Pylimitics

There are two kinds of digital places you can put your creations. In one of them, what you create remains and becomes a kind of stepping stone for crossing a stream. In the other, what you create disappears and becomes part of the stream, as if you’d poured a cup of water into a brook. 

In 1994 Neal Stephenson published a short story called The Spew. It was about a digital feed that was all stream. Nothing persisted except its effects on everybody. In the thirty years since that story, the spew has become real. It’s all the twitter-esque systems out there. You can find them on the open internet, inside corporate intranets, and behind paywalls. Post something to one of them and you’ll most likely never see it again. It can be difficult or impossible to relocate your post even if you want to. It’s probably there, somewhere. It’s just that when you try to find it, even when you know pretty much when you posted, any individual post can be oddly elusive. In posting to one of these systems, you’ve contributed your latest cup of water to the stream. You can’t find your water after that, and really it’s not your water any more, any more than your post is your content. It’s just…content.

Libraries have been around for thousands of years, and have always been archives of human knowledge. One of the basic tenets of libraries is access. A book, or scroll, or manuscript once stored in a library could be relocated. Going back to the image of the stream, anything stored in a library is like a stepping stone. It’s stable, stays where you put it, and you can use it to get to the other side. There are digital systems that share those virtues: wikis, many websites, blogs, and actual libraries. When you post something to one of those locations, you can rely on finding it again. It’s still your content. 

People can adapt to practically anything. The way we’ve adapted to a digital world with streams and stepping stones is to behave differently when encountering the two types of systems. The stream systems are full of momentary thoughts, first reactions, unconsidered comments, and unfiltered reactions. Nobody seems to think very much about what they post to a stream. And nobody expects too much, either. In spite of this, the news media have come to treat streams — the spew — as a source of news they can publish to their more stable systems. Maybe they think they’re installing stepping stones. But the content is just borderline-useless reiteration of the unconsidered comments and unfiltered reactions of the spew itself. It’s no less a waste of time than staring at the stream itself. Maybe even worse; somebody actually bothered to copy and paste these momentary thoughts. 

I tend to be an early adopter as well as an early abandoner. For example, I tried Twitter very early in its trajectory. I think it was less than a year later that I abandoned it as a useless waste of time and attention. I never posted anything significant there, and neither did anyone else. It’s just a machine designed to fool you into not looking away. There are plenty of other things like that. Slot machines, for some. Opiates. The kinds of things humans can be susceptible to. In other contexts we use the word addiction.

Your thoughts, stories, and comments shouldn’t be lost in the spew. They should be installed as digital stepping stones that might lead somewhere. Maybe they will, or maybe they won’t, but they will remain yours. Seems worthwhile to me.