The book 1.0

At each point between phases, I didn’t know where my next source of funding was going to come from. What I can say is that if you’re writing thoughtfully, in public, about a topic of niche interest to a certain set of people, and getting those people to engage with your work, it’s very likely that someone will come along and offer to pay you to... See more

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

Writing, more visibly and unquestionably today than ever, is inherently networked. It begins and remains connected to its subject, and to everything else, becoming part of it. It acts. It does work. It lives. When we write, we reconfigure the world.

I can’t overemphasize the value of getting hands-on experience, combined with the time I’d previously spent on research. I think it’s unlikely I could’ve gotten to my current point of view just by reading and talking to developers. Through my initial work, I’d become very familiar with what developers think about open source. But in trying to turn... See more

We are not undergoing a crisis of culture but rather a crisis of epistemology.

chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

Social knowledge is thus more epistemically fraught than personal knowledge. However, it is critical to our ability to function and coordinate and, furthermore, it is what gives that ever elusive quality of “meaning” to our lives.

To distribute content via email, message boards, blogs and social media users must act as nodes in the network, filtering feeds and pushing their own and others’ content into the network. They are the circulatory force that moves content around the network. Because of this, networks favor viral and memetic media. In this sense, network media... See more