Artefact 227
Which one is this one?
This one is the 227th. I thought it was the 121st.
Unbeknownst to me, down the bottom of the last newsletter was a wee number that told you ‘This was issue #226 of Artefacts’. Which is what happens if you roll up three newsletters into one on a new platform.
Let’s deal with that in a minute, but first, some announcements.
Cardstock - Vaughn Tan on Productive Discomfort
We’re delighted that joining us for the Cardstock meetup at the end of the month is Vaughn Tan, UCL Professor of Strategy, and creator of the new idk deck, a training tool for productive discomfort.
It’s on Friday 28th May, at 1pm UK time.
A forthcoming talk on ‘Light, Not Liquid’
I’m doing a talk, to actual people, in a room. I know, right? It’s part of a brilliant day Watch Me Think have put together under the theme of Managing The Message.
Even though it’s months away, for the first time ever, I’ve written a fairly specific description of what I’ll talk about, based on the TENETS project I was working on last year. Here’s what I’ve said…
The language we use to describe our work is more important than we might think. Whether we realise it or not, it forms and shapes our actions. Often, we use metaphors that suggest of information is liquid. Let’s have a brainstorm. We’re drowning in the detail. It’s backed up in the cloud. Data is the new oil…
This means we’re often concerning ourselves with the containers in which it’s held, and the channels through which it flows, not about what information actually is at the moments where it is most useful.
We also, less often, refer to information as light, not liquid. Let’s pause for reflection. It was a glaring omission. Is this in scope? This is pure speculation. It suggests that information is fleeting, hard to perceive, and transitory, rather than solid, permanent and additive. And that might lead to some interesting principles for action…
That sounds like a fairly interesting talk to write, so I’d better not change my mind and do something different…
Numbering off
Back to this. This is the 227th Artefact, by Buttondown’s reckoning. To be more specific, it’s a newsletterin’ artefact, which in various guises I’ve been doing myself and with others since Tuesday 11th October 2011.
I started writing them when they felt a better option than blogging for certain things. Back in 2015, I wrote a little about this:
“Maybe that’s why we’ve seen a return to email newsletters and podcasts, to posting letters and making things. There’s a certainty of delivery about them. People will get what we send.“
In that spirit then, this is the 227th newsletter sent, and therefore that’s the new numbering system round here. Maybe you’ve received all of them, maybe just a few. In any case, thank you all.
Buttondown feels delightfully raw. When we were talking about it the other day, Tom Critchlow used the phrase ‘typing on bare metal‘ which captures the experience well. It’s like the rally car equivalent of that comfortable small family hatchback. There’s no upholstery, but boy does it shift.
Writing newsletters on Buttondown feels like a link to the internet of the past, in some way. An elemental experience for writing and reading. Yet there are many other things around nowadays to plug in to the process that make it feel very now. For instance…
A blog you talk to
So, a short experiment on writing a piece of newsletters using auto transcription service.
I’m doing this on the dog walk… being out in the world and recording audio as part of a newsletter, which would then transcribe… it’s a decent way to just capture little moments.
This past year, I took part in Audiomo, which was about capturing little snippets of audio every day, for a month. A different way of creating, different way of writing, and different way of just bringing something into the world. When it’s almost just at your fingertips… just bumping into something fleeting…
I started using Otter.ai three, four months ago, just to start capturing meeting notes.
To go back and listen for particular acronyms, ideas, expressions, frustrations from people… just as a way to be in the conversation at a particular moment. Rather than worrying about taking notes…
These last few paragraphs are lifted from an audio transcription I made whilst walking the dog this morning (using Otter.ai). I’ve had to do the lightest of editing – mostly just dropping out some parts to present a coherent enough train of thought – but by and large, it is as spoken.
It felt like a good way to draft ideas, to explore and play with the language, to return to later.
Beyond being a sketching tool, it’s made me think that anchoring a section of a newsletter to a full audio note might be an interesting idea. Perhaps grabbing the most interesting five sentences as transcripts (mystakes and all), and then inviting people to listen if their interest is piqued.
(It might be something to try for #AudioMo 2021 in June, which is based on recording a piece of audio every day for a month.)
More broadly though, the transcription service space is getting really interesting, particularly with the reality of spending all our days in Zoom, Teams, Whereby, Around… (enter your video platform of choice.) I wonder if we’re not far away from a situation where online meetings are recorded, transcribed live, and shared as a standard practice.
But whilst very useful on the surface, the various implications on individual comfort and group dynamics need careful consideration.
Newsletters economics
Six years after writing the that Certainty of Delivery piece, newsletters and podcasts are very much de rigueur. Where once blogs were the place for exploratory writing (and may yet be again), it feels that the newsletter is the form in which to wander through writing, and the podcast is where you might wander with others.
Beyond just the guaranteed delivery – these land in an inbox or a podcast list – the feature which I hadn’t really thought that much about back then is the added economic angle; subscriptions! micropayments! tipping!
I guess I had figured people would use these artefacts to direct people to their other, rewarding things, not get paid for the artefacts themselves. For me, newsletters and podcasts were a substitute for the advert, not the product. But no more.
As much as the certainty of delivery is an important feature, all the hot action is around the value of receipt. What value are you creating in making this thing, and what financial return can you extract from readers and listeners.
Now, there is an interesting connection to the world of NFTs here, as both are presenting as finding ways of rewarding creators.
(NB. Perhaps you’re bored of hearing about NFTs. Back in the depths of February, I mentioned them briefly. Since that time, NFTs have been dancing their way up and down the hypecycle rollercoaster, making millionaires of some and losers of others (even if they don’t quite believe it yet). Perhaps we’ll soon get to the bit where we work out what the technology might be good for. (This, Beyond The Bubble - Making NFTs work for Fashion, is a good rabbit hole for that.)
Anyway, as is my want, I started doodling a matrix of supporting Artists versus Art, in Broad or Specific ways.
Obviously things like Patreon, Substack etc are supporting the broad work of the artist. ‘Keep doing your thing’, whatever that is. At the opposite side, buying a specific piece of digital art (with an NFT as proof), is very specific, and centred around one particular piece of art.
As always, the empty space created in a four-box like presents empty spaces you can wonder about. Maybe a Specific support for an Artist could be Time based? You support very specific days, or hours, of an Artists time. The things they create in these moments are attributed to your support (or maybe even you get a small patron’s cut from future revenue of that work)
Then the Broad support for Art might not be individual pieces, but Theme based. You offer support to artists to create works around certain topics, or in certain ways using a particular medium. A bit like side-missions, perhaps; you wander into the space station bar, and you find a selection of people willing to offer you credits for doing particular things.
Bringing that back to newsletters, the Time idea seems like something that might exists already – ‘the sponsor of this week’s edition is…’ – yet the Theme idea is maybe something you see in conventional publications like magazines, but not yet in newsletter land as much.
Perhaps you need a breadth of voices in order to make that a compelling proposition, which is one major advantage publications still hold over the writers who leave to become lone voices.
The psychology, not the technology
Now, I was going to write a section in the bit above about how to think about NFTs, using every available opportunity to see the Mona Lisa in the world (on a postcard, in a school book, at The Lourve…) as a proxy for the digitally distributed file, and the argument that would ensue as to who owned the actual NFT etc etc etc.
So if you could just imagine that I did write that… good, excellent, that’s a diversion we don’t need now.
My point was to think about the usefulness to the world in getting people used to the fact that they can own so little that they can actually own the absence of a thing.
I’ve mulling over a concept called Leastmodernism for a few years now (more here).
The shorthand for it is ‘imagine creating the excitement of early 20th Century Modernism around acts of doing the least possible environmentally impact things… which in a lot of cases may be doing nothing at all’.
What do I mean? Well, perhaps somebody has in the past bought you a goat. Not literally, of course, but a charitable donation in your name to buy a family or community elsewhere in the world a much needed goat. The idea of having something in your name that you never actually see isn’t totally alien to us.
So imagine then, using something like NFTs to accrue a whole series of those actions in your name. Or better still, a whole series of inactions. Where a copse of trees wasn’t felled, where some internal combustion engines weren’t used, where chemicals aren’t used for treating crops.
A collective memory stack of good things. Maybe the psychology is more important than the technology, the collective idea that remembering at scale is a good thing. Dave Birch’s Playful talk from 2015 on blockchain is still my go-to thing on the capacity it has for remembering.
I mean, as it stands at the moment the sheer environmental cost of NFTs means the best thing to do right now would be to rapidly shut it all down. This from earth.org is a useful summary of the various arguments.
But if that massive problem is addressable… well, that’s one for another day.
From the Library…
Slightly related to the memory thing, I’ve just started reading Simon Robert’s ‘The Power of Not Thinking’, about embodied knowledge. Very good so far.
John V Willshire, 11th May 2021