The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Find the Poetic 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 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.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Hello and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. I'm your host, Samuel Arbesman. In this episode, I speak with Kristoffer Tjalve. Kristoffer is hard to categorize in the best possible way, but perhaps if I had to provide a description, I would say that he's a curator and impresario of a burgeoning community online that celebrates the, quote, "quiet, odd, and poetic web". What does this phrase mean?
It can mean a lot, but it's basically anything that is the opposite of the large, corporate, and bland version of the internet most of us use today. This web that Christopher seeks out and tries to promote is playful, small, weird, and deeply human. Even though these features might have been eclipsed by social media and our current version of our online experiences, this web that feels a throwback to the earlier days of the internet is still out there, and Christopher works to help cultivate it. He does this through a newsletter and award and event and more. I am so pleased that I had a chance to speak with Christopher about this poetic web and what it looks like, how we should think about the internet, Christopher's projects, and so much more. Let's dive in.
Hello, Kristoffer Tjalve, and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. Perhaps it might be best to start by discussing and exploring the kind of internet and web that you're interested in, the kind that you're a fan of, trying to cultivate. You've written about a quiet, odd, and poetic web. Maybe you can share, what does that mean? What is the kind of internet and web and websites and things that you're trying to find?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Thanks, Sam. Thank you for inviting me and having me here, and perfect pronunciation of my last name.

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Samuel Arbesman:
That's too kind and probably inaccurate.

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
It's a very expansive question, which I love because it's like a never-ending love for the internet that I'm onto. I often identify with this quiet, odd, and poetic, but those are three words out of a list of hundreds that I could probably come up with and maybe to some extent should start to rotate.
But I think this whole direction started probably three, four years ago. I was writing a weekly newsletter. It was called the same as my newsletter is now, but the focus was a little bit different. I was very much writing in the slipstream of the US 2016 election with a lot of tech lash and a lot of criticism around technology and the internet and how it influences our societies. At some point, I felt that I was repeating myself and I didn't really feel that my contribution or my endeavor really brought anything to the table that others didn't do much better or with much more care, that I gave myself an ultimatum to just only look for what I found interesting and share that. And that led me into this whole other internet that I somehow had lost, that I didn't remember existed because my internet at that time was very much defined by the classic social media, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, Twitter back when it was still Twitter. And this kept me going and I kept exploring for things that somehow sparked something in me.

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Samuel Arbesman:
And then maybe you can maybe give some examples of the kinds of things that evoke that kind of feeling very distinct from social media. But do you feel as if it's the kind of thing where it was this kind of poetic web existed in the early days of the internet and then had been lost and then people are trying to rekindle it? Is it the feeling that it's always been there but because of the pressures of the social media giants, we just don't notice these kinds of things? How do you think about all this?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
The thing is that with any history of the internet is so difficult because everyone has their own intimate relationship with the internet and their own history, and in many ways the internet is a history that is being written currently. It's an ancient technology, but at the same time it's an evolving technology. It's still evolving. It's still taking different shapes, meaning different things, and it's so grounded in our own maturation. So the internet that I got to know when I was a teenager, obviously I looked at it very differently because it was different things I was interested in at that time than what I am now. So I think it's very hard to make a universal history, a statement of what it is.
Currently, in my assumption is that the poetry and the softness, the oddness, projects on the internet has existed all along from the early '90s. The whole net art movement was very strong. You had the sites really dedicated to just exploring the vastness of what's possible with hypertext, basically just pages of pages of pages of different weird stories and animations. And I think that actually never really got lost. I think what maybe got lost was my attention towards it. I, myself, and I would say society at large went through both the commercialization of the internet and also the whole social media, which I think for me came with the promise of quick growth. In my teenage years when I could do a Facebook page and then overnight would get a few thousand followers, and then I thought that that's how you grow an audience. You just create something and you wake up and then there are 3,000 liking what you did.
And that sounds silly now, but that was 10 years ago. This was really the reality. I would say it's still there. I think I lost it, but I'm getting connected to more and more people that have been doing this all along that I was doing other things and thinking about other questions.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Maybe you can give, and you mentioned some of these early artistic experiments, but what would be some good examples of this kind of web today?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
So early days, you have things like Jodi which is this collective. I would encourage anyone to revisit it. It's so native to the internet that it's hard to explain because it's really just strange. There's Super Bad. I think it's from around the same time. It's a similar endless, strange, odd project. And then more recently, I think some of the movements that I myself have been really shaped by is like HTML Energy. HTML Energy started by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst. Both their projects as individuals and their thinking has really shaped how I relate to the internet. They, for example, organize these HTML free writing sessions where once a year people meet in parks around the world and sit and write HTML on paper. And I think it's just, it's a super lovely and super different approach. And obviously what you then write when you sit in a park with other peers and you sit and write it on the piece of paper, it's a very different code. It's a very different website that you end up making than what you sit when you have your full studio set up.
And I think for me that really points it different directions. I always love very silly website, sometimes red, sometimes blue website. You go in and once sometimes it's red, sometimes it's blue. And things, it's just like you're like, "Okay, obviously someone had to make this," and this horse is made by... It's a horse AC art style and you keep on scrolling and it's just endless. The legs continuous. And it's like, "Someone had to make this and someone did." And I think that's really for me what makes the internet vast, but also just really a promising place for publishing and figuring things out.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Do you view that sort of internet and web providing almost rejuvenating or calming influence on people? And you mentioned that one of the reasons you found your way towards this part of the internet is in rejecting the social media algorithms that were forcing you to operate in certain ways or showing you certain kinds of things? Or do you find this rejuvenating?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
For sure, 100%. But I would say that as much as I was kick started by a resistance, I think I'm a bit more casual around it now. I think currently, there's a lot of bashing around the algorithms and social media. And to some extent that's fine, but I also find it a bit too easy and I'm more and more thinking about my algorithms as pets and training them to behave accordingly, or also just insist that they can be useful. And also I have an agency in what they do for me so that I'm not completely passive in this relationship and I cannot just say, "Oh, the algorithms just keep showing me these things and shaping me this direction," but also just knowing that I myself shape these. So if I use Instagram, I keep liking things that I want to see more of.

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Samuel Arbesman:
It's not either/or. It's like you're fine using these things the best way possible, but then also you're also just viewing this other part of the web is these are fun things like the endless horse. That sounds delightful. And I don't know how much time I'm going to spend on it, but I love the idea that that kind of thing exists.
Related to that, do the people who make... I mean you mentioned with some of this HTML Energy kind of stuff where people actually got together in person and wrote HTML by hand, which is fun and strange and bonkers in the best possible way. Other than those kinds of gatherings, is there a sense that the people working on these kinds of things are part of a unified community, or is it more you are helping identify things that after the fact you're able to say, "No, these things are all part of the same aesthetic"? How do you think about the community building aspect of it?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Yeah, I would really hope that it never gets unified because I think we don't really need one other universal or one single opinion around that. And I think also with all the projects that I myself are doing that somehow facilitates discovery or provide opportunities for others, I think generally speaking, I want to de-emphasize the connection is between them and also de-emphasize my own role in it. It's like I'm very much hands down and very transparent that approaching this has been very intuitive and idiosyncratic, but at the same time I would rather enable others to do similar work and I would rather have multiple newsletters, multiple gatherings, multiple awards. I think generally speaking, that you get a richer ecosystem and also stronger. And in the end of the day, there is a movement and I think it is connected, but I think it needs many roots and it needs many people who carries it.

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Samuel Arbesman:
I definitely agree that yeah, you don't want it to be this monolithic thing. And I think also the idea of providing multiple entry points into this community, I think, is really powerful because people will resonate with different components. But maybe you mentioned that there's a conference and you have this newsletter. Maybe you can talk about some of these different entry points and the different projects and things that you're working on because to a certain degree, at least from my perspective, you have become this a node within this thing. I know you said you don't want to be the central node within all this and you want it to be a lot more distributed, but you have been doing a lot. So maybe you can share a little bit of some of these different projects.

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
The main kick starter has obviously been my weekly newsletter, and I think just publishing every week for six, seven years just transform some things into it, but it also enables certain things. And I think what became was a personal practice became more an environment that I now can use to launch different projects. Last year, the newsletter rolled into a conference and it was really just a wish to gather some of these internet people that I have become friends with and I would engage with, rarely would've met in person. So I was like, "Okay, if I can convince some foundation to pay me some money and I can convince the location to host us, then I can do a conference." We did that at the National Film School in Denmark. It was really, really a lovely day, one day. Doing again this year.
Another project that I started last year was Tiny Awards, just the tiniest award on the internet. Last year we gave $500. It was an opportunity just to reward some of this odd, personal web that we find very important for the internet. It's not made by an agency or it's not made by a brand. It wouldn't fit into the more established Webby Awards institutions that do great work but they don't really promote or have an environment to support this more personal-oriented internet that I really feel is core to the internet. Got more than 300 nominations, close to 1,500 votes. And in the end, Rotating Sandwiches won, which is just a website with rotating sandwiches. And I think it was a very fitting first winner.
And we are repeating it this year and just closed nominations. So now the committee of people will select the people. We'll vote on the nominations and in the end, there will be a public vote again. And this year, we added a second award category. So not only the main reward, but we also have a multiplayer category to reward what social internet is, so what is social on the internet without being media-oriented. So these are basically websites that somehow think of the internet as an interactive medium where you can also engage with others.
Next to that, I guess I have another 10, 20 domain names, one that I'm very much excited about that I'm working on right now. It's an internet phone book, so we have now the main internetphonebook.net and we will launch it in the fall, which will be a physical phone book, a directory of personal websites. And I think this is really an attempt to claim physical space rather than to just stay only on the internet, but also to create an artifact that we can place into physical locations, ideally into independent bookstores and places where I feel that there would be an audience that would actually be quite interested in related to the internet that we're engaged with but might never really know how to find it. Let's say if you're not an internet person, I think it's very unlikely you ever encountered these corners of the internet that I'm part of because they live in its own network and it takes some time to get there, I think.

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Samuel Arbesman:
I'll say two things. One, full disclosure, you have made me a judge for this year's second Tiny Awards, which I'm very excited for. So I'm looking forward to seeing all them and maybe we will exceed the Rotating Sandwiches. And then and so related to this internet phone book, so is the idea almost like to make it with the same form factor of the very thin pages and the yellow or white? It'll look like an actual printed phone book?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Yeah, we are working now. We're also been talking with printers lately trying to locate the right paper and the dimensions and everything. And then because then we started to mock up and then we were like at first we thought we need 200 websites and then we'll be fine, but then we're like, "Okay, if we need to have enough pages in this phone book and we actually need the columns," then we're like, "We're going to need more than 200 websites."

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Samuel Arbesman:
200 websites out of a phone book. It's one sheet of paper, yeah?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Yeah. There's some work we have to be creative with here, but the idea is that it will as a form factor and it will copy a lot of the language from the phone book. I think it's, generally speaking, it's another directory. I do it again with Elliott Cost who I did this internet map called diagram.website, and I think there's generally speaking, it's a lot of relevance of resurfacing directories to navigate with and discover with, away from more feeds and search. The directories offer a different portal into someone's internet.
And I start to believe that generally speaking, I would just love you, Sam, to make me a list of a topic that you really care for. And I know you're a master of lists, so you do this. And I find that so much more interesting because it not only points me to new places, but it also gives me an idea of that person's taste. And it becomes very much an expression of an individual or a curiosity or a spirit somehow. And the more we can get into this and dare to build the structures where it becomes something that is within an individual person in whatever form, and that is I think we really start to have a quite diversified internet I love engaging with.
One thing if you go to a restaurant and they serve your plate, you can be fine having everything is fine. Everything tastes good, but what's even more interesting if you sometimes get there and you sit and you take a bite and you're like, "Whoa, this was strange. I did have not had this taste before." And then you're like, "Okay, what is this?" And then suddenly you have a conversation and you also discover maybe taste that you didn't know exist or you start to have a whole completely language around something. And I feel like that equivalent, I love repeating also on the internet to basically just increase the palette of what we can taste and how we can engage with. And it doesn't mean that everyone needs to like everything because obviously why should you do that? But I think it's just a bit stronger, a bit more odd sensations come alive.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Oftentimes, some of my lists, I'll mention these online lists are personal and idiosyncratic. They can't be everything for everyone. Not everything is going to make the cut, even things that maybe should because of my own personal taste. I agree. There is something to be said for showing your perspective on what these things are, and I feel like even with the Diagram Website or diagram.website, there's this sense it is not only your personal taste and idiosyncratic, but you visualized it as here is these somewhat overlapping communities that are all very different. And you can think about this poetic web or whatever it is from multiple different entry points and from multiple different perspectives and say, "Okay, here's this lens around certain things around the mythological aspects of technology or whatever, and here's something around just focusing on HTML and website." And they might overlap, but they might not and that's fine.
And so there's all different ways of thinking about it. I love the power of the directory, the curatorial power, not to make too much of the list versus the algorithm. Because of course these things often feed on each other, but having that smaller scale personal taste and personal listing can be very powerful because it can give you an entryway into things, but it can also give you an entryway into someone else's mind and understanding how they're coming to all these kinds of things.

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
In situ, what you're saying is for me, it also shows gaps to myself. So when I was making Diagram Website, it started as a list in my Apple notes and people ask me after the conference, "Hey, I love this day. How can I engage with the community?" I'm like, "The community?" It's like, "I don't know. It doesn't exist and I have no interest in becoming a community manager of this community that doesn't exist. But okay, what I can do is I'll send you links to places where you can then find yourself someone that you can start to engage with, contribute to, be part of." And then this listing quickly grew and I was like, "Okay, no one can use this." And then I was like, "Can I visualize this somehow? Can I make it understandable?" And I always loved maps, made maps my whole life, and it was quite intuitive to make a diagram as a map.
And then when I started to do it, I was like, "Okay, there are certain sections of types of sites that I know that I want." For example, ecology. I'm quite interested in basically the internet, how to seize control. So let's say in classic industrial thing, humans were in control. Everything came on time, assembly line kind of thinking. And then I'm like, "Where I feel like generally philosophy sidecar is going is to more rewilding thinking, and that also comes into accepting agency intelligences as ways of being that is beyond human." And then I knew that I will put this together on the ecology. But then when I plotted in the specific notes that I had within this, it was quite blank and I was like, "Oh wait, I think this is really interesting and I think I'm engaging with this side of the internet, but where are the specific projects?"
And then it was quite useful for myself and I was like could then ask specifically people that I know engaged in this world saying, "Hey, I'm doing this map. I would love to have more sites that relates to our ecology. Do you have any pointers?" And quickly it became bigger. I got more examples. To some extent, I would almost say too many examples compared to the map now. Just back to this map versus territory, I feel that the design of it is probably a little bit too complete so I feel like I should leave more empty space just to indicate that people should keep on exploring.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Righty, keep on exploring or here be monsters kind of thing. Was there any point at which when you were developing the map that not only did you find a gap and then you eventually talked to people who gave you examples to fill it in, but that there was something that you wanted to exist? No matter how many people you asked about it, it just didn't exist and there was almost this need of, "Oh, maybe I should build this or maybe I should just proclaim from the rooftops, start making this kind of thing online." Did that happen?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
The myth category, which a reminder to myself to keep exploring the myths of the internet, the internet is on one side very correct. So it's very factual. It's very, "Then this happened and therefore this." And it's very technical, very code language. It's very rational, and I think that there's the whole spectrum of different ways of writing histories that are anchored in different cultures, different societies, different languages that are also really missing.
I moved to Athens and I guess that could also just be a change. Suddenly you come from the Nordics, Denmark. You have the Vikings and you come to Greece and you have all the Greek gods. And you walk around Acropolis and you suddenly start to think about how these myths shape our societies, and I really want to encourage more of that for the internet as well. I think that's an exclamation mark or question mark or a call for proposals.

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Samuel Arbesman:
What would be the gods of the internet? Are these the founders of... The Tim Berners-Lee? Are they certain kinds of websites? How do you think about the mythological nature?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Yeah, right. I think there need to be territories at first because the Greek gods, they have Mount Olympus. And then the easy way is just saying, "Okay, this is Silicon Valley." We have this whole research institutions and military complexes, but I really wish we can replace that. And the very pragmatic would be it's under sea cables. So probably these are sea creatures. There must be like sea gods. Maybe starting to be satellites as well, but they probably don't live on Earth in the same sense. They need to live above. And then someone when stealing their juice and brought it to us, deadly humans and things changed.

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Samuel Arbesman:
This is wild and I love it. It's very provocative thought-wise. Oh my god, there's a lot of things. And you've been talking a lot about the internet and the web. How do you think about computing more broadly? For example, beginning in the late '80s, early '90s, there was this software for the Macintosh called HyperCard where you could almost build your own websites that lived on your computer in a very somewhat similar way. And people shared them and I think there were HyperCard magazines that were on floppy disks and you would subscribe to them and they would send them to you periodically. But these things were different than the communication medium of the internet and the web. Are you interested primarily in computing only when there is real-time communicative medium? Are you interested in computing more broadly? How does computing, I guess, fit into this broader mythology?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
I think it's fine. I think I started to accept that my niche is probably more in the web-based forms, and that's the thing where my own projects really try to basically keep the web alive and keep it away from the museums. And just the web is something that should be experienced, and ideally of course among friends, but it's still mediated between devices and the browser and stuff. And I think that's where I'm the deepest entangled, computation technology at large is that I'm aware of it as a part of it. I engage with it. I enjoy it. I find it always magical to see what's possible. In this sense, I'm super curious how it changes how we relate to each other.
But I wouldn't put computation on a pedestal. Obviously it's part of it, but it's also part of a political way of thinking, a social way of thinking. And I feel like the internet in the '90s were also very much shaped by the neoliberalism that was happening at the same time. It's certain world order, world philosophies to only claim that that's because of computation that we then end up with this way. I think it's also a little bit neglecting the wider influence of society at large. My main interest and where I spend the most time is the web, which is obviously a very reductionist approach to something that I want to be very expansive.

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Samuel Arbesman:
I don't know if you've thought about it in terms of the end goal for all this kind of thing. I feel like to a certain degree the journey is very exciting and you're having a lot of fun talking to interesting people and finding these websites and connecting people and ideas together. In terms of end goals, if there are any, is some end envision this idea that huge fractions of the people who are on the internet and the web come to appreciate the parts of the web that you've been highlighting, or do you recognize that this will always be a somewhat boutique kind of thing and will appeal to a small number and you're just trying to find the people that it will appeal to? Or is there a sense of no, this is for everyone and we should try to find ways of making this more accessible?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Everyone is a very boring audience for me that I really cannot relate to. The thing is, I think generally speaking, I'm very much a village person. So I love to go down the street, know my neighbors, go down to the bread store, and know the first name of them. And I think this is also how I really enjoy relating on the internet. And sometimes we get this, "Oh, now there are more than 3,000 reading. That's a lot of people." And then it's like, "Okay, but if it keeps growing, it'll be even more." And it's like, "Does this change how I should write or engage with things?" And sometimes I'm like, "It's nice not to have too many people," because also just there comes different standards that I would then both for my own but also responsibilities that I feel like comes with a skill.
I don't have end goals and I think it's much more defined by whatever I can see. I would say one thing that I'm very excited about is how actually I am creating infrastructure that provides opportunities for people whose work I really admire. And that helps them both to land in more classic, educational, artistic institutions and hence in that way shape that people in other, just shape the dialogue around the internet. I feel when we come, when we talk about the internet specifically, I feel within art institutions it gets very binary. We are still, if you're going to an art institution's, exhibitions that is related to the internet, it's like a critique about social media and I feel like, "Okay. And yes, and so what?" I feel like we can also move forward and I love to see how some of these things that I'm doing actually end up opening up other institutions to have a wider dialogue. So this providing opportunities is really becoming more and more important to me.
Secondly, I would also say just shaping a different language of the internet. I feel like, again, I don't know if it's from when the internet started to be commercialized and we didn't trust it and then people wanted to buy things and can actually give my credit card information to this unknown vendor somewhere. And then everything became very real, trustworthy, but almost to the degree where this whole pseudonyms, all this surreal-ness that the internet also has became forgotten. I would really like to make more space for that.

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Samuel Arbesman:
I love this idea of this catalyzing the community or being constructive rather than critical and providing opportunities and facilitating, expanding the shape of what should be possible and what do you want to be out there. And related to the commercial stuff, various tech trends shape how people think about a more artistic web and things like that. And so with crypto obviously had certain implications around NFTs and some of artistic stuff. And obviously I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't ask about AI. Is artificial intelligence. Is it a democratizer for creating these kinds of things? Is it like the bane of your existence and this kind of constant homogenizer? How do you think about an AI crypto or just even the trend of the month in general within technology?

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
No, I don't share about it. So I don't really write anything and don't try to form an opinion about it. I think a lot of people form opinion about both crypto and AI. I think early in my life I would do that, but I find that ultimately it's like things that are shaped outside of my... I'm not so close to it. It's not me doing and I don't really have... I'm not in a position where I can have a really educated opinion about it. But the AI, I'm more trying it myself in writing. I love to get feedback from it. I don't manage to prompt well or I don't know how to really get it to write how I like, but I like it give feedback. And then I can consider it as like a teacher that I'm not so scared of.
The red lines look differently when it's from a computer. It feels different than what the essay I got in school, which was just lines. I am just partly dyslexia, so writing comes with challenges and I always was afraid of this feedback. But I'm less afraid of it from the computer and I really enjoyed playing with it. This website recently, I'm not a developer. I don't identify with a developer. Maybe that's a little bit binary because probably everyone should be. So I did this website for my girlfriend called mygirlfriendisanartist.com. And so my girlfriend is a photographer and she takes a lot of... For commercial, it's like full digital. Everything's lines has to be straight, client order, 20 photos in the end of the day from three-day shoots. Very commercial in the sense that that's what is required for her to perform.
But then in her spare time or in the personal, she always shoots analog. And then we have this rich catalog of photos that she shoots in analog, but she doesn't really have a medium to share these photos. And then I created this website which was basically just every time you load it, you get a new analog photos of her. And then I added a small title to it. And given that I don't know enough code, I had no idea how to make it. And then came ChatGPT and then I realized I can just sit and chat with ChatGPT on how to do this. And then actually through a long evening, I managed to make, that was a really nice experience. How do you use AI?

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Samuel Arbesman:
I probably use it less than I should, but I'm unwilling to explore its full potential maybe or just less willing than I should be. I definitely enjoy generating images with it. I feel like that's very useful for spurring my own imagination can be re-thoughtful sometimes for even it can be as simple as if there's a word or a phrase or a term that I'm not familiar with, I can just have a conversation of, "Okay, what is this thing or what is this term and does this term exist?" And very quickly find a few ideas and go on to Google and then use that. And so I use these things all in combination. I try to lean into its hallucinatory and divergent aspects. And so I've actually used it as a collaborative storytelling tool or Dungeon Master for Dungeons and Dragons with my kids where we can write creative stories together or text adventures or a D&D experience. And that who cares if it's hallucinating and making things up? That is the exact point. And so I find that incredibly exciting.
And there is the coding thing, and I've used it a little bit with coding. It is very powerful enabler when it's not making up functions within software packages. I've had a situation where I think it was, this is I'm sure far from the exception where they'll recommend a certain package and that exists and then it'll recommend a specific function within that and that does not exist and you just have to roll with it.
I think when used well, especially when it comes to building things on the web, it could certainly be this democratizer and the idea of the low floors, high ceilings. It's really lowering that floor and making it that much easier for anyone to build things themselves. And especially building the kinds of things that are not going to be commercialized of that infinite horse or whatever. Maybe somewhere along this infinite horse, there are advertisements, I don't know, but it doesn't need to be commercialized. And so being able to build this thing make it that much easier to build, I think is a very powerful feature of AI. But I can also see spitting out huge amounts of text and images could flatten a certain amount of the weirdness of the web. And you have to balance those kinds of things and make sure we're using it in partnership with our humanity as opposed to in opposition,

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
There's this whole we'll just generate everything and then what's the web because everything is just being generated? But I think that I'm not so afraid of that. I think in the end we will all humans also connect because somehow other humans created that the magical effect of technology quickly fades away. So one of the things I love to do is walking around and then take photos of all the electronics that is on the street. You'll Discman and cassette players and all these things. And I remember how cool I was when I was walking around with those and they changed my world and now they're just trash on the street and no one gives a damn. And I think it's really just a matter of time. And I think in the end of the day still people making music, listening to music, and I'm still ultimately positive enough that it is, I think there are some problems in terms of are we then creating living hoods enough or are we destroying how basically jobs? And so then what is the point of that?
But I would say to the democratization point that you also had, like in my process of sitting and making this website, I also had to learn things because then I'm like, "Okay, how do I do that every time it loads a new image when I do it?" So there needs to be some JavaScript and then it generates this and I need to, maybe I can copy paste it, but I still need to understand a little bit what's happening because I need to change the URL from where to just where I text then photos. And then in the end I still need to learn how do I get it on the web. So I need to figure out how I use GitHub pages and then figure out how can I do that without having to do hosting elsewhere and stuff like that.
And I think I ultimately learned more from coding from doing this. And I think that's a little bit back to just how also shape around how we think about it. And maybe if one thing can be good, maybe this can change the labels of who gets to say what they are doing. So Melanie Hoff, she's an artist educator, performer who has this love for saying, "Always already programming." Basically, we are always already programming. And I think to many extents we are. And I think it's not really fair to say you are only a real programmer if you know amount of languages or you can do everything by hand. And I think it's nice to have a little bit of a scale thinking on X's instead of very gray, black, and white way of engaging with technology.

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Samuel Arbesman:
Well, however it changes, I would say here's to creating a closeness around the boundaries of creators and users and also even perhaps re-injecting a certain amount of magical effects on technology. I feel like that might be the perfect way to end this conversation. So thank you very much. This has been enormously interesting and wonderful, so I really appreciate it.

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Kristoffer Tjalve:
Thank you, Sam. Thank you.

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