My own writing, Iām happy to admit, is not āclassicā. Much of it should be something else, like games, web apps, datasets with exploration UIs, āpedia entries etc. Text was just the minimum viable form factor because words are the cheapest prototyping medium for any idea.
Conversation
In the first generation internet, we only shallow-digitized everything. Hypertext is an artifact of sentimental shallow digitization that mummifies the ādocumentā behind an essentially sentimental UI. We think weāre ādoneā with internet of text and moving on to āthingsā. No.
2
3
19
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. ā2nd gen nativeā content is *born* atomized.
3
3
22
These generation labels are for convenience btw, itās 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...
1
1
22
Finally, the *meanings* of dead ācontentā start to come alive. This is deep digitization. The āsemantic webā 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.
2
4
26
Even our best visioning attempts, like the Diamond Age āprimerā tech, seem impoverished and reactionary with respect to what is *already* happening. The idea of an advanced game world ābookā for one little girl, with humans turking at the other end, seems dated.
1
19
If this sounds all head-in-the-clouds visioning, you havenāt 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 āidea engineeringā.
1
1
35
All this frankly makes me ambivalent about writing in traditional forms like books or essays. Itās 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 š
10
7
65
We're trying to reinvent writing interface, take advantage of digital medium and provide such tool with brainec.com in order to make knowledge exchange much more efficient. Could it have a chance?
1
1
I like the look of the product at a first glance š
Once built a product like this myself which didnāt quite work so Iām always supportive of further attempts that might succeed where we failed. I think itās a solvable problem.


