Subpixel Space

There's been some good writing on the general failure of "Hypertext books" (e.g. the first couple of paragraphs here [0]). I personally think this stems from some of the reasons that underlie some of those that you outline - books published on the web simultaneously try to be skeuomorphic in retaining the physical book metaphor (organized linearly, mostly static and plain text, etc), while still losing some of the real-world effects of the physical medium (being able to intuitively understand progress, markup, etc). The way that we publish and read text actually hasn't changed much, even though the target medium has of course changed dramatically, and as a result you end up with arguably the worst of both worlds. E-readers try to side step the problem by extending the book metaphor even further, but text on the web doesn't have that privilege. I'm working on a product, Literal [1], that aims to solve some of your specific problems, specifically providing for a way to annotate and add notes to web content and enabling some degree of source management. My ambition is to move on to solve some of the other problems you raise as well. If you have an Android device and are interested in trying it out, I'd love to connect! [0] https://subpixel.space/entries/open-transclude/ [1] https://literal.io/

Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shorin: https://subpixel.space/entries/life-after-lifestyle/ Enjoy this piece and some of the themes in it, weird DTC brands, authenticity, manufacturing culture. It seems to make sense of the current moment we live in.

Related https://subpixel.space/entries/life-after-lifestyle/ argues "selling out" and "authenticity" are dead and that product and ideology are inextricably linked today. "selling out" -> ironically embracing brands -> unironically embracing brands And then, my view: I used to hold on to this idea of authenticity tightly. Everything I saw I was suspicious of. "Who is paying you to say that? Is this an endorsement? What ideology comes with this message? Who would benefit from me believing this?" But the volume of messages is too vast, and at some point I accept myself under someone's "illusion". Who cares? We (as a society) have moved past the question of commodity fetishism; complaining about it is no longer critique, it's just annoying. "--Yes. And?" We've been writing about the collapse of the "sacred" since at least the 80s.

I just discovered this from the same author: http://subpixel.space/entries/open-transclude/ It's a much more interesting development in the same direction! The implementation currently only seems to work when transcluding content on the same domain, rather than quoting anything from across the web. Having discovered this, I feel I have a bit more context for where the creator is coming from!

There is no place quite like Gwern’s. But still, for interesting hypertext, perhaps see: * https://meaningness.com * https://philosopher.life * https://ribbonfarm.com * https://nadiaeghbal.com * https://subpixel.space * https://slatestarcodex.com (adjacent to gwern somehow) I make it my business to dig up sites like these. https://kickscondor.com