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In the last year I think I stopped thinking of myself as a writer (always a very uncomfortable fit for me... it’s always been mostly an instrumental behavior for thinking and self-entertainment for me). I think I sometimes write well, but am not primarily a Writer.
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Even given my relatively cavalier approach to adopting and discarding identities (regardless of success/failure) it’s amazing how little the “writer” identity has penetrated despite it being 90% of public API for a decade. I feel zero connection with strongly writerly people.
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Briefly considered re-centering personal coordinate system origin at “researcher” (hence the crowd-plindependent-researcher thread last week) but nah, in no mood for a do-over of identity circa 1998-2006.
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Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it. twitter.com/vgr/status/119…
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Candidate identities currently undergoing beta testing for new core identity: 1. Game designer 2. Indie Consulting Elder 3. Podcaster 4. Think-tanker 5. Psychohistorian 6. Journeyman curmudgeon 7. Neoastrologer 8. Hypermedia experimentalist 9. Fiction writer 10. Rasputining
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One reason I never worked at the Real Writer shtick, besides being incapable of performing strong identities, is that I’ve always sensed that we are at the end of the Writer Era in a sense, like it’s the end of the Oil Age. It’s now an antiquarian speciality.
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Writing is just not a powerful enough medium to be *the* foundation of communication and cognition anymore. We’re evolving into a postverbal species. Writing today feels like programming in assembly did back in undergrad electronics class: a skill on its way out.
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One reason I think writing is done is that it takes a shit ton of literacy even to parse *bad* writing. Knowingly or unknowingly, both good and bad writing situate themselves in continuous, connected, mass-literacy traditions that are at this point about 6-7 generations old.
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If pre-offset-printing (~< 1890) non-mass textual traditions were like rivers, post-offset ones are like ocean currents. The work you need to do to situate in context keeps creeping up, and the relative value of your marginal addition keeps going down.
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This is not death of the author in Barthes sense, as the critical decision to ignore authorial context and intentions. This is the drowning of the author, in too much context to meaningfully situate work in. Failure by pale-blue-dotting.
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It’s too much work to make a work work. Except as a mechanical reproduction of genre norms. And increasingly everything belongs in a genre or micro genre. Genrefication of all work. Textual commoditization. Endgame of words.
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