LIL INTERNET: Obviously, we're in a crazy time right now. It's kind of like the time after the printing press, right? This kind of disruption happens every time a new medium arrives. But I was thinking, the internet wasn't the new printing press. Really, it was social media. So then I kind of realized, the internet is basically a super medium, right? It's a medium for creating mediums. And I wonder, how do we escape printing press disruption-period, revolution-period, happening every 10 or 20 years, if we're now going to have sort of revolutionary new mediums being deployed on a much faster scale than the distance between, say, printing press and radio and television and social media?

Daniel Keller: I think I predict the sort of the end of media, there's like an endpoint of media, which is like telepathic communications, we're going to get to there where there is no actual, like, physical media. There'll be new forms of telepathy, I guess. But like, in a way, that's like the final printing press, you know? That's how I see it. And so we're getting pretty close to that.

-- NM TopSoil Ep 52: POWER BROKER [1:26:41 - 1:27:56]

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You've been ported into a non-indexed part of the internet. Surrounding you are conversations marked by iconic ornamentation. Some of the marks are recognizable from your prior wanderings; others are all but inscrutable. You begin posting and watch as your contributions are adorned by a string of memetics symbols, finding yourself unsure whether :galaxy_brain: followed by an :ahha: is an expression of majestic awe or pretentious over-inflation, or baffled by the conflicting emotional valences of :doomcryokay:. What to make of this environment?

With time, every community produces a vernacular. This specialized local language defines the group while also protecting the information that is transmitted among its members. Vernacular is a form of soft-resistance against processes of systematization and over-determination. Take, for example, an interview from March 2020 with the head of Wuhan’s central hospital ER: the document is written in Mandarin albeit with the heavy use of emojis to phonetically translate characters into a human- (but not machine-)legible document so as to evade censorship during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This selective obfuscation is illustrative of how meaning is smuggled through the media pathways of our contemporary, information dark age. This means of communicating corresponds with what philosopher and historian of language, Walter Ong, called a second orality: a return to the logics, fluidity, and fleeting ephemerality of expression found in oral cultures while still maintaining the textual legacy of Gutenberg’s press/parenthesis. In this non-indexed environ, symbols (or “reacts”) feel “spoken.” These symbols are deployed to signal acts of notice or listening, they are visual vocalizations. They take on the leaky and lossy qualities of orality, a visuality that seeps and shape-shifts across various strata of the internet, taking form as dislocated glyphs or colonnaded strings of text.

Vernacular is thus inherently unstable, constantly in flux. The NM WebDex Y2K20 records the fugitive meanings of New Models’ vernacular as collectively defined, all at once, by a swarm of NM dark forest dwellers in early 2021.

--@phm