Dave Winer’s book

Dave Winer is thinking about writing a book.

What do people imagine would be in Dave Winer’s first book? It would be interesting to ask around. I will pretend here that DW has asked.

I imagine certain kinds of ideas and two kinds of stories. Stories that DW knows from years of conversation are his best stories because of the way people pay serious attention when he tells them in person and online.  The responses people have given tell DW what are some of his greatest moments of clarity. This is a big clue about what should be in the book.

But more particularly: stories he knows are his best stories because they make clear something about humans and the humanity of their technology, because that is his passion and the area of his insight. That and the work it takes to make it happen and the ways we get off track and destroy our opportunities along the way.

My father, a retired business person who uses the web for hours and hours each day, recently said that he doesn’t know what the web is. [I had just said proposed to him that the web should be guarded and supervised legally as a public utility like gas or electric.] Recent lawmaking in Washington suggests that Congress doesn’t know what the web is. When they are done reading, people who buy DW’s book will know clearly what the web is. I realize that my own concept of the web owes a great deal to having read Scripting News since about 2003 and having listened to every episode of Rebooting the News more than once.  There is an idealism and a hard-won realism in DW’s writing that centers on the nature of the web, the human nature of technology, the creativity of the code and of the words and images that surf on that code. There should probably be one rock-solid chapter that teaches exactly what the web is when it is not chopped up by commercial silos, so that people who care will never again be confused about what this or that company is doing on and to the web. This would be a great public service.

DW’s first book might be made up of alternating nodes of story and idea and story and idea, and the chapters would grow out of the nodes with the strongest connections to each other. DW could maybe start listing the stories on Popplet as a way of linking them to each other and to the ideas that they represent. More likely, DW would use an outline, but Popplet has the advantage of being planar instead of linear. More connections during brainstorming, maybe….

The tools that DW has been creating lately are, you can tell from his blog posts, meant to be working models of his insights about the web and its intersection with human creativity. A more experimental version of DW’s first book might simply tell the story of those tools as a way of opening up the themes I’ve mentioned above. Or another path: a book about 10 web tools by many creators in their human contexts of being both created and used, as a way of sharing the 10 most important insights about the web’s centrality in human creativity now, and its nature, and its vulnerability.

DW’s book might resemble elements of the books he most admires, the ones that help people think and give them permission to innovate and clear the brush away from essential concepts and tools. They crystalize a few things, a few powerful things. They are suggestive and explosive, I bet, rather than definitive.

DW’s book would, implicitly at least, argue against some of the narrow and crippling visions that threaten our public sphere, our web, and our creativity. Or he might take them on more directly. There are stories that might illustrate the options, the roads that diverge and what happens when we choose one or the other.

I wonder what five or ten books DW would be most proud to have written, in the area of web-tech-human creativity? I bet there are clues in those books.

Best wishes and put me down for a copy.