsense. Social media companies figured this out, but bloggers did too, a lot earlier.
• We need moderation. A wide-open social network becomes a highly abusive social network fast in 2023. And nobody who isn’t a Nazi wants to hang out at a Nazi bar. So we need tools to block and flag and maybe even ban people who use the platform to spam each other, impersonate real people, and abuse other people on the platform. In the now-seminal “Welcome to Hell, Elon,” Nilay Patel correctly identified content moderation as Twitter’s actual product: it’s what Twitter-the-company added to Twitter-the-protocol. We don’t necessarily need a Twitter-sized overhead, or a complex system of federated moderators, but it’s going to be a problem, so we’d need tools to address it.

But in terms of philosophy and vision, I’m all for it. RSS remains incredibly vital to what I do, and its potential as both a reading AND a writing platform remains untapped. You can write using your own tool and broadcast it everywhere. And Dave’s right: this worked for podcasts (the phrase “anywhere you get your podcasts!” is a great advertisement for interoperability breaking any single platform’s dominance), it worked for blogs, and it can work for this strange multimodal thing we’ve created called social media. It worked for the world wide web! And I will be ride or die for the open web until my life comes to an end.

Now we just need to work together to make it happen. And I confess: my tools are limited here. I can’t (really) code, I can’t (really) design, I can’t build a moderation feature. I can evangelize, I can strategize, and I can write. But I can do those things (in all modesty) very, very well.

So let’s do this thing. Why not? Twitter is dying, and Facebook is fading. None of the replacements have eaten their lunch yet. Why not make a swing for the open web? Why not try?

• Dave Winer
• RSS
• social media
• textcasting

By the end of 2015, Snarkmarket had slowed way, way down. But its writers would still pop by from time to time to revisit the site and write something for its community. (“A hardy desert ecosystem,” Robin once called it.) This post, “Unforgotten,” by Matt Thompson reflects on blogging a decade after its peak. “Blogs like this one are speakeasies now, not raucous pubs. I don’t actually know if fewer people are ‘reading blogs’ or if it’s that the web has grown so much larger that the boutique communities of yesteryear merely feel less significant. But I will say, I find enduring and immense value in this place, in the fact that you’re here, reading these words, however you’ve found them. Speakeasies can be marvelous spots.”

For Snarkmarket’s tenth anniversary in 2013, we gathered a large group of writers, commenters, and fans in its place of origin (The Poynter Institute in St Petersburg, FL) for a “conference” (for some value of the term). But first, we did a year-long online seminar to prepare how we wanted to rethink the site.

Robin Sloan on stock and flow in media:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Liberal Arts 2.5

Once, Kottke.org’s tagline was “Liberal Arts 2.0.” It’s a terrific description of everything the blog covers and how Jason covers it; unpacking the web with a humanist lens, looking for noteworthy specimens and bigger connections.

It also chimed with “Web 2.0,” which was a popular descriptive and prescriptive phrase at the time.

Tim Berners-Lee famously derided “Web 2.0” as “jargon,” claiming that the web was always intended to be a social and collaborative medium and that the things proponents of a renewal of the web wanted to emphasize were there from the start. Which is… basically accurate!

But the liberal arts badly needed (and still badly need) an update for the age of the web. So many of the big Web 2.0 projects (social networking and commerce, folksonomies, the web as a development platform) either betrayed some of their initial democratizing promises as they were taken over by giant companies, or got crowded out by the same.

And “Web 3.0” — well, the less said about that, the better. A straight marketing play that ropes together a few promising technologies with total dead ends.

Liberal Arts 2.0, though — that’s a concept that still has legs. But perhaps twenty years after Snarkmarket got rolling, and twenty-five years after Kottke.org hung up its shingle, we can propose a modest, incremental (but still significant) update: Liberal Arts 2.5.

In 2009, me and my partners Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan plus a community of collaborators at my old site Snarkmarket were so struck by Jason’s idea of Liberal Arts 2.0 that we decided to make a book that outlined a series of emerging disciplines that we thought might make up a set of New Liberal Arts.

This was pre-Kickstarter, so we rolled it up ourselves. With help from Revelator Press, we created it as a limited-edition paperback book; the print run was just 200 copies, so it’s quite a collectible nowadays. Once we cleared our production costs, we also offered it as a free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF, ebook, and as plain HTML — an early example of what I later called unlocking the commons.

I’m actually quite pleased that the plain HTML version I made (and hand-edited!) so we could turn it into an ebook is still up. The PDF version we had hosted succumbed to linkrot, but it’s still available on Issuu. For fun, I just posted a copy of the original New Liberal Arts PDF on Dropbox just for readers of Kottke.org.

New Liberal Arts is the apotheosis of everything I loved about Snarkmarket. It asks big questions about the past, present, and future, including especially the past/present/future of media. It is a collaborative project we made with our community. And it’s a concrete thing we put into the world, under our own terms, that got people excited and sparked more conversations.

And it’s a conversation that I think is still going. If anything, liberal arts education is even more under attack today than it was in 2009. And between then and now, liberal arts practitioners have had to reflect on what it means to teach, learn, and operate in the world given the rapid rate of technological change — not just between now and when the medieval trivium and quadrivium were formulated, but between now and the postwar university, or even the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s something we need to keep rethinking continually. (And not coincidentally, “rethinking things continually” is something that the liberal arts traditionally has done extremely well.)

Here is our original list of “New” Liberal Arts:

• Attention Economics
• Brevity
• Coding and Decoding
• Creativity
• Finding
• Food
• Genderfuck
• Home Economics
• Inaccuracy
• Iteration
• Journalism
• Mapping
• Marketing
• Micropolitics
• Myth and Magic
• Negotiation
• Photography
• Play
• Reality Engineering
• Translation
• Video Literacy

Contributors included myself, Matt Thompson, Robin Sloan, Andrew Fitzgerald, Gavin Craig, Diana Kimball, Aaron McLearan, Dan Levine, Theresa Mlinarcik, Laura Portwood-Stacer, Jennifer Rensenbrink, Alex Litel, Jimmy Stamp, Tiara Shafiq, Matthew Penniman, Rex Sorgatz, Rachel Leow, and Kasia Cieplak Mayr-Von Baldegg.

If you want to read more about what we had to say about any of these things, please read the book, or browse individual chapters at leisure — it’s really not very long.

But in true Snarkmarket/Liberal Arts 2.0/Web 2.0 fashion, I also want to open up this conversation to the Kottke community.

• What do you think are the new liberal arts?
• How do the liberal arts need to change to reflect new technologies, media ecologies, and social and political transformations (and crises)?
• What do we need to hold onto from liberal arts education that’s in danger of being lost?
• If you were teaching a youth today what they needed to know to be a free person in the world, what subjects would be on your curriculum?

• liberal arts 2.0
• liberal arts 2.5
• Matt Thompson
• New Liberal Arts
• Robin Sloan
• Snarkmarket
• Tim Carmody

“So often online, we interact in ways that are intimate enough to feel significant, but so disconnected they’re essentially mysterious.” — Matt Thompson on the internet of ghosts

Snarkmarket Turns 20

Today, November 3rd, is my 44th birthday. Tomorrow, the 4th, is my first wedding anniversary. But today is also an important day in my personal history of the web, and I’d argue, in the history of blogging, or at least our corner of it. It’s the twentieth anniversary of Snarkmarket, founded by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. It’s also the fifteenth anniversary of the day I joined as the site’s third blogger, or Snarkmaster, after five years of being part of the site’s community (the Snarkmatrix). (Coincidentally, Obama was first elected President that November 4th. It was a really good couple of days.)

If you didn’t have the good fortune to read Snarkmarket while it was active, I’ll give you a quick précis. Robin and Matt both graduated college in 2002, then completed a year of journalism study at the Poynter Institute. They started Snarkmarket as a way to write about the future of media, but also to keep in touch with each other as they scattered across the country to look for jobs in media. And for over a decade, that’s exactly what they did.

Now, there were a lot (for relatively small values of “a lot”) of blogs that purported to be about the future of media in 2003. But too many of these were navel-gazing armchair speculations that were mostly about settling scores within the industries they covered.

Snarkmarket was different. (For one thing, it wasn’t really very snarky.)

Matt and Robin were two young practitioners of journalism who loved the web but largely saw it for what it was — which is to say, a set of imperfect communities and technologies that were in danger of calcifying around a limited set of interests, and in even greater danger of being dominated by big companies.

Snarkmarket’s clearest vision of this future was a Flash video released in 2004 called EPIC 2014. It imagines a future of journalism where search, social media, and personalization transform the production and consumption of news, creating an ecosystem where traditional news sources (and traditional journalistic ethics) get displaced by the new techno-capitalist hegemony. The specific predictions seem quaint now (Google buys Amazon; Apple doesn’t release an iPhone, but a WiFiPod; The New York Times goes print-only, etc.), but for the most part it describes the world we live in shockingly well.

There’s also a coda/update to EPIC 2014 called, appropriate, EPIC 2015: in this version, along with the corporate dominance, there’s democratic pushback, with people using their own devices to create and share their own content, communicating with another in a loose, messy, but ultimately humanistic way, in smaller communities united by local interests. And I would argue that this future — the flip side of what we’ve known as Web 2.0 — has ultimately come true as well.

Both videos are now marvelous time capsules. Even at their inception, they were framed as an artifacts from an imagined history at a date in the future. I think this helps to explain what made Snarkmarket so different from the much snarkier blogs about media with which it was intertwined.

Snarkmarket was never about one future of media, but a plurality of them. And it wasn’t focused on the narrow present, but the Long Now: a confluence of histories that took the past, present, and future of media (and the communities formed around media) equally seriously.

At the time, I was a graduate student at Penn, studying comparative literature. My main fields were literary theory, twentieth-century modernism, the history of the book, and cinema and media studies. I was zeroed in on the media universe circa 1450-1950. I felt that it was at this moment, when all our assumptions about books and newspapers and movies and documents as such were being washed away, that we could finally see the past as it actually was. (I still think that’s true.)

But Snarkmarket was the site and the community that most fully yanked my brain out of the past and into the present, and through that, into the future. It made me care about what was happening now not just as casual politics or lifehacks, but as an essential element in that long history. And I think — fuck it, I know it for a fact, it’s just empirically true — that talking to me helped Robin and Matt think about their present and future concerns as part of that long history too.

It’s probably too easy to say that Robin was the voice of the future, Matt of the present, and Tim of the past. We were all (and are still) continually bouncing like pinballs between all three historical perspectives. But it is nevertheless true that Robin was and is an inventor, Matt a journalist, and me a scholar. We all helped each other and our readers think through those perspectives, even if it was just in how we reframed a quick link.

I don’t know anyone today who genuinely does what we did.

The same thing happened to Snarkmarket that happens to a lot of great web sites driven by people rather than organizations. Students stop being students, junior professionals become senior ones, people start families, and all the other demands on your time become more demanding.

Also the ground moved beneath our feet. The rise of social media and Google’s embrace, extend, extinguish approach to RSS changed how news and commentary on the web was distributed.

We still had plenty of fans and friends who kept their old RSS readers active or were willing to navigate to the URL every day, but there are reasons why sites like Kottke (or Waxy.org, or insert your favorite long-running blog here) are special. It’s hard to keep something like this going unless you can make it your full-time job, and the economics of that for three people are even harder than for a sole proprietor.

And at a certain point, at a certain moment in the web’s history, you have to think long and hard about what you want to put on a blog and why. From 2003-2013, you just didn’t have to think as hard about it. The blog was your post of first resort. Now, too often, it’s the last.

There are things I would change, and things I wouldn’t. Nothing could change the fact that after five years of watching them live, I got a solid five years to be a part of my favorite band. Isn’t that what it’s like to have a website that you love?

And now that site is twenty years old. The babies who were born at the same time Snarkmarket began are now old enough to have their own thoughts about the past, present, and future of media, old enough to start thinking about graduate school, or maybe even apply to a place like Poynter and try their hand at building the future of media themselves.

Maybe one of them might meet a friend or two in school and decide they want to document that journey: write down a few thoughts, link to things they’ve read, and keep in touch with their friends.

If anyone in Gen Z is reading this, remember: it’s never too late to start a website. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to get a million readers. It doesn’t have to change the world. All it has to be is a reflection on the past, a time capsule for the future — a document for the now. Your readers are out there, waiting. They’ll find you.

• kottke.org
• Matt Thompson
• Robin Sloan
• Snarkmarket
• Tim Carmody

Seeing the Present in Past Tense

It’s a pleasure to be here in Jason’s esteemed garden of links and digressions, celebrating 20 years since we created Snarkmarket. In keeping with our host’s splendid curatorial style, most of what I’ll post here are not little bloggy essays like this one. But there’s one thing I especially wanted to ask this crowd about.

Few people would ever have known about Snarkmarket if not for the short video Robin and I made, EPIC 2014 (and then, a year later, 2015), that went viral in an era of the internet in which virality was difficult. To make a video viral in 2004 meant people mirroring a file on their private servers, linking to it on their blogs, and emailing links to friends and colleagues. But the video itself imagined that friction as a thing of the past. YouTube didn’t yet exist, but we’d guessed that it or something like it was coming. A world where sharing was difficult had already begun to feel obsolete, even while we were still living in it.

I’ve come to find it useful to imagine parts of the world around me in past tense. There seem to be many things these days that we’ve committed to ending or know we can’t sustain, even though they’ll probably be omnipresent for years to come. Many stem from our changing climate and growing sense of the toxic effects of constantly gassing the air. In a few years, for example, most of the new cars sold in California won’t have gas engines anymore, by state decree. But that’s not all of it. Nowadays almost every time I find myself in a retail store that’s not a pharmacy, I get an anachronistic jolt. I don’t know if I’ll ever think about an office commute again the way I have for decades of my life.

The most obvious function of this exercise is to help me consider my own behaviors, wants, and habits in a different light. I hope to someday laugh at the fact that we once found it convenient to encase individual slices of cheese in plastic.

As a habit of mind, it’s also a way of grounding me more deeply in the world I still inhabit. It helps me savor the things I expect to grieve, and mark the things I hope to outlive. When I’m sick, I try to take mental notes for my future selves, reminding me not to take for granted the mundane luxury of breathing easy.

But I think this should be more of a collective exercise. We know that we’re seeing the end of an era and the beginning of another. We’ve pledged ourselves to this, in fact. So what should we look at as having begun to end? When we look back on this moment 20 years hence, what will we strain to remember? What will seem as distant to us as that world two short decades ago when making a video go viral required the distributed muscle of a network of human beings?

• time travel

How the “Lost Cities” of the Amazon Were Finally Found

In the past few decades, we’ve found out a great deal about pre-Columbian civilizations & inhabitants of the Americas, including those in the Amazon rainforest, where settlements were larger and more numerous than previously believed.

When European colonizers arrived in the 16th century, they were captivated by rumors of a golden city, hidden somewhere in the rainforest. Their search for “El Dorado” lasted more than a century, but only resulted in disaster, death, and further conquest of the indigenous people there.

Experts thereafter looked at the Amazon and saw only a desolate jungle; too harsh for extensive agriculture and therefore sparsely populated. They believed that it had always been this way.

Until recently.

Beginning in the late 20th century, archaeologists began looking more closely at the forest floor. Working with the indigenous people who still remained there, they excavated long ditches and mounds. After mapping them, they could see that these were the markings of large settlements; walls, moats, plazas, and roads that connected even more settlements. And they were all over the Amazon.

• archaeology
• video

The Puzzmo Manifesto. “Work cannot be magically reformulated to become play. Play is its own thing. Play is engaging and all-encompassing. Play makes you feel light and free, even when it itself is deep and complex. Play is the companion of joy.”

MIT Technology Review: “We asked prominent people in their field to weigh in on the underserved issues at the intersection of technology and society. Here’s what they said.”

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Thelonious Monk. Jazz musicians & writers share their favorite Monk tunes.

Please Welcome the Snarkmarket Gang

Hello everyone, I’ve got a bit of a treat for you. Tomorrow (Nov 3) marks the 20th anniversary of Snarkmarket, a quietly influential group blog that featured the writing of Tim Carmody, Matt Thompson, Robin Sloan, and a few other contributors. There hasn’t been much activity over there for several years, but it was a must-read for me back in the day (with a lively comments section) — you may remember the EPIC video that Robin and Matt made (oh, seeing that old design brings back memories!) or Robin’s evergreen classic on stock & flow.

Anyway, tomorrow Matt, Robin, and Tim are taking over kottke.org to celebrate their anniversary, reminisce about the Good Old Days, and perhaps opine a bit about how people relating to each other online has changed in the 20 years since the formation of the Snarkmatrix. Comments will be on and they’ll be in there mixing it up with you.

So then: I hereby declare November 3, 2023 Snarkmarket Day on kottke.org. Bake it away, toys!

• Matt Thompson
• Robin Sloan
• Snarkmarket
• Tim Carmody

Queuing Is Not a Luxury Experience. “One of the main parts of being rich is not having to wait, and yet these brands force their most passionate customers (and resellers) to uncomfortably re-enact Soviet bread lines.”

Let’s Get Creative is a “collection of high-quality, free, online creativity tools” that currently includes Line Rider, Townscaper, Twine, Beepbox, SumoPaint, and The Blob Toy (so fun!).

An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods

Using survey data, responses from community boards & city council members, and over 37,000 responses from NYC residents, a team at the NY Times has made a detailed map of the 350+ distinct neighborhoods in NYC. From a companion article:

It’s a New York pastime to gripe that neighborhoods are invented and defined by real estate brokers, developers and other city gatekeepers. But the more interesting truth may be that they are also reinvented and reinforced, refracted through race and class, by us: by the air traffic controller who lives in Little Yemen, by the Manhattan community manager who’s sure his constituents live in East Harlem — and not “Upper Carnegie Hill” — and by the Brooklyn residents who decided to name a relatively flat piece of land Boerum Hill.

A name has power. It can foreshadow who will be moving in. By itself, it can conjure so much: gentrification, displacement, inequality, status. When we argue over names, or even invent new ones, we may be trying to exert some of that power — or lamenting that others have more power than we do.

We asked New Yorkers themselves to map their neighborhoods and to tell us what they call them. The result, while imperfect, is probably the most detailed map of the city’s neighborhoods ever compiled.

The article is interesting throughout:

Our map reveals two main kinds of divisions: sharp ones and fuzzy ones.

The fuzzy ones often reflect areas in transition or dispute, where there’s no consensus or where gentrification is rewriting boundaries in real time.

The sharp ones often reflect features of the landscape itself: wide avenues, highways, remnants of canals. When you cross the street, you know you’re in another neighborhood.

Next time I’m in NYC, I’m definitely going to Little Yemen for lunch.

• cities
• language
• maps
• NYC

‘We’re sedating women with self-care’: how we became obsessed with wellness. “If you work hard enough and you buy the right things, you’ll be saved from disease and ageing and anything bad happening to you.”

Spent part of my lunch hour yesterday reading the screenplay for Arrival. “A desire for more cows.”

More Tycho From Burning Man

I am a fan of Tycho’s sunrise DJ sets at Burning Man (here’s 2023’s set), so I was pleased to discover he played a second, shorter DJ set that’s now up on Soundcloud.

• music
• Tycho

This looks interesting: a cooperatively owned and operated newsletter featuring all sorts of familiar names: Osita Nwanevu, Laura June, Hamilton Nolan, Anna Merlan, Clive Thompson, Maria Bustillos, and Matt Buchanan.

A recent health survey: “Americans have less confidence in vaccines to address a variety of illnesses…and more people accept misinformation about vaccines and Covid-19.” Only 63% of Americans believe a Covid vax is safer than a Covid infection.

Mastodon Is the Good One. “Mastodon is interoperable, decentralized, operated by a nonprofit, lively, and, ACTUALLY, isn’t hard to use. So why is everyone championing Threads as the main Twitter alternative?”

My Recent Media Diet, Fall 2023 Edition

I know I always say this, but I didn’t mean for so much time to elapse since the last installment of the media diet. But I have a slightly different reason for the delay this time: I have been really busy with work and family stuff, so much so that I haven’t been reading or watching as much as I usually do. So I needed to wait a couple of months to collect enough stuff.

Anyway. Here’s my recent media diet, a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months. ✌️

The Creator. Original, engaging sci-fi with good action, heart, and something to say. Madeleine Yuna Voyles is the best child actor I’ve seen in years. (A)

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson. I’m still making my way through this one but I’m going to review it now because Virginia Heffernan was absolutely correct in saying that the first part of the book is “the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard”. Richardson ties so many things together so succinctly that by the end of it, Trump feels not like an abberation but more like the result of a plan that conservatives have been striving towards for decades. (A+)

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Watched this twice: once in the theater and once at home. I didn’t like this quite as much as Fallout (or Top Gun: Maverick tbh), but this is a top-notch action movie. The tiny car chase on the streets of Rome is 💯. (A-)

The ocean. Still undefeated. (A+)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2. *sigh* Like many of you, I am extremely disappointed with the weird & harmful anti-trans crusade the author of the Harry Potter book series has embarked on over the last few years and it’s prompted me to attempt a reevaluation of my relationship to these movies and books. But I’ve had some difficulty doing so because the Potter wizarding world is so wrapped up in spending quality time with my kids (particularly after their mom and I separated) that it’s hard to have anything but extremely fond feelings for it all. Over a period of five or so years, we read the whole series together at bedtime and I can’t even put into words how meaningful that time together was. We’re listening to the series on audiobook in the car right now…it’s one of the few things my two teens and I really enjoy doing with one another.

Anyway, all that is to say that when some recent changes in our schedule together — good, developmentally appropriate changes for them but changes nonetheless — caused some parental melancholy, I watched these three films on back-to-back-to-back nights just to feel close to my kids in some way. It was just the thing. (A)

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Perhaps not the beach read I needed, but the one I deserved. I liked this maybe a bit better than the movie, but still not nearly as much as Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (and its sequel, Dark Sun). (A-)

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. This was excellent. Listening to actual people who lived and worked in Northern Ireland during the Troubles — victims, murderers, police officers, bystanders, family members of those who were killed — was completely enthralling and brought the 30-year conflict to life in a way that Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing couldn’t, as good as it was. I’ve been thinking about this series a lot over the past few weeks as the latest tragedy unfolds in Gaza. (A+)

The Repair. Another excellent podcast series from Scene on Radio, this one on climate crisis. I’ve read quite a bit about the climate over the past decade or two, so I thought I knew what to expect going in, but this takes a pretty unique angle. For one thing, they don’t start with the Industrial Revolution…their lead-in to the topic is the Book of Genesis. And it keeps going in unexpected directions from there. I think even a seasoned observer of the crisis will find something interesting here. (A)

The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher. Maybe a better choice of beach read than American Prometheus…I finished this slim, creative tome in one sitting on my final day at the ocean. Here’s a better review than this one. (B+)

The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie: Give Up & Transatlanticism 20th Anniversary Tour. Saw this in New Haven in a former outdoor tennis arena. So wonderfully nostalgic. I’m a bigger fan of Give Up but the track of the evening for me was Transatlanticism by Death Cab…it sent honest-to-god chills down my spine. (A)

The mashed potato pizza from Bar. I’d tried this once before and found it kinda meh. But not this time around…I couldn’t stop eating it. (A)

Hotel Marcel. If you’ve ever driven on I-95 through New Haven, you’ve probably noticed the brutalist building unceremoniously situated in the Ikea parking lot. Designed by Marcel Breuer, the former Armstrong Rubber Company Building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021 and converted to the Hotel Marcel a year later. Pretty cool to be able to stay in such a well-designed building. (B+)

The Super Mario Bros. Movie. This was perfectly fine. But it had that tightly controlled and over-engineered feeling that many franchise movies have these days. (B)

Arrival. Still an absolute banger and one of my all-time faves. And I notice a little something new every time I watch it. (A+)

The Flash. Better than I expected! And I bought the Quick Bite emote in Fortnite. Can we staaaahpp with the multiverse tho? (B+)

Legally Blonde. First time. Enjoyed it! (B+)

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Second time. It’s not the best Indy but I think in the long term, it will be rewatchable. (B+)

Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2023. Not quite up to past years, but it’s still in the while-working rotation. (B)

Ahsoka (season one). Hmm. This was slow, enjoyable, boring, engaging — sometimes all at once. Space whales tho? (B)

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. This is Wes Anderson, unplugged: simple sets, lots of acting, spare-but-precise cinematography, and a meta narrative. (A-)

Downhill mountain biking. Ollie and I went to a local ski area that offers lift service to mountain bike trails a few weeks ago and did several rides on a intermediate flow trail and it was the most fun I had all summer. I even got some air. (A+)

Boundaries, Burnout and the ‘Goopification’ of Self-Care. For the Ezra Klein Show, guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom (one of America’s leading public intellectuals) interviewed Pooja Lakshmin about what she calls Real Self-Care. Not yoga and juice cleanses but more like setting boundaries and practicing self-compassion. An excellent listen. (A-)

Wool by Hugh Howey. After really enjoying the Apple TV+ series, I was looking forward to dipping into the first book of the trilogy. But I preferred the show…and was also surprised when the book, well before the end, continued on past the events of the show. I stopped reading at that point and will revisit after the show’s second season. (B)

Killers of the Flower Moon. I wanted to like this more than I did. Great acting (particularly by De Niro, Gladstone, and Plemons) and it looked amazing but it lacked oomph. Plus I didn’t have a clear sense of what Scorsese was trying to say… (B+)

Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises. I watched these with my son (a budding Nolan fan) and I know this is sacrilege, but my favorite of the series is The Dark Knight Rises. Heath Ledger’s performance though… 🤡🔥. (A-)

I also have a bunch of stuff in progress, including The Vaster Wilds (good so far, need to make more time for it), the new season of The Great British Bake Off (my fave got eliminated in the first episode 😢), and Loki (skeptical this can match the style & weirdness of the first season). I stalled out on season three of The Great but I’m going to go back to it. I’m two episodes into Reservation Dogs (after many recommended it) and I love it already. And I haven’t even started Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad!

How about you? What have you been into lately? Anything you would particularly recommend? Let us know in the comments! (Just don’t argue with my grades…we all already know they don’t make any damn sense!)

• books
• food
• media diet
• movies
• music
• podcasts
• TV
• video

Marina Abramovic: “Instagram is not art. Social media is not art. These kids are not artists. I’m sorry, but they’re not.”

The story of regulation and Kia & Hyundai thefts in the US & Canada “is what intelligent, thoughtful crime prevention actually looks like when it involves a holistic government effort rather than a narrow and singular focus of policing and incarceration”.

Ian Bogost views AI as a Tool to Supercharge Your Imagination. “AI images allow people to visualize a concept or an idea — any concept or idea — in a way previously unimaginable.”

Emily Gorcenski banned her phone from the bedroom and started reading again. “I started to take inventory of the hours I was losing. It was bad. I was worried I was wasting my life with bullshit I could not control and could do nothing about.”

Why Some of the Rainbow Is Missing

If you look closely at a rainbow made from sunlight (e.g. through a prism or an actual rainbow), you’ll notice that some of the colors are missing. It turns out that these absent colors (called Fraunhofer lines) have something to do with the types of elements that are present in the Sun (and the Earth’s atmosphere). Dr. Joe Hanson explains in the video above.

Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets encoded in these lines, using it to uncover mind-boggling facts about the fundamental nature of our universe and about worlds light-years away.

Science is fascinating…Fraunhofer lines can tell us something about objects and processes all along the Powers of Ten scale, from the inner workings of the atom to the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere to how quickly the universe is expanding or contracting.

If you’d like to check out the missing parts of the rainbow for yourself, you can make this DIY spectroscope using a CD or DVD and a few other items. (via the kid should see this)

• Joe Hanson
• physics
• science
• video

This map shows the 50 countries in the world where you can (mostly) drink the tap water. But: “Fewer than one billion people have a tap at home that issues potable water.”