It’s been an awesome week in Sydney at Sunrise. I loved the opportunity to talk about The Good Internet and how we might get it back, by building, teaching, reclaiming our feeds and attention, and exploring outside the walls. You can see the slides and text here, and I’ll add the video when it’s available.
Also, get yourself friends so awesome they fly to another country to cheer you on and BRING SURPRISE MERCH:
I’ve been stoked to get such lovely feedback on last week’s deep dive at Fansplaining, The RPF Question. Please, keep sending me your awesome rpf memories!
Last year I read Susie Dent’s debut novel Guilty by Definition. Susie is the lexicographer on British game show Countdown (and on the comedy panel version 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown). Her book focuses on a group of dictionary editors at Oxford University solving a mystery. Without spoilers, part of the plot revolves around a commonplace book.
‘So, a commonplace book? What was that exactly?’ he asked.
‘Good question. It was a journal, a sort of personal archive in the early modern period – well, say from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.’
He blew over the top of his coffee. ‘So, Shakespearean times.’
‘Yep, and a couple of hundred years either side. Writing a commonplace book was a way of creating your own external hard drive of quotations, in a way. But not just quotations: thoughts, philosophy, news items, anything that caught the writer’s eye. Or ear.’
The commonplace book is important to dictionary makers because it’s a record of the language that was used when the book was compiled and gives a unique insight into how words and meanings came to evolve over time. At one stage, one of the characters in the book, Safi, says:
I’ve been reading up on commonplace books in general. Thousands of them survive, even from antiquity, but very few from women. People used them as miscellanies. There are recipes for ink and rat poison, instructions on card tricks, bits of biography, how to converse properly in French . . . Funny though, it’s that stuff, the unusual odds and ends, that makes them so valuable now.
Later, Safi muses on the ephemeral nature of phases of language:
The world needed another dictionary, one for London English in its entirety. It should capture and codify this moment in time: the chat of the city’s kids, their mouths full of the riches of Bengali and Punjabi, Yoruba and Tamil, Akan, Arabic, and Turkish and so many more – over three hundred languages, each given a new, homespun dimension. It would document the lexicon of Peckham, where a new sociolect was slipping effortlessly into the mainstream, wrapping itself around existing language to become a uniquely anglicised hybrid of itself. ‘Multicultural London English’ was too soulless a term for such wealth, Safi thought. But it did need to be lexicalised, otherwise in fifty years’ time the scholars of tomorrow would be puzzling over grime lyrics in the same way students today grappled with Beowulf.
I’m the sort of person who always fancies that I could become an excellent journaler. I will always fall victim to the idea that I’m just one new notebook or special pen away from succeeding. So I loved this piece from Iza in Culture Vulture, journal like everyone’s watching, which gets at part of what I’ve struggled with over the years.
Journaling became a commodity rather than a genuine activity. It became a badge you want to put on your uniform, something that positions you as an intellectual, a person in tune with their inner something. Journaling became a Pinterest board
It has to be beautiful, aesthetic, colour-coded. It takes time to set up, it looks flawless on insta.
This is what the characters in Susie’s book highlight — that’s what useful for archivists and researchers and the future about a commonplace book is the authentically everyday, not the things that we polish for public consumption:
‘I thought commonplaces were just ordinary sayings – like clichés.’
‘Well, that’s what “a commonplace” came to mean,’ Martha replied, ‘because keeping a commonplace book became so widespread, and people would copy down the same quotations, under the same headings. In the end you could get pre-printed ones so you didn’t have to do any of the actual reading yourself. It’s a bit like some self-help books today that are just a selection of quotable bits from famous philosophers.’
‘Like those inspirational sayings you see on Instagram.
So what is that we’re saving, or not saving?
As I was working on the talk for Sunrise, and on my book project, I’ve been struck time and again by how much we’ve already lost of the internet era. Linkrot is real, not only stealing cryptobros’ monkey jpgs, but also meaning that our personal histories and community histories are vanishing as well. For example, it was wild to see this (an image from one of my Sunrise slides) pop up in Garbage Day as the last known screenshot of The X-Files usenet group:
Over time, any number of platforms and companies have tried to transfer the notion of commonplace book online, encouraging us to save, bookmark, and index the things we have seen and liked. The web 2.0 era introduced us to social bookmarks. tags and folksonomies. I tried del.icio.us for a while, thinking it was the answer to everything, but abandoned it. I had a premium subscription to evernote and the moleskine to match. Who even knows what I saved there? Bet it was interesting, but it’s gone.
Now, I think my contemporary commonplace book is a single note in the Notes app on my phone. It’s my shopping list, books I’ve read, ideas for Christmas presents, thoughts for my book that haven’t made it into Scrivener yet, thoughts composed while half asleep or drunk that I can’t now make head nor tail of: “angry loosen tie spy movie”.
And unfortunately, this is the most ephemeral because I write over it all the time, and it only partly makes sense. I don’t know why I made a note about telling Luce something to do with Baz Luhrman’s Wear Sunscreen. I don’t delete that because it might come back to me one day. It probably won’t.
The promise of bringing a commonplace online is not only to try and preserve things but the opportunity to find connections — bidirectional links between ideas. Are.na lets you create an “internet memory palace”. Newly-launched Sublime shows you related ideas alongside the things you’ve saved. But note-taking apps won’t make us smarter:
In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough…The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.
I’ve been thinking about it again this year as I focus on the good internet. There’s a reason we use gardens as a metaphor (walled gardens, rewilding our attention). This is a great essay from Maggie Appleton on the history and ethos of digital gardens.
Here’s a YouTube video of a digital garden in Notion. Here’s a digital garden the creator describes as a commonplace book.
I’ve been writing this newsletter every week for 18 weeks now, and one of the things that strikes me as frustrating about it is, like a classic “blog” of olde (or, for that matter, a commonplace book), it’s not easily explorable. It’s reverse chronological. The connections between thoughts aren’t there unless I link them.
We’ve been lulled into this way of thinking about the internet as a broadcast medium, sending a curated firehose of content to our faces. It’s going to take a bit to remember we can go exploring again, go wandering through gardens, tend our own spaces, draw our own connections. That not everything needs to be polished and finished and ready for publication before we share it with others.
And we need to find a way that works for each of us to preserve the things we’re thinking about and talking about: the seeds and the seedlings and the weeds and the wildflowers. Preserve them in a way that’s under our own control, not using a tool or a platform that will inevitably disappear. Someone in the future will eventually thank us for it.
a few weeks back I talked about high-demand groups and the communities we choose to join. Related: this is a fab list from Teen Vogue of the 37 best documentaries about cults.
this is a great edition of Milly’s newsletter Tiny Rebellions:
Late-stage capitalism thrives on the enslavement of our time and attention. Fascist regimes work best if they are sort of slipped on like a subtle perfume; ideally if the people don’t notice, it’s much easier to get away with. If we’re all too busy working our long hours and doomscrolling and keeping up with the latest culture war and at each others’ throats that’s good for them; it means we don’t have the chance to form class solidarity and fight back.
if you liked last week’s newsletter about Conclave, or the earlier one about larps, you’ll love this from Adrian Hon We’re all going to the Conclave larp.
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