Conversation

Back in the day when all we had was crappy mapquest, I used to get paper maps from AAA for road trips, which I saved. Also had a road atlas. Then google maps and GPS got good enough that one day I looked at my shoebox of maps and atlas and went “why do I have this crap?”...
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Most of these maps were in great condition btw, and real works of cartographic art. They were just... obsolete. So one day I just tossed the lot. I’m not sentimental. Here’s the thing... lately I’ve been getting that same sense from my collection of books. Both paper and ebook.
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Phonebooks, atlases, maps, recipe books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, books of quotations, poetry books, joke books, textbooks,... dozens of categories of printed matter have already gone “deep digital”: they make no sense to digitize in their original form.
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This deep digitization. Shallow digitization turns a paper phone book into a digital one. Deep digitization makes it part of the phone app, where the actual number disappears behind a UI as one among many addressing protocols.
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Shallow digitization puts maps online in nicely vectorized form (remember the bitmapped mapquest ones that google disrupted?) Deep digitization willl eventually put them several navigation gestures behind an AR directions UI. 2d bird’s eye view projection will be mostly useless.
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You get the idea. The first things to get deep digitized were things that had a naturally structured, instrumental data DNA and made sense as a feature of some products. But it won’t stop there. *Everything* we think of as having a “natural” printed form factor will transform.
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All printed matter is just uninvented technology. This is why when I look at books now, it feels like I’m looking at doomed tech history. With deep digitization, almost none of them will make sense as “books” at all. Each is the ancestor of an unborn future digital beast.
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Books on your shelves are of 3 types. First: Those that have obvious instrumental non-book future forms like atlases. This is the easy case we just discussed. Low hanging fruit on the Gutenberg tree. These are really books specifying future products we can already imagine.
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Second: “Classics” that will retain a sentimental form embedded in a tech “shell” (Shakespeare behind a sentiments-and-tropes analytics UI?) Already, we access classics like data mines. Recently, I searched a classic on Kindle for occurances of a phrase to support an argument.
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Third: Non-classics. These are perhaps the most interesting. Stuff that humanity is not collectively sentimental enough to deep-digitize via the kind of mummification we’re doing to Shakespeare’s works. We’ll just re-implement their utilitarian *functions* in updated form.
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Plenty of examples already. Most textbooks should be sets of interactive apps a la Papert. Most data-driven empirical analysis should be in wolframesque computational essay form. Tons of opportunity here. Every piece of shallow-digitized printed matter is a future invention.
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My own writing, I’m happy to admit, is not “classic”. Much of it should be something else, like games, web apps, datasets with exploration UIs, ‘pedia entries etc. Text was just the minimum viable form factor because words are the cheapest prototyping medium for any idea.
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In the first generation internet, we only shallow-digitized everything. Hypertext is an artifact of sentimental shallow digitization that mummifies the “document” behind an essentially sentimental UI. We think we’re “done” with internet of text and moving on to “things”. No.
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In the second generation, boundaries of printed matter disappear, and the Gutenberg legacy gets unbundled, and atomized. Every worthwhile line and image becomes an independent addressable, linkable meme. The rest sinks into obscurity. “2nd gen native” content is *born* atomized.
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These generation labels are for convenience btw, it’s all happening messily sort of parallel. Third generation. New rebundled forms emerge. Early chaotic mashup and collage pidgins give way to true deep-digital creoles. Threads on twitter are a good example. Instagram stories...
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Finally, the *meanings* of dead “content” start to come alive. This is deep digitization. The “semantic web” failed because we thought meaning was something dead and inherent, to be modeled. Now it seems it is a potentiality to be expressed and enacted contextually, like genes.
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Even our best visioning attempts, like the Diamond Age “primer” tech, seem impoverished and reactionary with respect to what is *already* happening. The idea of an advanced game world “book” for one little girl, with humans turking at the other end, seems dated.
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If this sounds all head-in-the-clouds visioning, you haven’t been keeping up with tech (including ironically cloud tech). Much of this has already happened in patchy ways. Every year blogging becomes a little less like writing, and a little more like “idea engineering”.
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All this frankly makes me ambivalent about writing in traditional forms like books or essays. It’s increasingly clear that these are a kind of Industrial Age larping. The thing that keeps me in traditional forms is mostly lack of skills/tools to go beyond, not sentiment 🙂
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Picking up where I left on this thread late last night, a few more points, on print itself (and for context, I probably know way more about print tech than most people since I worked at Xerox and did a couple of minor projects on the future of print)
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One great thing about software eating the *functions* rather than just the form of all printed material through deep digitization is that it allows us to take a fresh look at print itself, which remains an astounding manufacturing technology, even without getting to 3d.
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For ~500 years we mainly used print as an idea prototyping technology because it was the cheapest in every domain from political ideology creation to game design. It still is the cheapest, but other things are getting competitive now. Like twitter for ideology prototyping.
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The great thing is that now that prototyping functions are moving to other loci gradually, we can do a double take on print itself as a manufacturing medium. Print tech is really advanced now. You can print in rich color on a variety of surfaces, and put printed matter anywhere.
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Since I no longer work in the industry, its size and profitability no longer concern me. I don't mind if it is 1/1000th the size (as is likely) and mainly used to print board games and cards and signage and interesting packaging. That's a great set of uses.
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Though people outside the industry don't recognize this, already the bleeding edge tech is production on-demand high-end laser printers. There's almost nothing it can't do as well as, or even better, than offset, and very cheaply at run lengths of just dozens to hundreds.
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Most people think either big Heidelberg type offset printers OR home/office class laser printers when they think "print"... both breeds are gonna die out mostly. It's the production digital printer that will take over what remains of the future, diminished, but way higher tech.
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It's not an artisan/hobby tech like letterpress. It's a high-tech sector. Right now, it's fueled almost entirely by... well direct-mail spam use cases. But I'm hoping it manages to shrink gracefully while retaining high-end production capability.
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If you *like* paper and print, start thinking in terms of short-run, bespoke, personalized, high-quality and rich printed materials. That's why I'm very interested in things like zines, short-run indie comics, board games, card games etc. Collectively they represent the future.
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I don't know the latest numbers, but right now, I'd guess the POD (print-on-demand) high end digital print industry is 80% direct mail junk stuff, 15% print-on-demand books, and 5% "long tail" use cases. I'm hoping those numbers shift to 5%, 15%, and 80%... ie reverse.
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There's problems to be solved along the way. Back when I was in the industry, though the equipment *could* do anything (rich, full-color, short-run, with variable data in each copy), the most interesting print jobs were the least profitable.
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What the industry *liked* to print was medium run-length (few 100 to 1000) low-area coverage (5% of paper covered with ink) with only a few colors. Going the other extreme tended to be both unprofitable and high stress on the equipment. I hope they've solved both problems.
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