Here’s a start-up idea that I’m putting out there to be stolen (even though it will make somebody US$ 100 billion).

Speckle is a social media platform, for seriously short messages. Addresses, tags, and other encrustations are tucked away into the margins of each message, along with URLs, which can be anchored in the text by a single character. That leaves exactly 14 characters for each ‘speck’ demanding extreme linguistic compression, making innovation of efficient neologisms, jargons, and acronymics near-mandatory. (It’s a T-shirt slogan or simple gravestone inscription length format.) Total information content for each speck comes to roughly 10 bytes, or a few more if exotic signs are imaginatively employed. Absolutely no pictures or other high-bandwidth media are tolerated.

Within five years, when the micromedia landscape has been speckled, a tweet will look about as concise as the Summa Theologica once did.

As with the previous post on micromedia and de-localization, this one is not aiming to be anything but obvious. If the trends indicated here do not seem uncontroversial, it has gone wrong. The sole topic is an unmistakable occurrence.

The term ‘micromedia’ is comparatively self-explanatory. It refers to Internet-based peer-to-peer communication systems, accessed increasingly through mobile devices. The relevant contrast is with broadcast (or ‘macro-‘) media, where a relatively small number of concentrated hubs distribute standardized content to massive numbers of information consumers. The representative micromedia system and platform is the Twitter + smartphone combination, which serves as the icon for a much broader, and already substantially implemented, techno-cultural transformation.

Besides de-localization, micromedia do several prominent things. They tend to diffuse media content production, as part of a critically significant technological and economic wave that envelops many kinds of disintermediation, with the development of e-publishing as one remarkable instance. By ushering in a new pamphlet age, these innovations support an explosion of ideological diversity (among many other things). No mainstream media denunciation of Neoreaction is complete without noting explicitly that “the Internet” is breeding monsters, as it frays into micromedia opportunities. (In all of this, Bitcoin will be huge.)

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For decades now, everyone who has thought about the matter at all has known that we were going to arrive here — which is to say nowhere in particular — and we almost have. It struck me forcibly in Cambodia, where connectivity was difficult enough to impinge on consciousness, that being linked near-continuously to nowhere (in particular) had become a fundamental expectation of my psychological existence. Twitter, ‘where’ I am still a novice, had drastically reinforced the blogger mentality that ejects the mind from place. Thoughts now latch onto online articulation as their natural zone of consolidation, entangled in social networks exempted from geography. A neural-implant twitter chip, uplinked through satellite to the Internet, seemed to be an inevitable consummation of current micro-media trends.

On the Shanghai metro, a large majority of travelers are submerged in their mobile phones, beyond speech, their attention sublimed out of space. The social networks to which consciousness has evolved, as an adaptation, are no longer found anywhere. As James Bennett predicted, in his formulation of the Anglosphere, cultural proximity has taken on a density that eclipses spatial closeness. It is already normal to live (psychologically), to a very large extent, outside space. Under many circumstances, the passenger standing next to you on the train is far more distant than the ‘voices’ on your twitter feed, even when every conventional standard of common social identity is satisfied. Minds that were biologically engineered over tens or even hundreds of millions of years to engage with their physically-proximate fellows are ever more elsewhere (or nowhere in particular) — in the techno-traffic ‘cloud’. Something seriously vast has happened.

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