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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Software eats World: digitization and indexing of the world's knowledge / libraries
World eats Software: books are printed to salvage and memorialize parts of the Internet (radioactive trash heap) for future readers
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Noise and fury signifying nothing. Yes he's annoying and loud and temporarily very important in the damage he can do, but ultimately an irrelevancy.
Trash heap or not (I'm definitely in not camp), we're here for good. No going back. Nobody's going to print/memorialize anything
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1. most publishing contracts or first time authors get taken up from the internet now, no? isn't that already what we're talking about? from meme to IRL? 2...
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Sure, but "being published as a book author" is no longer the endgame or even a necessary side game, just a nice-to-have side market. Anybody who makes that their main goal is already larping 1950.
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many wrote useless and unnecessary books throughout the middle ages, attached to a self-image of "author." It does not mean less today than it did then. (there's a bunch of stuff on this in shopenhauer)

