i would like to exchange text files on the internet
@Lady Am I being subtooted? This is an extremely valid objection, if I am being subtooted.
@gaditb you were not being subtooted haha i was complaining about the current state of internet culture mostly
@Lady (To be fair, that was my assumption. But "have we thought about the possible AU where we don't have a shared universal plaintext binary format" "I would like to exchange text files on the internet" does make SENSE--)
(Also, yes.
Like sure okay yeah it's COOL that you can make a really dynamic webserver that produces ad-hoc content in response to particular requests and maintains shared state across different endpoints that communicates the actions each to each-other.
And we've built up a BUNCH of really cool standards and expectations that allow us to socially-hold and technically-mediate cool shared social metaphors that we can co-exist within.
But also.
I like exchanging text files?? on the internet??
I enjoy this.)
@Lady (... I kinda kept going there and rereading there are other things you might have meant by this.)
@gaditb i think if i was to sum up my feelings on the internet in a short pithy phrase it is that we have created an experiential culture, one where you share experiences with others, not a documentary culture, one where you share documents
and i guess i just don’t think the experiential internet is all that good. i could use more documents
@Lady Oh I am a BIG fan of experiential culture, as well.
I just like doing it in the context of collaboraring in the production/accumulation of, and tactile access to, documents.
@gaditb yeah in fairness this might be a false dichotomy
@Lady Yeah but it's a true spectrum.
@Lady A spectrum across the pretend-we-quantified values of change-across-time (/size-of-update-interval?) / decline-of-relevance-with-age, maybe?
.. but maybe also mass-authorship.
@gaditb i think i would define a document, in this context, as something for which no part of it is published until every part of it is published
for some definition of “published” which does not preclude collaboration
the internet is full of append-only logs. the beginnings and ends of these logs are not published at the same time, so they cannot be treated as temporally fixed works. but this changes how we interact with them pretty significantly, i think
@gaditb in contrast, if you send me a text document over the internet i am going to assume it is a complete text document and that the authorship of the text document has edited it so that the end lines up with the beginning and that it is transmitting an internally consistent (or intentionally inconsistent) message, unless otherwise stated
@gaditb the expectation that this process of refinement has occurred, not as a temporal sequence of updates but as an editorial control over the entire breadth of the text, is something i think we are often missing