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?
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.
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!
Not all hour-long podcasts are worthwhile, but I found this one by The Atlantic’s Matt Thompson and Alexis Madrigal to be pretty compelling. The subject: how to fix social media, or rather, how to create a variation on social media that allows you to properly pose the question as to whether or not it can be fixed.
For both Matt and Alexis, social media (and in particular, Twitter) is not especially usable or desirable in the form in which it presents itself. Both Matt and Alexis have shaped and truncated their Twitter experience. In Alexis’s case, this means going read-only, not posting tweets any more, and just using Twitter as an algorithmic feed reader by way of Nuzzel, catching the links his friends are discussing, and in some cases, the tweets they’re posting about those links. Matt is doing something slightly different: calling on his friends not to like to retweet his ordinary Twitter posts, but to reply to his tweets in an attempt to start a conversation.
Both Matt and Alexis are, in their own way, trying to inject something of the old spirit of the blogosphere into their social media use. In Alexis’s case, it’s the socially mediated newsreader function. In Matt’s, it’s the comment thread, the great discussions we used to have on blogs like Snarkmarket.
(Full disclosure: I was a longtime commenter on Matt and Robin Sloan’s blog Snarkmarket from 2003 to 2008, until I was elevated into a full third member of the site, where I posted pretty regularly until about 2013, when our blog, like so many others, began to wind down, replaced by both social media and professional news sites. I was also one of the early contributors to Alexis’s Tech section at The Atlantic starting in 2010, which is also held aloft as a blog standard during this podcast. So I have some skin in this game.)
Also worth reading into this discussion: Anil Dash’s 20th anniversary roundtable at Function with Bruce Ableson, Lisa Phillips, and Andrew Smales, which pretty explicitly (and usefully!) constructs the early blogosphere as the precursor to contemporary social media.
It’s easy to look at Twitter and look at Facebook, and look at the things that are happening, and how awful people are to each other, and say: the world would be better off without the internet. And I don’t believe that. I think that there’s still space where people can be good to each other.
So here’s the thing:
The blogosphere was not always better than the contemporary social web;
The blogosphere felt like it was getting better in a way that the contemporary social web does not.
And that turns out to make a huge difference! I mean, in general, the world was sort of a crummy place in the early 2000s. (The late 1990s were actually good.) But on the web side, especially, things in the early 2000s felt like they were getting better. Services were improving, more information was coming online, storage and computing power (both locally and in the cloud) were improving in a way that felt tangible, people were getting more connected, those connections felt more powerful and meaningful. It was the heroic phase of the web, even as it was also the time that decisions were being made that were going to foreclose on a lot of those heroic possibilities.
A lot of the efforts to reshape social media, or to walk away from it in favor of RSS feeds or something else, are really attempts to recapture those utopian elements that were active in the zeitgeist ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago. They still exercise a powerful hold over our collective imagination about what the internet is, and could be, even when they take the form of dashed hopes and stifled dreams.
I feel like I can speak to this quite personally. Ten years ago, I was just another graduate student in a humanities program stuck with a shitty job market, layered atop what were already difficult career prospects to begin with. The only thing I had going for me that the average literary modernist didn’t was that I was writing for a popular blog with two very talented young journalists who liked to think about the future of media. That pulled me in a definite direction in terms of the kinds of things I wrote about (yes, Walter Benjamin, but also Google Books), and the places where I ended up writing them (Kottke.org, The Atlantic, and eventually Wired). So instead of being an unemployable humanist, I became an underemployed journalist.
At the same time, the blogosphere, while crucial, has only offered so much velocity and so much gravity. By which I mean: it’s only propelled my career so far, and the blogs I’ve written for (Kottke notwithstanding) have only had so much ability to retain me before they’ve changed their business model, changed management, gone out of business, or been quietly abandoned. They’re little asteroids, not planets. Most of the proper publications I’ve written for, even the net-native ones, have been dense enough to hold an atmosphere.
And guess what? So have Twitter and Facebook. Just by enduring, those places have become places for lasting connections and friendships and career opportunities, in a way the blogosphere never was, at least for me. (Maybe this is partly a function of timing, but look: I was there.) And this means that, despite their toxicity, despite their shortcomings, despite all the promises that have gone unfulfilled, Twitter and Facebook have continued to matter in a way that blogs don’t.
For good or for ill, Twitter lets you take the roof off and contact people you’d otherwise never reach. The question, I think, is whether you have to tack that roof back on again in order to get the valuable newsgathering and conversation elements that people once found so compelling about the blogosphere, or whether there’s some other form of modification that can be made to build in proper protections.
The other question is whether there can be anything like a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of social media. I suspect there isn’t, just because people are at different points on their career trajectories, which shapes their needs and wants vis-a-vis social media accordingly. Some of us are still trying to blow up, or (in some cases) remind the world what they liked about us to begin with. Others of us are just trying to do our jobs and get through the day. Many more still have little capital to trade on to begin with, and are just looking for some kind of meaningful interaction to give us a reason why we logged in in the first place. The fact that this is the largest group, for whom the tools are the least well-suited, and who were promised the most by social media’s ascendancy, is the great tragedy of the form.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves, what was it that we wanted from the blogosphere in the first place? Was it a career? Was it just a place to write and be read by somebody, anybody? Was it a community? Maybe it began as one thing and turned into another. That’s OK! But I don’t think we can treat the blogosphere as a settled thing, when it was in fact never settled at all. Just as social media remains unsettled. Its fate has not been written yet. We’re the ones who’ll have to write it.
My friend Matt Thompson grew up in Orlando, and like many of the shooters’ victims, he’s gay, a person of color, and a child of immigrants to the US. His wonderful essay grapples with the shooting and tries to untie the fear and risk and hope and community that’s knotted up in those identities.
My own parents were the very last people in my life I was out to, years after I’d been out to friends and colleagues. I didn’t know how they’d react to the fact of my sexuality, and among my friends, there was often impatience with that uncertainty. If they’re good parents, these friends would say, they will love you without conditions and without hesitation.
But this reaction was rare among those of us who grew up, like me, knowing that our parents left their homes and settled here mainly in pursuit of visions of what their children’s lives would be. They had imagined their sons as men with wives, and their daughters as women with husbands, and cultivated these visions throughout our adolescence and beyond. Some of our parents had tended to these visions so zealously that they missed all the signs that these weren’t, in fact, the people we’d become. When we came out, they were forced both to reckon with these people they no longer recognized and mourn the visions of us they had nurtured all those years.
“I can’t stop thinking about the possibility that someone like us was hurt or murdered at Pulse on Sunday morning,” Matt writes. “outed in the very worst way, in a phone call every family dreads. For some parents, such a call would be a double heartbreak.”
The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.
“Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said. “Here, drink this. You’re slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose.”
I was taken aback. “How did you…” I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.
“As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws-or lack thereof-apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn’t speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.”
I was thirsty, so I drank the electrolyte solution down. “This is delicious,” I replied.
“I know,” he replied. “It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream.”
“What… ” I stammered.
“Your prostate is enlarged. Let’s go hangout now. There’s some really great music I’d like to recommend to you.”
You could consider this a follow-up to 2004’s EPIC 2014 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson.
In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites.
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