The Doc Web
The soft power of Google Doc publishing
This piece was originally published in Lens (and less officially, in a Google Doc)
If you ask someone to meet you at the front page of the internet, where they will turn will depend on their habits, personal networks, and what year it is. Maybe they'll put a CD-Rom they received in a cereal box into their computer and patiently sit through a sequence of artificial noises, hoping to find you on the other side. Maybe they'll visit their favorite search engine, the source node for any place whose url is not known (or too burdensome to type). Maybe they'll visit a web forum or social network, allowing the wisdom of an individual, a crowd, or an algorithm to guide them to you.
No one would mistake a word processor for the front page of the internet, not unless their computer is nothing more than a typewriter. A hammer is not a portal, and Google Docs, the word processor of our time, is nothing more than a hammer to the nail of language. Right?
Slow down. Google Docs may wear the clothing of a tool, but their affordances teem over, making them so much more. After all, you're reading this doc right now, and as far as I know I'm not using a typewriter, and you're not looking over my shoulder. This doc is public, and so are countless others. These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige. But they form an impossibly large dark web, a web that is dark not as a result of overt obfuscation but because of a softer approach to publishing. I call this space the “Doc Web,” and these are its axioms.
Axiom 1: The doc you are now reading was once vacant
This is true, in a sense, of anything that is published. There is always an empty page, a 0kb file, a blank tape. But a doc is also different, because if writing is a terrain and publishing is a steep cliff, then here the cliffs are ever-present and imminent, almost infinitely easy to fall off of. The share button is always there, trivial to press, a forceful tide pulling the intimate into the public.
Axiom 2: The fact that you are reading this doc is impossible
The doc you are reading was inspired in no small part by a copy of a small-run perfect-bound softcover book, Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: For the Love of Softness by Be Oakley, that I picked up while browsing Yu & Me Books in Lower Manhattan. It was impossible that I found myself in that bookstore in a city in which I do not live, impossible that I would spot the book on a shelf amid a haystack of others, impossible that its minuscule spine would catch my eye, impossible that I would remember to pluck it from my own bookshelf instead of one of the many other unread books next to it, impossible that I read it surreptitiously in the back of a synagogue during the Jewish Day of Atonement, impossible that my brain lingered on the subject of Google Docs months later while I walked my dog long enough to pull the book out of the library of my memory and string it together with my thoughts, to say nothing of the impossibility of the book itself, or the internet, the cloud, distributed server farms, trillion-dollar companies, and the impossibility of an audience.
Axiom 3: To publish is the default position of being human
French philosopher Jacques Derrida has said that even the primordial question of philosophy, "What is being?" is a question, and therefore presupposes an Other that you are asking the question to. Not only is every thought that we have like a voice echoing through a cavernous room, desperate to find someone to hear it, but our very being is contingent on that finding.
Axiom 4: If you build a tool with the ability to publish, so help them god, people will publish
They will publish often, zealously, and without regard for the intended purpose of the tool. Yelp reviews will be co-opted to publish blog posts; Venmo payments will be co-opted to publish poems; spreadsheets will be co-opted to publish personal websites; maps will be co-opted to publish magazines. The arc of specialized publishing bends towards generalized publishing.
Axiom 5: A doc is a distinct, shareable object
A doc teaches you how to get into competitive Pokemon. A doc helps you determine whether you are lesbian. A doc exhaustively screenshots and analyzes food in the 2019 TV series Ming Dynasty. A doc walks you through the steps to rip a CD. A doc is a list of galleries representing only white artists. A doc is a room you need to escape. A doc is a recipe book shared between friends. A doc is a log of dose trips. A doc is the salaries of TV writers. A doc tracks the points awarded on every season of Drag Race. A doc chronicles the activities of an internet account called "Dad." A doc indexes the lore of Starset albums. A doc is a syllabus for decentering whiteness in design history. A doc asks what we should do before January. A doc is a love letter to a friendship. A doc is a toolkit for getting through the pandemic. A doc is a map. A doc is a playlist of experimental films and videos. A doc offers ideas for how to teach ceramics making virtually. A doc sends masks to prisons. A doc is email correspondences between My Little Pony characters. A doc is a place to put texts you want to send to your ex. A doc is a list of things to do after prom. A doc is a poetry mixtape.
Axiom 6: The cheaper and easier a publishing tool is to use, the more ripe it is for challenging power hierarchies
A tool that requires more technical literacy, time, or money becomes inherently inaccessible to many with less power, and its form will appropriately and intentionally project class, prestige, and rarity. For that reason, a feature-rich custom website designed and built by a web development agency can only have so much radical potential. A tool that is free, and whose interface is a common word processor immediately understandable by most creators and consumers, will often incorporate fringe ideas and language in a way that these websites do not.
Axiom 7: Some forms of publishing have softer edges than others
A platonic zine is that book made up of collaged scans, unedited handwriting that you print on printer paper at the apartment of the last person you still know with a printer. It's the book you fold tediously one by one, tie shut with a piece of string or a few staples, and hand out to your friends or sell for a few quarters at the local cafe. It's the book that will never make headlines, or a profit, or see the inside of a Barnes & Noble. It's that book, in the words of Oakley, "made without access to anything substantial to produce a work with substance," whose value "does not come from rarity but commonality."
Axiom 8: A doc is like a zine
The only thing that is special about a doc is that there is nothing special about a doc. Take its url:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Se0yHNaN9hwV2LcQXm2HlfTp-sGDeJSwY2sWrA2yg0/edit
Like a door to a home, or the cover of a book, this url tells a narrative about what you will find inside before it's even opened. Unmemorable, unexceptional, unoptimized. Anybody could have published this, it says. And indeed, anyone could have (in form, if not in content). And this is where its power lies. Because a tool that anyone can use (cheap, accessible, recognizable) is a tool that can be used by anyone. A doc is a website with soft edges.
Axiom 9: A doc is not like a zine
A zine shows wear in the form of tears, fading ink, coffee stains, and creases, but a doc always appears as if brand new. Instead, it bears marks by showing the presence of other people reading it, and carries with it a permanent impermanence, a position of constant unfinishedness, because it can always be edited, added to, or scrapped and built from scratch.
A zine is as close to free as possible, both in cost and in ownership. But while it does not require money to use, a doc does require subservience to Google. A doc's soft edges is a complement not to the potential of mega-platforms, but to the resourcefulness and ingenuity of communities. Google Doc's main goal is to make money off of companies whose main goal is to make money. Any other publishing that occurs is incidental, if not collateral. Anything radical published on Google Docs is published in spite of Google Docs.
Axiom 10: To witness a doc’s soft edges, all you need to do is feel
Feel the urgency with which someone said to themselves, “I must write this down somewhere.” Feel the equal, perhaps simultaneous urgency with which they said to themselves, “I must share it.” Feel the cursors of multiple people clumsily adding, subtracting, rephrasing. Feel traces of tracked changes, suggestions, comments. Feel the attention that went into font selection, character size, text color, alignment. Feel the attention that didn’t go into font selection, character size, text color, alignment, because again, urgency. Feel the other people reading in parallel with you. Feel the fingers that tediously typed in the 85-character url after seeing it in a screenshot. Feel its fragility. Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it has changed. Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it is gone.
Edited by Kate Lee and Yash Bagal
This will make an excellent talk one day 🌻
You can come over & use my printer any time.