We're here—on the net

We’re still writers, but we’ve moved far beyond books. They almost, at this point, don’t even count.

It takes courage to be a writer and say that books don’t matter, but the plain fact is that they really don’t. They can’t, not like they did, not now, not outside their antique aspect—for any real and practical purpose, they’re pretty much done. They’ve been encapsulated by something so much bigger.

But we’re still writers. We’re also artists, auteurs, photographers and performers, composers, musicians, and more—but we’re way past films, albums, paintings, and all the other legacy media we used to know. We’re far beyond that now, a fact that’s obvious to anyone who feels and is looking to make the living thing.

I remember when we were bloggers. The blogs, they’re also long gone—although I still see a few dusty secret ones that’ve been going, pretty much nonstop, since the nineties. But no one looks at them or even knows they’re there.

We were not legion then; there were few of us, at the time, throwing flames through the wild density of that uncharted jungle. It’s been a long online ride into this moment. On another Internet I was a serious writer, a guitarist, a poet and performance artist (my online “characters,” several even with their own published books and Wikipedia notations, were an early forerunner of AI literature). And, of course, I was a very public and prolific reporter—for Wired and about a dozen other big-news outlets.

The Linux Cookbook was an early hit—in print for 20 years, a feat utterly unheard of in the disposable tech-book world, it brought a lot of people to the computer revolution that we live in. Translated into half a dozen languages, it was the second “open source” book in the world. The first was a novel I wrote and released, as an experiment, with Project Gutenberg. I approached Michael S. Hart about it, and he agreed to let me try this on his platform, which at the time was as big as it got: and then the .txt file went into the world, shuttled onto the unsuspecting net. A novel, as a .txt, on the net, for everyone, instantly, for free: something never before thought of, never done. It was way ahead of its time, of course; it was so far out there that it was ahead of ahead of its time, and no one knew that a clock was even ticking.

Indeed, a big part of the excitement of that age was copyleft: Early on, I brought it out of software to everything else, an idea that came to me when I was a kid, back when everyone else said it was crazy—but an official license followed, first of its kind, with the help of a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s nascent cyberspace research center, and a lot of people used it for a lot of works of art. They quickly turned that into the famed Creative Commons, and then those crude dirt trails became remapped into highways and well developed lands, and the distance between those moments is a lifetime. There were many lives lived.

There was also Circuits of the Wind, a book brought out in three volumes, a tale of the coming of the net, and of growing up with it when no one knew. It was the first and really the only story out there to actually and accurately describe the rise and coming of the net from someone who’d hacked through it firsthand and was there.

In these years I wrote over a dozen other books. A few of them are each well over a million words. I shot very close to a quarter million photos, have weeks worth of video, and a cache of several hundred songs.

In other words I’ve created towards a single and cohesive vision, and kept on creating before stopping to pause and release.

So now that’s what this is all about, a place to stop and share it: first drafts and final ones, retakes, revamps, experiments, visuals and music and maybe even notes on how I’m doing it and why.