Previously, I loosely circled around social media, trying to articulate my frustration and discontent with “the way things are” (optimized for outrage, more publishing, more scrolling), and trying to hint at what it is that I want to see (a more relationship-focused model that encourages collaboration, co-creation).
I think rather than talk about social media platforms, I want to focus this post on thinking about the sort of mindset you have to cultivate, the sort of personal, psychological framework that enables collaboration. Talking about tools is sometimes a proxy for talking about mindsets, perspectives.
None of this stuff is truly new – kind of in the same sense of how… an Uber is just a modern version of getting some guy in a rickshaw to carry you to work. There are all sorts of cool and interesting stories about how people in the past corresponded. The brilliant mathematician Ramanujan worked on interesting mathematics via post with GH Hardy. Lewis Thomas pointed out in the 70s that humanity was already a hive-mind. I’m always curious to learn more about how people learned from each other, built off of each other’s work, and so on. Every scene is a kind of hypermedia nexus. My goal is to accelerate the creation of scenes, so that the world becomes a more interesting and exciting place.
So… what? How do we accelerate the advent of hypermedia, assuming we can’t make too much of a difference to social media platforms at this point in time?
The first thing to do – and I practice what I preach – is to cultivate a creative + collaborative mindset. I think everybody (and again, when I say “everybody”, I’m talking about the people who are already reading this, who came here presumably because they’re drawn to my work – it’s an invitation, not an obligation) should spend a significant amount of their time “nerdposting”. What is nerdposting? It’s… talking about stuff you like. It can be anything! It’s almost a good idea to specifically talk about things that nobody else seems to be interested in. There’s a line from a Paul Graham essay I like:
“Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.”
So the challenge is to figure out what you like. And it’s challenging because most of us grow up in a world where we’re pretty much told what to like. And we’re subtly (but pretty strongly) steered away from liking weird, odd, frivolous, strange things. We’re kinda “supposed” to like watches and wine and other things that signal status.
The irony is – as PG said, prestige is just fossilized inspiration. Watches and wine are cool because cool people made it cool. (And there’s a lot of marketing that goes into enforcing that.)
Also… I’m not saying that you can’t like watches or wine! While I don’t have much interest in either, I would love to follow a true watch or wine geek. Geeks and nerds who obsess about things that they are genuinely curious about give me life. They give me energy, they indirectly give me permission to be a geek myself. And I can geek out about anything. I look around me and I see so many objects. There’s a pair of nail clippers next to me right now. What is the history of nail clippers? How did people clip their nails before modern nail clippers? What were cultural attitudes to fingernails in the past? Exploring anything leads to an exploration of everything.
To me, nerdposting is obviously part of the joy of life. I used to go to the library to read what nerds had written about what they loved. I used to read books like that under the table at school, because the classroom was so boring, so devoid of love, passion, fascination, interest. It’s interesting for me to think about why this isn’t super widespread or super obvious to everybody else. Maybe I just got lucky to be exposed to the library and its wonders so early on. Or maybe people like me are just odd and uncommon in some way. Regardless, the point here is to find the others. Even if we’re 0.1% rare, that means there are millions of us.
So I guess that might be one of the cornerstones of accelerating hypermedia: accelerate nerdposting. Encourage nerds, celebrate nerds (but not too much – you don’t want to muck things up with needless awards and galas and nonsense like that. That just distracts from the nerding out.)
What else is there, other than nerdposting? Well, you can’t just have people nerding out in total and utter isolation. I don’t agree with the idea that nerds are completely antisocial. Maybe a tiny %, and maybe that tiny % is larger than the general %, but for the most part, I think most nerds like to nerd out with other nerds. Books are written for readers. Movies are made for people to watch them. And blogs are written for people to read.
If I generalize from my own experience, I think nerds are actually often hungry for connection, and they want to connect “deeply” on the things that they care about rather than “superficially” on things that don’t really matter to them. I know, this stuff gets a bit… pride-y, like it’s introvert pride or bookworm pride or something. I don’t want to overstate it. But I think there is something to it. I got to meet some of my fellow nerds from around the world this year, and while we are amongst the high-functioning nerds, socially speaking, I do think we all had a certain fundamental loneliness in common. A sense that the world isn’t actually designed for people like us, even though, if you really dig into it, the things that the world wants and needs – the googles and the iphones – were built by people who, in many ways, were a lot like us. The world wants the fruits of nerd labor, but isn’t very friendly to nerd behavior until nerds learn to be charismatic and charming.
Anyway. Coming to the end of this vomit. What’s the TLDR? To accelerate hypermedia we need more nerdposting. Maybe a guide to nerdposting would be a useful asset.
tbc
Scanning back through the vomit, I realized that I said “creative + collaborative”, and it’s probably worth talking about each of those two things separately. Nerdposting is a specific kind of creativity – it’s geeking out and talking about something that you like. You’re not necessarily inventing something new, or presenting a new perspective or anything like that – you’re presenting *your* perspective, which is interesting because you care strongly.
Pt 3 will likely be more about collaboration.