Chris Aldrich has the most multi-disciplinary resume I’ve ever seen, with a background that includes biomedics, electrical engineering, entertainment, genetics, theoretical mathematics, and more. Chris describes himself as a modern-day cybernetician, and in this conversation we discuss cybernetics and communications, differences between oral and literary cultures, and indigenous traditions and mnemonics, among many other things.

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Transcript

Jorge: Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris: Good morning. It’s good to be with you.

Jorge: It’s very good to be with you too. I’ve been following your work for a while, and this is the first thing I’ll say: this is our first time talking, but I feel that we have a lot to talk about. I suspect that we have a lot of common interests. Folks who might not be familiar with you, though, might be wondering about you and who you are. How do you go about introducing yourself?

About Chris

Chris: That’s a good one. I’ve had several careers in several fields. I was trained as a biomedical and electrical engineer and spent some time in high-end biotech, doing research in in vitro fertilization and stem cell work. At one point, I was making real-time 3D movies with MRI machines.

While I was in school, I also ran a movie theater, and that entry led me into the entertainment industry. So, I spent the better part of a decade or more in film production: talent agenting, talent managing. I’ve seen almost everything there is, or that one could do, in the entertainment industry.

And then, in my next iteration, I am an independent researcher, and I play around in areas of education a little bit: anthropology, intellectual history. I still do some work in information theory from the physics and mathematics side, and I delve into indigenous traditions as well as mnemonics quite a bit, and the overlap of all those things. So, it’s a weird multi-hyphenate mélange of all kinds of crazy interests. But it keeps me off the streets.

Jorge: I think that is one of the most diverse career trajectories I’ve heard. When I think of you, one of the words that kind of flashes in my mind is multidisciplinary. And I think that comes across in the narrative you’re telling here. On your website, you describe yourself as a modern-day cyberneticist. Can you expand on that a bit?

Chris: Historically, there was a discussion of whether it should be cybernetics or cyberneticist or cybernetician. And I think there was some linguistic pushback against cybernetician, but it’s a field that essentially started with Norbert Wiener’s work in information theory and biology, probably as early as the twenties and thirties, and then picked up speed through the forties, fifties, and sixties. He was leveraging a lot of the early information theory work of Claude Shannon, who is essentially the godfather of the modern information infrastructure. Almost all digital communications are trying to find the answer to a math problem he posed in the late thirties. And, in fact, in his master’s thesis at MIT, he essentially melded Boolean algebra with electronics that made the modern computer age possible.

But Wiener was taking that information theory and applying it to control systems, feedback systems, and biological systems. And to me, a lot of that kind of encompasses a bunch of the work that I’ve done in the past and some of the things I still hope to do off in the future. But “cybernetics,” as a general phrase, is a little bit of an archaism that really doesn’t exist in the modern world. Most biologists — practicing biologists — have no idea what information theory is, so it’s a weird disconnect that I hope the world can fuse back together.

Jorge: I had Jeff Sussna in an earlier episode of the podcast talking about cybernetics, and I teach a systems studio at the California College of the Arts, so I have done a bit of reading on cybernetics. The “modern-day” part of this comes from the fact that cybernetics as a discipline has fallen by the wayside and all that remains is the “cyber-“ prefix. People use it for cybersecurity, and it’s used as a prefix for a bunch of things that are not necessarily related to what Wiener was talking about.

Chris: Yeah.

Oral and Literary Cultures

Jorge: And I’m assuming that the modern-day cybernetics thing comes into the information theory part of your current interests. How does it work into the other stuff? I’m especially curious about the phrase “indigenous traditions.” You mentioned that when you were describing what you were doing now. I think you said something like indigenous traditions and mnemonics. What’s that about?

Chris: So a lot of this stuff is bound up in the idea of communication and how one… not only does one person communicate with another, but how do we communicate with each other over time and over space? I think it was Whitehead, in the twenties, who said something along the lines of, “everything is a footnote to Plato.” So we’re all still, at least the modern West, still communicating with Plato in some sense, and the ideas he brought forth. How can we build on them? How can we refine them? In terms of cybernetics, you can think of it as a communication loop. How do you improve on things? How do you make them better over time? How do you improve that communication to improve the human condition, let’s say?

So in indigenous cultures, which the West has broadly ignored, wholly to its detriment, before there was writing, everyone used words and speaking to each other as well as song and dance and movement to communicate information from one generation to the next. Most of the West thinks of small indigenous cultures and tribes as children and kindergartners. And in some part, it’s because of how they operate. So when, let’s say, settlers from Europe moved to the United States in the 1600-1700s, and they met the indigenous peoples of America, those people are not going to pull them into the fold and teach them everything they know. So the version of what they get of those cultures is essentially what you might give a kindergartner or a first grader as a basic education. And unless you become part of the tribe and the culture, you’re not going to see or hear about all of the advanced levels of knowledge.

And because it’s not written down, the West, as they move in, doesn’t see or appreciate the dramatically rich culture that has been passed down from one generation to the next because it’s all hidden and passed down orally. That’s, I think, probably the easiest way to concatenate the bigger story. But there’s an awful lot of subtlety and nuance there and trying to rebuild that, at least for me, as a Westerner not embedded in an indigenous culture, is very difficult. But it also means because it wasn’t written down and it was only passed on orally, a lot of it has just been wholly erased. It’s like this big hard drive that did exist at one point and now we just don’t have access to it because it’s been corrupted.

Jorge: This notion of durable knowledge — knowledge that somehow gets articulated in such a way that it transcends space and time — again, that sounds a little grandiose, right? But we know about Plato because at some point it was written down and we can read it and we can learn from these people who lived a long time ago. And what I’m hearing here is that there is a contrast between oral and literate culture.

My mind goes to McLuhan and all the stuff that he talked about, how electronic technologies were nudging us away from written culture. And I think he was thinking primarily of television, but I’m wondering, with the internet and computers, we are in some ways reading and writing more than ever. How does that fit into this model of oral culture? And I’ll put a pin here, I want to circle back to your website because I see your website as an attempt to create a repository of primarily written knowledge. But, what is the connection between electronic written culture and these ancient oral traditions that for the most part have been lost?

Chris: There are places you can sit and look at in history, and even the birth of a big chunk of Western history starts in the time of, let’s say, King David at a 1000 BC, and a lot of those religious and cultural pieces were not written down. They were transmitted orally up until about the sixth century BC when pieces of the Bible started being written into books and then translated and transmitted in a written form. And we have very good evidence that those things have been transmitted very nearly perfectly for two and a half thousand years. But before they were being written down, they were being passed on orally. So someone is telling those stories, they have memorized them, they are putting them into a package that means something for the culture that’s using them. And the only thing we have left of a lot of that now is the written pieces of the Bible.

Another example of this, and it’s probably much better studied from an oral into a written tradition, is the works of Homer. So Homer’s story there very likely was not one single person named Homer, but a multitude of singers and poets and bards who transmitted… and the Homeric Epic really is eight major works, of which we only have two left. And those two that are left that we still know about are the ones that were written down. So it’s those pieces get transmitted through song, maybe through dance, through music, and through that oral tradition.

And we now have a written record of it. But even until the early 1920s and thirties, the first chair of the English department at Harvard was a guy named Millman Perry, who studied oral singers in what is now roughly modern-day Czechoslovakia or, at that time, Yugoslavia, I think. But he went and did recordings of multiple singers and their songs and the stories they were telling and translated them over and he realized in close readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer was using little catchphrases like “wine-dark sea,” as a very common one. But those little verbal ticks are repeated regularly throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, both as descriptors of people, of places, of times, of things in general.

So they were small little… if you want to equate it to a modern space, they were the equivalent of short tweets that you could memorize and then reshuffle. And as long as you and most people knew what the overall arc of the story was. So as long as you’re singing a certain section, you can pick and choose these things that you’ve memorized. You can play around with them, you can reshape them. But they’re all so heavily structured from a linguistic perspective to keep the rhyme and the meter that you’ve fit them together like puzzle pieces, which any good musician learns a lick and suddenly you can reuse that lick in multiple places in a song or repeated as a motif and it builds something different and bigger.

And when Perry noticed this, it created a big pull into some of these older traditions. Where do they come from? Why do we have them? And to some extent, we still use them even though we’re not conscious and aware of them. But there were pieces of culture that were built into them that we no longer used.

From Ancient Mnemonics to Modern Techniques

Chris: So, some people may, in modern contexts, be aware of the idea of the memory palace. Or, in ancient Rome, you have ideas like the method of loci.

So, how do you have places? And so, you can imagine walking through your home, which is a place you know very well. You could probably close your eyes and walk around your home and know where everything is because you have a good internal visual memory for that. Now, what happens if you want to memorize pieces of, let’s say, the Old Testament? You can walk around your home and think of individual stories and characters in different places in your home. And so, you mentally associate those things with a space you’re very familiar with. And then, as you’re walking around your home, you may get to your breakfast table and can’t help but think of Moses delivering the Ten Commandments next to your plate of toast that you’re going to eat for breakfast.

As you’re moving around your environment, you’re continually thinking about those mental associations. Now you have the ability to not see that, but in some sense, it’s there and because you’re walking through that space every day, if you do lots and lots of those associations over time, you can memorize laws, you can memorize constellations, you can memorize stories, numbers, names, whatever things you want to remember. If you want to memorize all 208 bones of the body, you make a little path through your neighborhood or maybe your local grocery store. And as you’re doing it, you do those associations.

Indigenous people do that as a matter of course, but they’re doing it with song, dance, spoken words, rhythms, space. In Australia, there are massive—and in those contexts in the West, they’re known as songlines—but there are big paths all across Australia that encode all the culture and laws of the peoples who live there, both in individual groups as well as larger, massive groups.

So, when the British show up and they cordon off the land and they build fences, that immediately destroys a lot of the local culture because you now can’t walk across the land to use those associations to remember your culture. And in Australia, there is evidence of a really strong mnemonic tradition that goes back 65,000 years. So, there are examples of things like people can say, “Yes, there used to be a lake here, thousands of years ago, and there isn’t now. But we know what type of fish and things lived in that lake.” And then, modern scientists can go use GPS satellite imagery to look at those spaces and take samples of the earth to find out, yes, in fact, there was a lake there, 50,000 years ago.

And those people living in modern times know that whether they’ve been there or not because those stories have been passed down. But you show up as the Brits and you build walls and fences and you say, no, this is our land. That’s your land. You can’t walk across. Suddenly, that connection to the past becomes much more tenuous and breaks over time. But as moderns, we can use our literate traditions but still combine them with those mnemonic traditions. And there are people still… there’s a Memory Championships every year in individual countries as well as international ones where people are practicing and doing these things.

Sadly, they’re usually using them for parlor tricks or memorizing long strings of digits. “I know 5,000 digits of Pi by memory, but when am I ever going to need to calculate the circumference of the universe to within one billionth of a centimeter?” So, it’s a parlor trick. Or maybe I use it to count into a ten-deck shoe of cards in Las Vegas, although you have to be very careful, you don’t have any bones broken when you do that. You can’t make it obvious that’s what you’re doing. You can give yourself an edge against the house, but you can also use those things for modern day-to-day things you want to remember.

Jorge: The thought that came to mind hearing you describe this is that we, inheritors of the Western tradition, primarily base our cultural memory on literature, right? So, written texts… and almost by definition, that is a sedentary medium, whereas the oral tradition is, or can be, ambulatory, right? Like, I could imagine that people told stories around the campfire sitting down. But to your point, you can also move around. The Greeks had the theater where the audience was sitting, but the performers were on stage, and they were using more of their bodies.

Addressing Information Spatially

Jorge: I want to bring it back to how we are working with information today. I think that, in some ways, what I’m hearing from you is a provocation to say, how can we bring some of the benefits of ambulatory culture to the way that we work with information? I don’t know if that’s a fair assessment, but where my mind went with this was Vision Pro and spatial computing and all these things where… you talked about the memory palace. I’ve done the demo with Vision Pro, but I don’t own one. However, I’ve seen YouTube videos of people putting up their “work” environment in their study and then putting their “entertainment” environment in their living room with these virtual… It’s not screens, these virtual windows peppered everywhere, right? And they move—literally move—from one context of focus to another in physical space. So, they’re doing this merging of the sort of stuff that we do with computers, but now in a physical environment somehow.

Chris: Yeah, even if you look at the Tom Cruise/Spielberg movie, was it…

Jorge: Minority Report?

Chris: Minority Report, from the early 2000s, roughly. He’s moving things around on an imaginary screen and, to some extent, what in that movie, he’s stationary, but he’s got the ability in his mind to move around. So, he’s doing—seeing—things the way indigenous peoples, the world over, would have experienced in their daily lives. So, as you’re moving around your local space, the things you have memorized to the spaces you’re moving are then mapped into that space.

So, as you walk around, I take a tour through my neighborhood, to which I have—and it’s really an idea I got from Lynn Kelly, who studies a lot of these things; she’s an Australian researcher who comes from a Western culture but is embedded into indigenous cultures there—but I walk around my neighborhood, and I have a timeline of history in my head that’s mapped onto a walk that I make around my neighborhood. So, two blocks away, is the 1800s. So, as I’m walking through, I can picture things on that walk: each house represents a new decade. So, as I see each house, if I like and enjoy it, quirky little things pop out of each thing, or a block further back in the 1700s. There’s a house to which I’ve associated a library card catalog in the 1770s that indicates to me the time at which library card catalogs started as an information technology.

And then, associated with that is also… the Austrian government had a conscription method by which they brought people into their military. But to do that properly, you have to be able to find the people and go get them to force them into the military. So they created numerical systems for mapping people onto numbers so that when they needed to conscript people, they know where to go to find them, which is not an easy problem to do, but it was one of the first times that happened in human history and that a lot of that system, I think, was mapped into, “Hey, how do we keep track of books rather than people?”

So, you have that conscription numerical system being used by librarians who were also working for the Austrian government at the time. It’s, “the king or the queen has all these books and were already as a governmental system using these numbers to keep track of people for the military; why don’t we use that same system and do that for books?” Every time I walk by the house, it’s hard not to think about those things as I’m taking my daily walk. I also have some of those notes and things written down into my digital system, something like Obsidian, or—I use index cards still, as an older tradition—and I have versions of that there. So, you can use both of those. I use both of those methods personally.

And you mentioned, “how do you bring these into the modern world?” And I think he totally missed it, but in his 1945 essay, Vannevar Bush, in the Atlantic Monthly wrote a famous article called As We May Think, and he actively used the phrase, “associative trails.”

He’s doing it in an office-bound context. And if you think about how you sit at your desk, you may have bits of work in piles and folders and papers on your desk. Internally, you know where, and most people, even with messy desks, know where everything is because they put it there, they lived it, they experienced it, and that associative memory works even in the space of their desk. It’s their desk is a mini song line of the ideas and projects they’re working on. Or in your computer, you may have folder structures that do the same things. Or let’s say you have a messy desktop on your computer. If you’re looking for a project, you will know whether it’s in the upper right corner or the lower left corner. Where do I click on the thing to find the document I’m looking for? So, you’re doing those things, you just don’t realize that you’re doing them. But once you realize that’s a thing, how do you leverage that as a tool to better make sense of where you’re at and what you’re doing?

Jorge: I think that the term used in the context of the WIMP metaphor computers was spatial memory, right?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Making Information Addressable at Scale

Jorge: “I put the icon for this folder on the upper right quadrant somewhere on my desktop, and I looked for it there.” The other thought that came to mind in hearing you talk about the Austrian conscription example is the book Seeing Like a State. I think the author is James Scott. And he makes very much that argument, where he says that things like surnames… It used to be that people didn’t have surnames; they just had a first name or the only name. And this was in the days before easy travel. I would be the one person called Jorge in my village, right? So, everyone would know who Jorge is because there’s only one of them. Or maybe there’s a couple, and we find some way to draw a distinction. But it wasn’t until governments — states — started to operate at a higher scale that they needed ways to better inventory the population for taxing purposes, that they instituted the mechanism of surnames as a better addressing scheme, right?

So, we impose these top-down categorization schemas to try to bring legibility into the world. Because, to your point earlier, if the way that we know the world is through the stories that we tell as we walk around it, that makes centralized control harder somehow because you’re operating in more granular, emergent, decentralized units.

Chris: Yeah. Essentially, you’re indexing people. And if you think about it, especially in the news media, a first name and a last name is usually not quite enough to specify a person. So, when there is a serial killer or a mass murderer, they are almost always identified by three names, so as to distinguish that particular person from everyone else for legal reasons. The news media doesn’t want to be skewered for saying John Smith did this thing—not me, John Smith in Oregon, but John Smith in Illinois somewhere. So then you have almost every serial killer in the modern age has three names. So, John Wayne Gacy. And that distinguishes John Gacy from all the other John Gacys. And it also becomes easier to remember because you think… In my mind, I think John Wayne, the movie star. I have this weird clown image, which is also an association with John Wayne Gacy’s peculiarities. But those things become ways that you can mainly index the things you run across.

Jorge: This problem that you’re describing hits very close to home for me because I have the Gmail address jarango@gmail.com. So, it’s my first initial, then last name. And there are a lot of people in the world that have J as their initial and then Arango as their surname. So, I get all sorts of email that is not meant for me. And I think that part of what you’re pointing to here is that this addressing scheme comes from a world before computers, where now, literally — and I’m gonna bring McLuhan back in — we are operating at the kind of global village scale where there’s going to be multiple… What is it? John Gacy? What was the name?

Chris: John Wayne Gacy.

Learning From the Past

Jorge: Yeah, we have to add the third name, right? Because if we’re operating at the scale of the world, there’s going to be multiple people who have either your same first and last name, or in my case, first initial, last name. I want to bring it back to your website because that’s part of what drew me to reach out to you. You describe your website as an online commonplace book, and I was hoping you would tell us a little bit about your website as a sensemaking tool for you and maybe find a way of bringing it together with the stuff that we’ve been discussing so far.

Chris: So, I use the phrase “commonplace book” because it’s at least tangentially known in a modern space. To some extent, I also blame Vannevar Bush for holding back the computer and technology industry because in his As We May Think description of the world at the time, he reframed everything and used different sets of words, which maybe worked for him. So he uses things like associative trails or he invents the word ‘memex,’ which really, I don’t think he invented in some sense, but he didn’t use prior words that the rest of the world had been using for ages. But really, the memex for him is a commonplace book. It’s just one that can be connected digitally and spread farther and faster.

So he uses the technology of the time — microfiche — so if you have a desk with a bunch of microfiche cards and you can pull up whatever one you want and look at it and do your work based on that, great. What I find interesting from a historical perspective, in 1903, there was a company called Memex that created what is today probably more popularly known as the hipster PDA. There are people who use index cards with to-do lists on them. “Here’s what I need to do today. I check those things off. If I don’t finish one, I move it to tomorrow.” There was a company that made an index card system with a box with cards of every date, and you’d pull out two weeks of cards and put it in your vest pocket. And as you needed to remember things, you’d write them down and check them off and you could file them away. So if you needed the notes later, you could do that. Or, “Hey, I need to do this thing next Tuesday, so you write it down on next Tuesday’s card.”

Those things were super popular, and if you go back, the precursor to what is now Bloomberg Business News was a magazine started by a businessman in Michigan who sold filing cabinets, and he started that magazine. And you can find regular advertisements in that magazine for this Memex index system. So I have no doubt, within 50 feet of Vannevar Bush’s office, someone had one of these on their desk. So it’s not a super big neologism for him to say memex as a thing, but because he doesn’t use words like commonplace book, every engineer who sees and reads that stuff has to reinvent all the history of information that went before. Or they use bits and pieces of it that they know to… We’re constantly reinventing the wheel, and I’m not sure why each individual person has to learn and come up to some certain level of speed, but almost every programmer and engineer I know, rather than sitting back and saying, “If you’re designing a website, what do common user interface pieces look like? What have they looked like in the past? What can we learn from them?” They don’t look at that history. They just look at what happened yesterday, and they say, “Oh, Twitter’s popular. Let’s use that UI interface and iterate from there.” But they’re really just reinventing the wheel from 50, 100, 65,000 years ago.

So why are you doing that instead of leveraging… Annie Murphy Paul in her book, The Extended Mind, highlights the idea that human imitation is so much easier than innovation. And so, for tens of thousands of years, the Acheulean axe was everywhere in the world and people copied and mimicked it, and it took ages before somebody says, “Hey, maybe I can make this a little better. Maybe instead of a hand axe, I can tie this onto a stick, which then gives me more leverage on my chopping ability.” Those are the innovations that you want to make things easier or better. But in doing that, you also have to not forget the useful thing that came before.

And I think when Vannevar Bush writes that essay, he’s talking about something interesting that seems like an innovation, but he’s really applying commonplace book and indexing methods that go back 200 years, 400-500 years, just applies them to a computer or what he sees as the coming age of computers. And it helps certainly that at that time, he’s got Claude Shannon, who I’d mentioned earlier, the godfather of the information age, was literally a PhD student under Vannevar Bush. So he’s taking ideas coming from one of his students and saying, “Hey, how do we apply this? How can we make computers?”

At the same time, Bush is also running most of the wartime infrastructure for the US government. So he has got a huge platform to be able to leverage this technology into a new space. But in doing it, he erases all of the prior examples of what’s going on. And in the forties and fifties, everybody at the time has got filing cabinets of not only paper and folders but index cards. Literally, they are acting as databases for business operations. He ignores all of that. Hollerith, decades before him, is using index cards to index people on the US census. And he partners up with Melville Dewey, who’s doing the same thing with books. And they create a company that is probably now more popularly known as IBM. If you ask the average person on the street, almost no one will have any idea… the history of those ideas, how they were built, how we came to it.

Kids grow up now, and they just have a computer in front of them, and that’s the only context they know. They don’t know about memory palaces. They don’t know about how to write using index cards or what those ideas look like. When Ward Cunningham is building what eventually becomes the wiki, he’s using index card size pieces of information and data and putting them together and pulling them together, which goes back ages and that becomes the new thing. Or I, one of my favorite examples in the last few years. Everybody thinks Niklas Luhmann invented this idea of the zettelkasten, and he wholly didn’t. Like, the thing goes back to at least 1548, to a Swiss researcher, by the name of Conrad Gessner, who writes out the idea of putting ideas on slips, then you can rearrange them and then put them into a final form and then have written output. Even when he’s doing that, he’s taking earlier ideas of… At that time. I don’t think the word commonplace book exists in English. I think John Donne probably is the first English writer to use the word, but he’s using that word in English to refer to a word in Latin or a phrase in Latin, locus communi.

So if you start in the Latin context and go back another 2000 years or a thousand plus years and then before that into Greek, those ideas have been around for ages. Now, Luhmann does do one kind of quirky innovation. The stuff he’s writing, he wants to use in his written output, either in journal articles or books, so instead of indexing things by category, he’s just giving them numbers and then putting ideas he knows he might want to use with other disparate ideas that may not fall into the same category. And he is putting them together. And in his case, it’s on index cards. So putting them right next to each other and giving them a number becomes the easy thing for him.

But how do you do that? And even there, he’s not innovating. He’s using Melville Dewey’s idea of a decimal system. And mathematically, any two decimal numbers you give me, I can always, forever in the rest of time, find another decimal number that fits in between them so I can insert ideas into a system and as long as I give them a new decimal number. It can grow infinitely. And that’s fine. So his innovation isn’t even in his numbering system. And even Melville Dewey is stealing an idea from Francis Bacon, hundreds of years before him.

And now, you have all this community of people online who are copying each other. “How do you do it so I can do it the same way, so I don’t have to innovate?” It’s so much easier for me to copy Niklas Luhmann’s system or if I want to make a commonplace book, I’m copying something that Erasmus was writing about in the 1500s. I can do that now. It’s a lot easier to read somebody like Umberto Eco now who I can read in English with some, more modern language versus trying to read Erasmus in Latin, which is a harder enterprise. But we’re all just imitating everything and very rarely are we actually innovating and that’s what we’d rather do: how do you innovate?

Jorge: Part of what I’m getting from what you’re saying here is that one way to do it, one way to move forward, to innovate, is by grounding your work on what has come before. And I’m sensing that your use of the word commonplace in describing your website is because you are explicitly modeling it — modeling the structure of the website and the use that you put it to — on these earlier practices. And I want to do a callout to a couple of books here. One is Too Much to Know by Ann M. Blair, which is about the history of note-taking. And she covers several of the examples that you’ve brought up here. And the other is Alex Wright’s Glut, which traces the history of information technologies. And he also talks about several of the ones you’ve brought up. And he brings up the Mundaneum, Paul Otlet’s kind of “Google before there was Google,” using index cards, right?

Closing

Jorge: Unfortunately, we are running out of time here. Where can folks follow up with you and find out more about your work?

Chris: So, I have spent a lot of time in the indie web community, and as a result, knowing that things like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are of the moment and may not exist or be around, the number one primary place to find me online is at my website, which is boffosocko.com. It’s a rabbit hole because it’s an agglomeration of tens of thousands of things that I’ve seen and written. A huge amount of it is hidden only to me on the backend. I think I’m somewhere over 80,000 posts on this website, of which probably a good 15 or 20,000 are public. More of it’s private lately than public, but I use that website to interact with things in other places. So if you see me on Reddit write a post, that post is mirrored on my website somewhere, whether you can see it or not. But if you mention me on Reddit, my website actually gets a ping from that post. So I don’t even need to go to Reddit to see your thing. I’ll see the notification through my site.

Jorge: That’s fantastic. And I think that’s how I became aware of your work. I think it was through Mastodon, through the syndication of posts on your site. I’m going to encourage everyone to check it out. It’s an endless source of interesting stuff. I’m leaving this conversation feeling like I would love the opportunity to talk some more with you because I suspect there’s a lot more to cover. But, for now, I want to thank you, Chris, for your time and for being here with us and sharing your knowledge.

Chris: It’s a pleasure. Always leave ‘em wanting more.