Warren Ellis recently posted The Internet Favours Light Mode. He summarises a debate about ‘light mode vs heavy mode’, pointing to the original post by Anu about how the Internet prefers ‘light mode’:
It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production… It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter… Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax.
Increasingly, the Internet dictates the rhythms for creators. Algorithms reward regular posting above well-crafted irregular work. In the post, Anu talks about the desire to produce things in heavy mode. They also suggest that Substack is a sort of mid-point, avoiding the full ephemerality of light mode, but still missing some heft. This is something I’ve been feeling a lot lately.
Ellis points out that it is possible to work in light mode, and gather something more substantial from that:
fragmentary writing can in fact assemble into something weightier. I’ve written about several objects like that in the recent past – Kathleen Jamie’s CAIRN comes immediately to mind. It’s about intent.
For almost 20 years I’ve been fascinated by the way ephemerality can build into greater things – how fragments can make something wonderful. The Pillow Book can be seen as an ancient blog. The work of the beats played with this – Howl is a series of sentences that build on each other.
I enjoy writing for the substack, but I am find myself straining against it. I want to build things with more heft, that escape the Internet. It’s one of the reasons for the zines – to say that I thought a set of words was worth printing. And I still want to create something heavy. Something that captures what the world has felt like to me.