- The author discusses a machine learning experiment for an audiobook.
- Audiobooks are popular and producers want unique elements.
- The story in the audiobook involves fictional music in a fictional language.
- Due to budget constraints, the author used a machine learning model to synthesize the music.
- The machine learning model is called Sample RNN and was implemented by a researcher named Richard Assar.
- The output of the machine learning system is included in the audiobook.
- The author also uses the machine learning model to experiment with different texts and music.
- The input files for the experiment were Croatian folk singing called Klapa.
- The author discusses the process of educating themselves about robotic arms for the book.
- The author did not have a technical advisor but relied on living in the Bay Area and researching on the internet.

- The author discusses the "egg problem" in robotics and the challenges of creating a robotic arm that can crack eggs in a chaotic kitchen space.
- The author's inspiration for the book comes from living in the Bay Area and being drawn into the world of food.
- The author explores the intersection between technology/startups and old crafts in their books as a rebuttal to the idea that the old and the new are adversarial.
- The author's genre could be described as "puzzle fiction" or sci-fi inflected literary fiction, with a positive outlook on the world they create.
- The author aims to create characters and narrators that readers want to spend time with, and believes that science fiction writers should find a path through the challenges of real life while remaining excited about the future.
- The author was influenced by children's books, particularly those about runaway mutant food, in writing their book "Sourdough."

- The author discusses the influence of a lesser-known book called "The Duchess bakes a cake" and the concept of runaway food in their own book "Sourdough".
- They talk about the fascination with microbes and the microbiome as a direct influence for the microbial characters in "Sourdough".
- The author reflects on the idea of creating an app for "Sourdough" but emphasizes that the format is determined by the story, not the other way around.
- They share their experience of losing an app they created called "Fish" due to changes in iOS, highlighting the challenges of maintaining digital creations.
- The author contemplates the question of how to give digital creations an everlasting life online and discusses the trade-off between bleeding-edge technology and stability.
- They mention the efforts of museums and archivists to preserve digital art and the challenges of maintaining consistency in TV shows set in the recent past.
- The author expresses concern about the potential loss of digital content in the future and discusses their decision to use a script to delete their tweets on Twitter.

- The speaker reminisces about the early days of Twitter and how it was a fun and casual platform.
- They compare Twitter to a cafe conversation that fades away, and express their dislike for the idea of recording and keeping everything on Twitter.
- The speaker talks about their practice of regularly deleting their tweets and how it feels refreshing.
- They discuss the decline of blogs due to the rise of Twitter and Facebook.
- The speaker mentions their experience with user rage and their acceptance of change.
- They share their opinion on the increase of character limit on Twitter to 280 characters, finding it useful for presenting and reacting to ideas.
- The speaker expresses their interest in machine learning and the creative opportunities it presents for artists.

- The speaker is trying to write a novel using machine learning systems, but wants it to be good and not just a parlor trick.
- They discuss Magenta, a suite of tools focused on sound and music that they believe is doing machine learning right.
- The speaker believes that creating tools and instruments that people can get better at using is the next step in machine learning.
- They describe a project they worked on involving neural networks that can generate text and built a plugin for the Atom text editor to use it.
- The speaker believes that human curation and shaping is just as important as the output of the machine.
- They discuss a line from their book that became a social object on social media and how it doesn't tie back into the rest of the book.
- The speaker believes that long-form fiction has not yet been influenced by social media in the same way as museums or Instagram.
- They believe that the readership for books is different from social media users and that people read books for different reasons.

- The speaker discusses a project called Epic 2014, which was created in 2004 to communicate the rise of blogs and the changing media landscape.
- The project was made as a Flash video due to the limitations of posting videos on the internet at the time.
- The video became popular and had to be mirrored on different servers to handle the bandwidth.
- The speaker mentions that they were asked about creating another project similar to Epic 2014, but they declined as the original project was made with pure intentions and they wanted to move on to something else.
- The conversation then shifts to discussing the changing tone in the coverage of technology and how it influenced the speaker's writing.
- The speaker talks about their novel, Sourdough, and how they wanted to send a different message about Silicon Valley rather than just burning it all down.
- The character in the novel starts in a darker place and the story aims to be a dispatch from Silicon Valley today.

- The author discusses using a machine learning model to synthesize music for an audiobook due to budget constraints.
- They explore the intersection between technology/startups and old crafts in their books.
- The author aims to create characters and narrators that readers want to spend time with and remain excited about the future.
- They were influenced by children's books and the concept of runaway food in their book "Sourdough".
- The author reflects on the challenges of maintaining digital creations and the potential loss of digital content in the future.
- They regularly delete their tweets on Twitter and discuss the decline of blogs.
- The speaker believes in the creative opportunities of machine learning and the importance of human curation.
- They discuss a project they worked on involving neural networks and the influence of social media on long-form fiction.
- The speaker mentions the project "Epic 2014" and how it influenced their writing about Silicon Valley.

Robin Sloan is a writer and media inventor based in Oakland - https://twitter.com/robinsloan

He just released his second novel, Sourdough - https://www.amazon.com/Sourdough-Novel-Robin-Sloan/dp/0374203105?tag=robinsloancom-20&linkCode=as2

Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC - https://twitter.com/katmanalac

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

So this is a kind of a weird jumping off point, but I listened to you on, I think it was a Mother Jones podcast and you very briefly mentioned a machine learning experiment for the audio book.

Could you talk about that a little bit longer?

So the background is that, as I've been working on these books that are in a lot of ways, traditionally published, even though I have an interesting, very sort of forward thinking publisher MCD, they still get printed on paper and you know, sold mostly in bookstores and online and places like that.

As I've been working on all that stuff for a few years now, I've also like many people in this area, many people that I'm sure you guys know, I've been really interested to the, to the point of sort of preoccupation with machine learning in particular, the creative applications, Like less the super practical sort of uses and the ways that it might transform the economy and all that.

And I mean truly more like the ways that we can use some of these systems to mash and mangle and, and it just interact with like words and pictures and sounds in different ways.

The audio book, first of all, it's actually interesting to know for, for folks that aren't totally plugged into the publishing industry, audio books are huge.

It's like they're growing like gangbusters.

Every time I go to a bookstore and do a reading, I ask people like, how many of you also listen to audiobooks and I mean truly everybody's hand goes up.

It's like just a really, really popular way to consume this media.

So kind of in step with that, audiobook producers have gotten really serious and frankly a little bit demanding.

Sloan, it's time to produce the audio book.

You know, like what can you produce or what will you produce?

That will make this a little distinct from just the printed book.

They don't want to just do like a recitation of what's on the page.

So for this book, Sourdough, the story happens to hinge on this sourdough starter, you know, this little funny community of microbes that you use to bake this delicious bread.

And in the story, there's a starter with some strange properties and there's also this singing.

There's like this music that I don't want to give any spoilers, but it kind of helps the starter grow and it's all part of this mysterious package.

So I described the music over and over in the book.

I mean, like at great length, like, oh, it's so slow and sad and mysterious.

And it's like, in a language that no 1 understands.

And so come time to produce the audio book.

I was like, if you go through this whole thing in your earbuds, and you never hear even a scrap of this music, like it's going to be kind of disappointing.

Unfortunately, we did not have the budget to like hire the people who invent Dothraki for Game of Thrones or Klingon or whatever.

So we need some other way to like synthesize this sound that would be truly alien Like it's not any language on planet Earth.

It's something fictional something invented So this where it loops back around to that obsession with machine learning as I think you guys probably know 1 of the things that that these models can do really well is sort of take a corpus of stuff, of training material and extract some patterns, more general patterns, and then use those to generate something new, but different, you know, not just kind of mimicry of what you put in.

So I mean, at that point it actually, you know, it took a lot of kind of learning and tinkering with the code, actually struggling with the code.

This was in, actually, funnily enough, this program was in Lua in Torch, the original Torch.

And totally a testament to just the power of this open source ecosystem.

I mean, this was a paper written by 1 group of researchers, implemented by this like rogue, mad machine learning genius in the UK, this guy named Richard Assar, who's just like, I like bow down to him and his generosity truly and like making this really wonderful and very usable implementation of this tool.

It's called Sample RNN and it takes as many MP3s as you want to feed it, chops them up into bits, churns learning for days and days and days, at least on my deep learning rig.

And then in the end, spits out this really, to my ear, at least weird and lovely kind of generalization, you know, tries its hardest to learn the essence of that music you fed it.

Of course it kind of fails because none of these models are actually that good yet, at least at stuff of that level of complexity, but the way in which it fails is really interesting.

So that's all to say that now in this audiobook, there is just these little whispers of this fictional music in this fictional language.

And to my knowledge, it's the first time that the creative output of a machine learning system has been included in an audiobook.

I mean, I actually think it might be a tiny distinction, but I am all about tiny distinctions.

I will like, I just want to rack up all the like tiny steps forward in the state of the art.

Have you used the model to create anything else?

Oh yeah, I mean, basically when after you've assembled 1 of these rigs or a couple of them in my case, you feel bad about ever letting them sit idle because I mean, that's what they're for.

They've got these big beefy GPUs and it's so hard, truly it's so hard to get all the weird little libraries and dependencies all lined up right.

So having done that, you never want to let them sit.

So yeah, I have some models that are kind of always churning on different bodies of text just to try to see what happens and what emerges.

But there's 1 where I've thrown in all sorts of different kinds of music and sound just to see what it sounds like on the other end.

And sure enough, I mean, sometimes what comes out is just kind of a messy garble.

You can listen to it on the sourdough audio book, which is available on audible.com.

But no, none of the other stuff is public yet.

It's not quite, it's the other stuff is still at the level of, you know, and a lot of this stuff is, it's kind of, I think in this state, it's like that sort of frothy, fermenty experimental, like, ooh, there's like something there.

But I personally don't quite know what that something is.

And so a lot of my work with this machine learning stuff is kind of trying to push through that to get to like, you know, a thing, like a thing that's actually worth sharing on the other end and that is definitely a work in progress.

In this case it was almost like a short circuit straight from my own inspiration to the output because of course you know this all started this project was only necessary or you know I only sort of thought to do it because I had written about this fictional music and fictional language in my book and That came from my own experience listening to a kind of music that I've just long enjoyed and sort of thought was beautiful It's a kind of Croatian Folk singing all a cappella sort of a chorus of voices in sort of odd harmonies.

And so I just had my like, you know, folder, preexisting folder of just all the Klapa MP3s I'd ever-

I mean, that's like always the answer to that question.

And it just, like for years, I just, I'd long loved it and thought it sounded lovely.

And so of course it was in my brain when I'm imagining this stuff and putting it into my book.

And so then in a way, I mean, this might be reaching a little too far, but I kind of feel like the machine learning system and I did the same thing just on different tracks, like input, right.

And like the experience of listening to something followed by some munging, mashing step and kind of abstraction step.

Of course, in mine, I kind of had my response reaction, the music and the neural network had a different thing going on.

But then in the end, we both spit out something, actually something new and different and transformed, but still obviously based on that same input.

And did you educate yourself similarly around robotic arms?

We've done all these like basically technical advisor interviews for TV shows and movies and stuff.

And I was researching her the other day, hoping that there was someone there.

And Spike Jones explicitly said, we don't want a technical advisor because I don't want to be bounded by reality.

Actually, I, I wonder, I don't know if I like that or not.

I think there's probably, I respect the people who are able to dive deep and nerd out with the experts and remain unbound.

You have to be greedy and take everything that they tell you and they'd be like, cool, got to go, you know, and off into the realm of imagination and in strangeness and wonder.

I feel like that's cause I feel like that's sort of self serving cause I feel like that's sort of my model.

I've never personally operated 1, but I have seen them operated and I think they're pretty amazing.

Not just, you know, like mechanically or sort of computationally, like aesthetically, I think they're really interesting and lovely.

And yeah, and so the inclusion of lots of robotic arms and people talking about robotic arms and thinking about robotic arms in this book was definitely, it was driven just by my own interest and curiosity.

I mean, that's the great thing about living in the Bay Area and also just frankly, the level of tech journalism that exists today.

Boy, you can glean a lot and not just surface level stuff, but like the really deep mechanics, just by reading on the internet and and kind of going down those rabbit holes YouTube right like anytime you want to go beyond these sort of description be like, okay Well, what does it really look like or like how does it how does it swivel in space?

I mean, There's a YouTube video to show you.

But then, okay, so to give away a little bit of the book, she, Lois gets the sourdough starter.

She ends up in this kind of hidden farmer's market and part of her store is like making the sourdough with a robotic arm, right?

Is that a real technical problem that exists?

I suspect, yeah, I call it like the egg problem.

Yeah, capital E capital P It's like you know You like like in all these roboticists are like yes The all that stands between us and domination of all the world's economies is

Yeah, exactly And so I don't know I kind of suspect that it is a problem.

It has been my perception, I could be wrong, this is probably where it fuzzes into fiction a little bit, but it has been my perception that as a character in the book says, you know, there's something really appealing about these arms working in kitchens.

Like, I mean, you're like, we will have done something when an arm can like make you an omelet or do some of those kitchen tasks.

But in fact, it's really challenging because that kitchen space is in fact really chaotic and unbounded.

It's not 1 of these spaces that's sort of at least a normal kitchen, like a restaurant kitchen or a home kitchen.

McDonald's obviously is kind of designed around sort of modularity and it's already pretty robotic to start with.

But those other kind of kitchens, those more organic kitchens, if you actually kind of do that thing of like defamiliarizing it and like looking, trying to look at everything in that space and the way it all works together with fresh eyes, you're like, that's fucking impossible.

It is just the angles and the slopes and everything's a weird shape and you can't recognize it all and I actually think that's wonderful.

I think that's lovely that it's like, oh man, what a magic show actually for a human cook to manage all those things at once and then reach over and just with 1 hand go and crack an egg.

Yeah, well, because you kind of, you spoke to it in the book around having 2 hands basically like I can't do that either I've tried it today.

will tell you that you can learn it is and YouTube once again YouTube is your guide I think in the book if I remember right I actually have I have lowest learned by watching YouTube clips, including some that are so great.

They're just, because again, truly everything, everything you need to know and every task, no matter how small is somewhere like documented on YouTube.

And often it'll be like these disembodied hands.

Just the video is like a minute long and they just kind of show you and demonstrate and do a test run and then, you know, tap it on the edge and it comes right open.

And I was skeptical at first, but in fact, it is not that hard.

What was the inspiration to do this book?

you know it's actually a lot like the other books I've done it's really living here in the Bay Area which I I mean truly think it sounds a little dorky, almost a little Pollyanna ish, but, but, but, but truly I just, I, for all, for all of its complexity and problems and everything else, I think it's just a really, really inspiring place.

I think it's a place where people do interesting things and end up leading these really interesting lives.

And so yeah, over the last few years, I personally, just as a human, have gotten pulled more into the world of food.

First as an observer, kind of just like someone curious about it, and slowly as more of a participant, although I'm still much more of a observer than a participant.

And it just, I mean, this is what happens with everything.

You dip a toe and do something and you realize that it's just full of story.

I mean, there's so much stuff there, so many little dramas and mysteries and mechanics that you can pretty easily turn into plots.

And so that's 1 of my questions is that your stories from Penumbra to Sourdough kind of explore the intersection between, you know, tech and startups and old crafts like breadmaking or, you know, book selling.

And so what about that interaction is particularly interesting to you?

Well, you know, I think it's at the conjunction between them.

And the honest answer might be annoyance.

I'm so routinely annoyed when the old and the new get framed as an adversarial relationship.

This happened, and you know, of course this happens with books and it was so much the sort of conversation, especially around like e-books and print books, like the internet and old school publishing, like, well, which will it be, you know, which will triumph, or like what is the road forward?

And I don't know why, I don't know if it's just temperamental or I've had good mentors and good advisors or I've had the opportunity to read smart thinkers for a long time, that has always seemed so nonsensical to me.

Like it seems to me like it is always and.

Instead of the new thing replacing the old thing, it all just piles up in this like multi-car crash, non-violent crash, glorious crash, where everything is just kind of like, and the mountain is getting higher and higher and higher.

And I don't know, I find that totally exciting because it means we get new things all the time, but we also get the benefit of crafts and ideas and obsessions that have been sort of compelling people for a really long time.

So I think mostly, not mostly, but at least in large part, my books are intended as a sort of Rebuttal to all the people who want to make us choose between the old and the new I'm like nope I want both

option C yeah Do you have a name for the genre that you exist in because I was talking to Kat before about this and there seems to Be you know increasing amounts possibly infinite amounts of dystopian like black mirror type content But you're kind of into this like positive satire genre.

Yeah short answer some someone did suggest a genre tag that I quite liked they said I think your books are sort of like puzzle fiction and I just like the sound of that I'm not sure that's an actual genre or even if my books are that puzzling.

But I was like, if I ever saw my books on a shelf labeled puzzle fiction, I would be very happy.

I mean, in my heart, they are sci-fi inflected literary fiction.

And all I mean by that is, I try to take care with the sentences and just, you know, produce language and, you know, scenes that are like interesting, somewhat interesting to read and not just like glop on the page.

At the same time, there's no denying that my core genre as a reader is science fiction.

And so that stuff just gets kind of metabolized and regurgitated, I guess, or transformed.

I think it's refreshing to see sort of like a non-dystopic like there are funny, you know Elements like the slurry drinking that I definitely personally recognize But but I think it's there I get an overall like positive sense about the world you're building.

I mean part of that for me is rude and this is not necessarily a sort of dystopian or not distinction, but part of that for me is rooted in the desire to have like narrators and other characters that you actually want to spend time with.

And that's only because my most memorable experiences of reading from, you know, early childhood onward have been ones where I finished the book, you know, close the back cover and I missed the, the mind that I was spending time with.

And there's a lot of good books that are, you know, compelling, engrossing and rewarding that aren't that we were like, Ooh, what a, what a bunch of creeps, you know, like what a bunch of broken humans.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff like that.

Books and TV alike, probably probably more that than anything else.

Maybe it's actually for exactly that reason.

They've got the like, everyone is broken beat nailed down.

And so maybe I'm gonna do that thing that I like so much, which is voices that you miss.

I love it because I was talking once to a YC founder, and he was saying, if you talk to the vast majority of founders in Silicon Valley, they were influenced by things like Star Trek or Hitchhiker's Guide and these are all like pretty rosy visions of the future.

Whereas, you know, right now we have Black Mirror and all this like really dark stuff

like what is going to be built 20 years from now and the young people reading this and watching this.

Boy, You know, and I feel like that should almost be like a challenge.

That's a great sort of like challenge to the science fiction writers working today.

And I think some of them, by the way, are meeting that challenge.

I think people like Cory Doctorow, Annalee Newitz here in San Francisco is an amazing science fiction writer.

They don't write those sort of You know naive Panglossian features either like and guess what it all worked out great like obviously that's just like that's not actually useful either but yeah to find a path through the the thorniness of real life and and power and you know the way that people inflict pain and other people but still remain kind of like whoa excited about what's coming next I mean I do I think that's I mean it's what I like to read and I hope that's what people are, I hope they're still producing it.

Well, I mean, even in a couple of interviews I read with you and listened to, you were influenced by children's books.

When you're reading, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, you specifically mentioned.

Well, yeah, for sourdough in particular, there is a great genre of, I mean, this is even, the genre is very specific.

Talk about specific, Specific little slices of books.

This is the sort of like runaway mutant food You're cloudy with a chance of meatballs.

Yeah, absolutely Lesser known lesser known book called the Duchess the Duchess bakes a cake also great and basically it's like all like food that you know grows out of control becomes giant and There's clearly something that I like resonates deeply with the the child's mind because it's like you could totally populate a shelf with those books

Oh, man, and were you reading these beforehand or you're just like, I think this needs to go a little further

I you I can't say that those were the direct influence for this book That was more of a kind of hook shot where after writing this book, I was like, Oh, wait, you know, I think I think this has a lineage.

The more direct influence for that kind of stuff in sourdough that kind of like, runaway food vibe was truly it's all the scholarship that's been done in the last few years, you know, 5 years, maybe going on a decade about microbes and the microbiome and just the daily near daily wonder of like, Oh, let's see what's in the news today.

They talk to each other and they're controlling my and there's how many and we don't even know I mean, it's like I truly it's amazing I that's got to be such a fun discipline to be in now and and for the last little while And yeah, so that was I was like, yes, I need to put some characters in this book that are not people, but microbes or microbial communities and try to try to give them some personality on the page.

And did you think at any point you wanted to make an app as well?

Yeah, well, you know, you're talking about staying around with these characters and I Use fish a long time ago because when I actually sat next to Patrick Moberg while he was building it as I was working out Of beta work.

So my gosh, that's amazing gonna get out of my life, man But I just been wondering like if you'd considered building some kind of extension.

I you know, there's that thing you hear where people say like Okay, you have to come up with a story and then you find the right vessel for that story.

Like, does this story want to be a book or a video game or a HBO series, whatever?

I do not think that's actually how good things get produced.

So if you ever hear someone say that, you can tell them, Robin Stone thinks you're full of shit.

I think it's, at least for me, and I'll speak, I'll speak actually just for myself, it's almost exactly the opposite.

You get interested first in a format neither just you know I would have pure kind of like childlike interest like oh that comic book was so good or like wow an amazing movie or like even like that YouTube video was so weird and like creepy whatever it is and Then at some point you start to sort of feel that itch of like well, maybe I could make 1 too You know Maybe I could play in that sandbox You can trace everything I've ever made whether it's a book or a weird digital experiment, to that impulse of truly starting with some form that I admired and thought was awesome and then trying to figure out like what what kind of fits in that box.

So that's all to say that this book came out of a sort of a book shaped impulse.

And yeah, I think the next app is gonna come out of an app shaped impulse.

That the problem is you're like, ah, there's so many cool things.

I will tell you that I'm I'm kind of still in I feel this like tension is totally unresolved.

I don't have like a plan, a theory, a solution or anything like that.

But the app thing right now it's it's super well, you know, I'll make it really practical.

made this app called Fish several years ago, totally on a lark.

I mean, because I kind of, I admired the iPhone screen, in particular, the like lack of row of browser tabs across the top, or like other windows tiled in the background, you know?

Like it is the case that often, more often than on laptops and other things, people will just do 1 thing on an iPhone at a time.

Anyways, thought I'd take advantage of that, made this app, it was great, well-received.

Years go by, the newest version of iOS, something has changed and now that binary that I uploaded to Apple all those years ago will not run anymore.

It was getting a little funky, like it looked sort of weird on the newer iPhones, but you could still run it.

Now I am alerted by Apple via an email, it's not going to run anymore.

Because I am a writer and a tinkerer and not a professional software developer, I could not immediately find the source code to this app.

And I rooted around and dug out some old laptops and I booted them up and I just searched everything.

I was like, surely I must have emailed it to someone.

So I think it's gone and that bums me out.

So I fear, as of this moment, my current thought is that Phish is lost to the world or at least users of iOS, iOS 11 and above.

And, and, but there's actually something, I mean, that's just my sort of carelessness, which is a bummer, but there's actually something embedded in that, which is you make these digital things and unlike a book where once you bind it up and put it on a shelf, even if it gets forgotten, even if it gets damaged or you know, whatever, it's like still boots somehow you can, you can like compile and run that printed book basically forever.

And boy, that is just not the case with digital stuff.

Like the ground shifts under your feet and suddenly the platform you built it on goes out of business or, you know, the OS gets upgraded and you're like, the APIs are different And that's unsettling.

And to, to sort of figure out how to navigate that, how to still embrace the fun of those digital experiments, but like not sign up for infinite ongoing maintenance for like an ever increasing number of projects.

So that's, it's 1 of the things I'm really thinking about right now.

I think it's a, it's very distinct from the way that frankly people in like companies would think about making and maintaining apps.

But there's plenty of people out there who aren't.

People like me who are kind of just tinkerers, experimenters, writers and artists.

And I think it's kind of a funny moment for that kind of work right now

Well, if you actually look around at most people who work in the tech industry a lot of the work does fall away Like if you spend 2 years working at Facebook or Twitter or Google a lot of your work is gone 6 months after you leave.

So maybe the question is how do you give something like an everlasting life online?

I mean there's stability comes, it seems at least partially with time.

I mean if I was going to make a webpage, say, and not a fancy 1, like a real simple 1, and then if I took that webpage and I made sure to kind of have it hosted in a few different places, but it's an experiment.

Say it's a story and it's presented in some cool way and there's a few kind of interactive bits in JavaScript, say, you know, as the page proceeds and I host 1 on my website and maybe I host 1 somewhere else and I also, make sure that it's indexed by the internet archive.

I still don't feel as good about that as I do about a printed book on a shelf, But I feel pretty good about it.

I mean, I think there's like, you're like, okay, web pages have been around for what, like 30 years now.

You're like, finally we can kind of count on this technology continuing to be legible and accessible.

But at the same time, you're like, that's not the most exciting thing.

Like you don't, I can't make a cool, mobile, I don't know, like AR enabled experience with a web page, really not in the way that I would want to.

And so there's, basically I think there is this trade off, and maybe it's really natural, between that sort of like bleeding edge, coolness and interestingness, and that sort of stability and, I don't know, I don't know if it's just like the archive or I don't know you want to be able to share with people

Well, a lot of now is just falling into the hands of basically archivists in museums.

So you see it's happening, I think Rhizome's doing a project to preserve digital art.

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Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough