Welcome to you few elite readers joining us on this inaugural issue. Last week this newsletter didn’t exist and now we’re up to 4 subscribers before launch! At this growth rate Digital Gravity be read by all 4.6B Internet users in 13 issues!
If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, join my 4 brilliant, curious friends by subscribing here!
Digital Gravity is a newsletter exploring the Internet as a fundamentally new dimension. Each post will be an expedition through the portal to learn how we might better survive and interact with what lays beyond.
There’s Life on Mars, it just landed!
In 1999, certified starman David Bowie sat down for an interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight. The conversation ranges widely from self-acceptance and alcoholism to wearing high heels in front of the Prime Minister. For a moment, the interview also takes a detour to talk about the potential of the then still-adolescent Internet.
Bowie says that if he were starting his career again in 1999, he wouldn’t go into music. When he was younger, he felt a “call-to-arms” to make music because it felt counter-culture and subversive. There was a feeling that he could “affect change to the [existing] form” of pop music. But as the 21st Century closed in, the music industry had lost that appeal to him. He believed the Internet now embodied that same energy.
In his words:
The Internet now carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic and nihilistic. […] I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society both good and bad is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. […] It is an alien life form. […] It’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.
A friend sent me this video, knowing it would reverberate with a line of thinking I’ve had for quite some time: The Internet is a new dimension humanity has only just taken our first steps into.
Bowie and I seem to be of similar minds on this topic. He spoke of the Internet as a tangible thing, new and separate from the existing analog world. "Is there life on Mars?" he asks, before answering quickly "Yes! It just landed here!" Prescient words, spoken just six years after Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina built the world’s first consumer-friendly web browser, Mosaic, in 1993.
Mosaic helped bring the Internet to the masses, and Andreessen became a prolific venture capital investor in technology after Netscape’s later success. His VC firm’s most famous investment thesis is that “Software is eating the world”. I think he’s close. The analog world isn’t being eaten, but it is colliding with a new dimension that behaves by a very different type of physics. We’re in the middle of this collision and everything human in our world - our art, music, governments, cultures, societies, and industries - is desperately trying to adapt to the shifting landscape.
Everyday magic becomes mundane
No matter how much I wax poetic about this great dimensional collision happening right before our eyes, I can't shake off how boring the day-to-day Web experience can be.
I feel that I’ve lost appreciation for the idea that opening up my browser for the first time each morning is the equivalent of opening a portal into a new dimension. I find myself walking through this gateway and bumbling through sanitized digital experiences. I’m seeking an adventure in the digital realm, but instead I find myself in line at the equivalent of a Starbucks. Sure, Starbucks is synonymous with the experience of coffee drinking for millions of people, but that doesn’t mean its popularity isn’t muting the colors of a more vibrant alternative experience.
Even the Zeitgeist has seemingly lost interest in dreaming of the positive potential for the Internet. When is the last time you saw a piece of science fiction media that had a novel idea about how the Internet would evolve that wasn't based around a VR metaverse? Is the height of our cultural imagination really just reshuffling the ideas of Neuromancer into nostalgia-porn like Ready Player One? Has the exhausting pessimism of Black Mirror blinded us to the awesome power we possess today that would’ve had us killed for witchcraft two hundred years ago?
What is happening? Where has the magic gone?
Peter Thiel stands on a pedestal in front of his Zero to One stans and preaches about flying cars while running a company called Palantir. Palantir is named after the Palantiri seeing-stones from The Lord of the Rings. The Palantiri allowed wizards to communicate with each other over great distances. I literally use two Palantiri every day for work, they’re called Zoom and Slack.
Let’s take the Zoom analogy forward even further.
When I click on a Zoom link and turn on my computer’s camera, a digitization of myself occurs. An approximation of my voice and my image is taken, stored, and transmitted so quickly around the world that there is no perceivable lag between my actions in my physical space and the appearance of those actions to the viewer. Even 100 years ago, the average citizen who was rocked by the invention of widescreen video in 1927 would’ve been bewildered and amazed at an average low-quality FaceTime call. To them, using FaceTime is an act of psychic projection.
There was a time where these tools were new, fresh, and exciting to us too. Do you remember your first Skype call? Your first online purchase? Your first online community? Reality was electric with potential in those moments. For a moment, anything was possible.
But one of the qualities of our interaction with the Internet is how quickly our adoration for new ideas fades. The magic spell being cast right before your eyes becomes mundane and boring - and worst of all, expected. New ideas have never moved from “holy shit, this is amazing” to “well, of course” more quickly than they do today.
I fear that we’re losing the ability to see the forest for the trees. We’re wandering the same trodden trails every day. When a new scenic path is found, its beauty is forgotten as soon as it’s assimilated.
I want to rekindle the experience of exploring the digital dimension of the Internet and its amazing potential. I want to answer its call-to-arms that Bowie felt and odyssey across its unknown landscapes.
Fertile ground for imagination
The core problem of imagining the Internet's future is that we're not meeting it as a world on its own terms. No one alive today has grown up in a world that has embraced the Internet as a fully realized space. We must find ways of thinking from the first principles of its digital physics, not transplanting our own from the analog world.
We need to detach from the boredom-breeding perspective we log on with daily and find tools and analogies that help us see the Internet anew. With this fresh perspective, what can we learn about the digital world and its future potential that will help us breathe life back into the Internet today?
Answering that question is the pursuit of this newsletter. I want Digital Gravity to be a playground for imagining the Internet as our great-grandchildren will use it. “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” - and I want to learn more about the present by exploring the poems about the promise for our greatest technology’s future.
I hope you’ll join me.
Upcoming idea-dumps include the following, and many more:
Haptic feedback CSS
User interfaces as language
Digital cave paintings
A fully digitized Self
Have any ideas / books / articles / newsletters / Twitter folks that are pushing the boundaries of what you think is possible for the Internet? I’d love to read them. Who knows, they may inspire a future post!
Say hi on Twitter, at @tobthecreator. I look forward to hearing from you!