The Terror and Hope of CODEX Hackathon
I’m a writer. As I type this, I’m angry — seethingly, deeply angry; the kind of angry that leaves me cursing at myself during trail runs that are meant to relax me, because my mind races off, tears down trails of its own. Why so angry? Because I can’t figure out a plot point for the next installment of my serialized novel, Erra’s Throne; the fifth section was supposed to be out weeks ago and it’s not, because I am a broken failure of a man who deserves to be self-cursed whilst running the mountains. I could write something, sure; “get it out there”. Easy. But this thing, it’s my heart. It’s not meant to be something; it’s meant to be, for at least a few readers, at least a couple: everything. That’s what it is for me. So I care enough about this dumb plot mechanic, that probably no one will notice, in this serialized novel that may never be read by more than a couple thousand people, to strip myself down to a spare raging core till I find the right words to make this story at least close to what I know it can be.
I’m telling you this here, before sharing my personal impressions of a weekend spent with some coders in San Francisco, to juxtapose it with this next thing:
I don’t give a shit about books.
The “CODEX” part of the CODEX Hackathon, the San Fran event at which I met all these coders (and designers, and other people with skill sets I do not understand), refers to what you and I’d just call a “BOOK”. Meaning physical object; meaning pieces of paper bound together between thicker, harder pieces of (probably) paper, with a spine, and et cetera. The longevity, durability, and revolutionary impact of this technology “cannot be overstated,” and I’m sure as heck not going to rehash it here. At the hack (I’m just going to make up shorthand names for this event. I didn’t even know a “hackathon” was a thing, before this weekend), I was fascinated by how many techies proclaimed a heartfelt, visceral connection to physical books. They waxed about all the usual stuff: smells, textures; the grain of paper on your hands; the weight-memory of a familiar volume; annotations from a younger self, annotations from the friend from whom you borrowed this book oops, what, like: twenty years ago?
And yes, sure: I’ve got some old books that I care about. I’m not here to poop on anyone’s sensual pleasure.
But also, seriously: I could not care less. About any of that. About “books”, as a physical technology. The vestigial is accidental, vestigial, a format. I couldn’t care less.
And I kind of think you shouldn’t, either.
Now that I’m an expert hackathonian, I have the credibility to say things like: technology’s changed everything. No, but seriously. No one has to lug books around (well, most kinds of books); personal and professional libraries can be accessed anywhere, all the time; a lifetime of reading no longer carries unacceptable physical burdens: homes given over to codices, to pulp and glue stacked in shelves and on every available surface; we can imagine a day when trees are not asked to yield up their flesh that we may pass learnings and fictions between ourselves; those annotations we cherish are kept in a cloud where, despite what our chestnut-sized lizardbrains think, yeah probably they’re safer than they’d be in that charmingly dog-eared copy of The Three Musketeers that we read on the subway in 10th grade.
With all this in mind, I was psyched for CODEX Hackathon. “What’s the Future of Reading?” Darn straight. And it’s a good thing I was psyched, and a good thing I already had all that in mind.
Because even thus prepared, the whole thing messed with my head something wicked.
This was the hackaroo, in a nutshell: teams made up of designers, developers, and a handful of people like me got together. Each team tackled some question facing reading in this, our increasingly digital age. The deliverable each team created was a prototype — an app or a tool — that somehow addressed contributed to the future of reading. For an excellent summary of some of what was created, check out this recap. For my project, I was paired with Michael Bernstein, a terrific “full stack” (not pancakes) developer, to create a fun and easy tool for selling literary serialized fiction. We made this, and I think we’ll build on it — Michael was awesome; is awesome. Hire him, reader.
Throughout the weekend, as I was talking to these designers and programmers about stories and how we receive them; and at the end of the weekend, watching the presentations, the thing that struck me over and over and over was the extent to which technology is changing everything in this game. This is about much more than than a shift from physical books to, whatever, Kindles and smartphones. Or rather, that shift is about much more than whether you have paper or silicon in your hand as you read. Just as the physical book, and the printing press, and all of the technologies that defined publishing for the last couple centuries are about much more than ink, paper, and glue. They’re about magazines and the cultural tropes that model gave rise to; they’re about “news” “papers” and what that did to how we experience the wider world; they’re about the existence of the novel, #ffs, which to be honest when I say the word “writing” is pretty much the thing that I’m thinking about 96 percent of the time.
And that, all of that, is what’s going to, has to, change.
Representatives from Wattpad (“Discover a world of unlimited stories”) and JukePop were at the hackathon. These platforms — including one called I think Medium, of which maybe you’ve heard ?— allow anyone to write and distribute fiction, non-fiction, essays, whatever. JukePop is working to create tools to help writers multimedia-ize and splash up their prose; there in the hackazone, several of the prototypes developed were about using digital tools to enrich the reading experience with cartography, sounds, and social connections.
But the change all this tokens is still deeper than that. Anyone, anyone can now write and be read. In some cases, can be read by lots of enthusiastic people. And what’s interesting is that, right now, I’d say, looking across these platforms and at self-published work, taking in this whole democratized open ecosystem: a lot of it is just total garbage. Sez me. Does that matter? I mean, really: does it matter that I think that, at all?
Nope!
Not just because that’s one opinion, mine, on a subjective matter; and further I’m just some weird guy who lives with 2 cats and makes not so much money with apparently-so-good-I-can’t-think-of-the-next-bit fiction.
Not just that. My whole framework, and the framework of everyone like me; the aesthetics against which these bright new ideas at the hackathon kept colliding: they’re all built into me by the past — by books, physical books, by all the commercial and artistic and cultural forms that evolved around glue pulp and ink. And this hodgepodge of experimentation — go, check out the hackathon’s projects, see what I mean —this is future. Even if I hate it. I don’t matter. You don’t, either; neither does your or my ineffable, irrefutable, true-in-the-deepest-place-of-ourselves sense of beauty or wonder.
There’s a rude — in the good sense — robustness to this truth. It’s bracing, regenerative, literally literarily revitalizing. Reading is dead. Long live reading; everything’s new here on out. Stories, writing, prose — anything that engages the interface of human and text — is changing, totally. And what was exciting and frightening at this hackathon, for me, was being dropped amongst humans for whom this kind of evolutionary shift is automatic: coder- and developer-types, for whom the tumbling forward progression of technology and markets is an everyday fact.
I’m a writer. I look backwards by disposition; I settle wait and see until something forms, around which I can build shape; or I look inside, at the precious little jewel-box of the thing I’m making up, trying to find the exact right f***ing plot-point that will allow me to get on with my life.
What has to happen if I want to continue to exist as a writer, though, is I have to adapt. Because these Big Changes are not “coming.” They’re here. They’re happening. Really, check out the Hackathon’s projects. They’re zygotic; they are funny; they’re strange.
They are true.
This is what now is, and if you care about stories — if you’ll tear yourself apart for weeks, searching out a perfect plot point; if you can’t help but see some kind of moral deficiency in prose that (you think) is lousy; if you’re someone who enjoys reading those sentences and that plot point, and thinking: “yeah. pretty good.” — you have to care about this. You don’t have a choice. What a gift, to be forced to respond to upheavals, as we move forward together towards something terrifying, exciting, and new.
