To say "new forms" and "new structures" is to say everything and nothing. Forms evidently do not emerge from the brains of machines. The search for new forms has been made possible by a working practice first used by mathematicians: the axiomatic method. The axiomatic method was born the day we first refused to take as a given that which most commonly was. [...]
So an axiom is no longer an evidence, true in all circumstances, but one of the rules which govern a given set. We are no longer dealing with the truth but with coherence. The advantage of the axiomatic method is that it allows for all manner of perfectly arbitrary speculations that can subsequently, experimentally, be proven sound. Indeed, what the axiomatic method helped bring to light is that it can be wholly useful, when seeking to apprehend the real, to turn our backs on it. An abstract formalization, preoccupied with coherence and not with truth, often allows us to perceive the real more precisely. This is why physics, for one, adopts this method with increasing frequency.
Since Homer took an interest in the Trojan War, literature has always had a weakness for the palpable. Nothing forbids us to suppose that the Greeks must have waged the Trojan war so that homer could tell a story about it. This process has rarely contradicted itself, though it is perhaps a pity that the Greeks didn't have the converse idea, to ask Homer to tell the story of the Trojan War and then verify after the the soundness of this work. The whole history of literature would have gone differently. What we intend in trying to free ourselves from the evidences of the palpable is not the reduce literature to a simple formal game: quite the opposite, we might say.
Jacques Duchateau, "Lecture on the Oulipo at Cerisy-la-Salle" (1963) from All That is Evident is Suspect, Readings from Oulipo 1963-2018
or, I made over a billion Mastodon bots (real) (not clickbait) (kind of)
yellbot.online is a server for bots that say the same letter over and over. For any unicode character, you can follow it and every two hours you'll receive posts like:
The starting sequence with the most children was "Code is used when secrets are sent."
The longest sequence of edits was 10 long:
Pages bound in cloth make a book.
Pages dround in broth make a soup.
Pages ground in broth. a soup!
Sage ground in broth. What a soup!
Sage ground in broth. What a soup! Yum.
Sage cons broth. What a soup! Yum.
Sage considers broth. What a soup! Yum.
Sage considers broth. What is a soup? Yum.
Sage considers bro. What is a soul? Soup.
Sage considers broseph. What is a soul? Soup.
Consider broseph. What is a soul? Soup.
Welcome back to Lazar dot social and to Generation 7. This one is about editing.
1. Oulipo-Likes
Returning to the categorization system I discussed last time, Gen 7 is an Oulipo-like, same as Gen 2. Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle ("Workshop of Potential Literature") is a 1960s French literary movement focused on constrained writing techniques. If you’ve ever heard of something writing a whole book without using the letter ‘e’, that’s the kind of stuff they were into (1). Raymond Queneau, one of the founding members, describes Oulipo as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape."
Thanks to modern technology, one rat (me) can construct a labyrinth and we can all attempt to escape together. An Oulipo-like is any social network which puts a significant constraint on the subject or structure the user's creations. You might ask why anyone would put up with these kind of limitations – isn’t it better just to write whatever you want ? But I’d remind you that twitter was an Oulipo-like (2) and it was one of the most influential social media sites of our era. Other notable examples include oulipo.social, dolphin.town, and yo (arguably).
A social network is a tool for making art. It's other things also - a distribution network, a community, a database, a website - but it's also an art tool. Everything people put on a social networks is art and it's all made with the help of the site. Some of Tik Tok’s success can be attributed to it’s robust video editing tools and people often spoke positively about how Twitter’s character limit forced them to be succinct. Constraints breed creativity and by imposing constraints, a network can influence what gets put on it. People often talk about how social networks manage their outputs (who see’s what, how that is presented, who gets banned, what algorithms recommend, etc) but I think how they shape their inputs is under considered by creators and critics alike.
2. Editing and Distance
I had two major inspirations for this generation. The first was discussions of editing posts. I feel like in most cases where you’d to want edit a post, you could just allow people to make a few changes (most typos could be fixed just by changing a few characters) and then show the edit history, but this an approach I've never seen it tried. The second was a detail from Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota novels: in the books the Emperor is bound by an oath and each Emperor is permitted to add or change three words in the oath before passing it down to their successor. Thinking about these, I wanted to build something to let you experiment with making edits. Given a pre-existing text, what can you build out of it?
The standard I’m using for distance here is Levenshtein distance, which measures how many additions, subtractions, and substitutions it would take to get from one string of text to another. Meanwhile I’m using the Myers diff algorithm to make the diffs you see while editing. This series of blog posts by James Coglan were very useful in figuring out how to get that working. I played around with different ways of displaying text diffs before settling on the one you see right now. I wanted a display method that let you read both the new sentence and the old one, just by shifting your attention, and that didn't use any of the usual approaches (so no green and red). This kind of intentional contrariness, where I refuse to use the same solutions as everyone else for no particular reason, is an important part of the Lazar experience (3).
3. Harvard Sentences
The texts I use as the roots are Harvard sentences – list 34 from this site to be specific. Originally developed to test phones, Harvard sentences are sets of 10 sentences which contain all common English phonemes at the same frequency they occur in English generally (3). The idea being that if these ten sentences could be understood through your new phone, then anything else you’re likely to say would also be. I think Harvard Sentences are neat – they’re all very anodyne in a "written in 1965" way but they’re still slightly off, in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. They’re one of those invisible test items which shape our world (see also Lenna or Tom’s Diner). (4)
4. Technical Notes
Previously I was hosting Lazar on heroku, because it was easy, but then they changed their payment structure in a way that I didn’t appreciate, so I migrated to DigitalOcean. This took some effort but it was educational. I didn’t bring the old database along, which is why everyone’s accounts were lost, for the same reason I don’t let users reset their passwords: it would’ve been work and Lazar isn’t about giving people things they want.
Lazar can now be followed on Mastodon at @[email protected] and you’ll receive a feed of all the posts people make. It’s called Lazar Firehose cause you get everything, no differentiation. This is about half of a proper ActivityPub implementation – there’s a followable account and it publishes posts, but you can’t follow external accounts or receive posts from outside - but I think it's good foundation for future experiments in federation. The fire hose will likely continue to exist for all future variants, so long as what’s being produced remains vaguely post shaped, and more features will be added as needed. Darius Kazemi’s "A Highly Opinionated guide to learning about Activity Pub" was very helpful as a starting point, as was ActivityPub.Academy once I started testing what I'd built. I’m only mostly sure I’ve implemented everything correctly, so if anyone notices it working bad or being an impolite neighbor to other servers, please do tell me.
5. Conclusion
Lazar Forever!
Footnotes
1. Although they didn’t invent that trick. That honor goes to Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939. Although reading the Wikipedia page on lipograms, they apparently reaches back to ancient Greece ? Neat.
2. Before it burned down that mysterious Halloween night. Sad, but that is sometimes the nature of things.
3. Perhaps, this too is Oulipo.
4. Also see also the album Lenna Was a Test Image, if you’re into this sort of thing. I particularly like the track "Hello World".
LAZAR DOT SOCIAL PRESENTS GENERATION SEVEN: VARIANCE
Due to ongoing conditions, users are no longer allowed to make their own posts. The posts were too bad. However! Lazar has recovered a set of uncontaminated posts from an ancient shipwreck and used them to make a small set of perfect posts. And you will be permitted to use these posts to make new posts! As you do, we'll be tracking how things degrade from there, so we might finally understand how it all went so wrong.
Important Lazar Facts:
In Gen 7, new posts can only be made by editing existing posts.
Each post can make only 7 edits! (One for each generation).
Lazar Dot Social is now ActivityPub compatible (somewhat)! You can follow "@[email protected]" on mastodon or any other federated platform and receive all of the newest and strangest posts created on lazar.
You may ask "does this represent a dangerous breach of quarantine?" Probably.
Everybody's account got deleted because I migrated to a new host so you'll have to make new accounts. If you liked your old account name, I'm sorry. I liked mine too.
And finally: Da Rules:
Lazar will be live for about two weeks.
If it breaks, so be it. Fixes are not guaranteed.
If there's any bullshit, I shut it down.
I didn't mean what I said before about the posts being bad. I love the posts.
Throwback to the time where I tried to filter “***” to “ass” to annoy a specific member of our forum but since * is a variable operator I just filtered every single word on the forum to “ass” and all posts became immediately unreadable
These are the four categories of Lazar. Gen 1 was a database joke, Gen 2 was an oulipo-like, Gen 3 and 4 were centaur systems, and Gen 5 was a Jan 29th sim. And the newest iteration, Gen 6, is the second database joke. Welcome one and all.
1. Database Jokes
This is how database jokes work: consider websites. Websites can do all kinds of things, right? Wrong! A websites can only do one thing: access a database. Every website is just a tool for interacting with a database. A nice looking, complicated, and limited tool. We may think we're interacting with a store or books or a conversation, but we’re not. We’re interacting with databases. Making a website is taking a complicated real world phenomenon and converting it into a database. Database jokes are about doing the opposite: making a database structure and then expressing it as a real world phenomenon.
To narrow in on what’s happening in gen 6 specifically, let’s talk about associations. On twitter, a post can be a reply to another post. Let’s call the first post a “reply” and the post that it’s a reply too the “root”. The technical description of this kind of relation is that the reply “belongs to” the root. A post can have multiple replies, so the root “has many” replies. This is called an association. But why not let a reply belong to many roots? Now each root has many replies and each reply has many roots. So instead of a “has many” association, we have a “has and belongs to many” relationship.
This is a straightforward change to make to a database. But it’s not how real life social interactions work at all. If someone says something, you can’t come by later and retroactively make what they said be in response to something new. But, if someone says something you can’t come by and respond to it months later in a real life conversation, but we do that all the time on social media. Any conversions of social activity into a database structure is imperfect, and as such will enable impossible things. What are the implications of giving people these new abilities? I don’t know. That’s up to you to figure out.
2. Threaded Plies
This issue with making impossible conversation forms is that it's difficult to figure out how to display it. There are no pre-existing forms to pick from because what we’re trying to do is impossible, normally. But I took confidence from the thought that nobody’s figured out a good way to display threaded replies even without letting them go bother ways, despite years of trying. All of the solutions we have produced so far are bad and now I get to make up my own bad method.
All of the sketches I made while trying to come up with a UX pattern that didn’t suck too bad
There were some things I knew wanted the design to support. I wanted users to be able to combine a string of plies and replies to form a thread, and then mix and match plies and replies to make as many threads as you wanted. The flow of the posts was important to me – that the “order” of posts was legible. I had also wanted to be able to display the number of plies and replies – even if you couldn’t see them all at once, you should be able to tell they exist.
An earlier layout attempt that I built out and then abandoned
I’m not entirely happy with what I ended up with but when in doubt, I remember what's important: Lazar isn’t about giving people things they want.
3. Shakespeare
As with Gen 1, I’m only letting you make posts connected to existing posts. But that means there has to be something to start with, something to connect to. I chose Macbeth and the Tempest, largely based on vibes. Using plays as the seed posts also have the advantage that it demonstrated the threads in an understandable way: people are talking to each other, each line connecting too and proceeding from the previous one. I think it’s important to include this bits of grit, so that people have something to start accruing around. I also found that converting the plays into a social media feed revealed aspects which weren't visible before . My current favorite account on lazar is STAGE DIRECTION, definitely check them out.
4. Etc
I always try to scatter a few minor deranged decisions into each generation, disconnected from the central deranged decision. Gen 6 has three kinds of likes, it sorts posts alphabetically by default, and it doesn’t have a central feed, opting instead to show you a random post. I imagine gen 6 to be something like a secret library, dark, difficult to navigate, and full of tightly knit connections. Over time it grows more connected, like a tangle of ropes that keeps pulling tighter and tighter. I encourage you to wander and knit together freely. I hope you enjoy the experience.
Behold! Lazar gen 6 is here! We had a whole presentation prepared but there was an unfortunate accident with the tides and all but three of the slides were washed out to sea. Sorry!
As always, the rules:
1. Lazar will up for about a week and then I'll take it down.
2. If it breaks, it's broken. Might fixed it, might not.
3. If there's any bullshit, I shut it down.
4. Conclusions should be grounded in the specifics of the text.
It is my intention to start writing about each generation of lazar as I launch, in an attempt to communicate what I was thinking when I made them. In these essays I'll be going over some of the inspirations and intentions that lead me to make this terrible machine. Come along with me!
1. WELCOEM TO MY FUCK HOUSE
For a short period on January 29th 2015, tumblr was the best social media site in history. On that date it reached heights that have never since been approached, let alone surpassed. January 29th is day tumblr pushed an update containing a number of bugs that gave users the ability to style their posts in new ways. Far too many ways and far too powerful ways. Users could, for example, stick their posts to the browsers so they’d stay in place when you tried to scroll away. Or put their posts on top of other posts. Or insert text into the margins of the page. For the few hours before the change was rolled back, tumblr descended into total, beautiful chaos.
Now, the primary reason websites don’t let their users do this sort of thing is it’ll make your site completely unreadable (1). I do not respect this reason. Who said sites should be legible? The social is complete mess, so social media should be the same, so say I. I have been dreaming reenacting the glorious chaos of that winter night for a while and with generation 5 of Lazar, I am taking a stab at it.
2. The Feed
Gen 5 is also about the feed. In your standard feed, the kind you'd see on facebook or twitter, each post acts as an atomic unit. Posts are capable of being related but by default they are not. Each is it’s own universe, with no relationship to the posts above or below it. Or at least that’s the idea - I don’t think people are really capable of reading like that. We create connections between posts placed in proximity automatically, even if those connections aren’t intended or if they get us into trouble.
In Gen 5 posts are allowed to wander away from their proper chronological positioning, making their own decisions about placement in the feed. Posts can block or overlap other posts. The interactions between a post and it’s neighbors becomes very active and impossible to ignore. And why not? Those posts have a relationship and I've decided to make it an undeniable relationship.
Letting users freely pick their angle and offset is an intentionally over the top method of making that point. Every version of Lazar is ridiculous. I’m not interested in making a social media site that works. I’m interested in making a social media site that stimulates the imagination.
3. LA2AR
Gen 4 of Lazar ended in February, so it’s been slumbering for 5 months. During that time I threw away all the code I’ve been using for Lazar up until now and started over from scratch. The old lazar ran on Vue, google firebase, and google cloud functions (2). But I decided firebase has too many opinions about how it delivers data and so it had to go.
The new Lazar is a vanilla rails app. No front end javascript framework, just rails and erb. I want to keep this codebase simple and flexible. I want to be able to develop new and weird features quickly and with minimum fuss. Rails is a framework I already know, so hopefully the amount of time I have to spend learning. We’ll see how it pains out long term.
Making online art is often frustrating to me because of how much time I have to spend struggling with my tools. Every form of art involves some amount of technical skill and some about creative expression – you have to learn how to mix your pigments before you can paint a picture – but with tech art it feels like the technical requirements go on and on forever. At some point though you have to stop casting around for new tools and just make something. I want a set of skills and tools that let me quickly create and deploy new sites while still give me the flexibility to make whatever I want. I don’t I have that yet. But hopefully I'm working towards it.
4. Links
Here’s some stuff I was reading and thinking about while I made gen 6.
No More Pages and Reading Humanized, the blog posts that introduced the world to the idea of the infinite scroll. It's interesting to see what the idea was at the start and compare it how it turned out.
Twitter, The Intimacy Machine by C. Thi Nguyen. I’ve known about context collapse for a while but Nguyen’s insight about how Twitter’s limit character length leads to posts that require high levels of shared context is very interesting.
New_Public and Reboot – both organizations/newsletters focused on improving social media. They're also interested in social media but are doing something different what I'm doing.
Footnotes
1. The other reason websites don’t let their users just style their posts however they like is that some styling can break or attack other people’s computers. I grudgingly respect this reason and that’s why lazar isn’t quite as chaotic as tumblr was. I’d let you just write any CSS you want but I’m afraid you might do crimes with it :(
It is possible to give the users styling power while stripping out the dangerous options (cohost is doing very exciting work in this space) but that’s a lot of work and I’m very lazy. Gen 5 represents one compromise between no options and all of them but I’ll likely return to this well with future generations.
2. Shout out again to Kate Compton’s excellent social media speedrun video which I used to build the foundation the first four generations used.
With the January interface update on Tumblr, many users found glitches and took advantage of them to purposefully make posts that had a glitchy appearance.
Thus, this meme involves making such posts as well as screenshotting such posts.
Tumblr has since fixed most of the glitches.
Click here to see examples of the Tumblr glitch meme.
