Yet another ode to links. Would there be a web without them? You can just click the ones the algos hand you, like candy, just one out from the social stream and back in. Or better yet, you can wend your own way down and through the tunnels and corridors.

Join me in another path of wondrous webness and an example of the daily distraction. A good starting point is often a trusted source, like the email versions of Clive Thompson’s LinkFest. One issue along can spawn a thousand journeys.

I found in today’s Linkfest a description of “Escheresque”, a web browser game. Normally video games are not a call; I appreciate how others are devout, but I almost never play. And I suck at them.

One time long ago I was visiting Bryan Alexander when he lived up in the Vermont Mountains. Bryan was keen for me to see some video game he raved about the storytelling approach. Being the kind of guide/teacher he is, rather then him demonstrating to me, he handing the controls to me. I pretty much bumbled around some future landscape. Bryan’s daughter asuntered in, watched the screen, then me, before saying so matter of factly, “You don’t play video games much, right?”

So it was largely the name of this game today that largely caught my interest because of a long time interest in artist M.C. Escher‘s impossible space drawings. So as reluctant game player, I had enpugh of a spark to give Escheresque a try. You have to use AWDS keys to navigate a blocky character up and down obstacles (use the space bar when there is no way up, down, over, it inverts the color but change the game objects).

Me playing Escheresque note the top center icons, the one on the right reveals the game’s programming code.

I did not play too much as I was not really motivated to finish. But noting the information screen for the game, I noticed it carried a Creative Commons license. This is neat. CC licensed games!

Info screen for Escheresque includes a CC BY-SA license. Nice.

And this pretty much is what most folks do with shared links from the socials. They either just boost/re-whatever based on the limited description, or perhaps click once off the stream to check it, but then quickly return.

Me, I am reading the URL. I love a good web address read. This one is simple https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1223047

I like to see what this site is that a deep link is part of, so I hack off the back end of the link to see what’s at the top of the domain. Is it someone’s personal site? An organization? Or… something else?

Indeed today, the latter

And this is basic Mike Caulfiedian SIFTing not quite sure if its I (“Investigate the source”) to me its more T (“Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context”), I recall Mike talking about “going upstream to the source.” This is really something that stuck with me, as so often I find the links so readily shared/reshared are often ad encrusted “news” sites summarizing stuff that is elsewhere.

So when I see a web address like https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1223047 after trying it out, maybe bookmarking in my Pinboard I am always curious about the main site. Is it a personal web site? Is it from an organization? Is it a curation/collection? If you find one link of interest from a source, there’s liklely even more, if (and I think this is Mike Caulfield’s term again) going laterally, to see what else is adjacent or a few links away.

So I go to https://openprocessing.org/ and find an entire web universe under a banner of “Coding is Beautiful” and an invitation to “join the community of creative coders, educators, and designers that explore, experiment, and play.”

OpenProcessing site

I am familiar with the proper noun Processing – I have some memories long ago maybe in the mid 2000s of looking into the Processing language that is built on a sketch book approach but aimed at creating visual things. It was less coding like in the green glow of a terminal screen, but in a notebook. It was aimed more at artists and people interested i creating visualizations than code heads. There was, and my memory may be wrong, a feature where you could see how the code was assemble in a playback mode, so you could see the steps the programmer went through (am I wrong?), it struck me as a refreshingly new approach to teaching/learning programming.

At the time, I was working for the New Media Consortium and we had a meeting at MIT. On a break I visited the legendary MIT Bookstore, and as Processing was on my mind, an on impulse I just bought the book Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. I thought I woul end up teaching myself… and I never cracked it open.

But the book is still on my shelf, it took a bit to locate it.

Unread Book number 689 Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists

So I am poking around the OpenProcessing site. Now this is stunning, an open community with a mention that it has over 100000 members… and is free to join. There are, it seems a whole arm that is educational, and outward links to articles by the site creator on Teaching Coding with OpenProcessing “A quick walkthrough of the exciting world of code, creativity, education, bugs, and Kandinsky.”

Thus I get distracted finding and discovering more good things on the internet, more of them often several clicks away from the links that get shared online.

Again.

That was yesterday, today is young.

And I will continue to repeat that all those sweeping generalizations of how the internet is completely broken, the web is dead, search is broken, all is bull dozed and paved over by the [GAFAM machines](http://GAFAM Empire is a project in which we look at all the known acquisitions conducted by five big tech companies: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, from the moment they made their first one to the end of summer of 2022, when we stopped collecting data. Why do we call it an empire? Our focus is on trying to understand how these companies purchase their power and ability to grow their respective market positions based on their information infrastructure through the simple operation of acquiring other businesses and their products. Our understanding of empire here is very basic: empire controls three basic layers of knowledge: 1) collection of data/intelligence, 2) storage of that intelligence as well as 3) capacity of processing it. These three unique characteristics give them powerful and unprecedented insights into how our societies operate. Why are we not calling them monopolies? Because this framing based on the idea of limited resources and competition for consumers frankly does not apply - the resources are unlimited - and that is our data and attention. When it comes to competition we are free to chose the ones we like - we can use products of them all in fact. In short we call them empires in a collonial sense, as in digital colonialism and not monopolies in a market competition sense. All of these five companies dominate the space of collecting data (number of users), managing and processing that data (cloud and other infrastructures they own, including hardware) as well as processing and analysing that data (machine learning, AI, algorithms). They all monetize this dominant position, making them the richest tech companies out there. How big are they, which sectors do they dominate and in which do they compete, what futures are they trying to prepare for? It is obvious that for them the ideal future is the one where we do everything online, everything is digital and goes though their channels. These were the questions driving our research and this visualization.) (it just happened there, I had to Google “acronym for google apple microsoft facebook” and spotted GAFAM, and then I find the most fascinating report and visualization in the GAFAM Empire, and then… OMG I have to finish this post) — to make that assertion, one would have to have visited every single link on the internet. What deitty can see it all (sorry Stephen, you see much, but not all).

If you believe that, you are not leaving the Big Malls of the internet, you have never wandered the web residential streets, stopped in a local bodega, just wandered amongst the many small gardens that individuals and groups of them are tending all the time.

Or maybe I am just on a different internet than the Mega Substacking TedTalking pundits.

An that’s okay by me, its wonderful out here in link land.

---

Featured Image: The Way to the Future: Weirdos Gathering in the Desert flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license This photo was a response to a 2014 DS106 Daily Create challenge to make a Book Spine Poem and was maybe the last time I grabbed my copy of Processing to use in the poem.

If this kind of stuff has value, please support me by tossing a one time PayPal kibble or monthly on Patreon