Ideas are entangled things. Epiphanies are not our own, but the sum of everything around us, connecting in what feels like a moment. Authors are portrayed as singular figures, when beneath the surface a complex history exists.

One of these ideas the Mirror team has been kicking around is the split; a way of not only attributing sources of inspiration and collaboration, but also directing economic value to them. This is a quick series of overlapping (and optimistic) ideas centered on the split. I’ll leave drawing the connections and the resulting epiphany up to you.

https://twitter.com/jondashkyle/status/1377076060873838592

UbuWeb is one of my long time favorite sources of inspiration—a collection of experimental art spanning all forms of media and collected by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It’s been a big influence on digital archival practice, and if you haven’t yet found yourself several hours deep in an Ubu-hole, I suggest diving in.

Goldsmith taught a course called “Uncreative Writing”, where his students were penalized for any originality and “creativity,” and rewarded for plagiarism, repurposing, sampling, and stealing. This led to a book of the same name. It’s a manifesto of sorts, describing a new form of authorship unlocked by the internet and instantaneous access to everything ever created all the time.

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’ I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as ‘The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’ It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through the thicket of information — how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it — is what distinguishes my writing from yours.

It’s a compelling provocation, and extends beyond textual writing. Yes, there are poetics in Goldsmith’s elaborations, but the notion expands on familiar ideas of the reblog and retweet; this being the remix, or the recontextualizion. What form could a tool take if it enabled uncreative authorship natively? Built on web3, could it be possible by default to assign attribution and route economic value to these sources?

Look, I listened to a lot of Bieber in 2020. No shame. It’s good to lead a balanced life. Soon after the release of Changes an exchange played out over an afternoon on Twitter. An artist accused Bieber of directly lifting a hook from his record. It was beyond similar; it was identical. Listen to Bieber’s track and then the original. An uncleared and uncredited sample. A Twitter mob began accusing Justin of stealing from another artist, and one less recognized.

That’s when this producer jumped into the fold with the receipts:

Laxcity Twitter Credit

Neither artists had created the hook! Credit goes to Laxcity, a relative unknown who released it as a sample pack available for any one to use through Splice, a sample subscription service.

Splice mentions in a comment to the Verge that “Laxcity made an amazing sample, and we’re glad he’s getting well-deserved recognition.” While recognition is better than nothing, it alone can not sustain a creative practice. We should do better.

Splice does a good job at discovery and distribution, but the flat rate subscription licensing deal leaves artists out of possible upside, like with Laxcity. When musicians list their samples (or ideas) as up for remix, you could imagine a split is created when dropping a Splice sample into a track. For Laxcity, who’s sample runs the full duration of the track and forms its foundation, the split could be generous. It should feel less like a pure expenditure, and more like extending gratitude by saying “if this happens, and we get lucky, we get lucky together.” I’m skeptical if this fully replaces other models, but see it augmenting them in beautiful ways.

Web 2: @ mention Web 3: economic mention — @literature

It should be as easy to create a split as it is to tag someone in a photo on Instagram. Or adding an editor on Google Docs. There are many open questions, like… Should it be possible to tag someone in a work without assigning a split? Split by default?

My role at Mirror is to create interfaces for ideas like this, and distill somewhat complex mechanisms into useful and understandable patterns and tools. They must be both understandable and lead to a deeper knowledge of what crypto unlocks. Web3 and cyrpto’s economic and attribution layers could provide the basis of what a successful uncreative ecosystem could need.

When I think about splits, I think about questions of interface and defaults. Laxcity was excited for the attention, but is that only in absence of creative tools which include him in the flow of value by default? Bieber and his producers were being uncreative by using that sample. What if they had been using an uncreative interface in an uncreative ecosystem, and what would have that meant for Laxcity?

In the Twitter video response Laxcity says “Here it is, I wrote this MIDI.” This is beautiful phrasing. MIDI is a communication protocol for musical instruments introduced in 1981. 1981. This may seem long ago, but relative all of music history, it barely registers as a blip. For a new generation of producers, music and MIDI are one and the same. Protocols become the defaults, and the defaults become how we perceive the world around us.

There is so much work to do.

If it were possible to assign a series of splits for this entry, it would look similar to this:

• 10% Kennith Goldsmith for being the source of Uncreative Writing.

• 10% The Mirror team for collaboratively generating many of the ideas around splits. This split would behave as though directed at a DAO.

• 5% Laxcity for providing an insight about remixes and sampling.

• 2.5% Brainpickings, as I stole and slightly modified a paragraph (or two) from them when searching Goldsmith.

Elsewhere

• Another source of uncreative inspiration is Reality Hunger, by David Shields, a book of literary collage kind of like a long-form Tweet thread. Half of the book’s words come from sources other than the author. A very highly suggested read.

• I remixed a search result about Uncreative Writing as part of this entry.

• Recreativity and Remix Culture

• Nothing New Needs to be Created

• It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing.’

My favorite instance of this is Little Durag[^1], who created a viral dance set to Metro Station[^2] (lol) and proceeded to feed it input sourced from comments.

“Dance at 10% with 100% emotion.” “0% dance, 0% emotion, 100% far away.” “100% dance and 100% sadness.” “10% emotion, 100% dance.” “100% right arm, 10% left arm.”

What’s interesting is the feedback loop between how parametric the whole thing is and the TikTok algorithm — itself a parametrically weighted system.

The “killer feature” on TikTok is the algorithm — the sauce determining what appears in For You, the primary surface. It’s noticeably better than anything similar, like Instagram Discover. Apps are mediums of their own. What is appropriate for one platform may feel out of place on another. The context shapes the content.

Parametric TikTok is truly native to the platform.

Parametric TikTok is a symptom of its parent platform similar to early Mr Beast on Youtube. Let’s call it Analytic Youtube. My absolute favorite is the 2017 durational work (lol) “Saying Logan Paul 100,000 Times” in which he says Logan Paul 100,000 times over 17 hours.

Youtube is a platform driven aggressively by metrics. Big numbers. No surprise this performed well. Today the work has 16,492,195 views. Hear me out; this shit is profound[^3]. He takes the aggregate behavior of 100,000 Youtubers and performs it in one go. Call it “The User is Present” or whatever.

We live in an increasingly parametric world. One easily consumed and shaped by models. It’s funny to think about how these TikTokers are normalizing “parametric design” in a sense.

For instance, within architecture, a site condition is established and permutations in form are generated. The design processes becomes curatorial. Many practices today are centered around these principles of parametricism in response to advances in fabrication; the tools and materials at hand.

We can say this is nothing new or novel. It’s just more evenly distributed now. In other words, fuck your process, I’m just making TikToks.

In the near future I expect to see way more ML video processing beyond face filters. The emergent behavior of TikTokers feels like a warm up for this super automated future. A convergence between inevitable functionality and what creators are making today.

Snap has shipped filters which map your face on to animations that make you dance… this is not what I’m trying to point out here. It has more to do w/ creative process and how the platforms shape the work created and shared within them.

I wonder how much of Parametric TikTok’s novelty is thanks to interpretation. If we had trained a model on Little Durag’s dance and curated the best 10 out of 100,000 permutations would it hit the same? Even assuming they were indistinguishable from the originals?

By the time it’s possible I assume the novelty will have worn off. Similar to how anyone who has grown up with the artificiality of facetune can see right through it. I am curious to see the unexpected ways these future applications of ML on platforms will continue to shape what users create and share.

This entry was written in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and reposted here for archival purposes. Anyway, I’m not here to make a point. Just meandering after going down a TikTok hole ¯\(ツ)/¯

And don’t get me started on Pandemic Parametric TikTok.

[^1]: There are plenty of other instances, including imjoeyreed. Durag stands out for how the comments are literally weighted. [^2]: Yea I’m gonna play this card. I was waaaaay ahead of the curve on Metro Station. I was friends w/ someone who was the sister of one of the two guys. A demo of Shake It was her song on Myspace. I remember when they signed to Columbia. Let me cling to my relevancy. [^3]: Come at me. [^4]: Kyle Chayka, whose writing is consistently a source of useful insight, kindly shared this entry.

So it was disappointing to watch this thing I was so into become more and more adversarial over time. During my teens seeing big tech displace big oil felt pretty Virilio-ish. The story is familiar, yeah? Not a unique experience; it’s broadly personal.

As someone compelled to build, this creates a lot of tension. Honestly, the difficulty in reasoning about compromise is paralyzing at times. Over the past few years it felt like building meant deciding to contribute to the mess, however indirectly.

Platform singularities

As the net enveloped more of life the platforms began trying to eat each other. It’s still going on. Facebook wants to become Snapchat wants to become Netflix wants to become Youtube wants to become Instagram wants to become Shopify wants to become Pinterest… and so on. I’m exaggerating, but it’s undeniable that platforms want to become their neighbor before their neighbor becomes them.

It seems like the pattern is a function of time. An indicator of an aging ecosystem. We remember AOL, yeah? These things that feel too big to ever go away, but they do. This isn’t really controversial. It’s how it goes.

Every once in a while I revisit this lecture by Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp at Columbia GSAPP, where he attended as a student. It’s one of the better (imo) schools for architecture and urbanization. Makes sense that Evan went there. Everything is architecture, right?

Evan is on it. The lecture is scatter-brained and cross-disciplinary, and includes phrases like “spiritual neuroticism” and “fragmented myths.” It’s not a tech talk, but one of culture, spirit, big glass walls and gardens (lol.) What inspires us. He’s able to better articulate a lot of the same metaphors used by those critical of platforms like Pinterest.

After a few minutes of watching, a question always returns: How can someone with an understanding of things so dialed be responsible for… Pinterest?

If I had to guess, it’s partly about an interplay between inspiration and intuition. A sculptor or songwriter does not dictate their work. Instead they respond. It’s following your nose and being receptive to what a work wants to be. It requires an extreme sensitivity and the ability to move your ego out of the way to reveal the true shape of what’s in-front of you. Evan’s interests are on point. But Pinterest is less his creation and more the sum of what Pinterest wanted to be at scale. The idea wanted to grow.

Evan and his team were in tune with what a platform within the “web2” attention economy wanted to be, and were able to set aside their sense of idealism for what the ecosystem afforded and what mass utility at scale required of them.

To build on web2 at scale today means accepting those same defaults and a willingness to repeat history. We’ve seen how it goes. The combination of platforms eating each other and these conditions (it’s either ads or subscriptions bb) indicate it’s the end of that timeline. Donezooooo. Time for what’s next (and already underway.)

I’m having having a lot of fun working on Mirror…an understatement, actually. I’m waking up at night with ideas frequent enough that it’s getting annoying. A good problem. They don’t feel like personal revelations, but things that are floating out there, and Mirror happens to be at the right place and time to catch them.

That’s not to say I don’t have concerns about parts of web3. There are a lot of open questions, and it’s kept me out of the space up until recently.

For example, there are great things about permanent storage, and not so great things. I’m also not sure how much energy is involved for NFTs, same as I’m not sure how much energy goes into my salad I have each afternoon, even though I eat them every day. I try to make good choices. Eating a salad is better than a daily burger in terms of cow farts and transportation. It’s not as good as sustenance farming in my yard.

If crypto were going to go away, it would have by now. I’m not sure if it will start to scale in the next five years, or another ten, although I have a hunch, but there seems to be something fundamental here. It’s hard to put a finger on it, in the same way that people questioned the purpose of the internet when we only had phones, books, and TVs. People back then were also able to predict issues we’re now experiencing. “So anyone, anywhere, can publish anything, and everyone can access it?” Was it worth it? A difficult question, and I’m unsure if it’s the right one. It feels similar to how we now see issues with web3, but instead of looking at history we’re projecting forward.

Last question: If I were born a decade or so earlier, would I have been concerned enough about possible issues with the net that I wouldn’t have gotten involved?

Something Evan mentions in his lecture:

The world we are born into as humans is by default normal to us, and then as we live it changes. Occasionally in profound, and occasionally in tragically irrevocable ways, and the next generation that’s born just has no idea what’s been lost. … Any meaningful change we make to the world is likely to be source of great new beauty as well as traumatic loss. … And what matters is we try as hard as we can to make the changes we do make as carefully as possible and as sensitively as possible to the balance that we have today on the world.

Christ, I can’t believe I’m quoting the Pinterest guy. This all sounds great until you realize the Pinterest guy said it. fml.

Anyway, similar to the compromise with my salad, I’ll try to use platforms careful about the balance being shifted in the world with web3. Now that I’m contributing to the creation of this stuff too, I’ll try to do the same in my work.

Genuinely optimistic about the future, but let’s not get lazy here.

I’m excited to have joined up with Graeme and Denis to create Mirror, where I’m responsible for all things design, interface, interaction, front-end, and all that. With this being my first entry on Mirror I figure it can serve as an introduction to help provide context for future entries. What follows are a few personal anecdotes and speculation on things like cultural protocols, social(ish) interfaces, absolutely devouring fresh pizza in the mountains and possibilities for sustaining creative practices. Elaborations on prior work and thinking to set up both why Mirror and what might it be?

With some patience, and since everything connects, let’s go into the weeds (a little.) I’m not suggesting any of it’s interesting, or to imply singular solutions to complex issues, but as a form of personal sense-making for myself and those who care enough (or just have the time) to continue reading.

This will be a small series, and this is part one ✌️

I’d been working for several years on a project called Cargo a, personal publishing platform for designers, musicians, architects, photographers and the like. People creatively minded. I landed an early invite to the project in 2009 after spending days exploring Space Collective, another project by the same team. “Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.” It’s still an absolute favorite, and I’ve never seen anything else like it.

The invite enabled me to create my own site using the tools which had been developed for Space Collective, now white-labeled and able to be associated with any domain. In addition to a selection of designs you also had full access to the html and css. With that level of access I couldn’t stop messing with it. It was the first time I’d seen AJAX. It was also an introduction to unfamiliar culture like paintings by Bosch, design from Emil Ruder, or quotes of Timothy Leary—all examples of the filler content used instead of uninspired lorum ipsum. The designs were focused, mostly typographic, and emphasized the work over interface. “The content is the Cargo.” A couple days after receiving the invite an email hit my inbox.

“So you keep changing the design of your Cargo site, do you want to visit us in Los Angeles?”

My family is in the music industry, and I was touring that summer as a for-hire drummer in a group I had no interest in. I’m grateful to have gotten a first hand look at life as touring musician before having spent years chasing it, and parts of it were fun. Waking up in a new city each day, traveling on a tour bus, and (sounds corny) the energy you feel when performing live. But I realized it wasn’t something for me to pursue long term.

What got me excited was the internet. Or… not the internet as some discrete entity, but the possibility it affords. I stopped going to school at age 10 to basically surf online all day with no curriculum. Un-schooling. We lived in a small town in central Pennsylvania. The browser window was literally a window where access to the entire world was possible. And not only that; you could contribute to building that world by uploading, too.

After Cargo had extended the offer there wasn’t much of an internal debate. I hopped a flight from Nashville to Los Angeles to be the first full time hire on the Cargo team. Still unsure exactly how that happened.

A concern that grew over time was that of attribution. In addition to creating sites for presenting ones’ own work, many created image blogs. Some of them my favorites. Most were good about crediting the sources for images, but it was an impossible thing for us to keep track of—and not our place to chase people down. The livelihood of anyone creative depends upon their work being shared and credited, so it was important to us[^1].

Clicking around one afternoon MediaChain by Denis Nazarov, Jesse Walden and crew scrolled into view(port.) “Mediachain is a singular data fabric for open-first media applications.” More clicking around revealed some relation to Ethereum. Although friends had been involved in the cryptocurrency space for some time I had avoided it, aside from attempting to mine Dogecoin[^2] late one night. At least Doge was explicitly a joke when so many other projects postured as not… which is generally the case when something is.

I began reading through the documentation for the Mediachain Attribution Engine and it appeared directly related to the problem at Cargo. It was around this time I also came across IPFS.

Sometime in 2017 I left Cargo to pursue projects touching on these questions of attribution, data ownership and archival. If you are your data, you should own your data. Or at least to the same degree that your mind or body are your own. Coming from a cultural project, I looked at these questions through a cultural lens. What form could a cultural protocol take?

Fundamentally, culture wants to propagate—information wants to be free. So I began looking into the peer-to-peer space. The work happening around Decentralized Archive Transport (Dat Protocol) caught my eye. It’s a torrent-like network, with features like versioning, and is good for everything static files based. Turns out a website is essentially a collection of static files, and the Beaker Browser team had realized just that, building a browser with the dat:// protocol baked in. Being a peer on the network meant what you visited then worked offline—going offline being the ultimate luxury these days.

I began working on projects utilizing dat, including an experimental publishing tool called Enoki. Perhaps the most meaningful contribution was organizing a series of relaxed afternoons about decentralized publishing and culture called Peer-to-Peer Web. Instead of convening in tech offices we met in spaces such as the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, the School For Poetic Computation, and Folder Studio. Events took place in Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. Callil Capuozzo who organized the New York hang now happens to be the lead designer at Uniswap. Small world.

Around this time I was living in New York, and in addition to peer-to-peer publishing projects I took a few commissions. One of those was for the design and development of a featured editorial for Bloomberg News about the Ethereum DAO Exploit written by Matt Leising. They gave me a desk in their Midtown Manhattan office for the month, where both the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg News are created directly beside each-other. This was also peak ICO boom of 2017. You couldn’t get a coffee in Brooklyn without hearing someone shilling a shitcoin. A special type of hell that helped solidify my position at the time that crypto is largely a toxic (and energy intensive) continuation of the financialization of everything. Solutions desperate for problems.

After several years of staring at screens I was getting a little burnt out. While living in Los Angeles I enjoyed going on day hikes in the San Gabriel Mountains on weekends. Reading about the Sierra Nevada and looking at topographic maps was my favorite form of escapism when living in New York. After returning to California I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2650 mile path running from Mexico to Canada along the mountains spanning the west coast.

What I expected to be a break from technology ended up being four months of walking a marathon (or two) each day while contemplating technology, perception, environment and how it all overlaps.

After a four day stretch of one-hundred(ish) miles and relative isolation all I could think about was food. At the end of a long leg like this it’s the ultimate motivation, and at a certain point becomes the only thing you can think about. That is to say; you start thinking with your stomach instead of your head. Up until agricultural abundance most humans did—pretty recent on the planetary time scale. When moving at a biological pace—walking with two feet—across distances long enough to register as “substantial” when looking at a globe, and through an environment which has shaped your evolution over millennia, your sense of scale adapts to become more planetary. This as opposed to scrolling while staring at a dumb screen. I digress…

Another day of slogging along the trail behind me, I arrived at a clearing in the woods. A gas station—the only structure around for at least an hour drive. I walked through the door and ordered a pizza. I literally could not believe it. It was absolute magic. How the fuck does this pizza exist here? And how can I hand over a piece of plastic and begin immediately recovering calories without having to like, apprentice for a month? In that moment everyday occurrences summed up into something totally euphoric. Again, it’s worth emphasizing the difference between thinking with your head vs your stomach. One is logical and the other is evolutionary, or something… literally head vs gut. It’s like, in that moment of eating pizza after walking 100 miles I was experiencing the collective shock of all my ancestors at what is possible today, as if they were there to see it, too.

I was telling this story to a friend recently and he said, “You sound like the ultimate block chain bro. Going on some hiking pilgrimage and having epiphanies about the role of capital.” Shit! I’m unsure how to articulate much of this without it sounding totally ridiculous. I mean… it is 🤷

Although seemingly disparate, all of this connects directly in my mind. The state of publishing online over the past decade—from blogs to websites to stories. Questions of data ownership and attribution, and what it means to centralize around the creator—not the platform. The environments we find ourselves in, what they afford, and how we shape them.

So this is how it’s been.
It’s now a question of where it’s at.

Test

Part two will follow soon enough.
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[^1]: It’s also a saturation issue. Reverse Google Image search often returns pages of Pinterest boards as sources. All unattributed. [^2]: Shit… really should’ve held onto that wallet 🙃