🌐 Inneresting #138 - Being Online
Apologies to Stephen Sondheim and Adam Driver for how this one starts
It may be a dumpster fire, but it’s our dumpster fire
Chuck Wendig surveys the current online landscape for ways writers can reach an audience and build community. And it looks like a whole lot of things are broken or breaking. One explanation for why many platforms are in the state they’re in comes from Cory Doctorow: Enshittification. It’s the idea that platforms are built by people who initially want to please new users, but abandon that drive as soon as advertisers and other stakeholders enter the picture.
It’s not just social media and publishing that fall into this conversation. Noah Smith also asks why ChatGPT generates obvious lies, undercutting its usefulness even as a first draft tool. Ted Chiang May have an answer, comparing the strange responses from ChatGPT to lossy algorithms that created problems for Xerox copiers. Subscriber Simon Lord sent in a recommendation for Alexander Stern’s article on AI, and how projects like ChatGPT and DALL-E consume existing art and reduce it to fuel for new content. He quotes Heidegger’s description of how a dam transforms a river:
The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station.
It ties in with this notion of the Personal Brand, and how an identity becomes useful as a way to sell products and earn attention. Debbie Millman highlights the way being your own brand reduces a person’s messy complexity to a simplified narrative. Building off this, Lia Haberman highlights how some social media influencers are attempting a selling-by-not-selling strategy labelled as de-influencing.
Take a trip back to the early text-based version of the internet with the archives at T E X T F I L E S for some perspective. The internet has always had a lot of promise as well as a lot of problems. Maybe you can find connections on Mastodon, like Glenn Fleishman talks about in his explainer on the emerging platform.
If you’ve found a good way to find your people on the internet, whether it’s for community or building an audience, we’d like to hear about it! Reply to this email and tell us your story.
Chipping away at your writing with Write Sprints
This week, join us in the Substack thread for a Write Sprint, even if it’s a short one! Remember: A lot of small, repeated blocks of focused work can still add up to big progress on your story.
What’s a Write Sprint?
John wrote up an explanation, but here’s the short version: Set a timer for 60 minutes, close down all distractions, and do nothing but write until that timer goes off.
Shout out this week to Sprinters Dallas Gow, Brian Matusz, CD, John Harvey, and Aimee Link!
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Reading the room
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For Your Consideration: Weekend Read 2 Beta
The original Weekend Read made it easier to read screenplays on an iPhone. Now we’re preparing to launch a sequel!
Anyone with an iOS or iPadOS device can use TestFlight to download a copy of this app in progress. Your feedback helps speed up the process of getting the best version of this app to the App Store.
And you can test it out using a library of For Your Consideration scripts from this year’s Academy Awards nominees! You’ll find a library of these scripts under the Discover tab in the app.
Download the beta through TestFlight and let us know what you think!
Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link Martin McDonagh talks about dialogue, and how tapping into your deepest insecurities and saddest places can help find your best stories.
Other Inneresting Things…
Happy New Yo La Tango Album Day to all who celebrate! You can listen to This Stupid World via: Apple | Spotify | Bandcamp
This cat isn’t lost. It’s just a prompt to convince people to find a way to spread kindness in their neighborhood (and you can use it, too).
VFX miniature shots recovered from an old Amiga show the work that went into some of the shots from Titanic.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.
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🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Twitter @ccsont, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art