Foundation

Robin made a few adjustments to The Society of the Double Dagger and the new format is great: he’s split up this newsletter into all sorts of micro-newsletters that you can pick and choose from. Not only that, but he’s also going to create a series of secret websites that adjoin each newsletter so we can dive into a subject more afterwards, with the blog post acting as a kind of footnote.

Or a satellite!

In the secret website to Robin’s most recent newsletter, Foundation (part 2), he very kindly refers to Newsletters and then mentions one of the biggest problems he has with the web today:

Among the many small violences of the social media platforms is the way they squash every contribution into the same rectangle, framed by the same buttons. They do this so they can assemble those contributions into a larger structure; a timeline. They prefer neat bricks; stackable, interchangeable. Heterogeneous, weird-shaped content won’t do — although it’s interesting to imagine what that kind of timeline might look like…

This particular shapeness of twitter mostly pushed me off of it some time ago and whenever I return it always feels like I’m the wrong shape. I don’t really know what to do there anymore; I can’t capture my voice, my dumb jokes, my weirdness in a way that’s satisfying to me. But, right here on this very website I somehow can.

In that secret backroom newsletter blog post though, Robin adds snippets of video every once so often and it all feels new and exciting to me in a way that many websites aren’t. It’s like Robin is reimagining Vine here and putting his own extremely earnest and charming spin on things. And, if I might be bold, it is the perfect Sloan-shaped vehicle; experimental, bristling with excitement, and inspiring.

To the blog!