A Sense of Doubt blog post #4195 - Buckminster Fuller's Chronofile and other Selections from Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations Newsletter

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4195 - Buckminster Fuller's Chronofile and other Selections from Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations Newsletter


My blog is not a chronofile, but there are parallels.

What an extra ordinary thing to catalog one's life in such detail. As I reflect on my own, I wish I had more detailed records.

This is a collection of a few things via Warren Ellis -- I am very behind on reading his newsletter -- all of which are somewhat writing related for today's WRITING WEDNESDAY.

Thanks for tuning in.

THE WORLD SERVICE

ONLINE

I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to be online your entire life. I saw a newsletter the other day talking about some fake scandal about a livestreamer being accused of using a shock collar on his dog (he didn’t), and there was a phrase therein along the lines of “he spends almost every waking hour livestreaming and there are tens of thousands of hours of video of him that people can take out of context and manipulate.” And it just got me to thinking - I can barely manage six posts a day on LTD and people like this guy are constantly online and constantly on. And the archives of that activity are almost like a public version of Buckminster Fuller’s Chronofile, his system that logged his life every fifteen minutes, every waking hour, for sixty-five years. Wanna see what that archive looks like?

With more than 140,000 papers and 1,700 hours of audio and video, all stretching to more than 1,400 linear feet of material, Fuller's life might be the most documented life of all time. The files go back to when he was four-years-old, but he only seriously started the archive in 1917. From then until his death in 1983 he collected everything from each day, with ingoing and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, models, and even the mundane ephemera like dry cleaning bills.

Source

I think about the Chronofile once every year or two. Especially a public one - private things are for paper notebooks. Livestreaming is, of course, more accessible, almost more ambient - these people who livestream eight hours a day are somewhere between a tv on in the background and a friend keeping you company. It’s a different degree of separation from someone who writes you regular letters, or sticks pieces of their notebook up in public for you to read.

We’ve gone to an interesting place, I think. Being invited to surveille someone full-time over the internet isn’t new - lifecasting, for one example - but for a certain class of creator and viewer, it’s become the norm. It is, on one level, constant production - but the viewer cannot stay fully and actively engaged with it all day. (Unlike the livestreamer, who has to time their bathroom breaks down to the second). It’s monetised disengagement, almost.

There used to be a thing called the blogosphere, which was everyone writing longform online all the time. Social media decimated the blogosphere. I wonder what decimates longform livestreaming, and when.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Jennifer Ringley, who was the immensely popular lifecaster JenniCam twenty-odd years ago, made damn sure she vanished from the internet when she quit streaming, and never went back.

Bonus round: sousveillance.

ORBITAL

TYPERACTIVE

Artist, writer and designer Rian Hughes has a compendium of his typography up on Kickstarter.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day

Notes on Catherine Nixey’s excellent book HERESY resurfacing the blogchain-about-blogging BROADCASTING HOUSE telemetry - various links

Admin For Purgatory

Orbital Operations for 3 May 2026

THE WORLD SERVICE

RELICS OF A DEAD UNIVERSE

Headline of the week:

Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes.

Here’s a fun dark matter solution. The invisible and as yet hypothetical substance could be made of “relic” black holes that survived the deaths of previous universes. This idea is explored as part of a new study published in the journal Physical Review D, which the lead author Enrique Gaztanaga breaks down in an essay for The Conversation. It hinges on two key concepts: the “Big Bounce,” a controversial idea that the Big Bang was part of an endless cycle in which the universe expands and contracts and expands again; and so-called primordial black holes. “The universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded,” Gaztanaga wrote. “And the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the Big Bang.”   https://futurism.com/space/dark-matter-black-hole-dead-universes

I wish I’d had that when we did DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2608.12 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 4059 days ago & DAD = 713 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.