Oblomovka

I work in an entirely (mostly) remote organization. Inside that organization, I interact with an extremely decentralized ecosystem. Some of the people I co-operate with the most are in other orgs, some are individual contractors volunteers, others are conglomerations of mononymed Internet-monickered mystery-types. A remarkable amount of my and my colleagues work is intended at making this whole system less opaque and confusing.

We spend a lot of time jocularly consoling people that this fog-of-peace is one of the consequences of decentralization: but is it any different from working in an impenetrable bureaucracy or a sprawling marketplace? It definitely feels harder, in the same way that I’ve found other extremely horizontal un-organizations (like Noisebridge) more challenging to parse than more trad orgs. There’s a reason why Seeing Like A State talks so much about legibility. Things that are built in other ways to the standard top-down system are going to have to invent their own ways to be legible, or they will hide their functioning in entirely new, impenetrable manners.

A year or so ago, I described one of the frustrations: modern remote, distributed, internet-mediated environments, it struck me, have become oral cultures. And yes, this is me, trapped at last in nostalgic revery, bemoaning the passing of the older memory of a (non-existent) Internet, which was all about RFCs, and beautifully-crafted emails, and well-pruned wikis; and also me whining about Youtube Videos, and Zoom chats, and the tiktoks and the DMs.

But to be honest, it’s not about the Internet getting less literate or some such kneejerk swing. It’s about the multi-modality of real-world human interaction cramming itself into another, narrower-bounded space. Writing is that, of course, a narrower form: but it’s a compression we have a lot of familiarity with, and a lot of scaffolding to support. Orality per se, as a communication medium in itself, has perhaps withered a little recently, back in the real world. We shunted it off to performance and spectacle. Its unsearchability and distance from writing made it a form unsuited for legibility. It sat in phone-calls and radio, answering machines and tannoys. Oral histories are anything but: they’re transcripts, and hard to interpret.

And now, somehow, it’s back — and it’s having to hold up so much more. I predicted, years ago, the rise of informality in the public square, but I didn’t imagine that in pushing more of our life through these high-broadband pipes, that it would switch so quickly from literature, to “video”, to … whatever this is. This chit-chat async glimmer of multiple conversations, hemming and hahing and trying so hard to implement ephemerality.

It’s so flammable, right now, too. We talk and then suddenly misunderstand, and the misunderstandings jump from conversation to conversation faster than we can track. No-one is on the same page, because there are no pages — just scrolling and backscrolls.

I’m not really bemoaning this: it’s another fascinating trail, another thing that demands tooling. And the tooling, like dock leaves, appear magically next to the nettle: I love how AI is able to listen so hard to orality, and hopefully parse and pull it all together. Local AIs, at least; AIs that are ours, not those of a wider surveillance, working to make everything legible, so the state will see all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 12th, 2025 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS/Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.