Read The Dead Media Notebook Online
Authors: Bruce Sterling,Richard Kadrey,Tom Jennings,Tom Whitwell
Based on material from Dead Media Working Notes: deadmedia.org
Compiled (1995-2001) by Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Tom Jennings
This edition edited (2015) by Tom Whitwell [email protected]
Contributors:
John Aboud, James Agenbroad, Joel Altman, Mike Antman, Lars-Erik Astrom, Richard Barbrook, Eleanor J. Barnes, Ron Bean, Steven Black, Trevor Black, Trevor Blake, Nicholas Bodley, George H. Brett II, Stephen P. Brown, Adrian Bruch, Bill Burns, Rich Burroughs, Ted Byfield, Ian Campbell, David Casacuberta, Roberto de Sousa Causo, Lauri Christopher Gardner, M. E. Crane, Bill Crawford, Charles Crouch, Frank Davis, Melissa Dennison, Julian Dibbell, Richard Dorsett, Philip Downey, George Dyson, Paul Di Filippo, Micz Flor, Gary Gach, David Galbraith, David F. Gallagher, William Gibson, Carl Guderian, Matt Hall, Mark Hayhurst, Stephen Herbert, Peter van Heusden, Tom Howe, Dan Howland, Richard Inzero, Bill Jacobs, Tom Jennings, Stefan Jones, John K. Fitzpatrick, Richard Kadrey, Manoj Kasichainula, Mike Kelley, Patrick I. LaFollette, Greg Langille, Suzanna Layton, Pat Lichty, Patrick Lichty, Paul Lindemeyer, Eric Mankin, Aaron Marcus, Martin Minow, Nick Montfort, Morbus, Bob Morris, Dave Morton, David Morton, Bradley O'Neill, Bradley O'Neill, Adam O'Toole, A. Padgett Peterson, Tom Perera, John Perry Barlow, Damien Peter Sutton, Soeren Pold, Matthew Porter, Jonathan Prince, Marcus J Ranum, Dan Rabin, George Raicevich, Darryl Rehr, Greg Riker, Derek Robinson, Marcus L. Rowland, Deac Rossell, Matthew Rubenstein, Jack Ruttan, Colin Savage, Larry Schroeder, Mark Schubin, L. Seth Hammond, Brett Shand, Geoffrey Shea, Andrew Siegel, Mark Simpkins, Robert Spaun, Bruce Sterling, Candi Strecker, Charles Stross, Jim Thompson, Paul Tough, Albin Wagner, Bill Wallace, Dave Walsh, Alan Wexelblat, Thomas Weynants.
Cover: Edison’s Electric Pen, from Patent 196747, November 1877
How this book was produced:
1. I scraped the numerical index of deadmedia.org using the
Scraper
extension for Google Chrome to produced a list of URLs for every article.
2. To download the full HTML for each article I used
Refine
. Using ‘Add Column based on this column’ I was able to to separate the relevant fields into columns in a spreadsheet. For example,
value.parseHtml().select("b")[1].innerHtml().split("(")[1].split(")")[0]
returns the author byline for the majority of notes.
3. This spreadsheet (500+ entries with columns for headline, source, byline, body copy) was then edited by hand in
Google Sheets
, to remove personal emails, dead URLs, strange line-lengths and broken formatting.
4. I then used Mail Merge in
Microsoft Word
to create the book as a catalogue of the spreadsheet, applying styles for headlines, bylines and so on. The Word document was then hand-edited to add paragraph breaks, rewrite headlines and re-order the notes.
5. The word document was fed into
Calibre
to be turned into a .mobi file.
Thanks to schoolofdata.org for the scraping method, and to Tom Jennings for maintaining a very neat site.
In 1995, Bruce Sterling issued a challenge; “I'll personally offer a CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK.”
The handbook would be “a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media… a rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfect bound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book… by some really with-it, cutting-edge early-21st century publisher. The kind of book that will appear in seventeen different sections of your local chain store: Political Affairs, Postmodern Theory, Computer Science, Popular Mechanics, Design Studies, the coffee table art book section, the remainder table.”
Bruce appealed for help collecting stories and notes about dead media, and over the next five years, notes and suggestions accumulated at deadmedia.org.
But the book never happened. The website has survived, gradually succumbing to link-rot as the Internet evolved and grew around it.
Twenty years later, Bruce’s idea is more relevant than ever. As Benedict Evans said “For the first time ever, the tech industry is selling not just to big corporations or middle-class families but to four fifths of all the adults on earth - it is selling to people who don’t have mains electricity or running water and substitute spending on cigarettes for mobile.”
The history of media is impossibly rich. For every cranky stillborn idea (“when the real hair wig on the crown of her hinged head was lifted up it contained a turntable for playing 3 1/2 inch records!”) there were successful media, around which industries were built, fortunes made and societies transformed, now lost completely.
This collection is not The Dead Media Handbook. It is simply a lightly edited collection of those nearly 500 notes and contributions. Inside, you’ll find lists of early home computers, speculations about the multi-dimensional mental images created by Peruvian knotted-string books, details of Timothy Leary’s experiential typewriter and a lengthy analysis of the Magic Lantern peripherals market.
I have clarified headlines and amalgamated a few entries and trimmed a few lengthy discussions of late ‘90s Internet and video game minutiae. You may be disappointed that I removed the nine-page list of dead mainframe computer serial numbers, but rest assured it is still available at deadmedia.org/notes/0/006.html
I also took out all the meta-discussion about “Is this dead?” and “Is this media?”. The only question I asked while editing was “Is this interesting?”
There were various attempts to categorise the notes; by chronology, by type of media. These would make sense in a printed reference book, but this collection is in the order that notes were added to the archive, lightly shuffled to make sure there’s lots of good stuff at the beginning.
It opens with Bruce’s first post about Peruvian knotted-string books and closes with a note about the Martian data from the Viking Landers “written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.”
This collection feels like a long rambling conversation. Each time you turn the page, you never know what you’re going to get. Enthusiasms appear, are expanded or dropped. If you enjoy something, keep reading and it will probably return. If you get bored, skip a few pages and you’ll find something unexpected.
Thanks to Bruce for letting me publish this collection, and to all the contributors who made the project possible.
Tom Whitwell
Herne Hill, London
January 2015
[email protected]
by Bruce Sterling, 1995
Ever notice how many books there are about the Internet these days? About 13,493 so far, right? And how about "multimedia?" There are 8,784 books on this topic, even though no one has ever successfully defined the term. CD-ROM -- is there a single marketable topic left that hasn't been shovelwared into the vast digital mire that is CD-ROM? And how about the "Information Superhighway" and "Virtual Reality"? Every magazine on the planet has done awestruck vaporware cover stories on these two consensus-hallucinations.
Our culture is experiencing a profound radiation of new species of media. The centralized, dinosaurian one- to-many media that roared and trampled through the 20th century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment. The new media environment is aswarm with lumbering toothy digital mammals. It's all lynxes here, and gophers there, plus big fat venomous webcrawlers, appearing in Pleistocene profusion.
This is all well and good, and it's lovely that so many people are paying attention to this. Nothing gives me greater pleasure as a professional garage futurist than to ponder some weird new mutant medium and wonder how this squawking little monster is going to wriggle its way into the interstices between human beings. Still, there's a difference between this pleasurable contemplation of the technological sublime and an actual coherent understanding of the life and death of media. We have no idea in hell what we are doing to ourselves with these new media technologies, and no consistent way even to discuss the subject. Something constructive ought to be done about this situation.