Joanne McNeil

Joanne McNeil (JOMC) originally wrote today’s email for her excellent newsletter All My Stars. We liked it so much that we asked if she would mind us running it here. Joanne’s got a fascinating-sounding book coming out next year called Lurking: How a Person Became a User. From the promotional site: “she charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us.” You can (and should) pre-order at Amazon. - Noah (NRB)Joanne here. A couple weeks ago, I picked up Pattern Recognition and reread it. It holds up really well—just as I expected—because now that moment of online communications feels so distinctly of the past, while totally natural to include in the text.One of the nice things about reading William Gibson is that you can learn from him. Philip K Dick and J. G. Ballard are so entirely in their own spirits that you can only admire rather than wish to imitate them. A writer who tries to do something Ballard-like ends up transparently riffing off Ballard. A writer who tries to learn from PKD will only end up with a clumsy homage. But there are stylistic tricks and techniques Gibson employs that can be borrowed like his attention on the sentence level, general story mechanics, and pacing. Even characterization—Cayce is so subtly brought to life and so recognizable; he makes interesting choices to describe certain mundane tasks, while leaving other aspects of her as an enigma.That's not to say Gibson hasn't been ripped off and constantly. That is why, having moved on to a reread of Neuromancer, I am trying hard to image what it must have been to read the book with fresh eyes in 1984 — back before there was much of a "consensual hallucination" between hardware and through networks. That novel has been so absorbed by the culture, especially the internet-centric culture we have now; it's like trying to assess the merits of something like Citizen Kane.Why is this interesting?I started taking notes while rereading Neuromancer, because I had this idea that no one has yet to write a great long critical piece about William Gibson's body of work. I thought I could probably do a good job on such a piece, because while he's an influence on my work, his books aren't as elemental to me as say, Concrete Island or A Scanner Darkly. And if I were to read and reread all his work starting now, I could probably have a long essay together in time for his next novel which drops in January.Then, I wondered if I actually wanted to write this piece or I felt motivated simply because of the absence of anyone else accomplishing it and my own perception that I might do a good job.There’s the writing I want to be doing—that fully engages my imagination, that is risk-taking, and might not command a huge audience, but when it is well-received, there is no better feeling. There's the writing that I know will always whip up attention when I want that. And there's writing that helps me feel less precious about publishing, such as this newsletter, which I think of as like an ice rink figure skaters practice on that is open to the public. Nothing written here is ever perfect, but it isn’t meant to be, either.There are other kinds of writing, but for the purpose of this being an imperfect space, let's stick with these three kinds. In no category does a 7,000 or so word critical essay about all of William Gibson's novels fit in. Nor would any possible publication pay particularly well for such a piece, for that matter. I don’t have all the time in the world so I have to make choices about what to write and when and why. But it was a nice idea for a moment; so instead I’m describing this discarded idea as I pirouette on my little ice rink. I have stopped taking notes, but I continue to imagine myself as a my-age person encountering it in 1984 while I reread Neuromancer. That makes it more fun. (JOMC)Poster of the Day:The Type Directors Club (which I’ve never heard of) has an amazing-looking exhibition of IBM posters in NYC until August. Even if you can’t make (I’m going to try), the website featuring the posters is full of inspiring design. (NRB)Quick Links:Robin Sloan on the “flip-flop”: “the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back, often more than once.” (NRB)How sugar conquered the world. (CJN)Million Short is a search engine that allows you to remove the top 100, 1000, 10k, or 100k sites from the results to give you a different view on what’s out there. “In creating a differentiated search, we aim to provide alternative methods for organizing, accessing, and discovering the vast web of information on the Internet.” (NRB)Getting caught in Airdrop crossfire. (CJN) Craig Mod on a very long walk in Japan. (CJN) Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Joanne (JOMC)

Why is this interesting? - The William Gibson Edition

Today’s WITI is from Joanne McNeil (JM) who previously wrote The William Gibson Edition. Today (!!) she’s got a new book out called Lurking: How a Person Became a User and she was kind enough to give us one to give away. So … if you want to give it a read just respond to this email and let us know. We’ll choose one respondent at random and have it shipped out. Also, if you’re in NYC on Thursday, Joanne is doing a launch event at Books are Magic in Brooklyn. - Noah (NRB)Joanne here. I thought I was done with the chapter I was writing on the internet in the 90s, when I came across a brief mention of the early online community and media site Cafe Los Negroes. Its founder, McLean Greaves, was a well-known figure in the New York tech community back then, but this was the first I’d heard of his work. Several Google searches led me to the extensive media coverage he received including profiles in publications like The New York Times, Wired, The Village Voice, and even a capsule review in Entertainment Weekly.Greaves also founded a company called VMI (Virtual Melanin Incorporated) and built websites for clients including Spike Lee, HBO, and Puff Daddy's Bad Boy Entertainment; but it was Cafe Los Negroes, a digital hub for black and Latino New Yorkers, that was most relevant to my research. I found a link to it in a 1997 Wired article. The link is dead now, but still I accessed the pages through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In a few clicks, the cyber-presence of late-90s Bedford Stuyvesant came alive for me on the screen.I also found a mirrored Geocities page that includes a chat room discussion that Greaves moderated with Living Colour’s Vernon Reid and the poet/playwright Ntozake Shange, among others:mgreaves: Question for the panelists: will computers democratize society or create fragmented "networks" like the ones being waged by online racists? Angel: ughCarlaR: hmmLisaJones: lotta shopping going on. big voids. blame who? tv?Vern: Computers can also make us More isolated.ntozake: we are not in the mesh of the 'fragment ' per se anywaymgreaves: Ntozake: aren't we all black in this forum?Why is this interesting?Greaves may have been profiled widely in legacy media when Cafe Los Negroes was new, but his work has been largely written out of internet history. Those same profiles foreshadowed a major reason why his work isn’t properly remembered today—Greaves had a difficult time finding investors. He wasn't just a black tech entrepreneur, but a black entrepreneur building a platform for people of color. Greaves was correct that in time more and more communities of color would become internet users, and that his platform could scale. However, myriad factors, including the discriminatory practices of investors, prevented his projects from flourishing with their inclusion. The success of major companies like AOL and later Facebook, designed to absorb everyone online—and not specifically communities of color—has further contributed to this erasure. (It is worth checking out Charlton McIlwain’s book Black Software to understand how this pattern of racism has frustrated innovation.)Cafe Los Negroes was in operation for only a short period of time, but its lost potential is instructive. The blogger Renina Jarmon put it best in a 2014 post about her experience discovering Greaves’ work (in the 2001 book Technicolor). Jarmon writes about how inspiring it was to see that “even prior to the rise of the Blogosphere, young urban Black and Brown people were trying to OWN their own platforms. Not only were they trying to own their own platforms but they had a sense of building community while they did so. They were trying to own their own platforms while living in the ‘hood.”I would have loved to have interviewed McLean Greaves for my book, but sadly he passed away in 2016. His work with Cafe Los Negroes is worthy of its own book (and a biopic, for that matter). The Internet Archive makes it possible for any future historians or biographers to further explore this online community from the past that deserves wider recognition. (JM)Interactive of the Day: Your World of Text, the “infinite grid of text editable by anyone” still up and running more than ten years after its creation. (JO)Quick Links:I can consume an unlimited stream of stories about the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal. This episode of ESPN Daily is a good roundup of the latest news. (NRB)A Stunning Legal Decision Just Upheld a $6.75 Million Victory for the Street Artists Whose Works Were Destroyed at the 5Pointz Graffiti Mecca (NRB)Tim Harford on what we get right and wrong about the prisoner’s dilemma. (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Joanne (JM)Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).