Coming Soon: A Digital and Theoretical Book
Looking forward to Theoretical Structures of Online Content
I’ve been working on a new book for some time now.
Granted, I’ve written several books before, exclusively fiction. But the last time I wrote a novel was almost five (!) years ago this summer. I’m not sure if I’ll ever write fiction again, and a big part of the reason why is because I’ve transitioned to researching and writing about the digital world in this blog and across online sites. I enjoy it more; I feel it uses my time and energies in more substantive ways. The world is changing, and I’d much rather be a part of that.
My upcoming new book, Theoretical Structures of Online Content, has a mouthful of a title, but it nicely sums up what I’m trying to do with it: explore new ways for content to be created and disseminated across online ecosystems. Like our world, the online one is evolving constantly, leaving us racing to catch up or patch it or find fixes and ideas. Theory will only take you so far; at some point, you have to create the things that help shape tomorrow.
I have a lot of ideas myself, as people who read this blog well know.
This book is an original attempt to succinctly explain much more than I can encompass simply in blogs. It’s a way to hopefully help chart a digital future and shape online presence in meaningful ways. I want to evolve along with the world, and this is a chance to make a statement that is hopefully relevant and forward-thinking. I’m sure I’ll be wrong about a number of predictions in it—in fact, I expect and hope to be. It would be very boring to see the future clearly and have no surprises, and no one to build on the ideas you’ve concocted.
With that in mind, while my books in the past were published physically as paperbacks through Blurb (an excellent company), this book will be an eBook distributed for free here on my Substack. It will be a downloadable PDF that can be shared at leisure without bounds. Part of my love of the internet is our mode of sharing, copyleft, GNU licenses, and other means of sharing our work for free with the people who helped form our opinions in the first place. I’m a believer in open-source literature. I want us to seek a world where we craft our lit engines.
It’s been slow going so far in the writing, which is why I haven’t mentioned it until now. But I’m feeling it’s at a place where I’ll be ready to release it by early summer 2023. While I’m no George RR Martin, this won’t be a Winds of Winter for decades. It has a release window and I’m sticking to it. I’ll release updates to it periodically online with different versions, like code.
This book will touch on a lot of things, and its wide variance might make it a hindrance to many readers. I’m okay with that. I want people to pick out what they want from it and feel free to use what they need and build on that. Some of it will be very general, other parts are highly technical or abstract. I won’t mark which is which in the book, as I leave that to the reader’s good judgment.
Some topics that will be included:
Web 3.0, Web3, Semantic Web
Artificial Intelligence
Quantum content (told you it was abstract)
SEO
Prediction markets for writing and companies
Information-centric networking and content-centric networking
Blockchain
Petri nets
Distributed and decentralized content
Organizational SEO
Peer-to-peer
Cybernetics
A lot more
I likely won’t offer another update on the book until it’s completed, but I’ll post snippets and chapters from it here on my Substack every now and then leading up to it. I’ll also welcome feedback once it’s completed and published, and I look forward to the reactions across the spectrum to it.
-Sam