Year: 2024

• Push the button for a sweet treat

  I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.

  The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.

  

  

  The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.

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  As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.

  Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.

  The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.

• The handmade internet

  

  A fragment from random notes over the last few days, weeks…

  There seems to be a return to an idea, philosophy, or practice of “just make stuff!” or “just do it!”; “just write something, ffs!” (Maybe that last one is more for me…)

  I noticed this most recently with Rick Rubin’s odd but intriguing Squarespace tie-in promo for his book; he’s seeking to spawn or to gather online folx who are just doing cool, interesting, intriguing stuff. At least that’s how I saw it in my cursory glance over the copy:

  A collaboration with Rick Rubin to build tetragrammaton – an online world of curated materials – and a new website design, Transmission, to inspire your creativity.

  From “Co _ Rick Rubin“, Squarespace, accessed January 22, 2024 (archived).

  It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

  There are other offshoots of this movement, like tiny-internets, and lovely lite micro-blogging services like bearblog and Plume, even Neocities. Larger companies like Automattic, for all their faults, are (at least at a surface, front facing level), trying to champion this kind of crazy, personalised, creative internet.

  Whether this is a return to the internet of old, or a new evolution entirely, remains to be seen.

• Critics and creation

  

  I started reading this interview this morning, between Anne Helen Peterson and Betsy Gaines Quammen. I still haven’t finished reading, despite being utterly fascinated, but even before I got to the guts of the interview, I was struck by a thought:

  In the algorithmised world, the creator is the critic.

  This thought is not necessarily happening in isolation; I’ve been thinking about ‘algorithmic culture’ for a couple of years, trying to order these thoughts into academic writing, or even creative writing. But this thought feels like a step in the right direction, even if I’ve no idea what the final output should or will be. Let’s scribble out some notes…

  If there’s someone whose work we enjoy, they’ll probably have an online presence — a blog or social media feed we can follow — where they’ll share what they like.

  It’s an organic kind of culture — but it’s one where the art and vocation of the critic continues to be minimised.

  This — and associated phenomena — is the subject of a whole bunch of recent and upcoming books (including this one, which is at the top of my to-read pile for the next month): a kind of culture where the all-powerful algorithm becomes the sole arbiter of taste, but I also think there is pressure on creatives to be their own kind of critical and cultural hub.

  On the inverse, what we may traditionally have called critics — so modern-day social media commentators, influencers, your Booktubers or Booktokkers, your video essayists and their ilk — now also feel pressure to create. This pressure will come from their followers and acolytes, but also from random people who encounter them online, who will say something like “if you know so much why don’t you just do it yourself” etc etc…

  Some critics will leap at the opportunity and they absolutely should — we are hearing from diverse voices that wouldn’t otherwise have thought to try.

  But some should leave the creation to others — not because they’re not worth hearing from, they absolutely are — but because their value, their creativity, their strength, lies in how they shape language, images, metaphor, around the work of others. They don’t realise — as I didn’t for a long time — that being a critic is a vocation, a life’s work, a real skill. Look at any longer-form piece in the London Review of Books or The New Inquiry and it becomes very clear how valuable this work is.

  I’ve always loved the term critic, particularly cultural critic, or commentator, or essayist… they always seemed like wonderful archaic terms that don’t belong in the modern, fragmented, divided, confused world. But to call oneself a critic or essayist, to own that, and only that, is to defy the norms of culture; to refuse the ‘pillars’ of novel, film, press/journalism, and to stand to one side, giving much-needed perspective to how these archaic forms define, reflect, and challenge society.

• America confounds

  View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by Dan Binns (@theclockworkpenguin)

  Seemed appropriate to share this one again, some 15 years down the line.

• Reorientation; tides; houses and rivers; databases and archives; a new moment to sit and think

  

  It’s a real back to the future moment, this. Where I’ve headed off for a year or two on a journey of personal inspiration, seeking new knowledges, grand new themes, new looks, new designs, new vibes, only to come crawling back to the place where it all started. It’s all very Joseph Campbell.

  My very first proper blog ran on a website called Blog-City, and for some insane reason I remember that my first post was on the 15th of July, 2003. This followed many years of experimenting with all sorts of web hosting and design services (all completely free) including GeoCities and Angelfire. I had websites for myself, for my made-up career, for imagined airlines and businesses and all sorts, not to mention links outwards to rudimentary social media services and websites like Neopets. The internet was simpler then; maybe it will be simple again some day, but probably not.

  Once I started working properly on my career, I tried to separate out all the different parts of my life into different web presences. There was social media, of course, and since 2007 I’ve had Facebook, Twitter, and the rest (most of them are private or deactivated now, apart from Mastodon, which I’m enjoying playing around with). I had separate sites for my filmmaking, for my work and profile as an academic, for my photography stuff, as well as a blog archive just kind of floating around. When I registered danielbinns[dot]net back in 2014, I thought ‘right, time to link everything up’, but I never quite got there in a way I liked. Everything was still floating, still nebulous.

  Part of this was the technology, maybe, but primarily it was due to my trying to force things to fit in a particular way. This is personal and psychological as much as it has anything to do with a particular host or platform.

  Several things have happened in the last few years to make me reconsider all of the above. The pandemic was a player, for sure, but it also took me reading stuff and watching videos and learning about different ways of managing my time, my notes and knowledge, my skills and expertise, and just figuring out who on earth I was and accepting that person.

  Long story short, we’re back here on WordPress, under a new domain, The Clockwork Penguin. TCP isn’t a business, necessarily; for now, I still like making stuff under the Deluded Penguin moniker. TCP is more of an ethos, a place to play and experiment, to reflect. To look back over some notes and some things I’ve been thinking about; to post fragments, or more developed work, works in progress, or just some cool links I found. I don’t know if it’s a cozy place or a mysterious place; if it’s a house sitting next to a river, or a garden where I can plant things and watch them grow. But I look forward to finding out.