Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
For the next two weeks, we'll be diving into In Formation Magazine
<https://informationmagazine.com>, which has just released its
long-awaited third issue--25 years after issue two. Its tagline:
"Every day, computers are making people easier to use."

In Formation is a cult publication exploring what technology does to
us, written by insiders who know the industry from the inside out.
Issue #3 upholds the magazine's reputation for meticulous
production: heavy stock paper, elegant design, and eclectic content
ranging from a graphic novel and photo-essay to a flexidisc of music
by The Layoffs (a band of the magazine's own art crew). The tone
blends the serious with the satirical, offering sharp critiques of
tech culture. True to tradition, the only advertisement appears on
the back cover--this time for Espolon Tequila, following
Absolut's iconic placements on the first two issues.

At over 160 pages, it's a publication to dip into slowly, a
genuine labor of love with no commercial compromises. In Formation
#3 goes into national distribution at Barnes & Noble in early
October. It's also available online: 
<https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/> and through MagCulture in the UK, https://magculture.com/>.
  

    
Our guests for the discussion are Paulina Borsook and Brian Maggi.

Paulina Borsook got a WELL acccount back in 1987 because, at the
time, it was the only way she knew of to acquire a
backdoor/graymarket entryway to the Internet. She is best known as a
writer on technology and culture.

She contributed to In Formation #1; she and Brian did their first
humor collaboration for #2 with the graphic feature, "Silicon Valley
Alpha Males". When In Formation founder/publisher/editor-in chief
David Temkin contacted her two years ago about participating in
issue #3, she replied "yes boss". In the current 25th anniversary
issue #3, she mostly contributed humor pieces plus one serious piece
about IP/appropriation/copyright/AI/Stepford Wives. She is honored
that David awarded her the title "contributing editor" for issue #3.

"Cyberselfish", both the original essay and the book, about the
libertarian culture of tech, are still being read today. She has a
serious Cassandra complex because of these and other things she
wrote in the 1990s, such as a 1999 Salon feature on how the Internet
ruined San Francisco. She had nothing to do with her Wikipedia page.

Brian Maggi is In Formation magazine's Humor Editor, webmaster,
shipping department, and social chairman. He got his start in tech
over 30 years ago as a subject in a research project at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications. He worked at Apple on iconic
and not-so iconic products including the Newton and the iMac. His
biggest claim is inventing the email spam filter with Postini, thus
giving the world the greatest excuse for not reading our mothers'
emails.
  

    
Welcome, Paulina and Brian! Can you discuss why In Formation went
away after two issues so many years ago? And why the team decided to
bring it back, 2 1/2 decades later?
  

    
my understanding is that issues #1 and #2 (1998; 2000) were created
during the dotcom boom, infinitely worth having at.

but then came the dotcom crash + 9/11 --- the moment had passed and
everyone went their separate ways.

david temkin, founder/publisher/editor in chief, had just quit his
job at google a little more than two years --- and  i guess he felt
the time was right to bring back the publication, given how
pervasive tech has become (what it is doing to us? and how
wealthy/powerful tech companies have become.

most of the original crew from isssues numbers #1 and #2 have been
involved in issue #3 --- with the addition of a bunch of new
contributors, including the amazing and splendid art + design crew.

david has had to go back to work, with a current dayjob at paypal,
so brian and i will attempt to answer questions as best we can.

it's worth mentioning that david had been editor-in-chief of his
college newspaper and worked in/with many media-oriented startups.
unusual in someone with a CS degree, david gets magazines deeply.
that has aways given the publication a good editorial oversight. he
also is very witty, which seems to be a default trait for  most of
the editorial crew. we all had fun working on the
magazine/coffeetable book--- which was one of david's goals for the
project.
  

    
Was most of the work virtual, or did you have physical meetings? 
  

    
we had two splendid in person meeetings, about six months apart, in
sf, early on.

the rest of the business was generally conducted with zoom, teams,
etc. however i wasnt involved with a lot of the production issues,
so i know david and others would meet to do stuff in the bay area;
david and josh the design head flew to denver where the printer is
located about six months ago to decide on paper, etc. and of course
david flew back to denver for a press check this summer (i think
videos of the press check are online somewhere, probably either on
david's LI account or the magazine's LI account).

as magazines with remote contributors have been a thing for a long
time, the remote-work aspect is pretty native to the medium. we had
weekly 'editorial' meetings on zoom and we had slack. but obv.
writing and editing are done however they get done, always. the
'virtual' component with these is as it's been for decades. lots of
phonecalls; are those virtual?
  

    
> why In Formation went away after two issues so many years ago?

One of the simpler reasons the magazine stopped after 2 issues, was
it was a ton of work and we all had full-time jobs. This time around
it was still a ton of work, but the maturity of collaborative tools
made a big difference. We can work asynchronously much easier. 
  

    
We met online weekly and sometimes twice a week when working on the
magazine. 

The in-person meetings were the best. I wish I could bottle the
energy from the room and take a hit from it when I'm in other
meetings. It's just a bunch of riffing and non-sequiturs. The only
good reason to have a meeting in my opinion. That and catered
lunches. 
  

    
but our lunches werent catered!
  

    
I sense a difference of opinion about the source of the lunches...
who made the sandwiches? (Or was it chips and caviar?)

I'd like to hear more about the collaborative process - I count 37
people on the masthead. Who was responsible for organizing the work
and deciding who was in which meetings? Did it ever feel like
cat-herding, or was it mostly well-organized?
  

    
(we sought out our own lunches from what was avail near union
square, where our wonderful peerspace meeting place was).

my understanding is that david sought out the sort of inner
editorial crew (10-15 folks) --- and then outreach was done to
individual contributors as they were discovered over time. 

there was an official editorial zoom, where from anywhere from two
ppl (david and me) to 15 ppl would show up. these are folks with
'editor' or 'director' in their title on the masthead.

david worked with each of the contributors as an editor-in-chief
does; there was an art/design cohort which brian was also involved
with; and a humor cohort (brian as big cheese).

there was a bit of group collab on google docs, but a lot less than
you might imagine. for example, i never interacted with ME alex
lash, but he did a great job of copy/line editing.

i would say less  cat-herding and more self-organizing --- with
certain distinct roles as mentioned above.
  

    
As people came together, what guidance did they get? I.e. what was
the shared understanding about what the whole team was creating?
  

    
david, whom we all liked and respected and had mostly worked with
before, asked some folks to be part of the inner crew. we all had a
intuitive sense of what the mag's sensibility was.

so there wasnt guidance per se; we all had a sense of who possible
contributors outside that group might be --- and sent them to david
to talk to.

so 'guidance' came in the form of discussions on the weekly zoom. we
talked!

this has been an all volunteer effort under the enlightened benign
despot that is david. no one needed guidance; we all went off and
created the things we talked about doing, occassionally asking for
feedback..

so in that sense not a team effort: a bunch of individual efforts we
sometimes checked in about. this worked because there was a shared
sensibility: maybe  'know what you are talking about and dont be
self-serious.'

david's invisible hand was the 'guidance', maybe. but he is a very
allowing and supportive fellow...
  

    
I credit the experience level of most of the contributors for
working from a minimal set of instructions. 

When it came to vetting ideas and concepts we tried to stay "on
brand" a term I loathed using… a lot. Also, knowing it would take
at least a year or more to produce the magazine, we focused on
topics and stories that would have a longer shelf-life. 

For humor, we leaned a lot into inside baseball type of jokes. Our
rule of thumb was not everyone had to get the joke, but those who
do, deserve a bigger pay off. For example, "The Scrum Master" movie
poster is an unapologetic riff on the corniness of Agile
Methodologies. If you know, you know. 

I also know from writing humor, there are people who want to get the
joke and are compelled to either laugh anyways, or they're compelled
to do a little research. 
  

    
Sorry to be coming in so late - I went out of town Thursday and just
got back last night. Slowly catching up.

I guess my first question is "why print"? I enjoyed leafing through
In Formation, but it occurred to me that, other than NYRB (which I
think I read in print because I find their website so painful), I
don't read any print periodicals any more. In fact, once I plopped
this one down on the pile of stuff I'm reading, I realized that
there _were_ other periodicals in there - I just never read them and
had forgotten they were there. (Worst of all, I did read one of
them, and had left it on the stack so I could send a notice about it
to an email list ... a year ago.)

So, a very self-referential way of asking, why print? Will there be
an online version?
  

    
print because

a) it's a great aesthetic + sensory experience.

b) you read print differently than you do a website and can do
things in print you really cant do on a website.

c) a few of the pieces -are- available on the
informationmagazine.com website and maybe eventually all of them
will be.

also, people -jumped- at the chance to work on a -magazine-. 

this is the equivalent of coffeetable book. gorgeous; meant to be
kept around and have visitors to your place check it. this wouldnt
happen with a website. and yes issues #1 and #2 are collectible and
hard to find.
  

    
Thank you, Paulina. In fairness, there were several pieces (the
graphic story, for instance) that were much more fun on the printed
page than they would be on the web - but that only occurred to me
after typing.

Also, I asked this in another discussion on the WELL, but who is the
audience for this? Where will people encounter it? Is it being sold
in bookstores? Other types of store?
  

    
we are lucky enough to have barnes + noble agree to take the 3k
copies we have left in the warehouse to be distributed nationally.
if we sell enough, there will be a 2nd printing.

there -are- stores which carry magazines, such as in sf heath
ceramics/farleys/dogeared books/smoke signals, etc.

audience is anyone who appreciates good design/in partic has a sense
of humor/cares about what tech is doing to us. so, lots of people.
and people who work in tech (or tech-adjacent) seem very interested.
i think 150 copies were left in the breakroom of google's AI hq in
london...
  

    
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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
September 22nd. Thanks for being part of it!
  

    
thanx jon for the administrative stuff. cut+ pasted this on FB + LI
+ the magazine's slack. we'll see who might drop on by...
  

    
Was issue #3 created with a particular theme or core question in
mind? What was the force driving a revival after 25 years?
  

    
i think just a more loosey-gooesy organic 'what do people feel like
creating?" and 'let's see what comes in?"

driving force was really just david saying "let's revive the
magazine --- are you in?' sort of 'cry havoc and let slip the dogs
of war'.

obv times have changed since 25 years ago, so different things were
on people's minds.
  

    
Here's another angle on print. It's permanent. It can't be upgraded.
It will serve as an interesting relic in say another 25 years just
like the previous 2 issues. Magazines are great time capsules of
their era. My grandfather was born in 1904 and was a total hoarder
of magazines. When he died in 1997 I went through a stash of his
Popular Mechanics. One article that struck me was about the
viability of commercial flight. 

Sure, we have the Wayback Machine as a way to find old websites, but
it's horribly incomplete. And digital has a way of rewriting history
by making the losers disappear from the record. 
  

    
so very true.
  

    
In our kick-off discussion of issue 3 we may have tossed around some
ideas like "The AI Issue" or some kind of unifying theme. In the
end, it was like Paulina said, "let's see what comes in". 

For the humor section we had a Google Doc full of ideas that kept
growing. We had something of an algorithm to decide what made the
cut. We weighted ideas on things like…

Tone: is it in our voice
Execution: how is it activated e.g. fake ad, movie poster etc. 
Originality: have we already made a similar joke in the issue or has
someone else.

There are concepts in the doc that are laugh out loud funny that
didn't make the cut because it wasn't enough to just be funny.
Likewise, there were ideas that made the magazine after a tepid
response and ended up getting bigger laughs in execution (I know I
just mansplained how humor works).

When I pitched the probl-o-matic and I don't recall anyone laughing.
It  was borne out of a joke I'd been making about the word
"problematic" itself. I pictured a Ronco / Popeil device that just
looked for things to complain about. I also have a niece who shares
the same name as a popular spying device and she loves to tattle
when you say a bad word.

There were several iterations of the ad that weren't landing for
various reasons. It wasn't until I started going down the path of
making it look like an air purifier ad from The Sharper Image that
it gelled. 
  

    
yeah the process of what went in and what didnt make the cut was
mysterious. i know there were ideas jon callas and i tossed around
(as a joint effort) that sort of just fizzled out.

there is a 'just because' aspect to what made it in, imho. i think
we all liked the idea of fake ads for academic programs, for example
--- but execution is everything and alex's 'tech bro studies' at
brown was just pitch perfect (we all threw some ideas and language
at him i think because he expressed an interest in what we might
throw over the wall).

one thing about successful publications i have noticed over the
years is that outsiders tend to think there is a big controlling
thepowersthatbe masonic secret agenda. whereas to me it feels more
random: it just happened/it felt right/no one minded/let's see how
it plays out.

right now, the tech bro fashion spread has in a way become our
calling card --- yet i dont think brian and i -knew- it would be so
popular. we had lots of ideas for the art that didnt get used (i
loved brian's ideas for a sort of butterick pattern concept for
example) --- but somehow  here we are. and ppl seem to respond to
it.

and the meta joke there is the increasingly absurd/abstracted job
titles are -real-, including the one for retro bio...