The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Build the Fruitful Web

Danny Crichton:
Hey, it's Danny Crichton here. We take a break from our usual risk-giving programming to bring you another episode from our ongoing miniseries, The Orthogonal Bet, hosted by Lux's scientist and resident Samuel Arbesman. The Orthogonal Bet is an exploration of unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Take it away, Sam.

Samuel Arbesman:
Hello and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. I'm your host, Samuel Arbesman. In this episode, I speak with Laurel Schwulst. Laurel operates within many roles; designer, artist, educator, and technologist. And she explores, among other things, the intersection of the human, the computational, and the wonderful. I wanted to talk to Laurel because of this intersection and particularly because of how Laurel thinks about the internet. As part of this, she helps to run HTML Day and its celebrations. She helps promote what is referred to as HTML energy, and she even is thinking deeply about what it would mean to create a PBS of the internet. In other words, the internet and the web are delightful and special for Laurel, and she wants more of that energy to exist in the world. I am so pleased that I had a chance to speak with Laurel about her background and interests, the internet, HTML, and so much more. Let's dive in.
Laurel Schwulst, great to be chatting with you and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. You do a lot of really interesting and fascinating things, so I think perhaps the best way to start is if you can maybe just share a little bit of your background, what you're doing now, and also, presumably, this can be woven in as well because it's deeply connected to what you do, how you think about the world of the internet and the web.

Laurel Schwulst:
I am based in New York, but I'm from Central Illinois called Normal, Illinois. As a child, I was very curious about a lot of things. I grew up in the 90s and my parents got the internet very early on.

Samuel Arbesman:
What was the reason why your family ended up being so early adopted? It happened to be like my family was also an early adopter and it's always kind of fun to see the different reasons behind why certain families got online and got onto the web very early on.

Laurel Schwulst:
Yeah, my dad and mom are both very curious people I suppose. I consider myself an artist among other things. I think if they were born in my generation, they might be artists, but they happened instead to work at an insurance company that is headquartered in Central Illinois.
My dad was also interested in other forms of technologies. He got a video camera very early on. He's not an artist, but when I look back at the way he did home movies, there's clearly a vision there. And even sometimes he would do these letters that were selfie videotaped and then he'd send the tape in the mail to my uncle and I was like, "Wow, that was very forward-thinking, but it was like the late 80s."
As a young kid, I was really into horses for whatever reason. I remember using the internet, specifically using AOL to talk with other horse-obsessed kids. And at the time, in I guess late elementary school, I started using this website called horseland.com, which was almost a Neopets but for horses, and I think this was partially because I could only be in touch with real horses once a month just based on my situation, and so I needed to channel that horse-loving energy somewhere else.
So I'd create these make-believe horses. And I remember on horseland.com there was a little box where you could enter HTML and CSS to kind of depict your model horse stable on the web. Through that small box that I got into making my first websites, and essentially it wasn't about making a website, it was more about depicting a make-believe world. That was very formative to my upbringing.
Eventually, it was time for college. I went to Rhode Island School of Design. I was like, "Okay, I'm interested in art." I was also very interested in science, and so when it was time to pick a major, I chose graphic design, like the computers and art. Since RISD, I've been in New York for almost the past 15 years. I kind of think I'm very much the same person I was as a kid now but in adult form, or I think childhood is very important to what I do and may be related to some of my current interests in education and what public space should be on the web.

Samuel Arbesman:
Going back to what you were talking about with this box that allows you to type in HTML and CSS, I feel like that is sort of a very different way in which people think about HTML or the web and the internet and when I using GeoCities or things kind of early on and I imagined there were certain aspects of building websites as a form of self-expression or relaying information. But you also viewed it as this deeply, almost like world-building exercise of building this little pocket of the internet for yourself that was kind of exactly what you wanted it to be. When you think about the world of the internet or what you want the web to look like, is that one of the driving features of allowing people to almost mold or sculpt the internet kind of in their own image or kind of something like mapping something from their brain and their imagination into this virtual reality?

Laurel Schwulst:
World-building is a large part of my work. I think as a kid I felt quite unique and slightly alone. It was important for me to build this world I wanted to inhabit. I actually think that's a common artistic strategy for many artists who don't feel at home or feel like they have a sense of belonging is to kind of put a flag down and see if anyone else resonates with that flag.
One of the beautiful things about the internet is that oftentimes there are many others who feel that way. It's just that there hasn't been visibility or representation around that idea before and it kind of takes one person or a couple people to have the courage to put some kind of flag in the ground of the internet, see what community forms around it.
I'll also say that having a personal website has been very impactful for me over the years. I kind of think of a personal website as this incredible opportunity to share your personal system or ecosystem in which you operate. Before the internet, there was mostly mass media. You couldn't just instantly deploy something for everyone to see in the world. I think it's kind of an amazing thing to remember that that possibility is still there.
But yeah, with a website, unlike social media, you essentially have total control to do whatever you want. And I think learning some amount of programming has really changed the way I think because I can create systems or taxonomies that actually map very well onto the way I think and to the way I work and I can share those with the world through my website.

Samuel Arbesman:
Is that part of what you do in your educational work of providing people the tools and the skills, make their own websites, their personal websites? I agree with you that building your own little corner of the web of like, "Okay, here are the things that I think about and here's the way that I think about that." That is massively underrated in terms of being able to, one, allow you to think through some of these things, but also then act as some sort of beacon to attract other like-minded people. Is that some of the work that you're trying to do in your educational work?

Laurel Schwulst:
I guess I started teaching 12 years ago at Yale in the art department, a class about interactive designer the web, but I also have my own school called Fruitful School that I started with my friend John Provencher right before the pandemic.
So Fruitful School is our own workshop series. So far our primary offering has been this six-week workshop where people essentially pitch an idea for a website that they want to create, but it's not going to be a portfolio. It's almost going to be something they want to live maybe in another role that would've been a book or something, but they have a very specific web idea they want to manifest.

Samuel Arbesman:
I recently spoke with Christopher Chelva about his work with kind of the indie or poetic web or this smaller kind of web, and I feel like it overlaps very nicely with your vision of this kind fruitful web and fruitful internet, but I think it is distinct because you're also talking about providing the tools or techniques or maybe the confidence to have this certain amount of agency in creating some of these kinds of things as opposed to just trying to surface some of this more poetic web though there definitely is a lot of overlap.
Yeah, how would you think about some of your visions around this fruitful web or fruitful internet or other ideas and how they overlap these other either communities or terms that people are using to think about, these visions of an internet that are alternative to kind of the blander, more corporate, more kind of social media?

Laurel Schwulst:
I think one of the most important things about the web is just what you have to say and your message, and so this past winter I led a course for our workshop called Ultralight Lightweight Websites and Time and Place for Fruitful School. It's kind of about returning to source, what is the most essential thing that you want to communicate and how can you do it in a lightweight, straightforward, flexible, sustainable, accessible way.
The course was three weeks and we had a few different workshops on how one could do that, teaching HTML, CSS, JavaScript, but we also invited a couple guests, Marie Otsuka and Benjamin Earl, two website makers who think of this in different ways. Marie showed us how to make time-sensitive websites with JavaScript and Benjamin did an ultralight computer workshop, which was actually about physical computing, and we all had to make websites that were under one megabyte big that could only be accessed in a specific area where you put this little Arduino and it offered up a wifi network and you would connect to it and then the under one megabyte website would come up. And so having constraints like that were useful in exploring different ways to think about ultralight.
For me, it's both about making ultralight work for the web, but it's also this more metaphorical and process-based thing. In contemporary life, I think as we go on, there's entropy of heaviness. It's like we just accumulate and become bigger and bigger. And I think it needs to be an intentional act to live with levity or lightness.
There's this quote from Italo Calvino, his Six Memos for the Next Millennium book where he talked about how lightness is a very important quality in literature just to be able to think about a problem from a different perspective, seek fresh methods of cognition or verification. And then I also think about how can I work in an ultralight way is another thing. As time goes on, I have more and more projects, but I still need to operate with a sense of levity.
Ultralight for me is both very literal, how can we make lightweight accessible websites that work and express our ideas, but it's also kind of a bigger idea of how can we have ultralight processes and also ultralight ways of living everyday life because things can get very easily heavy if we're not intentional.

Samuel Arbesman:
And related to I guess the creation aspect of ultralight websites and things like that, do you sense that there's almost a lowering of the barrier and making it easier for people to build some of these things of saying, "Okay, in the sense that if you don't need to build a slick and complex and bloated website, but rather focus on what are you actually truly trying to convey? What is the information you want to share? What is the vibe you want to articulate or whatever it is? Then you don't have to worry about all these things."
And there's a lot of computer science professors who all basically have very, very similar websites and they're all really, really basic. I'm not even sure if there's even like CSS involved. It's very old school basic HTML. And they all cut to the chase of like, "Okay, here's this person, here's my research, here's my qualifications, done." And I feel like there's power in that of saying, "What are truly the things that I want to convey?" Is that one of the ideas with this ultralight? And does it feel freeing for many people think, "Oh, I don't actually have to make some slick responsive thing. I can just kind of throw this thing out there and that can be enough"?

Laurel Schwulst:
Yes, exactly.

Samuel Arbesman:
So one of the things you mentioned around planting flags and kind of articulating, okay, this is an area or this is a community maybe should exist or I'm very interested in, and you mentioned briefly HTML energy. I'd love to hear more about what is the flag of HTML energy you were trying to plant and what are the results, but also what does it mean? What is the community that you've catalyzed?

Laurel Schwulst:
HTML energy, we call it a movement, a podcast, and an event series, and it's a project that I have created with my friend named Elliot Cost. HTML energy is all about returning to source, not just viewing the source, but also returning to our original inspirations for publishing on their web, our own internal source.
Elliot started it in 2019, but we view it as something much broader than what he and I did together. I was the person who started the podcast and interviewed a lot of people about their favorite HTML elements. Then we host these things called HTML Freewrites, which is where people get together and write HTML documents either in person or online in a synchronized fashion.
And so last year, two people in different cities wrote to us and said, "Hey, we want to host HTML Freewrites on June 3rd." And we're like, "Yeah, great. Go for it." And it was interesting that two different cities decided to do it both on June 3rd, I think it was Toronto and San Francisco. And then I was like, "Wait, we should host an event on June 3rd too and we should just call it HTML Day." And so I really love that it was this kind of emergent thing. And then once I tweeted about it, I was like, "Do any other cities want to write HTML on June 3rd?"

Samuel Arbesman:
So June 3rd, it arose organic. It's not like Tim Berners-Lee's birthday or something like that.

Laurel Schwulst:
No, it just arose organically.

Samuel Arbesman:
Okay.

Laurel Schwulst:
And then this year, June 3rd wasn't on a weekend, so we're like, "Let's do July 13th." So this year, 18 cities worldwide participated in HTML Day. And so it was funny because it was this synchronized yet very IRL day where people are writing HTML across the world.

Samuel Arbesman:
Was anyone writing on paper or was it all on computers? Did anyone really try to say, "Okay, I'm going to just think of HTML as this almost manuscript kind of thing or scribal thing?"

Laurel Schwulst:
Yes. Actually that's some of my favorite HTML is when someone knows it well enough to write it with a Sharpie on a piece of paper. And then I really love when they then give it to someone else to convert into HTML and become the browser almost.

Samuel Arbesman:
Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. So with HTML energy, and it sounds like you've kind of created this community of people who have these freewrites and people getting together kind of annually, HTML Days. If you were to ask the people who kind of participate in all this what is the unifying idea behind HTML energy, what do you think you would get back?

Laurel Schwulst:
Actually, someone at the freewrite on Saturday told me, "HTML energy is really nice because I can connect with other people who think the current state of the internet and the web is not on the right track." There needs to be some societal shift towards health, towards well-being, or towards some kind of energy that's aligned to why the web began, which I feel like in Tim Berners-Lee's mind is about this incredible human potential of sharing information and it not being captured for corporate profit.
And maybe this links to another big idea, which is could the web become more of a public good or actually serve people instead of capturing and selling their attention, which is just the entropic path of so many corporations. And so sometimes I throw around this phrase called PBS of the internet. Could the internet have more PBS, Public Broadcasting System energy? Or could there be an internet that's not algorithmically driven that encourages individual silos that drive commerce and entertainment?
Like Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, who's part of like the PBS on television, saw TV as this incredible educational medium if channeled in the right way because there's this incredible one-to-one relationship you can have with an audience member. Maybe you've seen it. There's this amazing clip on YouTube where he's testifying before the Senate to get funding for PBS. I think that we need a similar movement for the internet because it's this incredible resource. Many people think of it as a human right to have access to the internet. But so much of the internet is actually hurting us or becoming this addictive thing almost like drugs.

Samuel Arbesman:
My sense is that to a certain degree, HTML energy and the community of that is almost designed to be so shockingly basic in terms of a version of the internet, it's too... In that way hopefully it will draw society and the world of the internet and the web a little bit towards that vision and away from this not as playful internet. PBS of the internet, that vision is also the same kind of thing of not necessarily pulling the entire internet that way, but at least carving out this space and saying, "Okay, this space is going to be different." In the same way that television, there are lots of things on television, but PBS was, I don't know if oasis is the right term, but it was this different kind of more educational, public good kind of thing.
And in my mind, when I think of what is the PBS kind of like, how does that term kind of cash out in terms of practical ideas? One example would probably be things around like Wikipedia. Wikipedia seems very good at having avoided certain commercialized incentives, and there's a very good governance structure in terms of actually making this thing actually very powerful public good and remarkably accurate because of the underlying governance structure. And would Wikipedia be one of the elements of the PBS of the internet, and if so, what are other examples as well?

Laurel Schwulst:
Part of the first phase of imagining a PBS of the internet is basically to do a sort of mapping project where Wikipedia is definitely on the map, but if we draw a 2x2, it's just in one quadrant. This universe is actually bigger. Based on my own biases, I would probably put Arena on the map, the social network that's kind of Pinterest for academics and creatives. The way I use it helps me think and also helps me connect with people.
Well, okay, I think that technology has this incredible potential to help us reflect and kind of understand our own selves. In general, with the wave of being in touch with everyone all the time, we don't have as much access to our own selves or ways to circle back to what we're most interested in. I think it's almost like this camera metaphor, we're always facing out and never in. Another maybe adjective I'd use is reflective or a way for technology to actually have this very nurturing potential.

Samuel Arbesman:
And you mentioned Arena or Wikipedia. I noticed actually on Arena you have a collection of people's the lines on their phones, apps, of what are their own PBS of the internet. What are their other examples of apps or tools or things that you would consider part of this PBS of the internet or other people would consider as well, because I imagine you probably don't want to view it as you were the major arbiter of this kind of thing? What are the other examples of things that promote this more reflective human aspect of the internet?

Laurel Schwulst:
For context, I have an Arena channel called PBS for the Internet: On Your Phone. And essentially what I ask people to do is to take a screenshot of a row of four apps on their home screen that they think embody PBS energy for the internet. And so this is more of a curation exercise. A lot of people put Wikipedia, a lot of people just put kind of basic things like maps, phones.

Samuel Arbesman:
Or their phone because the phone is like... And even though it's a smartphone, the fact that we think of it more as this computer or access to the internet or various aspects of it and don't think of it as this tool for speaking to other human beings means that maybe the phone app is actually really important for that kind of human reflective aspect of the internet.

Laurel Schwulst:
Yeah, 100%. Part of my work I've realized with PBS is actually reclaiming the word basic because people think sometimes basic, it's like, "Oh, the minimum viable." But when I looked up the etymology or definition of basic, it means essential foundation.

Samuel Arbesman:
It's like what is the base? Yeah.

Laurel Schwulst:
There's also other apps like a meditation timer. There's also a personal music library, different note-taking apps. One thing I'm working on right now, a note-taking app that actually helps you be in touch with your own self. And we're kind of thinking of it as a camera roll for your thoughts, almost like existing within this world of a PBS of the internet. And when we're calling it ping practice, the idea being we get so many what we call pings from the universe, but what do we do with them? There should be a way to note it down and then to be able to traverse your pings as you keep pinging and kind of understand patterns in your own thoughts through metadata traversal and things like that.
And I guess that also kind of goes back to I love using my camera roll, but I find the phone... But I find its ability to help me categorize things or make collections actually quite primitive. And I would really love a whole world where our phones actually helped us understand ourselves and our connection to the world.
My friend was playing the most recent version of Zelda recently, and in the beginning of the game, you're gifted what looks like a magical smartphone. And it was funny because the person who gifts it to you says, "Hey, this will help you find direction in this world." And I'm like, "Wow, what if our phones helped us do that?" The simple, basic need of finding direction, maybe it's as simple as connecting to friends with a phone app or taking pictures of the world and being able to understand our pattern. Things like this I think are really important.

Samuel Arbesman:
There's this whole movement in the world of computation and this long history around tools for thought and computational tools for thinking. And I feel like what you're discussing is complementary and in some ways not too dissimilar, but it's almost these what are the important computational tools for being or for meaning or for purpose. Yeah, and we definitely need more of those kinds of things as well. Yeah, that is super exciting.
Anyway, that actually might be a great place, a very uplifting place to end. So thank you so much Laurel for chatting. This has been wonderful.

Laurel Schwulst:
Oh, yeah. Thank you, Sam. Yeah, I really enjoyed chatting with you.

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