I really dig this idea of a story 2.0 . In your post, you asked whether people do that. I think the key word there was ‘released’. I don’t think that people really *release* multiple versions of stories. That’s a really neat idea – different iterations of the same story, and one I’d love to see.

I think I wrote about this before re: Raymond Carver. There, I argued that new versions would somehow be better when they slashed rather than added. I can’t quite remember why now, but here’s the link:

http://scrawledinwax.com/2009/07/31/the-electronic-book-more-through-less/

I actually wasn’t 100% disciplined with it throughout — there’s a spot near the end where the narrator speaks in quote-marks — and I think I want to fix that.

One more thing. I was just looking at the story (confirming that I was remembering that line near the end correctly) and it occurred to me: Is there anything other than Mr. Penumbra saying “my boy” that indicates the narrator is male? I mean, formally. You can infer from the tone. But I think that’s actually pretty interesting, right? Hmm. Might be fun to expunge that, and leave it (again, at least formally) ambiguous.

These are wonderful notes. And a great thread here. Thanks, Nav.

@Tim, re Kat: Totally agree. A Mr. Penumbra 2.0 will give that character space to flex & play.

@Nav, re point on capitalism: That’s brilliant, and provides an opportunity to get into something really interesting. Honestly I hadn’t thought through the why-are-these-books-so-expensive angle at all; it was totally half-assed. But I’m going to file that away — again, for 2.0.

What’s interesting about this is that to many web-heads, value always means exchange value. But it sounds like you’re talking about use value – as you say, the closed circle of exchange keeps away the exploitative effects of capitalism.

Have had a conversation of this sort with a friend about torrent groups – this constant exchange of art for ‘the sake of it’ seems somehow analogous.

I do wonder about the cultural exchange in the not-closed-circle though. That line by Penumbra seems to suggest that book culture created a kind of cultural insularity or narcissism. But the economic concerns responsible for that kind of cultural centralisation – all the money’s here, so all the good stuff happens here – seems to have intensified. I always kinda’ go back to Buzzfeed on this: all ‘other’ cultures are there for entertainment, for ironic reflection (“It’s funny because their clothes are different from my clothes”…).

“Some would say our society has, ah, devolved,” Penumbra said, “for we now read only the books written by our membership. Books which are filled only with observations of other members. And references to other books filled only with observations. And so on.”

Now – the circle is not closed. Which means it could become a big funnel to siphon value. But unlike the age of late media, tv etc. there’s a humanist and closed-circle ethos in a lot of the digital and web culture. Patronage and piracy can coexist in a way that neither can w/ capitalism. New possibilities.

1) Kat seems very much like a helper character; and in that sense, I suppose the story repeats the gendered tropes of silicon valley. You’re right – some perspective from Kat on issues of textuality/the author etc. might have been nice, particularly since that latter thing can be pretty gendered.

2) The fellowship, while dedicated to books, is also somehow sustained by capitalism – the books have to be purchased, and the sense of transition invoked seems to suggest a crystallisation or intensification of late capitalism. Google is, rather than the benefactor on high – the church, the freemasons, whatever – is at the core of an economic shift that organises information so that it can be monetized. Google are the paragon of late capitalism.

3) So the weird thing is that piece invokes a world that fractures the book and, consequentially, fractures the self, as it insists that the author-self has to find a way to reassert its presence. (ruh-roh).

It seems the challenge is to make something that lasts; what’s cool about that is that it becomes this textual gesture toward an ideal of permanence, written into a story that many people received using a system called ‘Whispernet’.

So this is pretty ambivalent: is the idea of permanence at odds with the ephemeral nature of the digital? Or does the text deliberately make a futile gesture toward solidity as a kind of polemical call-to-arms?

See, the strange about digital is that, for example, some random tweet I wrote two or three years ago is still floating around somewhere. If I do a vanity search, it pops up. So it’s that intensely iterative nature of the web-as-public-text that still fascinates me.