Silas Jelley's Corner of the Web / Pearls

Afghans, speculators, and Timothy Snyder

2021-07-31T12:00:00Z

I just published the first draft of the second chapter of A short walk beneath a long white cloud, where we plunge into Raetea forest and (spoiler) emerge mostly unscathed, so go ahead and read that. Photos will be added in due course.

Of course, looking back over the trip makes me hungry for another, and for now my interest centres on Afghanistan: the Khyber Pass, Nuristan, and the Hindu Kush. It will probably be some time before travel restrictions and the eternal obstacle – money – permit me to explore the land where empires go to die, but that hasn’t stopped me poring over the atlas’ in the library or reading accounts from other roamers. With dubious merit, I can now name each of the six countries that Afghanistan borders. Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy soothed my yearning this month. Murphy’s 1963 odyssey, the richest pages of which concern her time in Afghanistan, is staggering in its rendering of the landscapes she passes through. The book is regrettably marred by her frequent racism but if, like me, something about Afghanistan calls to you then I recommend that you read it anyway, because the beauty between the bigotry is nourishment for the itinerant soul. For an unsullied gambol through the region, read A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush: eight years before Murphy, in 1956, Eric Newby fled the world of high fashion and set about climbing the peaks of the Hindu Kush in ill-fitting boots, with a companion who, like him, had never climbed before. I recommend it without reservation, except perhaps with the caveat that it’s a very English memoir. I read it first late last year in the middle of my own short walk, and have several times dipped back into it to vicariously reminisce.

Here in Nelson I am soon to return to the world of work, having been forced to take a month off by a shoulder injury. If all goes to plan I should start planting next week as part of New Zealand’s effort to plant a billion trees by 2028.

With work back on the brain, it occurred to me that I am always either accumulating or losing money. Always working and saving or anti-working and anti-saving. Never at a steady state. For the last four years that has taken the shape of working solidly for about three months of each year to support my frugal lifestyle and slow-travel ambitions for the remaining nine. Maybe it’s time I started looking for a steady state, whatever that may be. All that is immaterial for now, I expect I will work the winter through here in the southern hemisphere, but it bears thinking about.

Speaking of money, as I write this, sitting in the Elma Turner library at 5.30pm on a Friday, a middle aged Englishman is showing his well dressed, earnest, and unskeptical young partner how to buy cryptocurrencies. He’s anxiously biting on the knuckles of his left hand while he repeatedly refreshes the page with his right, muttering about which coins have bulled and beared since yesterday. His partner looks on credulously and asks, “is that good?”. Since yesterday! If you care what the market did yesterday or what it will do tomorrow you’re not investing, you’re speculating, and speculating chiefly on other people’s gullibility, on the FOMO that drives this cockamamie market. The novelty of Bitcoin, and of cryptocurrencies in general, is not in it’s suitability as a decentralised value-store, but in it’s creation of a global, distributed ponzi-scheme.

The experience of literally watching one naive ‘investor’ indoctrinate another put me in mind of that famous adage that emerged in the boom/bust of 1920′s America:

If shoe shine boys are giving stock tips, then it’s time to get out of the market.
— Joseph Kennedy

Not that there are any shoe shine boys here, but there has been a great proliferation of people touting the merits of an asset class they don’t understand. Whether you believe cryptocurrencies have the potential to displace fiat currencies or not, at present they remain a purely speculative vehicle, not the much vaunted means of democratising finance that a great many charlatans and their devotees loudly proclaim them to be.

Rant over. Angry replies welcome.

This month I was introduced to Sharon Olds, or rather to her work. Satan Says, the title poem of her first published collection (1980) is captivating. I had thought to include my lay analysis here, but I haven’t managed to knock it into shape just yet, and it might have felt a little incongruent – out of place – anyhow. Look for it in the next one, or perhaps I’ll publish it standalone.

The pearls this month are more varied/less thematic than last week, follow only what takes your fancy…

Please think of these links, always, as the vendors at a night market. Most of them you pass by, simply enjoying the fact that they’re there; a few grab your attention; one or two actually provide nourishment.
— Robin Sloan

Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

Toby Shorin 2020, 4000 words

Our long read comes from Toby Shorin who offers a pretty thorough exploration of the growing number of smaller, paying communities and the implications of this new funding model for the web.

The Elusive Male Smile

Timothy Snyder 2021, 1300 words

A poignant look at the effect of covid on a parent raising children in a foreign country. In humble tones, Timothy explores being overwhelmed by the unfamiliar systems he must navigate to support his kids learning, and of the power of the “everyday smile”.

Collage

Timothy Snyder 2021, 8mins audio

I know, two links to the same writer, unconscionable! But justified by the beauty of this, besides, this one is audio so you don’t even have to read it. Timothy’s son’s school project, a collage, inspires a soothing journey through the relationship between the letters C and L in so many words. I’m not usually one for audio, but Timothy’s spoken voice is the perfect companion to his written voice. If you’re not normally one for audio either take this as a solid recommend from someone who was sceptical going in besides, at eight minutes it’ll be no great robbery of your time. It’s tempting to quote from it here, but you deserve to hear it in his voice and unspoiled, so I wont.

Thoughts on total openness of information

Daniel Paluska 2009, 400 words

What if all your private information was public? Sharp, provocative, a nice follow on from People Staring at Computers which featured among last months pearls.

Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?

Philip Oltermann 2019, 2000 words

I tend to avoid linking to major publications, they get enough traction as it is, but this street-level look at the history and future of retail in Berlin and the lessons that it might have to offer in a world where Amazon is becoming synonymous with shopping is both comforting and affirming. Maybe there’s room for passion yet, even if the suffocatingly sterile landscape of western globalisation often makes it hard to believe.

Incremental note taking

Linus Lee 2021, 3600 words

This one’s definitely not for everyone, but if you have an interest in note-taking/thought-capture that borders on the fanatical (as I do) you’ll likely gleen a few good nuggets and a hefty dose of satisfaction from Linus Lee’s condensed, cruft free dive into the ideals by which we should evaluate any tool entering this space.

That’s all my pearls for July. I’m not so pleased with this issue as I was with the last, mostly because of my ugly little rant and also because it doesn’t feel focused enough, but I’m using it as a forcing function so it must go out, the next one will be better, and every one after that I can hope.

☞ reply@silasjelley.com

12:00pm on July 31, 2021 from Nelson, New Zealand

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A feast of links

2021-07-08T12:00:00Z

I love the web – in all it’s world wide wonder. I particularly love the small web, a beautifully idiosyncratic name for a very large cohort of geographically and culturally disparate humans who share their unique voices as they see fit to, on their own domains, in their own words.

The small web is the web of yore, it’s non-commercial, it’s scrappy, and it belongs to all who believe in it. Small eschews large, small spurns the myopia that the pursuit of fame and ‘engagement’ create, small is human scale. This page will be host to some of my favourite artefacts of this wild web, I’d love to hear about yours.

Devon Zuegel consistently weaves threads together and then un-picks them before your eyes, leaving you adrift in quiet wonder. That habit has made her one of the few writers who’s work I will read regardless of whether it touches upon my interests. Her accessible, humble style of writing briefly conceals her brilliance, but read a few of her pieces and you’re sure to notice the pattern: meaningful insights from an uncommonly curious person’s experience of the everyday. Take Independence for whom, ostensibly a quick bit of trivia about a unique California housing development becomes a provocative take on the impacts of genius on communities and their independence.

Parimal Satyal feels much the same way as I do about the [growing hostility of the web][] and his long essay Rediscovering the Small Web is a beautiful reminder of what is lost by the rise and rise of the commercial at the expense of the personal.

Craig Mod is a walker, a writer, and a photographer who also likes toast enough to have self published an incredible book about it. His newsletters (Ridgeline, and Roden) are always a treat for your inbox. Dive in, you’ll not regret it.

Dan Luu’s blog is ugly as sin, two lines of CSS would make it immeasurably more readable, but his deep dives on latency, debugging, CPU’s, and more are brilliant and insightful. If you’re into hardware, read his exploration of keyboard latency, and then read everything else he’s ever written.

Derek Sivers’ site is a good place to go when your struggling with a problem, it’s peppered with a lot of small, easily digested wisdom and a perspective that only a life spent doing things a bit differently can deliver. Read It’s all who you know?

Jeremy Wagner has sage advice to temper the onward march of technological bloat on the web. ‘Make it boring’ exemplifies the thesis that is at the core of his writing and his work.

Jason Kottke has been writing at kottke.org for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Early web, an immense catalogue, a pioneer and a steward of this thing called blogging.

Idle Words, home to Maciej Ceglowski has been a recent discovery for me.

Three Quarks Daily counts many of the worlds prominent contemporary philosophers, physicists and writers among its readers. You would be hard pressed to find a richer aggregation of humanities thought output.

Rachel Kroll is a virtuoso sysadmin, her blog is a trove of novel wisdom that touches almost every dusty corner of the datecentre and the systems that hum within. Systems are often no more stable than a house of cards, Rachel has seen it all and solved most of it. I like ‘Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory’ as an entry point but the whole site is diamonds so start anywhere.

12:00pm on July 8, 2021 from Wellington, New Zealand

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Art, ideas, and how we share them

2021-06-30T12:00:00Z

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
— Salvador Dali

I have had to hold Dali’s words between my gritted teeth as I try and put pen to paper this month. Usually if my writing starts to feel mimetic I abandon it, if I have the energy I start anew, too often I slay it fully. This month I managed to quell the urge to discard and actually hit publish on the first (small) part of A short walk beneath a long white cloud, my account of walking the 3300 kilometre Te Araroa trail.

Continuing that New Zealand theme, the best book I finished in June was without doubt The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. Set in Hokitika, about 150 years ago and 150 miles south-west of where I am here in Nelson, it is an extraordinary tale of high-stakes, betrayal, murder, and the clashing of language, culture, and class in gold-rush Aotearoa. At almost 900 pages, it isn’t a short read but it is thrilling and beautiful from first to last. The weaving of astrological elements into the plot and progression of the story gives it a unique inevitability, as though its final crescendo could only have occurred as, and when, it did – as if we were simply waiting for the stars and the planets to align.

And if that put you off, let me ground that astrological dimension with a quote from the author:

I like to think of the zodiac as having a lot in common with the Greek pantheon: less of a thing to be believed in, and more of a repository of cultural knowledge and history that is archetypal, and mythic, and responsive to close study.

Throughout June I have returned again and again to Käthe Kollwitz’s Selbstbildnis mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-Portrait with Hand on the Forehead). Kollwitz was a prolific self-portraitist, completing more than a hundred brooding and deeply emotional images of herself, portraits that capture all of humanity in their singular intensity. Self Portrait, Hand at the Forehead, like much of her work, has a dark and oppressive quality. The detail in the knuckles of the hand that casts a brooding shadow over the left side of her face, the resignation in the mouth, the deadened exhaustion in the visible eye, all together create the face of pain, of true sorrow, better perhaps than any other artist. And all this in a portrait that pre-dates some of her greatest sorrows, the death of her son, the horrors of both world wars.

Looking back over the things I’ve read online this month, the theme seems to be the nature and exchange of ideas. From questions about the scope and ethics of art, to the heightened emotion of online exchanges, the notion of ideas eclipsing their creators, the importance of making our work accessible, and ending on a short bit about the craft of photography.

Kyle McDonald, People Staring at Computers, 2012, 9400 words

This was far and away the most provocative piece I read this month, it raises great questions about the role of art in society and perhaps about the damage that has been done to that role in our age. It also offers a unique entry point into the discussion on reasonable expectations of privacy, who we implicitly and explicitly permit to observe us, and what recourse looks like for entities large and small when a trespass is perceived. Read it with as open a mind as you can.
Devon Zuegel, The silence is deafening, 2020, 800 words

What is lost as more of our social interactions move online? Devon highlights some of the key social cues that don’t survive this transition, and offers meaningful guidance on how we can salvage them in an increasingly polarized conversation.
Nadia Eghbal, The tyranny of ideas, 2019, 1500 words

Ideas often take on a life of their own, in our heads sure, but out of our heads they can truly run wild. Here Nadia likens ideas to virus’s, spreading through the individual and co-opting groups, framing people as mere hosts to the ideas that inhabit them.

Once ideas find an audience, they’re hard to eradicate. Many a surprised creator has found that they’ve lost control over an idea, watching helplessly as it’s shaped and reinterpreted in ways they didn’t intend. It is enormously difficult for a successful creator to escape their own idea, because ideas need hosts to survive.
— Nadia Eghbal, The tyranny of ideas, 2019
Terence Eden, The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML, 2021, 600 words

A thoughtful, and frankly, charming anecdote about digital accessibility and why championing and demanding it matters.
Simon Griffee, Editing, 2011, 400 words

As a keen amateur photographer, Simon’s short take on editing was a comforting reminder that even the greats take crap photos, that much of the craft of photography is in choosing which of your photos to show, not in never taking a dud exposure.

12:00pm on June 30, 2021 from Nelson, New Zealand

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