I really appreciate your encouragement. If you would have told me one year ago that I would be building a little Yahoo!-style directory, I would have laughed extremely hard and checked the date to see how far into the month we actually were. Yahoo!'s directory was adorable and doomed—but here we are. I think it’s pretty cool for personal use and I’m surprised that you see it too!

I would love to see more directories spring up—and I would look through yours from top to bottom. I wouldn’t have the restraint to stop myself—it feels like an untapped medium.

I’m assuming the link logs you are referring to are the ones tagged reading, usually with “Articles” in the title.

Yes, exactly. This type of post is a major draw for me.

These are essentially to force myself to reflect on what I read. Even if I’m only writing a word or a sentence, it’s been helpful as a reflection practice. On occasion I forget to add things, but it’s supposed to be everything I read that day. Due to that fact, they dont necessarily think it is all worth sharing. I have a podcast log too where I do the same thing for myself.

Worth sharing. Huh, ok, this is a pretty ripe topic still.

I can’t help but feel that this goes in with the modern view that we must be “content creators”—writing original essays and gathering unique data to share. And that a pile of links is not worthy. Am I way off? Can you explain further—you later refer to things being “worthy to share with ‘the world’”—is this tied into RSS, like what sort of significance must a bit of hypertext have in order to justify making all the smartphones go ding?

I’m increasingly against RSS. I don’t know that anything I’m writing should fire off notifications. I’d be much happier if I could just fill up a blog without being accused of dinging the bell too many times. (This is an issue with all the social media platforms—there’s a threshold you cross when you become the one who overshares. So you have to pace yourself against the group’s pacing.)

But back on whether link lists are worthy. I mean—that’s the goodstuff for me. That’s the draw! Personally, I’m looking more for a tangled web of thoughts and chains of ideas, following link to link, to get a sense of what is happening out there. Exploring, discovering.

I think many people think they can’t or don’t care to write a blog, because then they’ll have to come up with ideas for tutorials or articles—“content” again—when I think that’s kind of rooted in a ‘performer’/‘audience’ relationship. I think what has appealed to me about h0p3’s work is that you can write out in the open, for your own purposes, and just pile up hypertext there—and if it’s organized sensibly enough, then those who want to correspond with you will find what they need. (It particularly interesting/innovative to me that he works on drafts of his letters in public—and that it works so well in practice.)

On the other side, TIV link posts are more considered.

I think I have felt this way, at times too, like I won’t post something to my home page if it’s just a little ‘thumbs up’ type of comment. But, more and more, I find myself writing detailed and considered entries that don’t get broadcast.

Can you relate to that? Is ‘more considered’ really the line between TIV and Humdrum? You just wrote me a lengthy reply that seems very well-considered. Could the difference be something else? Is it tonal?

It might even be that ‘public’ blogging has traditionally been directed toward an audience and now that the Web has changed (there is less of an audience)—then it doesn’t need to be that way. (I say this as someone who also blogs at some imaginary audience—tho I’m not sure I like doing it that way.)

I kind of view TIV as a digital publication […] I like to think of it as a digital newspaper. It’s text based and more professional. Am not a reporter in any sense though, so the metaphor starts to fall apart of you really think about it.

Ok, so, then a zine or something. But whatever: a newspaper, surely you’re safe to use that term.

Yeah, I can relate to that! I think one benefit of the ‘publisher’/‘audience’ type relationship is the pressing desire to draw someone in and not to waste their time, but to benefit them and serve them. And to take your craft seriously, too, I guess.

I’ve done a few album reviews, which are more fully formed; I think these should stay on TIV. The top ten lists I view in the same way Rolling Stone or SPIN would publish a top ten list, so I feel like their home is still TIV.

This is such a motivating, creative thing to be play-acting in homage to magazines and fully-staffed writing houses. It provides vision for your work and a kind of high aspiration.

It really makes me wonder what the future holds for the lone blogger. Now that I can look back a decade at so many of the blogs I’ve enjoyed, I can see that they often either went away or became real magazines themselves.

I feel some longing for those days when all these personal websites wondered to themselves, Is there anyone out there? But it’s also very much like that now! And I wonder if something new might spring up—outside of newspapers, magazines, blogs and anything else we know.

[On the ‘now’ page:] This is for me/novelty, but mostly just an exercise in learning Siri Shortcuts.

This section of your letter was very enlightening and I think I’ve gleaned a better understanding of this phenomenon. I imagine much of it is certainly prompted by a desire to play with integrations just like you’re talking about—whereas some of it is linked to Public Self-Modeling and basic journaling.

I think it’s very useful for you to discuss your methods and the software details of how you work. TiddlyWiki isn’t for everyone—neither is Ceasar Bautista’s Encyclopedia project—so options like yours could be very useful to other microbloggers and Mastodon users who want to start building a permanent file.

I’m going to leave off the discussion about URLs, because I have to leave now and wanted to get this letter off—but I think there is much to talk about there as well. I just thank you for fielding my questions! I feel so lucky to have had this chance encounter with you. Looking forward to your work on TIV and Humdrum.

I like to think of it as an ‘antimisanthrophic’ effort to at least establish a baseline sympathy or pity or some kind of comfort with our other peoples. Being a person is rough—we have no idea what’s going on here. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? (Perhaps I don’t take ‘power’ seriously enough. If none of us did—would it still be ‘power’?)

I will continue to argue for radical decentralization and worldclass p2p filtering. That is the only out, and the window may be closing. It can’t just be done by hand. We go down if the masses do.

Gah, I’m not convinced that technology has any answers! We can’t make some elaborate mousetrap that will enforce the life we want to live.

Of course, I’m not sure humans have any answers either! But I will say that talking to you and your family is the best technology I’ve encountered in a decade. Sure, I’m reliant on a sturdy free-enough technology that gets our words passed around. And those words are our plain humanity on the wire.

I am worried about some perhaps difficult to justify originality+authenticity moves, but the underground is not more real to me conceptually (though it can be more valid or valuable in the dialectic). I only care about “making it your own” insofar as it is justified to the particulars of your context. The Beautiful is not the overriding reason, but insofar as all other obligations are met, it is the last deciding force. The necessity of preserving freespeech and decentralizing power (including memetic distribution) comes long before The Beautiful though.

You’re not being cryptic—I just think sometimes your compression level is turned up on thoughts like these. I also have to add that I DO appreciate pop culture—I actually think it’s one of the most promising religions or symbolic systems we’ve ever developed. (And it’s REALLY tempting to demonize it, because it’s backup by capitalism—though I think that most people can appreciate the value of the engine—most people seem to agree that artists should be paid.)

Anyway, I don’t think mainstream culture is necessarily any less original or authentic than the underground. I just think that mainstream culture has become imbalanced—it has really captivated everyone this time, and fewer people seem to know how to escape it—which is the purpose of an ‘underground’, to me, and, of course, this is all just my perception.

I think—I think what happened was that, in the previous decade, the Internet gave the underground a tremendous breath of air. You basically had a network that was all underground—and I don’t just mean some kind of hip, stylized underground—I mean that, before the corporations figured out how to milk it, you would search for ‘donuts’ and be at someone’s uncle’s website.

There was no hunting around for rare vinyl or out-of-print Borges novels any more—the whole ‘underground’ world had doorways now. The underground became the mainstream culture and, yeah, we lost an actual underground. And I think there was a kind of crisis of overwhelm that mainstream culture had become so wide—like, “we need robots to sift through all of this.” There was a time when Twitter first came out that people were joking that it was just a bunch of people posting updates that they’re shitting right now. And now we just post those updates, no shame.

What, you want I should call you a selfish nihilist, a brainwashed individualist, an all-too-convenient emotivist, a shallow aesthete, a vapid internalist, a dark-triadic relativist, a deflecting anti-realist, a gas-lighting interlocutor, an actual waste of potential, and a gutless, wallowing, purposely purposeless sissy who hatlessly lacks the integrity to take the existential risk of committing themselves to an identity: i.e., the shadow of my enemy?

The part that actually got me here is the ‘shallow aesthete’ because it’s dead on—I think that I am on the prowl for this guy, but he’s out all the time, spray painting little soap bubbles on people’s suitcases.

I don’t think the point of a personal website is so much to design something pretty and ‘authentic’ (wtf?) or even ‘cool’. I think of it just as having a ‘home’—which seems eminently human to me—as opposed to ‘mechanical’ or ‘hive-minded’, such as being another tweet, lost in the feed.

While I hope for technologies like Dat (and have always loved peer-to-peer since the days of Freenet and Gnutella), the technology is so far from being adequate as to seem impossible at times. So, I’m quite happy getting anyone I can back into personal websites and wikis. Lately I’ve been thinking that ensuring a myriad of ISPs is a lot more important than peer-to-peer.

Let’s return to that final tap into it! paragraph. The phrase I want to look at is here: “the acknowledgement by powerful organizations.” Wait—so the tap into it! is meant… for them??

Are you asking the powerful organizations to—go outside themselves? Why? So they can continue to show us what’s legitimate? Because they are the authorities on what shit is actually cool?

I mean, yes, I’m not dense—the ‘powerful organizations’ are a massive pipeline of fame and currency—and this stuff can be gasoline to an artist. (Lord knows I want Boots Riley to keep it up—dammit, give the man what he needs!) But all of us out here, all us commoners, put together—we’re pure fuel, too. There was a time when it seemed that those very organizations were at the mercy of the buying public, earlier in this century when the entire system shook in fear of ‘disruption’.

And so, it feels like the article is just asking the mainstream to open a little wider, to give out a few more awards here and there, in lip service to the world of underappreciated, wonderful, unknown artists. (Black artists, in her case—but also in mine, because I want my mind blown by cool shit as much as any of you.) And, yeah, okay, maybe the ‘corpypastas’ might just throw us a bone.

However, I love the ‘parallel universe’ she refers to—that’s our unruly, unpredictable Web—an extension of the underground scenes, of the avant-garde, the mixtape traders, the world of the only critics that matter: our little group of friends. Those mixtapes blow up out here first. Out in our parallel universe: all of you out on your little blogs and wikis that I tap into each day. This world exists. It’s here, even if it faces its own doom on some days, in the face of resurgent mainstream culture.

Fuck the NYT, fuck Netflix—I’m reading you folks.