If:book Australia is a think-and-do tank dedicated to promoting ‘new forms of digital literature’ and exploring ‘ways to boost connections between writers and audiences’, which is more exciting than I can fully express.

They are associated with the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, and if:book London, and are based at Queensland Writers’ Centre. Kate Eltham and Simon Groth there are my newest heroes, not least because Simon found an excellent photo of a statue of Farnsy to accompany the essay I wrote for them.

I’m pretty excited about this essay because: 1) it is a call to action on governing our own literary culture and is my first steps into the territory of full-blown internet apostate; 2) it was commissioned with a Direct Message on Twitter by Simon after he read SIB; 3) they paid me really good money to do it.

I’m becoming a little tired of writing and promoting SIB in the ad hoc fashion I do, so I’m starting to think of this commission as the catalyst for the beginning of a departure, maybe.

Sometimes I’m tired of being a wannabe leftist revolutionary and pseudo-intellectual. Thinking about ideology, politics, economics and the publishing industry all the time is kind of bringing me down: the ideologues, the politicians, the failing markets, the legalese … ugh.

Doing this sort of work with good (liberal) intentions is kind of like trying to ride your bike safely: there will always be dickheads on the road, making your journey unsafe no matter how cautious you are; there will always be ideologues pushing their agendas in the way, making your journey of intellectual discovery that much more difficult by being dickheads.

I want to focus on creating literature again for a while. I had a short story broadcast on Radio Adelaide recently, and sitting there listening to it with Felice in Lucy’s lounge room caused a heartswell that I want to chase up.

Also I don’t want to burn out and become jaded ten months out of the next Academy, so after a couple of posts I’ve got lined up I think I’m going to give SIB a break and just post whenever I feel like it and, ya know, try to stop worrying about the internet.

Meanwhile, here is the introduction of the if:book essay, which is called ‘You’re the Voice’ (the rest can be found here):

There was a time, kids, back in nineteen tickety two, when people sincerely believed in the internet as the great democratising power of the twenty-first century. I, for one, thought it was the Second Coming of the Gutenberg Revolution. But then I’m one of the most naive and optimistic people I know. Gullible maybe, whatever.

Now, in only nineteen tickety three, this promise has gone the way of … well, democracy itself. Just as a concentration of third-estate power has occurred in Thomas Carlyle’s esteemed fourth estate, control of the online knowledge market is coagulating in the cloyingly, sickeningly sweet hands of our dear friend Google.

Sure, there are others (alternatives), but only in the same sense there are alternatives to News Ltd and Fairfax in Australia’s traditional media industry: they’re nominal alternatives, with no real power. Running a successful, independent newspaper in Australia would be much like going into farming against Monsanto in the United States.

The book-industry implications for this trend first dawned on me when I found another puff piece about cultural criticism, this time in the Guardian: “Is the age of the critic over?” Puff piece or not, the precis really got to me: “Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism.”

I feel as though I shouldn’t post anything here until I’ve at least posted about The Academy, and maybe until I’ve done everything to follow up on the day, but the former is going to take a while and the latter is: impossible. Besides, my need to post this missive about Facebook somehow supersedes everything I do online, including the Academy post I haven’t yet typed up.

I’m spurning Facebook as much as I can now, and this post explains why, as well as how else I’ll share the information I so love, in case you’re interested in following that trail. If you’re chasing notes about The Academy, festival guest Sophie Langley has posted some here and here.

Privacy Paranoia Mixed with Boredom

Check out this freaky video, in which Facebook’s connections with the CIA and the innocuously named Information Awareness Office (IAO) are illustrated:
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*SPOILER ALERT* According to this clip:

The IAO stated its mission was to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government.

So, according to this clip, Facebook are doing much more than selling our data to advertising firms, which is bad enough: they are making that data available to gummint authorities, presumably for the purpose of civil surveillance.

Now, I’ve written before about wanting to move away from Facebook and not stuck to my Steakzooka, but this time it’s different. Until I can confirm evidence that contradicts the conclusions in this clip, I’m too worried about my privacy, and the affect of its exploitation on my life and the lives of others, to abide remaining as heavily involved with Facebook as I have been in the past.

I’m concerned about Facebook’s advertising-based business model: we feed them data, they feed that to advertisers, then the advertisers feed it back to us, perfectly catered to manipulate our consumption choices, then we talk about those choices on Facebook, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, etc., etc. We get enough advertising drivel already, and it saps our will to differentiate between products, rendering us susceptible to the will of the few large companies who control most of our production.

Those are now the least of my concerns.

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Call me paranoid, but there are other ways to share information on the internet and, for now, I’d rather be the one in charge of who I share that information with.

Privacy concerns aside, I’m moving away from Facebook for a much simpler reason: boredom. Facebook homogenises the way we share information, and it’s just stopped being fun for me: post a link here to illustrate your political acuity, ‘like’ a post there to congratulate your friends for the ideology you share, tag yourself in a funny avatar because you’re, like, totally removed from how your face represents your identity. Whatever.

Alternatives: Introducing ‘SIB’s Miscellaneous Miscellany’

Until I can be sure that my information is safe with Facebook I’m going to take my online activity as far away from the site as I can manage without compromising my ability to communicate with as many people at the same time as possible.

The obvious alternative to Facebook is Diaspora, for which I grabbed a sneaky alpha invite recently from Rohan Harris. Diaspora aspires to be Facebook with two fundamental differences: you can store your data on your own server, so Diaspora will never own your data, much less extract it and sell it; within the network you can choose who you share your data with according to Aspects. (Actually I think you can do this with Facebook’s Groups or Lists, but I’ve never really used these or known them to be used. Anyway.)

Great, but the general sharing model is almost identical to Facebook’s and (as Adam Ford said in a Diaspora comment) it’s not clear why Diaspora is even good, let alone better than Facebook. Adam described it as a ‘big echoey room’, and that’s what it is right now: considerably minimal, lacking certain functionality we’ve come to expect from such a networking site (stupid games, somewhere to post your androgynous, Hipstamatic self portraits, and your network of 67–5000 disinterested acquaintances).

So, Diaspora is not going to fulfil my need to over-share with relative strangers.

The less obvious but more fun and creative alternative is to begin sharing my Facebook links and thoughts here, on SIB. I will call the post category ‘SIB’s Miscellaneous Miscellany‘.

I was going to say ‘fun, creative and original‘, but that would have been a lie. What I intend to do from now on is based on a rudimentary understanding of ‘link-blogging’, which used to be popular in the late 90s, before sites like Facebook and Twitter made it fundamentally easier to post annotated links to pages you find interesting on the internet.

My intention is the same: I will filter the content I wade through on the internet, produce a digest of links with annotations, and email a link to the post to the people I’d like to share it with. I might also start using and building up my mailing list for this purpose. If you’re reading this and would like to be on the SIB mailing list, shoot me an email.

This conveniently brings me to the first step I’ve taken to get away from Google because of similar privacy concerns: finding a reliable, halfway intuitive, independent webmail provider or a web-hosting company that’s not affiliated with Google. I think my web-host (JustHost) is affiliated with Google. I actually don’t know what I mean by that, except that I’m equally paranoid they’ll scan my email and sell the data to advertising firms or, ya know, the gummint.

Thanks to Esther Anatolitis for pointing me in the direction of Fastmail.fm, an Australian webmail service that appears to offer all that I was getting from Gmail, sans evil #robots. I’ll explain my fear of the #robots in a forthcoming Gmail post.

Questions

Am I just being dumb/silly/paranoid? Do you think it’s futile to try to escape these companies’ reach? Do you share my concern about the way these internet interfaces will influence the way we consume information and culture?
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[I've been meaning to post this for a while. I've been hesitating because it feels unfinished, but I now think that's because the central idea is going to need a long time, and many posts, to percolate into anything really coherent. Consider this a disclaimer or an invitation, however you prefer to see it. Sorry about the glitchy typeface colouring – not sure how I ballsed that one.]
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I’ve been reading this doomsday book about the internet, called You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, which explains why I went offline almost entirely for a while there. The book just might, incidentally, help us understand why we’re so fucked up as a species.

I found the book last year, over-priced at Unibooks in Adelaide. I try to be frugal, but: it was called You Are Not A Gadget; the cover is a picture of a Kindle, with a prefacey chunk of text explaining why the author had chosen to publish the text as a book, not online¹; I immediately developed a mancrush on the author when I flipped to the inside-back cover and saw that he was a large, dreadlocked man with big, almond-shaped eyes and a pensive demeanour.

(I was going to insert a copy of the picture, but I can’t find it online – check out his website: see the picture with all the vines coming out of it? That’s the face from the picture I saw. Considering the website doesn’t appear to have had a makeover since 1987, I’m pretty sure it won’t change before you get a chance to look at it, whenever you’re reading this.)

Jaron Lanier is a philosopher and computer scientist who pioneered the development of virtual-reality technology back when we were grubbing for penny candy at the school canteen. So he was thinking about this stuff way before the internet went mainstream, and has pretty much seen it all. Now he is described by one critic as something like ‘the first great apostate of the internet age’, but I think ‘apostate’ is too strong – he’s critical of the internet, but has by no means forsaken it: like I said, he has a website, (granted, it’s old skool, so maybe he has – he’s not on Facebook or Twitter, though that doesn’t mean anything).

I love these books about the internet – I reviewed a couple over the last couple of years, including The Blogging Revolution (which sucked) and Say Everything (which didn’t, which was actually really awesome). I love them because they read like history books, discussing out-moded internet apps as though they’re relics of the past, artifacts of a bygone era, which I guess they are. Things develop so rapidly that you can write about something that happened in the nineties as though it happened a hundred, not fifteen, years ago.

Herein lies the rub: the central thesis of Lanier’s books is that the software systems developed to supply an interface for the internet – Google, Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, now Quora, soon voyURL and Diaspora, etc. – are at risk of suffering ‘lock in’, a syndrome that software programs suffer when they develop too fast for us to ever actually understand how to use them properly. I may have that wrong, but it’s my interpretation of his argument².

Lock in starts at an early stage of development – is basically a symptom of flawed design (cf. the universe)

Lock in occurs when a system is adopted so rapidly that so many other systems come to depend on it and you can’t really improve the foundation software because too many other things are tapped into it: like brain surgery – fuck with the brain wrong and you could lose all sorts of faculties (cf. Flowers for Algernon).

Lanier makes the example of MIDI, a protocol that has rendered music two dimensional, according to him, who is also a renowned classical musician on top of all the other awesomeness. MIDI was developed and adopted so fast that all digital music is now based on this protocol, which is apparently quite limited, rendering the various, mellifluous tones of organic music into a series of pixelatted sound waves that merely replicate the sound of music. Felice, who proudly wears a ‘keyboards are for typing’ badge, will appreciate this, though she dances like a motherfucker to The Presets, even when sober.

The MIDI example continues to pop up in the book, but is only a metaphor for the greater problem of lock in that is beginning to affect those who eke out any sort of existence online: due to the shortcomings of the software we are rapidly adopting in our daily lives, we are threatened by the risk of becoming defined by what that software allows us to express; worse than two-dimensional, we become Facebook-dimensional.

This made me wonder if ‘lock in’ could be applied to the human condition more broadly, but also to human emotion in particular: I remain convinced that humanity is yet in its adolescent stages, that each of us is barely protruding from the experiences and emotional manifestations of our upbringing.

Apparently we have ten per cent of our intellect at our disposal, a system of morals handed down by a guy with food in his beard, and an emotional range more phenomenal than any one of us can truly comprehend, yet we go around the place as though we’ve got our shit together, interacting with others, hating and loving each other, and really what we’re working with is intellectual, moral and emotional systems that have developed so rapidly that we don’t know how to use them properly. Each of these systems is dependent on others, and vice versa. We cannot remove ourselves from the world to wash that emotional baggage out of our pants, anymore than we could seriously expect to hang Google out to dry, or capitalism, or Justin Bieber.

And, well, that’s all I have got to say about that.

She had got the cancer ...

I’m worried about it, is all. I think it was Orwell who warned us that we would become trapped by the technology we thought would bring us to freedom. Also I read this other article about how social-networking sites are resulting in our own, special brand of cultural elitism, and that upsets me too, and I need to link back to this post to make my point in the one I’m drafting about that article.

Of course I don’t have any answers, just more questions, which is why I won’t stay off the internet for long.

1. because it is a self-contained, book-length argument, as which it would never be read online – part of his his whole beef: the fragmentation of reading, learning and dissemination of sound-bite knowledge
2. which, granted, is not the most coherent I’ve read, suffering from the very fragmentation for which he criticises the society of the internet age

This article on Dave Eggers’ optimism about youth literacy and print books (via @Mean_land) made me think of the title of his unfinished Salon.com serial, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, or, Optimism: for Eggers, it would seem, optimism about print books is compulsory, and should not be forbidden.

Elsewhere (almost everywhere else), it seems the trend is in the chatter: it’s trendy to be pessimistic about print books, regardless of whether there is actually a declining trend in print-book readership, because worrying about the decline of print books seems to illustrate your affinity with digitial technology and the democritising power of the internet.

But I think it’s true that the concern is misguided:

Adults might be projecting from their own behavior when they worry that kids will forsake reading in favor of Twitter, Eggers said, as some adults in the audience nodded in apparent self-recognition. “We’re blaming the kids, but we’re the ones who can’t stop checking our e-mail and adding the latest Google apps.”

So stop worrying about it, stop reading this blog, and go sit in the park with a book, it’s spring time!

I was doing a bit of internet stalking the other day and came across this article by Rjurik Davidson about creative writing courses and so forth. It’s an interesting read, but there was one line in particular that hit out at me from a guy he interviewed (Errol).

[I]n the 1970s, there was a much smaller pool of authors … fewer publishers [and] no literary agents. We were more inclined to take on things that were perhaps a bit rough around the edges in the hope that we could work with the author and polish them up … We used to do more work in those days. All sorts of things have happened since then. Literary agents have come along …

There it is. That ellipses represented to me not a edited quote (which it was) but a backward gaze into the carefree days before agents or agencies, and my head started to explode from wondering about what the industry would look like without formal representation for authors. In this one paragraph I could see a literary utopia blossoming like vinegar and baking soda in a glass – a place/time where writers and editors worked on manuscripts together in coffee shops, their heads bent to the paper and their noses nearly touching, and the editor would whisper a word of advice and the writer would leap up and shout in delight and the book would be a bestseller and everyone had leather bound notebooks and no-one wrote about vampires.

Obviously this is far from any reality. I know that agents play an integral part in the industry game – making sure that authors get enough money for their art. But facing a time when the author-publisher relationship might be changing, I started to consider what this could mean for agents. Are they likely to be more important now in bartering distribution and rights deals for digital editions? Or will the author just take their Adobe Acrobat and manuscript and go straight to a distributor themselves?

More than this, I began to question the fundamental aspects of being an agent. It seems to me that literary agents are another form of middle-management – external to the house but somehow so entwined in all the major publishing deals that they can’t be bypassed. Even though it’s a job an editor could perform if they had the inclination. Sourcing new talent and reading raw manuscripts – didn’t this once fall under the remit of editor/editorial assistant? It sounds like more fun than dealing with an author who has a premature ego the size of a small galaxy due to the fact an agent has decided to pitch their novel to Penguin. And is this even what agents really do? There are now books out on how to best go about getting an agent, as the agents themselves start putting up filters before they will touch a manuscript.

I believe publishing houses should do more in-house siphoning. Not to put agents out of work, but to keep their hands in the author pool, feeling out the grooves and flows, rather than only dipping their toes in the warm shallows. With socks on.

TINA was on this weekend. TINA, or This is Not Art, is a festival for independent, emerging and experimental art, based in Newcastle, New South Wales. The festival is made up of other festivals, of which I am most closely involved with National Young Writers’ Festival (NYWF).

What happens at NYWF is a whole bunch of writers, editors, illustrators, publishers, and anyone else you can think of who’s involved with writing and publishing, converge on the sleepy working-class town of Newcastle and talk about things they do. Very interesting for people who do similar things, but not so interesting for most of the town.

This was my fifth or sixth TINA, and each year I still come away feeling over-stimulated, under slept and over pickled. Usually I can’t string a thought together for days after the festival, and wallow instead in what is colloquially known as the TINA blues.

This year I’m going to blog about some of the half-formed ideas I came back with, starting with a conclusion about Facebook you have perhaps already reached and disregarded. I’ll tag them with Various and Miscellaneous Ill-formed Thoughts From TiNA.

This pearler about Facebook didn’t come directly from TINA, but from reading a sort of personal expose of Mark Zuckerberg in The New Yorker on the plane.

According to the article, Zuckerberg’s motives and ambitions are noble: to make the world a more open, honest and transparent place. I don’t buy it – it all sounds a bit like spin, especially now I understand that Facebook users’ openness about their identity and interests is fundamental to Facebook’s business model. This openness is what makes our personal information so valuable to marketers and advertisers.

And this exchange, between a fellow Harvard student when Zuckerberg was establishing Harvard Connect, the precursor to Facebook, doesn’t give me confidence he’s in this for other people’s good:

So I’m going to pull back some way from using the site: I’m no Tyler Durden, but I’m not comfortable with my personal information being sold to unscrupulous advertisers.

How do you feel about all this? Am I being paranoid or precious?

Again with the Monty Python, but this clip illustrates the following post as well as it did the post about my flesh wound:

Brian Ward disappeared from Facebook the other day, while we were in the middle of a debate. I was surprised by this, because Brian runs a great-value blog, a lot of which is dedicated to holding other citizen journalists to account. I’m bothering to post about it because I feel like it’s necessary to return the service.

Brian posted a link to an article about the new batch of deadly drugs going around at the moment, accompanied by a comment that people deserved what they got if they took dubious drugs from a dubious dealer. I would post the exact link and comment, but of course I no longer have access to Brian’s Facebook wall.

I said the comment was inordinately harsh, that some people might not be in a position to make a better decision and should not be judged so fiercely for making a bad judgement call. Someone else got involved and the debate quickly swung away from the initial issue to focus on the morality of dealing, something I feel entirely differently about: dealing dubious drugs is morally reprehensible; consuming them is not – and is certainly not deserving of the scorn demonstrated in Brian’s dismissive comment.

It’s exactly this sort of narrow-mindedness that causes problems in drug culture: people who are ignorant of the complexities involved in the decisions surrounding drugs make generalisations that tar the whole community with the wrong brush. Drug users are not all reckless and irresponsible – many use them safely, and I consider it a shame that such users bear the brunt of the stigma that results from those who are irresponsible, and from those who shame them.

Of course, I never got as far as explaining this to Brian. When I came back to the debate and couldn’t access his page, I thought maybe an error had occurred. I added him again, but my advances were rejected. I tried again the next morning. Then and now, when I search for his name he no longer comes up in the results.

At first I thought Brian had a massive dummy spit because I didn’t agree with him¹, but as I’ve gone about drafting the post I’ve realised I should give him the benefit of the doubt, as his Facebook page appears to no longer exist. Maybe something really has gone wrong: I’ve emailed him to find out, but have not heard back.

Of course it’s entirely up to Brian whether he allows me to see his Facebook page, and the truth is that we’re not exactly ‘friends’ – we have met once, through a mutual friend. But I had assumed Brian was reading the Facebook definition of ‘friend’ rather loosely – he did, after all, either extend a friendship request to me, or accept one from me, I can’t remember which now.

Maybe I was wrong in assuming that Brian was using Facebook for reasons other than to keep in touch with friends – I have seen him chime in on debates elsewhere, so I thought it would have extended to Facebook. Plus, that he published such a provocative and opinion-laden link suggests that he uses Facebook for debate and information extending beyond his immediate friend circles.

Brian, if something really has gone wrong with Facebook and you’d like to rejoin the debate here, I would certainly welcome that.

1. from what I’ve read on his blog, he doesn’t take criticism well

An exciting opportunity has come up for young writers at one of Australia’s most prestigious platforms for the discussion of literature, ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. They are looking for five young bloggers to write about book culture on their new blog. I will certainly be applying, and I encourage other young book lovers to do so as well.

The gig is unpaid – advertised as ‘the best unpaid gig in town’ – and a discussion was brought up by Lisa Dempster about whether this is because blogging is not a legitimate form of publishing. The discussion of blogging legitimacy baffles me, especially attempts to articulate support for the medium, and the cries of outrage when another media outlets ‘exploit writers to leverage their online presence’: if the writers didn’t consider it worth their while, they wouldn’t do it.

The debate also reminds me of the equally superfluous debate about the life expectancy of the novel as a medium. Debating the legitimacy of blogging or the longevity of novel publishing is less important than simply blogging well and publishing good novels.

Reading the post highlighted a division that I think is worth exploring further. For these purposes, legitimacy might be arrived at through payment or publication of writers. I think there is much more at stake here than the meagre incomes of a couple of writers – embracing this opportunity, paid or unpaid, will yield far greater cultural capital than the alternatives proposed by its detractors.

Legitimacy through Payment

If the legitimacy-through-payment debate is to be had, it could be easily applied to many art forms that people practise without remuneration: graffiti, long-stitching, or writing books themselves – Lisa herself has done a lot to reveal the appalling financial conditions under which Australian authors labour.

Brian from Fitzroyalty mentions – with some exasperation – legitimising blogging by paying bloggers is difficult in a medium that barely has a functioning economic model. Instead, another idea of legitimacy needs to be considered when evaluating blogging.

Legitimacy comes from other sources in the blogosphere – sources that traditionally legitimate mediums are lacking, such as the amount of conversation generated by your writing, which is inhibited in most print mediums. And the inclusion of young voices on the ABC is worth more than the validation a young writer might get from being paid by any other institution. The prospects arising out of a gig with the ABC far outweigh the likelihood that they’ll never pay for blogging.

Legitimacy by Publication

Young writers are apprentices pushing their way into an industry with an abundance of suppliers (writers) and a dearth of distributors (editors/publishers). The under-representation of young writers’ voices in our traditional outlets makes this even harder. These positions at the ABC will help young writers to advance their position in this pursuit, by teaching them the ropes and getting their name out there. These are legitimate means for the development and promotion of youth literature.

They could choose not to publish them, which is the model alluded to by Mel Campbell, editor of The Enthusiast. In the comments to Lisa’s post, Mel criticised the ABC and Express Media¹ for not paying young contributors, and stated their alternative policy of restricting the number of contributors and writing a lot of the content themselves instead of ‘exploiting inexperienced workers’.

Not only does Express Media have an honourable tradition of paying its contributors, the organisation also works extensively at legitimising young writers in other ways, such as by providing professional development and experience in the industry. As with the ABC publishing youth literature on this blog, this constitutes a greater contribution to the legitimacy of their careers than paying them ever could.

I would rather see a million young writers working for free than a handful of writers dominating the industry because the market found a way to pay for their time. These young writers are producing content for free anyway, on their own blogs – that the ABC is leveraging some of their resources and infrastructure to endorse this content is legitimising enough.

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1. Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Express Media, and I have been paid to write book reviews for The Book Show, so maybe it’s easy to go into bat for these guys, but in reality I’ve seen the value in providing professional development for young writers, and I’ve experienced the same writing for the ABC; I certainly would have written for the ABC for free if it meant getting my name out there the way it did.

I just found these two grouse websites, Brazen Careerist and Location Independent Professionals. I’ve been thinking of mobilising Paine Management for some time, and it’s been great to bump into a bunch of like-minded souls: people who want to be financially (and locationally?) independent. Each of them have great blogs – in fact, Brazen Careerist has many, somehow linked to members’ sites.

I even found a post called ‘Putting Together A Portable Office That You Can Take With You Anywhere You Go In The World’.

The first time I thought of myself as the sort of guy who might use a portable office was when I was interviewed by David Prater for Cordite. He described the man bag I carried at the time as a ‘portmanteau’. I’m pretty sure Orwell’s listless Gordon uses a ‘portmanteau’ in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well.

What I’m talking about is not a ‘portmanteau’. It’s just a portable office. I always thought ‘portmanteau’ meant, specifically, ‘portable office’. It doesn’t.

But the thing with Gordon would be the second time I bumped into the notion.

It’s difficult to articulate how excited it makes me when I discover  whole groups of disparate people doing similar things with their life that I’d like to do. When it gets as specific as building a portable office, it gets kind of boggling.

Combine all this with my principle of Three Degrees of Uncoordination and a decision pops out: I’m going to create a portable office. If I do, I might need to do what this guy (presumably) did, and ditch all my stuff. Getting rid of my books is proving to require a few more than three collisions of colluding ideas, however.

I had started creating something other than a portmanteau before I found these websites, and I had begun to break it down into items I would be able to transport with me, and items I would need to buy at each location. Ideally I could have a bike wherever I go, but transporting one each time I move is simply impracticle, so that’s an item I’d need to have in my ‘Purchase Onsite’ category. Bike pants, on the other hand, would go in the ‘Transport’ category, of course.

I bought a mini stapler today, to replace my clunker, which had run out of staples anyway.

Now I will never be late again!

I’m excited about Brazen Careerist because, as a testimonial run from FastCompany said, they ‘decided to turn existing traditional online career management tools on their ear’ by merging the best of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in a way that might practically advance your career. Basically it seems like a fun version of LinkedIn, which is a weird schmoozy site of the most boring variety, until you have hundreds in your network, which is not where you’re going to be if you’re interested in things like Brazen Careerist. A good stopgap, then, between Facebook and Linked in, via Twitter.

As you read and write around the site, your updates and comments are published in your personal feed, which is called Ideas. In the tab next to that you have your resume, so that if people like what you’re thinking, they might check out your resume to see if you’re good for a job they know about, or an opportunity coming up. That’s how I imagine the site to work, anyway – I’m still new to it.

I never cease to be amazed by what I find on the internet created by like-minded young people.

I’ve set up my profile on Brazen Careerist¹ and joined the Ning group for Location Independent Professionals, the Clubhouse. If you’re in Melbourne and this sounds like your sort of thing, it’d be great to see you there because I feel like the real value of these new mediums is found when they intersect somewhat with your physical world.

1. which, although it’s irrelevant, my fingers insist on typing as Brazeen Carerist – watch out for that one!

Dear Twitter,

What we had was thrilling for a while, but then it got lame. I’m sorry – it’s not you, it’s everyone else.

You gave me the confidence to publish longer blog posts at Socratic Ignorance is Bliss, but there’s something … something about you that makes me feel squeamish now.

I know, that’s rough, but I have to be honest – you gave me the confidence for that, too.

Maybe we could continue seeing each other, but it would have to be an open relationship.

Remember how I had a drink with Networked Blogs on Facebook? I can’t even remember how it happened now – I was so drunk. But it was good, and we’d like to keep seeing each other. She sees a lot of other people, so it wouldn’t be right for me to shut off any options that might come up.

Have you considered polyamoury? The strictures of traditional love can be throttling sometimes, considering the lifestyles we all lead in these big cities.

Like I said, it’s not you – it’s just that I feel so violently bombarded by everyone else when I’m with you, ya know.

I’m gonna wanna post about Socratic Ignorance is Bliss on you, it’s just that I won’t be publishing as much inane stuff.

I understand that maybe we need each other. We always did find such interesting people to talk with when we were together – it was weird, you’re like a magnet for nutjobs. But maybe we’ll just have to settle with whatever comes of this thing with SIB.

She doesn’t have the same shapely public timeline that you do, but there’s something special about the way people come to her specifically, to read what she’s got. It just seems so much more … intimate. In contrast, you seem quite promiscuous, which is why I find it weird that you’ve reacted this way.

I don’t want this to end on a bad note – shit, it’s not even ending. I just wanted you to know that, for me, things need to change. I totally dig you, but who knew that all that early fluttering would peter out without so much as a flash fire? There’s too much else in the world, ya know, so much to distract us: it’s hard to imagine we’d spend any longer than our twenties together.

There’s still heaps of time. We should hang out, just you and me and everyone else. We’ll be okay – you’re better in crowds, I’m better one-on-one. Seeya just above the blogroll.

Love and democratic self-determination,

Ryan xo
September ‘09