John tries to write a "baccumulation"

"Blog" comes from "web log". "Baccumulation" is a tortured analogue from "web accumulation". ("Baccus" has nothing to do with it.)

Time, labor, and shitposting

The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral is a nice piece, critiquing the form of most writing in the internet age. It is the basis for this section.

It is worth a read, but let me both highly condense the key points and argue them from a slightly different perspective.

The Stream

Currently, most writing or "content labor", broadly construed, consists of producing works which have this two-phase life cycle:

1. Create

2. Disseminate

We can charactarize these along two axes as follows:

1. Create

   • Much editting

   • Few viewers

2. Disseminate

   • Little-to-no editting

   • Many viewers

So right away, we see a produce-consumer divide, and the work ossifying even as more people see it for the first time.

Of course, the production ideas does not stop, so the result is that this is an iterative process. New ideas result in new works, each of which are finalized and disseminated in turn. What we have is a "Stream" of works over time, and that is where the second part of the second part of the document comes from.

Materialism Interlude

Before getting into alternatives and passing judgement upon the stream, let’s do some materialism. Whether documents are handwritten or printed, dissemination and revisions by "original authors" are mutually exclusive. Thus, for most of the history of writing, a editing—​dissemination dichotomy is mostly inevitable. After the printing press, when much more dissemination became affordable, the "stream" aspect really took too, as writing one-off pieces (versus, say, just copying ancient religious texts) became far more feasible.

However, other media begets different social processes.

Oral traditions natural undermine individual authorship claims, as for better or worse the work is mutating at some non-zero rate. Improvisation traditions embrace this, where the fixed idea is more "culture" than "work", providing a structure / means of coordinating a performance which in its specifics is fresh and not a reproduction of anything in particular.

That’s great for "art", but what about, ahem, "serious prose"?

Well, in our internet age, their is no reason to "freeze" works to disseminate them. In fact, HTTP sucks as broadcasting / otherwise taking advantage of immutability, so one could almost say the web by its very sloppiness is encouraging a break with the traditions of the printing press. (Don’t take this part to seriously, HTTP’s primitive nature is not, I believe, net good. And there are many other preassures to continue the printing press model.)

The Garden

If we can disseminate and edit simultaneously with the internet? What would it look like if we did? The answer is shown in Wikis, games like Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online (neither of which I have played, to be transparent), and long lived software projects. This is the Garden.

I have a big affection for these types of things. I like editing more than I like writing first drafts. I don’t like producer—​consumer divides. I don’t like performer/entertainer—​audience divides.

The most important thing to realize is that while they are a radical break from the stream in large part, there are some important threads of continuity. A consumer divorced from the culture at large would not be able to follow the stream. More advanced stream entries required having first consumed more basic ones. Clearly, there is some "state" going on here", but what is it? The answer is that the consumer internalizes at least some port of what they have consumed, and carriers it forward to the next thing they do.

The garden is, first and foremost, making that implicit and individual activity explicit and communal! Instead of individual accumulating "the discourse" in our heads based off the stream, we can directly write down that accumulation and exchange that instead. The garden "cuts to the chase" focusing on the end result rather than the skeuomorphic stream historically used to get us there.

Unraveling the snarky title is left as either an exercise for the reader to do some web searching, or an exercise for me to write more stuff. We’ll see who gets there first!

Calculus

Those that learned and remember calculus should be able to understand that the stream is is something like the derivative of the garden, and the garden likewise something like the integral of the stream.

I think this is quite useful realization, and (if you take my word on that first part) I think it is a good example about how "hand-wave calculus" is an essential liberal art. I rather have fewer kids learn about polynomials, and more kids learn how, given rough drawings of ℝ → ℝ functions, to draw their approximate derivatives and antiderivatives.

So what the hell is this "baccumulation"

It is me trying to write a blog but with the stream aspects removed, and garden aspects put in their place instead. Rather than discrete posts, I will write, rewrite, and rearrange things As I Please. This will take place under version control, so permalinks are possible despite the "rearranging" seemingly dooming the enterprise to link-rot.

The current form is just a git repo. No rendering to HTML, and no hand-maintained indices, just raw asciidoc and relative links between files. I do have a private version for WIP things I do not want to share yet, but I will try to keep edits in public by default. There will be no force-pushing of anything older than a few minutes, so those permalinks do not break. The license is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

We’ll see what happens!