Subject Matter 19: Beings in Network Space
This morning I woke to some kind of flute music lifting into my window from inside the alley. The notes played were in a major scale, between each simple 6-note melody, two tones dilating repetitively, forming a sweet third. I wondered what happened to the mourning dove which made its spring nest beneath the air conditioner across from my window, the mourning dove which woke me up in march and april with its similar cooing. In a fairy tale of foreign origin, this wood bird transforms at sunrise to a flute player, who sits on windowsills and fire-escapes, playing in the morning until the sun reaches its full height. This thought sent me on some searches, coffee steam in my nose, for music matching the melody I heard. While the mourning dove's airy call bears most similarity to the Japanese shakuhachi, a roughish and open sound which almost instantly recalls the mind and body to cicadas and shaded heat, I discovered it was the clear and full sound of another bamboo flute, the Indian bansuri, which most sounded like my morning prelude. Satisfied, I opened up a blank note to write this letter.
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New Essays
I have two new articles I want to share with you. I'm late to announcing the first, so you might have seen it floating around in the last month: "Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool." This piece describes the phenomenon of what for now I am rather bluntly calling "paid communities." They are content-driven paywalled social spaces, and many are building their own custom software, enabling new types of community, and, the buried lede, new types of person.
A second piece, which just came out yesterday, is a very different angle on similar themes. It's a collaboration with my beloved Berlin-based co-authors Sam and Laura (Headless Brands, Protocol-Market Fit), and this one we wrote for nobody but ourselves. The piece is called "SQUAD WEALTH." If "Come for the Network" explains the new business of community, this piece is what happens when group identity comes first, about bottom up movements and love and vibes, and about how new tooling can support the group. More than anything, this piece is a celebration of the joy that is a small group of friends having fun online. My friend Aaron said about it: "ultimately the thing i like most about this piece is the way it reframes what people have been talking about as the 'retreat from the open web' into 'dark/private' spaces as a totally natural and also positive thing for the culture 😎 let the squads bloom." Thank you Aaron.
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"Come for the Network" is one of those pieces that I can feel has penetrated beyond the visible social web into the private social spaces that feature prominently in both places. Beyond circulating on the newsletter belt, I see emails at domains I've never heard of sign up for this letter, I see people I've never met appear on LinkedIn tagging me, new projects from surprising places, and people Not followed by anyone you're following sharing it on Twitter. This consumable piece of content is now traversing different networks, passing through a mesh of business and personal identities and reappearing here and there.
When I stop and think about it, I realize how extraordinary this sense for network space is. We, and by "we" I mean you too, reader, we have this ability to feel and sense these networks beneath our feet, spaces which can only be grasped by looking at something like the Twitterverse Graph. For nearly a year now I haven't been able to get those visualized groupings of networks out of my head. I close my eyes and I see woven color gradients against that dark and infinite backdrop of minds I will never know. Who goes where, who belongs to what, the edges of communities and cultures and discourses... we may not have words for it, but we feel it, we know. The term "sixth sense" would be inappropriate here. It is a vast deception that children are told that our basic senses number just 5. We have as many senses as we have body parts and feelings. Sense of touch is sense of self is sense of justice. A human being is nothing but a massive proprioceptive contraption, blindly, clumsily glomming exogenous elements onto itself, language, rocks, posts and beams, alike minds, live creatures both open and unwilling, entire cultures pass through a single point, this sensing apparatus the human being, pulsating in prolapsed time beyond what even we can think.
For as long as we have lived we have never been individuals, yet we cannot obliterate the envelope of our bodies. This is humanity's profound blessing, the original fracture from which all meaning flows forth. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sc8SyL47ao
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Sounds
Definition - Kruder & Dorfmeister
No Piano - Theodore Cale Schafer
I Believe In You - OCA
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Note
I will be on vacation until August 28th. Personal and professional email is on hold until then.
..
Until next time.
..
New Essays
I have two new articles I want to share with you. I'm late to announcing the first, so you might have seen it floating around in the last month: "Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool." This piece describes the phenomenon of what for now I am rather bluntly calling "paid communities." They are content-driven paywalled social spaces, and many are building their own custom software, enabling new types of community, and, the buried lede, new types of person.
A second piece, which just came out yesterday, is a very different angle on similar themes. It's a collaboration with my beloved Berlin-based co-authors Sam and Laura (Headless Brands, Protocol-Market Fit), and this one we wrote for nobody but ourselves. The piece is called "SQUAD WEALTH." If "Come for the Network" explains the new business of community, this piece is what happens when group identity comes first, about bottom up movements and love and vibes, and about how new tooling can support the group. More than anything, this piece is a celebration of the joy that is a small group of friends having fun online. My friend Aaron said about it: "ultimately the thing i like most about this piece is the way it reframes what people have been talking about as the 'retreat from the open web' into 'dark/private' spaces as a totally natural and also positive thing for the culture 😎 let the squads bloom." Thank you Aaron.
..
"Come for the Network" is one of those pieces that I can feel has penetrated beyond the visible social web into the private social spaces that feature prominently in both places. Beyond circulating on the newsletter belt, I see emails at domains I've never heard of sign up for this letter, I see people I've never met appear on LinkedIn tagging me, new projects from surprising places, and people Not followed by anyone you're following sharing it on Twitter. This consumable piece of content is now traversing different networks, passing through a mesh of business and personal identities and reappearing here and there.
When I stop and think about it, I realize how extraordinary this sense for network space is. We, and by "we" I mean you too, reader, we have this ability to feel and sense these networks beneath our feet, spaces which can only be grasped by looking at something like the Twitterverse Graph. For nearly a year now I haven't been able to get those visualized groupings of networks out of my head. I close my eyes and I see woven color gradients against that dark and infinite backdrop of minds I will never know. Who goes where, who belongs to what, the edges of communities and cultures and discourses... we may not have words for it, but we feel it, we know. The term "sixth sense" would be inappropriate here. It is a vast deception that children are told that our basic senses number just 5. We have as many senses as we have body parts and feelings. Sense of touch is sense of self is sense of justice. A human being is nothing but a massive proprioceptive contraption, blindly, clumsily glomming exogenous elements onto itself, language, rocks, posts and beams, alike minds, live creatures both open and unwilling, entire cultures pass through a single point, this sensing apparatus the human being, pulsating in prolapsed time beyond what even we can think.
For as long as we have lived we have never been individuals, yet we cannot obliterate the envelope of our bodies. This is humanity's profound blessing, the original fracture from which all meaning flows forth. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sc8SyL47ao
..
Sounds
Definition - Kruder & Dorfmeister
No Piano - Theodore Cale Schafer
I Believe In You - OCA
..
Note
I will be on vacation until August 28th. Personal and professional email is on hold until then.
..
Until next time.
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