Reintroducing friction into our lives.
Welcome to StdOut. This subsection of Ham Typed exists for quick posts or daily reflections where I am not expected to maintain the rigorous quality of writing that I prefer (and so happens to gridlock everything I attempt to write). It might also focus more on the _technical_ aspect of tech. So, if the content does not appeal to you, please feel free to avoid this section.
For a month or two, I’ve been enjoying David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)’s writing on Hey World. Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a two-decade old web framework that was used to create Twitter, Shopify, and GitHub. He’s also the co-founder at Base Camp and Hey.
I’ve really been enjoying what Hansson has had to say about introducing friction into modern communication and the benefits of email.
After tens of thousands of tweets across more than a decade, I vowed to stop responding to – let alone arguing with – strangers in that particular thunder dome of despair.
And like all recovering addicts who now wax lyrically about the healing power of their perpetuating intervention – be that Jesus, the group session, the gardening, or whatever – I fight to restrain myself from breaking out in song about the gospel all the time. (Because there really is nothing more annoying than a born-again sinner serenading from the soapbox.)
But now that it's been a while, I still thought I'd share what has worked for me. To prevent a relapse, I've replaced the free-for-all of the thunder dome with connections mediated by friction. The kind of friction the internet had since its inception, but that has been outrun by the virulence of the frictionless social media variants.
The most important of these mediated connections have been through email. Both sending it, like this, but also receiving it from the small minority of readers who because of the friction took the time to write thoughtful, polite replies of both encouragement and disagreement. Which in turn has led to thousands of fruitful exchanges. Going a long way to give me faith in the internet again. Even faith in the connection with strangers again.
It's a similar idea shared by other dev writers that focus on digital communication. Dustin Curtis, the founder of Svbtle wrote all the way back in 2013:
[T]witter is so much easier than writing, and I have been enormously tempted to just tweet it, so instead of not writing anything, I’m just going to write about what I would have written if Twitter didn’t destroy my desire to write by making things so easy to share.
Curtis continues later in the same essay:
Twitter takes complex ideas and destroys them by forcing my brain to compact them into little 140-character aphorisms, truisms, or jokes. For every great tweet, there could have been four insightful paragraphs, but there aren’t, and never will be, because Twitter removes my desire to write by killing my ideas. Once I tweet something, I stop thinking about it; it’s like an emotional release of idea liability. If I wrote this essay, I would have written about how Twitter does that.
The interesting thread between these two men is that both, frustrated with the lack of friction between thinking and posting on modern platforms, created their own seemingly to reintroduce a semblance of systems for themselves and others, once seen as hurdles, as a means to regain their creativity. Hansson created Hey, piggybacking off email's open standard to introduce what I've come to see as patently positive changes and in extension, Hey World. Curtis created Svbtle, a minimalist writing platform with a focus on content perseverance. I used to write on Svbtle for years, and without it I might not have been inspired to continue learning about web development. And Hey is still my default email service, with no plans to change.
What I lacked before in describing how I felt about modern communication Curtis and Hansson have plainly wrote. There is a lack of the friction every communicator needs to refine their ideas before expressing them. Because it's so easy to think and publish, the quality of the ideas being expressed has decreased and the frequency of their expression has increased. But have either of these men made the solution?
How do increase the friction in digital publishing without making it harder to publish?
Hansson and Curtis created their own solutions at the opposite ends of a spectrum of choices.
Hansson embraced email--which has always been open and accessible but near impossible to customize and improve upon other than client-level changes.
Curtis embraced the platform. He created his own website, wrote his own proprietary code, and hosts his and any other writer's work on managed server. He can change and improve upon it whenever he wants, however he wants. However, everyone else is at his whim. And if he writes bad code, or makes an unpopular choice, everyone in his garden must suffer.
Personally, the solution is somewhere in the middle. Everyone wants to express him or herself differently. Some people like the basic web, and don't even include stylesheets with their code. Other people love single page apps, think client-side rendering is still the future, and couldn't imagine writing without a content management system. Similarly, everyone wants to kill an idea from propagating. We all have beliefs we highly ridicule, and most of us are not strong enough to resist the urge to impede it through unsportsmanlike plays such as censorship and DE platforming. So, we need a highly customizable individualistic frontend and a decentralized standard backend. That way we can all look different but play by the same rules. It sounds like the World Wide Web. It sounds like Federation.
Despite working with the World Wide Web, I'm not sure many developers are familiar with the Social Web Working Group. This now-dead gaggle of goobs--the group, not the people in it--pioneered the Social Web Protocols: a collection of standards which enable various aspects of decentralized social interaction on the Web. Activity Pub, which has allowed staple Web2 projects like link aggregators and social feeds to become fully decentralized, is relatively known. But other interesting protocols like Web Mentions have largely gone by the wayside (1 million web mentions having been sent as of 2017 is paltry considering the scale of the internet).
In my opinion, this can be attributed to the relative lack of incentives to offer decentralization on writing platforms. If you're a writer, you want to be fully in control of your own work, and often, you only gravitate to community hubs such as traditional publications, SubStack, or Medium for financial incentives. Otherwise, why use somebody else's press when you could have your own and capture 100% of the attention?
Ok, so why did I just write five paragraphs about the merits of federalization when this essay was about friction? Because they're one in the same. To incentivize and reinvigorate the core ideals of our society: of free expression and the marketplace of ideas--which are still as good as ever--we must repopulate the old debate field and create a system in which no entity, regardless how powerful can bend or change the rules. We must embrace the core principle and purpose of the internet. Decentralized, un-censorable communication. No more will we have to worry about sneaky bills or perceived censorship on centralized platforms because they would be unable to undercut the mathematical certainty of the technology underfoot.
Okay, so I just proposed we invent the internet. Nice.
But there are real solutions anyone can take to improve their experience creating content online.
Find a platform that challenges you. Whether it's proprietary, self-hosted, or something as basic as an email listserv, synchronous communication is your friend for all things thought out. In the rare instances I've found myself posting on Twitter this year, I've realized they've been inspired by extreme spouts of emotion and would have been better served unwritten or promoted into an essay--like this one.
Connect with other creators you admire. It's a simple as sending them an email. Everyone is just as human as you are, and simply reaching out with friendly feedback or questions is a fantastic way to strike up a dialog. Sometimes they might not be the friendliest to talk to, or might incite confrontation rather than pleasant conversation, but it's the internet. Just go outside and touch grass. It's not worth starting an uncivilized fight over. Though don't stray away from civilized confrontation. The weakest steel is untampered.
Don't be afraid to invest in your own infrastructure. It's very inexpensive to host a website today, and there is a litany of tools that allow you to create your own blog with little to no technical knowledge. Though if you're reading my work, I'm sure that won't be one of your concerns.
I hope you've enjoyed this post. It was a little scattered, but passion distracts the enthusiastic. I'll be writing more about decentralized publishing in the near future and encourage you to check out/work on https://github.com/tristanisham/wng with me. The spiritual successor to Wingman and a static/dynamic site generation tool written in Go.