distributed localism

Robin Sloan:

A premonition is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the creatures of the digital night: ghostly bots, cackling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punctuated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, beacons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network.

So, I am planning ahead, contemplating new (old) systems that might be better suited to the media ecology & economy of the 2020s & beyond. 

I couldn’t agree more, and in my own tiny way I want to join Robin in this endeavor. There are three elements to Robin’s plan: 

Traditional book publishing Writing on the open web Selling and sending via the mail 

Robin’s celebration of the U.S. Postal Service is inspiring! — I especially like how he’s applying to his personal writing what he has learned from selling and shipping olive oil. Though that’s the one part I’m not doing. Maybe I should re-think that, but for now I’m writing books and posting to the open web. 

What Robin says about the “signal towers poking up into the clear air” is a regular theme in Auden’s poetry, especially in his first years in America, as he was striving to build a community of like-minded people. Thus the comment in “September 1, 1939” that, though “Defenceless under the night / Our world in stupor lies,” still, “dotted everywhere, / Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages.” Robin actually quoted that recently, noting that Auden came to disown that poem — but he didn’t disown that idea, which he has many versions of. My favorite is this, from “New Year Letter,” in which he celebrates his time visiting the Long Island house of his friend Elizabeth Mayer: 

What we’re counting on is a “local understanding” that’s shared across great spaces by internet protocols and the mail. Distributed localism.

(This is of course not true localism, but is a partial compensation for the loss of strong communities; also an aid and comfort to those who have strong interests and convictions that are not shared by many, or any, where they actually live.) 

More about my particular contribution to all this in a future post.