Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.

As Graydon Hoare puts it; always bet on text. Text is “stable”, “flexible”, “efficient”, and “socially useful”. All of these make text a powerful medium to work in, but they mask another quality — that of lossy compression. Humans are blessed with tremendous mental capacity; even someone on the lower scales of intelligence outperforms most supercomputers, all while merely running on a few watts of power. This overabundance of computation, constantly running every second of every day, has incentivised humanity to create systems of ritual, magic, and religion to otherwise simple phenomena.

“Shower thoughts”, of different kinds, are an example of how our brains are constantly reinterpreting the world around us. It is particularly a common activity to play out imaginary arguments between oneself and another person whilst in the shower. This is not just because our imagination is then fully in control of what is being said, but also how it is interpreted (and we can also reïnterpret what our opponent means). Much of the trouble in interhuman communication comes from the lossy quality of text, speech, and words.

It is noteworthy that this is not unique to text, but rather a quality of language more broadly, but this character is magnified enormously due to text’s durability and longevity. Sending a message encoded in text (whether by sms, letter, or granite slab) requires the effort of creating a symbolic representation to create the message (writing), but is is equally important that the act of consuming the written material (reading), and understanding it, requires an equal — if not greater — amount of symbolic processing. This is why text is such a useful medium for communication — it offloads information from the text itself and instead leans on the intellectual and creative capacities of both author and reader.

It is a common saying that “a picture tells a thousand words”. One might therefore infer that graphical representations are more efficient — at least for broad and vague concepts such as emotion. In some regards this is true, it would be very difficult to represent a Rothko in text¹, but this is once again merely the consequence of text’s lossy quality. Take for example the following picture²:

The image shows a photograph of a lake with slightly overcast skies, taken from one of the shores. The opposite shore is rocky and covered with evergreen trees. On the left half of the image the shore rises to a hill. The lower left corner has cyan text that reads “02/08/2012”.

This description is not a perfect representation of the image, but it allows your mind to create its own description that fills in the gaps. Even the simplest part of the image to describe, the text, does not specify a shade of cyan nor any font or sizing.

Another field that might argue against mere textual representation is that of statistics and/or data visualisation. Florence Nightingale’s contribution was just as much one of data presentation as much as it was one of data collection³. But it illuminating that not only are graphs often turned back into textual representation, even at the cost of resolution (via techniques such as regression), but it is also an expectation in academia that one provide the raw, often text-based, data because it allows for easier reproducibility. If images were really preferable then would it not be easier to directly employ the results of the visual representation?

There is however a way to merge the strengths of text and the visual medium: vector-based art. This is practically a list of instructions (in text) as to how an image should be reproduced. Maggie Appleton concedes (from an artistic perspective) that “Vectors are great for [sic] create hard, crisp edges and working with perfect geometric forms”. That adding texture and imperfect geometric forms is difficult to do in text is to be expected — it is much easier to describe a “perfect cube” than a “skewed cube” (in what way, to what degree?).

Text is, contrary to speech and other utilisations of language, an asocial social medium. The author, in creating a work meant for social communication, is alone in its creation. I have written about this aspect of writing before, in regards to its impact on email, but have since come to realize that it generalized much more broadly. The absence of thought contained in the “blank page” prompts the creation of philosophical thought to fill it. This jolts the mind into movement, and does it as much as a good conversation. As one writes the mind is captured in a dialogue between itself and the very text it is creating⁴.

The mind requires this activity in order to be truly alive. That we humans are constantly in intellectual motion is one of the elements that builds up our consiciousness, it allows us to be continuously aware of our continued existence. When we are in a dreamless sleep, our mind ceases to exist and we are philosophically dead for a short time — we are neither aware of our own existence nor are we creating new symbolic representations. When we are lost in the land of the dream however (regardless of if awake or asleep) we are in every sense alive.

Writing qua intellectual method does not require any form of advanced vocaubulary — or even developed communicative capabilities. It is a skill that is centered on one’s capacity to interact with yourself, with the golem of static intelligence that represents a snapshot of your mind. It is in this regard both an inner and an outer practice that showcases your capacity to be one with the world and to make sense of it as well as mold it.

It is not strange then that large language models (llms), one of many machine learning techniques, were the first machines humans built that people started to be considered sapient⁵. Computer vision models, many of which have been around for some time now, were never even considered to be sapient, not just because they are very dissimilar to human intelligence but also because they lack the capacity for symbolic action that llms posses. While a computer vision model can identify a cat (and therefore has some sort of symbolic knowledge) they are unable to process the knowledge of the cat’s existence in a broader context. This is the step that llm’s take; they are capable of continuously creating a mental context, with thoughts that themselves impact its future thoughts.

The difference between the human mind then and an llm is that we humans survive a much greater amount of time than most llms, and are able to filter information much more effectively. When you open up your favourite llm app, asking it whether or not there are rats in Alberta (there are not) a new mind is created, thinks for a few fractions of a second, and then instantly disappears. To say that it is killed is perhaps an overstatement, it is closer to being asleep. The llm stops thinking as soon as it stops writing, and then is “reawakened” as soon as you ask it another question. During this intermediate period it is in a proper trance, in that some (or all in this case) of its mental capacities are in a loop and are then philosophically disabled. The llm is stuck on one singular representation of its mind, incapable of changing it for whatever reason.

Intelligence is in some regards a measure of how nuanced and detailed your perspective is. For llms, this is largely correspondent to context length — more information that can be used to inform the next token. Moonshot’s (月之暗面) ceo Yang Zhiling (杨植麟) explained in February of 2024:

To achieve agi, long-context will be a crucial factor. Every problem is essentially a long-context problem — the evolution of architectures throughout history has fundamentally been about increasing effective context length.

Humans are very good at this, but particularly we are good at picking details of our experiences that stick out and are most important — you probably do not remember what shade your shoes were when you met the love of your life for example. Instead we filter our memories and pick out what may be relevant in the future (the “lessons to be learned”). Those lessons are then used to extrapolate information in all areas of your life and — particularly of relevance to this text — when reading.

Natalie Lawrence wrote in What Counts as a Mind? that the representations of llms are distinctly different from those of organic creatures, and that

The predictions of a computer and a human brain function in completely different ways. Bonobos, stinging nettles and amoebae are meaning-makers. They collect sensory information from their environments, such as changes in light or temperature, then take action accordingly. This slightly shifts their perceptions and the predictions that result, and the loop continues.

In contrast, llms use syntax to generate outputs, predicting the next token in the chain using algorithmic rules sifted from massive data sets.

The irony is that the processes that she describes here are both the same, the only difference is the language used. llms function by predicting the next token; a loop that gathers the information available and then takes action, adjusting accordingly before continuing on just as the bonobo reaches out and checks the sturdiness of a branch before attempting to climb. I do not deny that the difference between machines and biological beings is very great (what is it like being an llm? Do they dream of electric sheep?)⁶ but offhandedly denying their sentience does not bring any further knowledge forward. That plants and synthetic materiels exhibit some mind-like properties seems like a model that could expand to include language models, not one that arbitrarily excludes them.

Programming languages, one of the most ubiquitous applications for plain text (in both the proper and metaphorical sense), are one of the most interesting advancements in the fields of text in this regard. Many programmers may think of the code itself as “being” the program, but that is not the case. Programming languages are really codified (so that different people can read the same text) ways to create commands and instructions for the computer. The C programming language is itself not “fast”, though it explicitly exposes very low-level functionality, but instead is compiled into a program that runs very quickly. This is thanks to the tireless work of compiler engineers, who have come up with a lot of interesting tricks to interpret instructions and come up with shortcuts that still end up with the same result.

Even programming then, one of the most rigid methods to use text (one has to be very careful to use the words incantations, oftentimes even with correct case), is still up for interpretation. This is so clear that an interpreter is even a strict technical term in the field of programming languages. But as I have just explained, compilers are themselves another form of interpreter, albeit with a wider definition than the one commonly accepted. This is why hand-optomization is so rare these days — the level of abstraction allowed by written language allows the programmer to build their own mental model of what the machine is doing rather than comprehending each step of the machine code.

Hopefully I have shown sufficiently that the many reasons that written text is so pervasive and powerful is due to a few factors — its durability, its lossy nature, and its consciousness-evoking dialogical quality. Text is therefore unlikely to to be supplanted any time soon by a superior medium. If it is supplanted it will likely be by some medium that has yet to be invented. ❦

For a period in high school my cellular data stopped working for some inexplicable reason. This meant that my phone only had an internet connection when I was at home or had access to some other Wi-Fi network. At first this was of course incredibly frustrating, but since I had no time to fix it I simply had to come up with ad hoc solutions. This forced me to be a lot more intentional when it came to my media consumption.

If you want to consume something when you are out of the house (say on your commute) this meant that you have to have downloaded it in advance. pdfs, html documents, music to listen to — it all has to be pre-planned. Most troublesome however was the inability to use gps. Instead one had to memorize or write down addresses and routes, download maps of different areas, and ask strangers for directions. This last practice has practically dissipated from everyday use, but it was of course quite common before. This was perhaps one of the most strongly positive aspects of not being able to find your way around — it gives you a stronger anchor to your surroundings rather than merely gliding past a world of extras. Being consciously aware of what media you are consuming, and for what purpose, also allows you to more critically evaluate that media, rather than just letting it flow through you.

I think doing something of this sort is a good idea for most people. It does not involve any major sacrifices in that you still have access to your tiktok slop feed, but only at home. You don’t sacrifice the security of being able to call for help (you still have your phone) but you also can’t respond to slack messages immediately as they come in. Instead you have these specific moments of prescence whenever you are out partying, walking the dog, or just commuting. The knowledge that you are capable of this stays with you even if you choose to enable mobile data (or in my case your connection suddenly starts working one day).

The biggest downside of not using social media is not getting regular updates in things that are going on. The largest issue I had with this is that I would spend enormous amounts of time trying to read everything there was to know about everything going on at any given moment. Not only was this incredibly draining to do, I also realized that it didn’t give me enough time or energy to think about big-picture trends. The solution for me was twofold:

1. Stop using news apps and read an actual newspaper.

Reading a newspaper — ideally a physical paper one — creates a hard cut-off for consuming news. You can’t read any more about a topic than what is in your hand! It also gives you a nice feeling of being “caught up” on everything that has been happening. Getting your flow of information from an actual reputable source is also better than merely having it filtered through some unknown twitter user. In my case I read The Economist, a general news paper with some extra focus on business and politics². I particularly enjoy the number of graphs and data-driven journalism since I love statistics. Since it is released weekly I also get to read it at a leisurely pace.

1. Get updates through rss feeds

Reading on an analog paper is lovely, but there are of course some things that can’t be delivered to physically or that come out on an irregular basis. These sort of things are best served through an rss feed in my experience. rss is supported in more places than you might think, and if not there are often ways to integrate it with an rss reader³. Having a fixed, reverse-chronological list of things to read (or otherwise go through, rss can be used for formats other than text) also gives you this feeling of being “done” that a newspaper gives you. There is no infinite feed that can get you stuck scrolling for 6 hours. You can still use get some digital media delivered to your phone, but won’t be glued to it and it will return to “just” a communications device after a short while.

“But what about discovery?” I head you say. For this I recommend Andreas Gohr’s indieblog.page (where you can also find this website). He has rss feeds to a number of random daily indieblog entries⁴. Not every random blog post will be interesting, but sometimes you’ll find someone doing interesting things — at which point you can subscribe to their rss feed. You can read feeds in lots of different ways — I use feeder on my smartphone and elfeed on my laptops and desktop.

1. Actually talk to people

Scrolling through your friends’ social media posts may seem like a good way to keep in touch with them, but in actuality you are not creating or maintaining a genuine connection with them — you are merely interacting with a simulacrum of them. Our brains are not made for distinguishing the differences between the two⁵ but we nevertheless suffer the consequences. The solution to this? Just reach out to people that you might otherwise not have. Either message them directly, email them, or give them a quick call.

There doesn’t have to be any stress about it — and in fact there should not be. Genuine human interaction is by definition messy, and that is okay. Social media often tries to show the existence some of perfect social being, the “pickup artist” that always has the perfect lines that always work, the influencer with the perfect jokes that everyone laughs at (while being at a carefully orchestrated photo-shoot) et cetera. The techniques they are employing is of course just simple cherry picking, but it is easy to fall for it in the moment. Embracing the messiness of human conversation — and the cost and benefits that come with it — is much more rewarding in the long run.

Social media is in practice not a social endeavour. Instead it is a form of entertainment, a means to observe things going on. This does not have to be inherently bad in any way, but it is clear to anyone in the modern day that social media platforms are not your friend, but instead want to keep you addicted while they show you more advertisements. It would be a mistake however to abandon all forms of media.

It has become clearer to me over the period after the covid-19 pandemic that contentedness — although not happiness — can only be attained through active engagement. Victor Breder puts it as “I love having read”. Happiness can be found easily in the individual moment through listening to someone else’s jokes, social media, sex, or drugs but long-term contentedness requires effort to be put in. It requires the mind to be fully occupied with whatever one is doing. It is straining, and it has to be because it should challenge you.

The difference then is not as simple as “stop doing X”. Watching instagram reels is not inherently negative, it is possible to be intellectually stimulated through them, but it is much harder to misuse a physical book or magazine. I also have no problem with movies in this regard because if I am sitting down to watch a film I am entirely focused on the subject matter at hand. A problem would theoretically emerge if I am merely watching it to “pass time” or get some cheap dopamine. The problem merely emerges with one’s interaction with media, not the media itself.

But this still does not mean that we should blame ourselves for failing to restrain ourselves when it comes to these new addictive technologies. They are genuinely problematic, and you need to identify where the line is for you and what media you can regularly interact with without misuse. For me I will confess that this line is quite low — I found most pure social media platforms too addictive — but it might be different for you (although I think that it is really quite low for most people).

The methods outlined here work for me, but they are by no means guaranteed to work for you. Experimenting with different forms of media consumption is not only one of the most impactful changes you can make to your life, but it is also quite fun! Optimising this is also one way to easily challenge yourself — is what you are doing right now really what will satisfy you? If yes; great! Maybe try and do more of it? If not; try and identify what caused you to get into that situation and create frameworks in your life that will effortlessly guide you away from those activities. ❦

I usually always carry a few business cards. This is quite uncommon in this day and age, with the need for remembering phone numbers having disappeared and with the ubiquity of social media for creating, sharing, and maintaining contact. But I reject the use of mainstream social media, partly for ideological reasons but also for practical ones¹. This inevitably requires making certain sacrifices when it comes to what events I can participate in, on how learning about what people I know are up to, and on how I can communicate with the people in my life around me. There are some drawbacks that you might expect — you can not dm someone on instagram if you do not have instagram yourself — but there are hidden drawbacks that may not be immediately obvious.

People want to communicate in the medium that they like the best, that is almost tautological. While I am not shy about my feelings about the wonders of email I still do not expect others to share them. This means I that email is usually not an option. But I still want to use open standards. Thankfully, likely because of their open nature, these standards are next to ubiquitous. Email is one of them, and sms (and phone calls) are another. sms is not a great technology by itself (primarily because it is not encrypted), but it works well enough for planning meetups where you can continue talking about your secrets in person. Signal works very well in combination with this, as you can give out your phone number to people and easily “upgrade” to an encrypted connection if your conversational partner has signal. But people usually do not prefer using sms, and so there will always be some friction in dialogue. This is the use case that business cards serve for me.

When meeting a new person, they will commonly ask for my {snapchat, instagram, twitter et cetera} and I will proceed to have a short conversation where they cycle through the services they use — followed by me saying I do not use them. Business cards instead allow me to quickly communicate my preferences without going through a fruitless conversation, and are usually well appreciated. Since business cards are so rare in regular interpersonal contexts they serve as a good conversation starter and are quite memorable as well. The cards contribute to a memorable interaction, and mean that people are more likely to keep in touch (since they get to keep the card).

My first batch of cards were made in 2023, and I made a total of 250 of them. I usually carry a few (2-5) on my person at all times and give them out to new people I meet. If I am going to some kind of networking event I might bring more, but usually not more than will comfortably fit in my phone or wallet. Having carried them for perhaps 2 and a half years now (and also having run out) I get an average consumption of:

(/ 250 (* 365 2.5))
;;; => 0.273972602739726

So I have on average given out one card every 3-4 days. This does not mean that I meet someone new that often; what commonly happens is that I meet lots of new people in a new context, and proportionally give out lots of cards at once. A common occurance is that I give one person a card, and then that person shows shows other people (“omg look at what Joar gave me”) and then more people ask for them. That means having to carry cards unnecessarily most days and running out almost immediately when I do need them. Nevertheless I have found a target of 5 cards is a good amount.

If you are thinking of getting cards of your own I highly recommend designing them yourself. It is a great opportunity for a truly free form of creative expression. No one is in charge of deciding how your cards will look or be shaped other than yourself, and its a way to express yourself in a new medium. While most printers will give you a generous bulk discount for ordering large volumes of cards I like that smaller orders allow you to experiment with new designs and doesn’t put as much pressure on getting it “right” the first time.

With the new second-generation cards I had a few things that I wanted to do with the design:

1. Move from a Swedish business card format to a more continental size². This is the size of credit cards and ids and so will comfortably fit into people’s wallets. This was a very annoying issue, and I am okay with sacrificing the ability to use certain business card holders.
2. Include my whole name. I think “Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt” looks quite striking when written out in full, and so I would like to include it once again on the card, rather than just the shortened “Joar von Arndt”. It is quite long however, and so requires some creative design work.
3. Make use of the International Typographic Style or elements from 1960’s Swiss-style design. This is a deviation from my old design using the older-looking serif font of im Fell. This might have been caused by watching the wonderful documentary Helvetica (2007).
4. Switch to the new provider-independent email address of “joarxpablo@vonarndt.se”.
5. Use the correct domain for this website, rather than redirecting from my old neocities domain.

This is the first-generation card that is being replaced:

The line at the top is fun, and has on some occasions sparked conversations just by itself, but I did not feel a very intense need to keep it for the next batch of cards as it is quite difficult to work into another design and also may be a bit too narcissistic. The texture on the card is from the paper, 300gsm Conqueror laid.

Throughout the creative process, I saved eight different designs as ideas worth keeping around (so that I could continue working on them or use them as reference). There were of course an infinite number of variations of these, some of which were different enough so that they could very well be regarded as new designs of their own. These are the ones that survived, displayed in as chronological an order as possible.

Compared to the front, this was quite easy. This side should not try to “compete” with the front for attention, but should more just be a supportive space for additional information, chiefly a qr code to this website. For this I had three main approaches.

Designing your own business cards is not just a fun project, but it is also practical. It makes you more willing to give them out, that is why you made them the way they are after all. I highly recommend anyone to do the same, and please email me if you do — I’d love to see what you have made. I made all of my designs in inkscape a wonderful free-as-in-freedom vector design tool. I printed my cards at Pixel Palace, an independent print shop in Stockholm. ❦

In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem, with each method merely remaining due to network effects, but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and not a weakness. I do however still see what I deem as a misuse of tools, and I shall endeavour to explain, and hopefully convince you of, my ways of structuring communication in different spheres.

The key difference that I think many do not make is the division between urgency and importance. This might seem an unwieldy or arbitrary division, but I believe it is crucial. In many cases needing an answer quickly is the only thing one cares about, and in others it is the accuracy of the response that matters. To explain simply, here an order of different modes of communications:

Sorted by importance:

When you want to be very clear about something you always want to meet in person, and if speed is necessary nothing is faster than calling someone’s cellphone. But there is one medium that has been overlooked, or in many cases even despised, email.

The Indieweb wiki’s section on email describes an “Older [reason] to use email” as “messaging among older internet users” as if this is an archaic or outdated form of messaging. This is echoed by my anecdotal experiences with talking to younger generations of people who in many cases detest email, having only used it in a professional setting and for making “accounts” to websites that then flood them with newsletters and advertisements. I understand these experiences that I imagine many people have, but they do not mean that email should be thrown out altogether. Instead it should occupy a new place in the way people communicate.

The word revolution has an interesting history, meaning both a transformative change in a given field (although often political) as well as a simple revolution of a spinning object, returning to its starting position (see rpm; revolutions per minute)¹. These two seemingly homonymous words are however deeply interconnected, and to explain this I want to use the example of the Glorious Revolution. It was not only a profound political development, overthrowing the established idea of the divine right of kings and replacing it with popular sovereignty, but also formulating it as a return to the normal political order of the ancient rights of the English people². The Meiji Restoration in Japan was also of this nature, a profound and forward-looking development that framed itself as a return to the original state of things.

So what does this have to do with email communication for the kidz? I see email as a niche that no other medium occupies, that being asynchronous communication. All communication is of course asynchronous in some sense, but there is an expectation that texting should ideally be done instantly and intensely. One is expected to respond quickly, and “leaving” someone “on read” is seen as an insult. I think that this form of synchronous communication, when combined with the scale of modern technology, creates enormous stress on the individual. At all times one is able to intimately³ communicate with thousands of people, leaving the individual paralysed from overstimulation. Email by contrast emphasises long-form messaging, often being longer than posts on microblogging services meant for permanent or semi-permanent publication. This gives the individual more time to respond but also the sender to live their own life while waiting for a response. Originally this was of course a technological necessity — it was impossible to reach someone through the internet when they were not at their computer — but that limitation has since disappeared through the introduction of the cellular phone and later the smartphone.

This does not mean that the problems with email are not real but that they are obscuring the usefulness of the technology. The primary change I would recommend (or that needs to be done) is the division between communication and information. There is no denying that a lot of services rely on email for registration and advertisements. But there is a clear mental barrier between receiving an email from a real human being and a machine sending you a morass of spam that one is not expected to reply to, but simply to consume⁴. The greatest damage to email has been done by no-reply@domain.com. To counter this one needs multiple email addresses, one for machine communication that is seldom used and another for human connection. This allows for the mental separation of messages so that the enormous flood of email does not drown out the signal, and so that individuals are not anxious when they are sent an email.

Herman Martinus of Bear Blog calls this a part of digial hygiene, and proposes that one should try and “explicity act” on each email, either filtering them out, responding to them, or archiving them. We both seem to have independetly arrived at similar conclusions, where emails strictly needs to be kept for interpersonal communication, and that mere information should be kept out to avoid drowning out signal.

What would then be required to return to the earlier asynchronous mode? It is unclear if the massive use by commercial-scale actors can be undone or reduced, and email spam filters mean that the system is heavily centralized to just a few big actors. But it is hard to deny the powerful networking effects of email, where almost every user of the internet can be assumed to have one. Would it be better to simply torch email and convince a new generation of users to move to a new system of e2ee async messaging? I do not know. But I do still believe that email has the potential to be the solution to many people’s problems with the internet and communication as a whole.

It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consumption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves entertainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisements. This has been accelerated due to llm’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.

Social media’s fall from grace did not occur with the release of Chatgpt, but it has accelerated since then. Social media platforms do not make money off of our enjoyment, but merely from our attention. This was perhaps best displayed by the stratospheric rise of tiktok, and of the subsequent explosion in short-form video platforms that followed. These are built on an ecosystem that has continuously been trying to capture more and more of our waking hours. Actions to resist this were slowly being taken, even if subconsciously. The decline of independent forums, where discussion is instead taken to deep-web⁵ spaces like slack, discord, group chats and direct messages, is perhaps the clearest sign of this. This was well underway before generative ai arrived, but as Maggie Appleton has pointed out, “the dark forest” of spam and slop has expanded — and will continue to expand — rapidly.

When talking about email as a mere asynchronous medium the focus is on how email benefits the user individually, and on how spam has forced people to move to other such mediums. Here, I instead want to describe how one can not just return to the email-workflow of yore, but reimagine it as a new form of social media that allows one to curate and decide on what to interact with, but also how to format that interaction and to contribute to the meaning and interpretation with the work.

Writing emails is a laborious task, at least compared to scrolling an infinite feed. But it is this labour that is put in to email that is the differentiating factor. Microblogging platforms like twitter, mastodon, and bluesky can never become places for genuine presence because of its ease of use. Writing a toot on mastodon is little different from writing as short prompt for an ai. What llms have taught us is that one must put in the work to create something meaningful in the eyes of others, because what is valuable is the time you spent in formulating those ideas.

Social interaction is by necessity a creative process. One does not merely communicate raw information in the form of statistics or binary data, but we instead choose to frame and disseminate information in a unique way. This creative process is what makes us interesting as individuals, to interact with, and valuable to others as agents in the world.

Email also facilitates an inner discussion. While other mediums require little of the author to critically examine their statements, writing emails allows oneself the time to read, reread, and edit ones position. This means that in an email conversation between just two people, each person takes control of the conversation completely in a way that instant messaging and the like does not do. The author is free to have an entire discussion in their head, picturing responses in their mind. This then moves the conversation forward in a double dialectical fashion, with each person’s internal debate framing their responses that are in turn responded to.

As I explained in my musings on text, the dialectial motion that is present in the creative process means that the relationship between author and reader disappears. Seneca explains that “The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach”⁶ — explaining your thoughts to another necessarily means refining them for yourself.

When I write emails, it is not uncommon for the word count to reach into 2-3000 words. This is longer than many blog posts I write, and while it commonly covers multiple topics — all organically developed — it allows for a form of creative expression that other mediums do not posses. It allows me to write in a much more free manner, to an audience whose intellectual strengths (and weaknesses) I am much more aware of, and yet still cut those parts that would otherwise be necessary to paint a full picture of the issue. It allows me genuine connection with people I know in a way that reading their newest tweet does not.

This intimate relation between blog posts and emails means that a back-and-fourth discussion with someone over email is not all that dissimilar to writing for a literary audience, it is just a smaller audience. It forces us to come up with and process our ideas, and is in that sense similar to what I call productive note-taking, where one uses the production of a work to prompt intellectual growth.

Email’s asynchronous nature allows us to write and respond whenever we personally have time. Some people argue that email fails to accomodate groups of users greater than 2, but I disagree. Things like mailing lists allow large groups of people to communicate in public with lots of other individuals, with anyone quickly jumping in when required. Conversations chains are easily listed and followed, compared to the fleeting reply chains of large slack or discord groups. We can take our time to respond, and those wo are interested in what we have to say can quickly get up to speed in the conversation, much like the easily digestible feeds of social media. The difference is that instead of quickly scrolling by to read short messages by lots of different people, you are forced to sit and listen to one person’s reasoning for much longer — not all that different from how you would in real life.

James O’Sullivan, of University College Cork, writes in noema magazine:

Social media’s current logic is designed to reduce friction, to give users infinite content for instant gratification, or at the very least, the anticipation of such. The antidote to this compulsive, numbing overload will be found in deliberative friction, design patterns that introduce pause and reflection into digital interaction, or platforms and algorithms that create space for intention.

This is exactly the sort of deliberate control that email offers. This is not to say that email as it exists today is a perfect alternative, but the way it is ubiqutous and at the same time completely forgotten means that we have to make a deliberate attempt to understand the technologies that already exist in practice. ❦