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.”

Here is the first installment of SIB’s ‘Miscellaneous Miscellany’, a link-blogging series I’m going to experiment with for a while after deciding, again, to have a go at moving away from Facebook. Herein you’ll find links to things I’ve found on the internet, kind of like StumbleUpon but less addictive, more specific to SIB’s general interests, and less automated.

Some of these things:
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• have been sent to me by others, in which case I will acknowledge that, if I still remember who it was;
• are endorsed by me because I have read them and employed my powers of discernment;
• are not endorsed by me because I have read them and employed my powers of discernment;
• are note endorsed by me because I have not read them.

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It should be noted:

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• I do not endorse my powers of discernment;
• you’ll have to make up your own mind about how the above dot points relate to each link;
• in the above dot points ‘read’ means ‘viewed’, ‘heard’, ‘listened’, ‘watched’, etc., accordingly, obviously.

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(Sorry about the shitty bulleting – I’m not as much of a tech head as I like to think and don’t know how to make them look more respectable.)
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This one, kim jong-il looking at things, never gets old. I guess looking so singularly underwhelmed by everything is part of his MO. No one could survive constant feelings such as those for long.

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More from Benjamin Eltham and Marcus Westbury about shaking up Australia Council.

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Jillian Tamaki’s Sketchblog. I love the idea of a ‘sketchblog’. SIB is kind of like a sketchblog in that we write down ideas before they are fully formed, in the hope they will morph into something else, usually something else equaly ill formed.
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The Magaziner, ‘where magazines and digital meet and have a fun time together’. Sounds orright. Bit like an orgy.

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I wanted to say something witty to someone about Prometheus, but wasn’t sure I had the reference correct, so I googled it and found an encouraging sentence about the cheeky bloke who stole fire from the Gawds and burnt man’s eyebrows with it: ‘He was a champion of mankind, known for his wily intelligence, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals.’ So I guess he was an early philanthropist. I’ll try to remember this next time I’m hating on everyone.

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I found this thing called Intelligence Squared US, which reminds me of TED, but I think I’ll like this more than TED because it seems intent on making the debate far more inclusive, less grand-standy.

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ChinaOnTV looks orright, but I watched one of the clips, about a Chinese Medicine Western Doctor, and it sucked, so I haven’t dared to re-enter yet.

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When I googled ‘think twice’ I bumped into these articles about Facebook changing their interface on the hop again, something that I am inordinately worried about.

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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

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