We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Adventures in Real-Time Story Collaboration: Day One (Google Docs)
Reading Time
The Internet is an amazing thing. I’m sure of it now. Yes, it’s full of stupid people making stupid comments on YouTube that make dyslexic people wonder if everyone else is dyslexic too, but after what happened last night, I have to say that the Internet is the single greatest human invention (next to bread and John Williams).
My friend Adam and I have been doing our best to do what are called Word Wars every single day. This is in part because Adam is the crazy “write 5 billion words a day” type and because he knows that the last four to five months have been a veritable hell for my writing; I suspect he’s using my lighter load this semester and his persuasive abilities to get me back on track. In any case, a
Word War is a kind of “competition” between at least two people (though I’ve seen wars with up fifteen) who decide on a time limit, and then do nothing but write for that period; the person with the most words after the buzzer “wins,” but the object is not necessarily to win–the object is to write. Adam and I have written over 20,000 words (combined) since the 1st through these wars. We don’t get to them every day, since sometimes one of us is having an off day, but we try our hardest and have formed a pretty strong little writing relationship (and friendship) through all of our critiques and what not.
Today, however, I upped the ante. I’ve been playing with Google Docs a lot in the last three weeks for the classes I teach, though I’ve been using them for Young Writers Online for a year or two. Lately I’ve been getting a laugh from seeing people from YWO using the documents I set up for moderators at the same time that I’m using them. It’s the ultimate in web-surveillance, because you not only see that they’re online, but you see everything they are typing, including when they select features (like bold or italics) and use them. Maybe I’m a simpleton, but I find real-time documents amusing. I suspect this is because I grew up in a period where things like Google Docs were either not around or not of interest to me (video games were pretty much my life-blood when I was young). I preferred Real Time Strategy Games (like Starcraft) and the first Half-Life, which is the single greatest First Person Shooter ever invented. Period. I will argue with you over that game until I suffocate!
Moving on. So early last night it dawned on me that Adam and I could write a story in Google Docs in real time, piece by piece. We’ve talked about collaborating before, but haven’t done so yet because, well, we’re both busy and weren’t sure how it would all work. I suggested doing real-time story writing with Google Docs as a semi-joke to him, and then didn’t really think too much of it for an hour while we did some writing. And then I got inspired to write a paragraph of something entirely random and explosive (literally, it starts with an explosion), and then I forwarded the Google Doc link to Adam and gave him editing capabilities. An hour later, we had an action-packed scene completely written out. Written together. Paragraph by paragraph.
First things first, let’s get the obvious out of the way. The fact that technology has made such a collaborative project possible without long wait times between chapters and so on is simply amazing. Here we are, two little nobodies with very little to our name (with the exception of Adam, who has a pro sale to his name, because he’s awesome like that) writing a story together in real time, watching each other as each word flows from our fingers. I’m awed by it, to be honest. Maybe I’m silly to get so excited by such a thing, but what’s going through my head right now is the potential for this technology to make collaboration across borders possible. Imagine writing a story with someone from the Philippines or Japan or Europe or (and here my skin starts to tingle) someone from the Caribbean, or the lower Americas! Maybe it’s already happening and I just haven’t heard of it yet, since Google Docs has been around for a while.
But the second thing to take from our first day is two-fold:
We’ll see what tomorrow brings. Whatever happens, I think we’re enormously pleased with last night’s proceedings.
So, have you ever collaborated with someone over the Internet? I’d like to hear about it in the comments. It doesn’t have to be a writing collaboration. Music, movies, whatever! Let me know!
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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