Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.

Share your ideas on what you would like to see to make news media, research materials, conceptual innovations and basic statistical evidence, and/or writing that expresses new ways of thinking, available for your consumption.

• The Hot Spring Network’s Discussion on ‘New Publishing Models to Speed Ideas to Application’

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network

The traditional newspaper or magazine has a limited amount of space, as well as the physical constraints of materials used, weight, shipping, cost, etc., that necessarily interfere with the length and scope of materials contained within. And yet, one can often find far longer profile or investigative pieces printed in the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair, than one tends to find on even probing, serious investigative online publications.

Indeed, traditional print news sources are often the most reliable sources of lengthy, in-depth online writing and analysis. The paradox here is that the online medium lends itself to length, as costs for storage and “global distribution” are so low as to be almost zero for any given article published. What we do not have is an established tradition of treating web media as primary sources for serious journalism and cultural analysis, and so we have not come to devote our attention spans to reading the fullest, most in-depth writing available online.

There are legitimate reasons relating to both craft and content for longer, even meandering essays. An essay, as such, is an experiment with an idea, or a series of ideas, a rehearsal of thought-processes and rhetoric, aimed at behaving like a forum for exploration of related themes and the testing of certain challenges to a central thesis or guiding set of principles. This is a vital part of our literary and philosophical collective endeavor, as a species, as a civilization, and the online medium is ideally suited to “give place” (a phrase taken from the Spanish language) to that rehearsal.

One key drawback for realizing this special quality of the online medium is end-user interface: the conventional laptop or desktop computer monitor does bias the reader toward a chronic confinement to “above the fold” content. For whatever reason, the human intellect is less willing or less able (probably due to an instinctual bias toward efficiency in gathering information) to locate links and media that occur outside the main featured areas highlighted by above-the-fold or page-load site layout. As one scrolls down, sidebar content is increasingly “buried”, harder for the loosely attentive eye or impulsive browser to locate.

But hardware is being developed that will better harness the capabilities of the website format for long-text reading. E-paper technologies and ultra-thin full-color monitor designs are evolving to a point where letter-sized single-sheet edge-to-edge panels will be able to store massive amounts of data and present book-length documents in a much more physically and visually comfortable format. This will allow web-pages to evolve, to develop better approaches to the end-user interface issue related to buried marginal content and scroll-to-read obstacles.

If it were possible to actually “sit with” a long piece of writing, the way we do with magazines and books, online writing would be better able to start exploiting the vast storage and distribution potential of the medium. The idea of a limitless archive of globally available information, a sort of library of Alexandria to the nth degree, would be more relevant to our use of the web, and browsing the web for “information” would be simultaneously more serious, more entertaining, and more educational.

Publishers need to consider that high-quality, full-length online content not only has a real commercial potential for the future, given the evolution of e-reading technologies, but that paper and publishing are also evolving to integrate such new functions, so that publishing as a whole will benefit broadly from embracing such advances. That embrace needs to happen in such a way that quality of content, democratization of production, free flow of imformation and author’s rights, are all central to the way these new publishing formats develop.

In the meantime, the web is now mature enough that it is in fact the primary source of information about the world for millions of end-users. If we can take seriously the idea that this is not a fluke and that human beings are not from this point forward condemned to gravely limited attention spans, then we can work on finding ways to make essay-length, contemplative writing more of a fixture in online publishing.

. . . INTRODUCTION

Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, The Hot Spring proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.

It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.

To emerge from the fog of flawed, incomplete and opportunistically limited economic and financial analysis, means we need to come to grips with the fact that all resources, all functions or ‘services’, be they natural or the product of human ingenuity, figure somehow in economic values at all levels. There may be no clear way to quantify their contribution or mercantilize them, but they are there, and nothing can be fully understood in economic terms without seeing this.

We could calculate, for instance, that to do by artificial means what nature does of its own accord in a handful of basic environmental ‘services’ (such as climate stabilization or the global fresh water supply—avoiding discussions of such complex processes such as new species evolution, deep-sea current patterning or ultraviolet light blockage and refraction), we would have to spend well in excess of 10 times the entire global economic output (using GDP in sum as a base).

This helps us to take note of the immense ecological influence we have erased from economic calculations, seeing it as inconvenient or in realistic terms unquantifiable. But it does not help us to place a useful economic value on such influence over the economic infrastructure of civilization, globally or locally.

It may be enough to say, though this shades all following calculations of any kind in a significant and problematic way, that they are indispensable and dynamic values. They exceed all calculable value of our own activities, which without their contribution would simply not make sense or could not take place at all.

Metaphorically, their incalculable immensity could be compared to the way the tides at the edge of a great sea shape and define the shoreline and the kind of activities that can be conducted at that point of contact. It is necessary to think of how such information could then be integrated into a more complete and less untruthful (it’s worth noting) matrix of economic calculations.

What parameters determine downward and upward trends, and what do such trends mean for our ‘traditional’ economic footing, financial activities, international treaty obligations on issues like trade, water, farm subsidies, and transportation? These questions only begin to gain relevance when we see that the ‘macro’ view is in fact far broader than the segmented vignette-style of economics we are accustomed to pursuing, for the level of mathematical and sociological comfort it affords.

So, everything is very big, all numbers are astronomical, nature is everything and more, we cannot make it all fit into a nice little frame… yes, yes, yes, this is true and it’s a problem. But what can we do to apply this observation to our economic outlook in general or to programming the calculations for this quixotic pursuit of an intregrated economics?

. . . 1. CORRECT THE ERRORS

We first need to correct the errors that are already built into our economic calculations, and which are part of the traditional economic outlook: for example, nuclear energy. Why do we not count the costs of long-term maintenance, security, protecting national technological secrets, pollution clean-up and, above all, the long-term hermetically-sealed containment of nuclear waste?

Primarily, because that last figure requires examining the huge costs of sealing radioactive materials in a hermitically-sealed, non-conductive container, for between 1 million and 10 million years, which may take us only to the half-life of the radioactivity of the spent fuel.

Depleted uranium, for example, which is used as a heavy metal for armor and bomb-casings in US military machinery, has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. 1 to 10 million years to abide by public health and safety laws and prevent widespread radioactive contamination of the natural environment or of human habitat.

We can calculate these costs, but they remain unimaginably vast. Imagine telling a businessman —it is irrelevant whether he is serious or not, talented or not— we would like you to build a nuclear plant for electricity generation, move toward taking a profit after a few decades, maybe make a few billion dollars over another few decades, then pay for decomissioning the plant, clean-up of all dangerous substances or contaminated panels or constructions, then pay all the expenses for containment and security, for 1 to 10 million years, during which you will not be able to take any profit from your activities.

The offer would not be convincing. So, in our calculation of the usefulness of such technologies, we need to take very seriously the reality that those costs will be paid or those operations will not be successfully carried out. Though we may see the economic value now, and tell ourselves as a society, it’s worth it to get the gain we get from “cheap” energy now, we need to see clearly what those costs look like, and what they will take away from us in the future.

The calculations need to be wholecloth and transparent. The healthy functioning of any market depends on there not being unreliable pockets of secrecy and deceit where the eye is fooled and the ‘magic’ of economic value just a trick.

. . . 2. INTEGRATE AND COMPREHEND

The founding principle, the goal and the challenge of this undertaking is to integrate and comprehend in an integrated manner the economic, ecological, financial and spending data that account for real long-term viability and prosperity at the human level. It begins in the theoretical realm, and through analysis and discussion, could reach the moment of practical application, likely with much new information technology put into the process. The model will be the physical metaphor of the Inca quipu, a tool for measuring taxation in an empire that combined urban centers, agriculture and nomadic hunter-gatherer bands.

The quipu was a system of strings, knots, colors and patterns, created in each case by the individual agent whose job was to oversee the history of taxation and tributes offered to the Inca by his subjects in a given region. It provides an evaluation of geography, social composition, currency and chronicle.

The quipu was used to evaluate the state of affairs through a dynamic system of spontaneous coding, a system open to the introduction of new elements, categories and coding patterns, at nearly any time. The quipu’s creator might have been the only living soul able to fully decode its meaning, which was, in itself, a way of establishing enhanced economic value in the work of formatting and maintaining the document itself.

The problem will be, evidently, how do we program into a matrix for moment-by-moment calculation of an international economic outlook, values we cannot quantify? and, how do we allow for a dynamic, bottom-up intregration of new code, new parameters, and new paradigms into what should be, in theory, a consistent model for evaluating global economic trends, beyond the bounds of the traditionally ‘economic’?

. . . 3. MOMENT VS. METHOD

These are questions that need answers, and will form the basis of Project Quipu. Allow for discussion, criticism, analysis and the contest of ideas, to guide us toward a series of solutions that help make such a matrix possible.

Project Quipu proposes as a rule not shying away from seemingly impossible calculations, because they likely contain vital economic data which may come to us in forms not quantifiable but in fact relevant and comprehensible, when seen through the adequate lens.

One key feature will be timing: as with any economic reality, the moment brings context that cannot be discarded, and two moments which may appear numerically similar may in fact have amply divergent significance. It is therefore vital to understand that any data with real impact will emerge either more slowly or more rapidly than our ability to perceive it, just out of reach of our attempts to ‘capture the moment’.

We cannot take a ‘snapshot’ and live the captured moment at the same time, so we must manage that lapse in time appropriately and understand that it carves out a hollow in the information available to us. This nature of the moment helps to shape the method, so to top off the aggravating complexity of this challenge: we cannot assume at any time that we have rendered the definitive picture of a global economy. It escapes our grip like water…