Zittrain: Welcome, every­body. I think we can pay the high­est com­pli­ment from our cam­pus to you, which is a total­ly full room on a sum­mer day.

Sun: Yes…

Zittrain: That’s quite extraordinary.

Sun: Thank you for com­ing out.

Zittrain: And Jon was actu­al­ly curi­ous and I am too about who’s in our room. We have a num­ber of peo­ple I think lis­ten­ing online. But let’s just slice and dice it. How many folks gen­er­al­ly turnout for Berkman Klein Center stuff so you’re turn­ing out for this, too? How many peo­ple gen­er­al­ly turn out for Johnny Sun stuff so you’re turn­ing out for this, too? 

Sun: Oh, hey. Okay.

Zittrain: So the soft­ball teams cre­ate them­selves. How many peo­ple have fol­lowed Jonny on Twitter for at least a week? Alright, that’s…everybody. The rest of you, you have your chance. Any oth­er demo­graph­ic ques­tions we want­ed to ask?

Sun: I think that’s great. Yeah. 

Zittrain: That sort of gets us started.

Sun: How about are you hav­ing a good day today? Alright, yay!

Zittrain: It just got better.

Sun: Yeah!

Zittrain: How many of you con­sid­er your­selves an alien? Alright. We could revote at the end.

Sun: Yeah, alright.

Zittrain: And we thought in the spir­it— Often torts is taught in this room. So in the spir­it of tort, not that of injury but of Latin, we have a prin­ci­ple called ​“res ipsa loquitur” which is ​“the thing speaks for itself.” So we thought to start us off we might do a lit­tle res ipsa loquitur with some of Jomny’s tweets.

Sun: Sure. Yeah, I’m gonna go over here and DJ them. JZ asked me to pull up some my favorite tweets that I’ve done.

Zittrain: You want to embiggen it?

Sun: Yes! How do I…?

Zittrain: Ctrl-+ usu­al­ly does some­thing. Or Ctrl-Shift-+? There we go.

Sun: There we go. Embiggening. Okay. Do I need to read these out loud or can you all read them?

me: good­night moon :)
moon: night<3
me: good­night stars :)
moon: wtf
me: sry wrongnum­ber
moon: whos stars
moon: who is stars
moon: answer me

— jon­ny sun (@jonnysun) October 21, 2014

This was kind of in rela­tion­ship to the Joe Biden/Obama memes:

https://​twit​ter​.com/​j​o​n​n​y​s​u​n​/​s​t​a​t​u​s​/​7​9​7​1​9​8​2​7​2​0​7​9​2​9​8​568

This is kind of like the spir­it of my entire writ­ing project:

look. life is bad. evry­ones sad. we’re all gona die. but i alredy bought this inflat­able boum­cy cas­tle so r u gona take ur shoes off or wat

— jon­ny sun (@jonnysun) November 8, 2013

Another one of my favorites:

on earth: a magi­ci­am puts his hand in his hat

in the rab­bit realm: The Hand emerges. it is time. the rabit coun­cil must chose a sacrifice

— jon­ny sun (@jonnysun) February 22, 2014

Audience Member: That’s so funny.

Sun: Thank you! 

omg.. Will O. Smith and Jada N. Smith pic​.twit​ter​.com/​6​D​z​6​d​5​Y​B5Y

— jon­ny sun (@jonnysun) September 14, 2015

This one’s a bit of an expla­na­tion, but I tweet­ed this and I said ​“omg.. Will O. Smith and Jada N. Smith” with Google search result images of Will Smith’s mid­dle name, Oliver, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s mid­dle name, Naomi, which refers to their kids Willow and Jaden, right. Willow Smith and Jaden Smith.

It went kin­da viral, 50,000 likes. But I doc­tored these search results. So, their mid­dle names aren’t actu­al­ly Oliver or Naomi, I think it’s like Christopher and Koren or some­thing. But this is kind of like I pre­ced­ed the fake news thing by tweet­ing this in late 2015. And so this was like a fun fake news piece as opposed to every oth­er fake news piece.

And I thought, giv­en the tech thing that we’re in right now:

as a child i asked my dad why the moon looks real­ly real­ly big some­times and he said ​“sim­u­la­tions always have bugs” and i havent slept since

— jon­ny sun (@jonnysun) March 19, 2016

So yeah, that’s a lit­tle intro on me. I’ll flip it over to the PowerPoint and… I just put some pages from the book in the back so we can kind of loop it as we go along and hope­ful­ly it’ll help us set the tone for this talk.

Zittrain: That’s won­der­ful. Thank you so much. And I can’t help but also by way of intro­duc­tion— This is a love­ly book, by the way. Available over here after the pre­sen­ta­tion. And there are few­er books than there are peo­ple, so… You know.

Sun: So run.

Zittrain: Lord of the Flies. 

“When he isn’t tweet­ing, Jonathan Sun is an archi­tect, design­er, engi­neer, artist, play­wright, and com­e­dy writer.” Which is a fair­ly long list of things.

Sun: Yes.

Zittrain: But tell us about, first, the title of the book.

Sun: Sure.

Zittrain: Authors choose their titles very care­ful­ly. They often have sec­ond thoughts about it. ​“everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too:”—

Sun: Yes.

Zittrain: ​“a book”

Sun: Yes.

Zittrain: I love how the sub­ti­tle is…“a book.”

Sun: Oh it is a book, yeah. Explain what’s going on?

Zittrain: Unless you think it speaks for itself.

Sun: I mean, I think this is one of the things— This title kin­da came about after I’d done the book. And it’s a line in the book and it’s one of those things where when you see the line in the book you’ll be like, ​“That’s the title of the thing!” And it’s kind of the entire theme of both the book and my work in gen­er­al. I think I kind of have float­ed through the world feel­ing like an out­sider and feel­ing a bit like an alien, I guess. And along the way I’ve met so many oth­er peo­ple who have felt like that too, and I think this is a cel­e­bra­tion of that kind of diver­si­ty and of that kind of outsiderdom.

Zittrain: And are aliens… I remem­ber my dad once told me that when he went to col­lege there were a bunch of fra­ter­ni­ties. And then there were peo­ple who did­n’t join the fra­ter­ni­ty who joined some­thing called the Nonfraternal Union.

Sun: Okay.

Zittrain: And I was like “…” Is that not…a fraternity?

Sun: Yes.

Zittrain: And he’s like, ​“No no! It was the Nonfraternal Union. And we had meet­ings and did activ­i­ties and—”

Sun: And memberships.

Zittrain: Right. So are aliens a cohort, or is the whole point of being an alien that when every­one else is an alien… [crosstalk]

Sun: Yeah.

Zittrain: …we’re aliens from one another?

Sun: Yeah. I think I love that delight­ful para­dox. It’s kind of like the nice ver­sion of when every­one’s spe­cial no one’s spe­cial. And maybe this is like the pos­i­tive flip of that, when every­one’s an alien you’re an alien too. And I think it’s part of say­ing that being an out­sider is okay, and kind of a cel­e­bra­tion of that. And I think that we can kind of spend more time kind of cel­e­brat­ing every­one else’s dif­fer­ences and mak­ing that the high­light instead of kind of cel­e­brat­ing similarities.

Zittrain: Yeah. Now, in some of the wonderful-to-read cov­er­age of you, pro­files in antic­i­pa­tion of the book, you’ve been described as sort of… It’s prob­a­bly the kind of thing like the anar­chist’s club had bet­ter not have a pres­i­dent. I assume Weird Twitter does not have a leader.

Sun: Sure.

Zittrain: But cer­tain­ly a denizen of Weird Twitter. 

Sun: Mm hm. Yes.

Zittrain: If we were play­ing word asso­ci­a­tion, tell us about Weird Twitter. And demo­graph­i­cal­ly, how many peo­ple— I don’t know if this is like ask­ing if you’re a hip­ster, because… How many peo­ple would say, ​“Weird Twitter. Yes, I iden­ti­fy?” Alright, so not that many.

Sun: Well, Weird Twitter was a thing I think around 2012, 2013, I’d say. Like this move­ment of loosely-connected com­e­dy peo­ple who were writ­ing with anony­mous accounts and just like, mess­ing up every­thing about Twitter and mak­ing weird aes­thet­ic mis­cues and mis­spellings and mess­ing with gram­mar and syn­tax, and real­ly just using Twitter as this text-based medi­um in a way that I’d nev­er seen com­e­dy used before. And so it was total­ly absur­dist, total­ly sur­re­al­ist. But also kind of remind­ed me of the Fluxus move­ment from the 60s, which was a group of poets who real­ly looked at the aes­thet­ic of the form of the type that showed up on the page and played with that, and were explor­ing the effects of what that would do.

Zittrain: So that’s a fas­ci­nat­ing expla­na­tion ground­ed in syn­tax. But I guess—​“if our medi­um is our mes­sage” there’s also— Is there a mes­sage hav­ing to do with what you were talk­ing about before about diver­si­ty or out­sider­ness or some­thing or…anybody can use weird syntax?

Sun: Well, I found that the under­ly­ing spir­it of that kind of move­ment was that— And there was a tweet that said, ​“I don’t think we’re using Twitter for what it was intend­ed for.” And I think that was kind of the spir­it of the whole thing. It was this total­ly sub­ver­sive kind of rebel­lion against the plat­form itself. And I think that’s what I found so fas­ci­nat­ing, because at that time I think a lot of what Twitter was being thought of was things like, ​“I’m eat­ing a sand­wich” or like, ​“Go watch my movie,” or, ​“Go vote for my par­ty” or what­ev­er. And then all these peo­ple came in with no desire at all to kind of use it the way that oth­er peo­ple were. And so in a sense every­one was try­ing to break Twitter by doing this.

Zittrain: And you speak about it kind of in the past tense. Is Weird Twitter no longer Weird Twitter or around because its aims were achieved? Twitter now is pur­pose­less? Or what caused the end of Weird Twitter as you would describe it?

Sun: I mean, I think so many online com­mu­ni­ties and online lit­tle groups, they have their moment and they kind of work for a while and then they nat­u­ral­ly fiz­zle or dis­band. Or peo­ple just start kind of— It starts being this small thing and it starts get­ting more and more disparate.

Zittrain: Woodstock can only be so many days before the mud takes over.

Sun: That’s right. And I always have to say with quote ​“Weird Twitter” unquote (because that was not a label that any­body liked), it was a thing that was beau­ti­ful because it was small and no one knew about it. And at the time, hav­ing 200 fol­low­ers was a spe­cial thing. And even­tu­al­ly it just became more and more pop­u­lar, and I think more peo­ple were pay­ing atten­tion to it. And because of that there was this lifes­pan where you had like the gen­uine first kin­da wave—

Zittrain: Yes.

Sun: —peo­ple who were doing this. And then it got some atten­tion and oth­er peo­ple are com­ing in who were essen­tial­ly try­ing to mim­ic the voice and the aes­thet­ic of it with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly grasp­ing the spir­it of it. And so you had the sec­ond wave of peo­ple. And then those waves even­tu­al­ly kept going until the voice or the look of it was what peo­ple were going for.

Zittrain: There was some kind of busi­ness book like ​“how to sell your prod­uct on Weird Twitter.”

Sun: Yeah! And that’s kind of like, that’s like the weird thing about the mon­e­ti­za­tion of Internet con­tent any­way, right, is that as soon as some­thing catch­es flame, oth­er peo­ple want to use it for their own pur­pos­es. Whether to grow a fol­low­ing or to get enough eyes on it to sell some­thing. And so it kind of became disbanded.

Zittrain: Now, some of those tweets you showed as demon­stra­tive of your account had tens of thou­sands of retweets, and you’ve got like a quar­ter of a mil­lion followers?

Sun: Uh, 400,000 now, yeah.

Zittrain: God…

Sun: Yeah.

Zittrain: …a lot hap­pens in a week.

Sun: Yeah, exactly.

Zittrain: And, so do you have a secret account, kind of like Jerry Seinfeld wear­ing a mask to do stand-up, where you’re try­ing things out?

Sun: It’s fun­ny because this, is sup­posed to be that. This was sup­posed to be like the secret place that no one was sup­posed to know about. And some­how now it’s what I’m known for. 

Zittrain: Note he did not answer the question.

Sun: But I also do not have a secret sec­ondary account. I kin­da treat this as like my per­son­al place where I get to voice all this stuff. So I do see it as my per­son­al account and not a char­ac­ter thing.

Zittrain: Now, in the pub­lic eye, when peo­ple talk about Twitter these days or wring their hands over it— And there’s a lot of hand-wringing about what has Twitter become? What kind of over­all expe­ri­ence is it? Tons of neg­a­tiv­i­ty, cyn­i­cism, out­right hos­til­i­ty, misog­y­ny, you name it. You now have a high enough pro­file that you could have a tar­get on your back, metaphor­i­cal­ly, rhetor­i­cal­ly speak­ing. And yet I think it’s safe to say your rep­re­sen­ta­tion there and with­in in the book is nev­er, it seems, with cyn­i­cal dis­tance. Maybe with dis­tance, but with an earnest­ness that you would think would make trolls sali­vate. And I’m curi­ous what your expe­ri­ence is now, hav­ing the pro­file you do, tweet­ing with the form and con­tent that you do.

Sun: Right. Well, I think part of what I’m try­ing to do is—and maybe not explic­it­ly, but cre­ate like a pos­i­tive space online and prac­tice empa­thy and kind of cre­ate lit­tle moments of kind­ness and delight and joy. Especially giv­en the cyn­i­cal, poi­so­nous waste­land of the Internet as it is right now. I think hav­ing those lit­tle moments—

Zittrain: Let the record show he’s say­ing that with a smile. Which does­n’t mean he does­n’t believe it, it’s just…

Sun: Yes. It’s a chal­lenge to play with. But I think because of that it’s even more impor­tant to try to cre­ate those moments where peo­ple kind of see things and feel a lit­tle bit [inaudi­ble; crosstalk]

Zittrain: And do you have a sense of the recep­tion of that? I mean, I imag­ine your men­tions look like, what is it, ​“RIP my mentions.”

Sun: Yeah.

Zittrain: Are your men­tions per­ma­nent­ly rest­ing in peace? Or are you sift­ing through them…

Sun: Yeah…

Zittrain: And is it a Skinner box? Are you like…you know, some­thing gets a ton of stuff, you’re like ​“alright, more of that.” And then ​“oh, this did­n’t get good reac­tion, less of that.”

Sun: Yeah, I mean it’s real­ly hard to… I mean, part of the joy of Twitter’s hav­ing that instan­ta­neous response. It’s kind of like the clos­est you can get to mim­ic­k­ing being in front of peo­ple doing a stand-up set, right. Because you get the imme­di­ate reac­tion from peo­ple. But at the same time there’s a dan­ger of look­ing at those num­bers and turn­ing it into data and turn­ing it into—

Zittrain: It’s like dur­ing a debate when they turn the dials and Frank Lutz is like, ​“That’s it, Trumps gonna win.”

Sun: Yeah, exact­ly. There’s a dan­ger of doing that and kind of turn­ing into a par­o­dy of your­self, I think. So part of it is, my men­tions are kind of…a mess. And you asked about the kind of harm­ful speech stuff a lit­tle bit.

Zittrain: Yes.

Sun: And I do have a tar­get on my back and I do have a very ded­i­cat­ed group of trolls and peo­ple who hate me.

Zittrain: I was like ​“props to them for their devotion!”

Sun: Yeah, it’s like shout out to them. Shout out for stick­ing around for four years and con­tin­u­ing to do this.

Zittrain: Have you engaged with them? Because so much, too, of your work, almost every instance we see is a dia­logue of some kind. It’s not a pro­nounce­ment, it’s a dialogue.

Sun: Yeah.

Zittrain: And so how much of your work when you’re on Twitter is post­ing the dia­logue and then on to the next, ver­sus engag­ing in dia­logue, whether with peo­ple who are either try­ing to pick [up] the ball and car­ry it fur­ther, or just react and say ​“great,” or react as one of your devot­ed trolls?

Sun: Right. The book is kind of a cel­e­bra­tion of… Like, it’s fun because the main char­ac­ter of the alien is main­ly a lis­ten­er and main­ly more on the qui­et side and some­one who would rather kin­da learn about every­one else’s lives than project their own lives to every­one else. And I think it’s part of the chal­lenge for writ­ing the book was cre­at­ing a pro­tag­o­nist that the world, like the sto­ry is cen­tered around, who actu­al­ly does­n’t do a lot of the dri­ving of the sto­ry. Who would rather kin­da take the back seat and lis­ten. And I think that kind of reflects [crosstalk] my…

Zittrain: An everyalien.

Sun: Yes. Yeah yeah. And I think that kind of reflects my view of Twitter best prac­tices, in a way. I used to respond a lot to haters and get in fights and kind of pick fights or retweet them into my time­line so oth­er peo­ple would pick fights with them. But now I’m kind of more okay with just see­ing that stuff and kind of being like okay, I hear that but I’m not going to respond.

Zittrain: I can’t tell if this is a jour­ney where you’ll end up as Cory Booker, who has these won­der­ful, weird owns of love back at his haters.

Sun: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s so much… And this is some­thing like Susan [Benish?] is here. And we’ve kind of been talk­ing about harm­ful speech online and the role of humor in kind of being able to counter harm­ful speech online, pos­i­tive­ly or in a pro­duc­tive way. And that’s some­thing I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in find­ing the bal­ance of. Of how to do it in a way that kind of deesca­lates the con­ver­sa­tion instead of mak­ing it—

Zittrain: Yes. And humor has, I think, so acknowl­edged… I was think­ing of Mark Twain’s thing about a lie gets around the block faster than the truth while it’s still putting on its shoes kind of thing. But there’s maybe a corol­lary to that where humor can reach peo­ple in a way that just earnest dec­la­ra­tions of what you think is true, fired at them like a Gatling gun… But humor also if it’s to have that ele­ment of shift of sur­prise, of whiplash that is often what humor is, can be mis­in­ter­pret­ed, can be mis­un­der­stood. People might not under­stand that this was sar­cas­tic. Especially when you’ve got 140 characters.

Sun: Yes.

Zittrain: Do you find your­self pulling back from some­thing that is humor but you’re already antic­i­pat­ing the eight ways 10% of the peo­ple see­ing it are going to find it hor­ri­bly offensive?

Sun: Right. I mean, I do spend a lot of time fig­ur­ing out what the right way to write a joke, a short, a short piece. And some­times I’ll spend like half an hour just fig­ur­ing out the word­ing or fig­ur­ing out the angle for these things. I think there is a huge dan­ger of— Like there’s a quote that I think it goes some­thing like ​“satire does­n’t work if the peo­ple who are main­ly the fans of it believe it’s true,” right. Like are a lot of—

Zittrain: I’ve always won­dered about all the peo­ple that watch The Office…

Sun: That’s right. Yeah.

Zittrain: And they’re like, ​“Oh my god, those goof­balls,” when many of them work in offices—

Sun: Right, exactly.

Zittrain: —and might…be the goofball.

Sun: Exactly. Or peo­ple who think The Onion is like, a real newspaper. 

Zittrain: Spoiler alert. Or The Colbert Report was great.

Sun: Absolutely. There was a big Republican fan­base for that. And I think gets kind of mag­ni­fied online. Because of how short the snip­pets, the tweets are. There’s this huge chance of it get­ting mis­in­ter­pret­ed. And I think part of what I’m try­ing not to do is I’m try­ing to stay away from the iron­ic side of Twitter. Like there is kind of this voice of irony. Which to me is kind of like being a jerk, then if peo­ple think you’re a jerk you’re like, ​“Ha ha! Gotcha. I’m not actu­al­ly a jerk. I was just pre­tend­ing to be a jerk.” 

Zittrain: Kinda like tweet­ing fake news.

Sun: Yeah, it’s kin­da like this weird—

Zittrain: [inaudi­ble]

Sun: Yeah, you’re right. So, that was in 2015 so I’ve stepped away from that.

Zittrain: Which was just me being a jerk.

Sun: Yes, exact­ly. But there is—

Zittrain: You don’t have to agree that quickly.

Sun: But there is some­thing about the online dis­course that those mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions like, when we’re in per­son we can just agree and be like, alright that’s great. And we agree and move on. And we get each oth­er. But then online there’s so many ways that these things can get mis­in­ter­pret­ed or you pass by each oth­er. And so on some­times those deep lev­els of satire or irony I think are more coun­ter­pro­duc­tive than productive.

Zittrain: Now, it’s trite to call some of these amaz­ing tweets gems. But they have the a gem-like qual­i­ty maybe of… I’m curi­ous how long they spend being pol­ished and sort of buffed and pre­pared. You men­tion it might take half an hour to kind of get it right. But at the begin­ning of the half hour is maybe when you had the idea, or you might be work­ing on some­thing for like a week?

Sun: It real­ly depends. Sometimes it just comes out fully-formed, like the moon one. The good­night moon one, it just came out just fully-formed and I just tweet­ed it. And I remem­ber it was exact­ly 140 char­ac­ters and I’m like, ​“This is a sign.” This is fine. I’m just going to put it out there.

But treat it like any oth­er writ­ing project. Like I don’t treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly from play­writ­ing or sketch com­e­dy or writ­ing essays or any­thing. I kind of will…I have this notes thing on my phone that I just any time I think of some­thing I just jot it down real quick and then I can refer to it lat­er and just keep going back and fig­ur­ing out if there’s an angle or some­thing that I want to say with it. And there is this process of I guess writ­ing the ideas down and then fig­ur­ing out which of these is worth kind of explor­ing more and then kind of pol­ish­ing it. So I think I real­ly want to try to boost the work that peo­ple do on social media as a gen­uine form of cre­ative output.

Zittrain: And it seems like there may be no top­ic explic­it­ly off lim­its for you to engage with. The book as I look it over can some­times flip from the most… From whim­sy, maybe even twee, sud­den­ly into exis­ten­tial­ism. Like on the next page our alien encoun­ters a skele­ton. It’s dead. It’s like ​“oh, this is a baby that’s real­ly all grown up.” And them some­body else is like, ​“Don’t touch it.” Next. page.

Sun: Yes. Yes.

Zittrain: And I’m won­der­ing— It’s like…I don’t know, I can revis­it. Should I give this to my 7 year-old nephew, or?

Sun: Right. Yeah.

Zittrain: And you did a tweet in the wake of one of the recent mass shoot­ings, I think, that said some­thing like ​“the year 2030,” then it was ​“Son: dad what were things like when youwere a baby? And dad says, ​“Believe it or, son, they weren’t every day.” 

Sun: Yeah. That’s right.

Zittrain: And that said… So I don’t know, I’d be inter­est­ed to hear a lit­tle bit about, is there any top­ic off lim­its for this modal­i­ty for you?

Sun: I think it’s just find­ing ways to make it um… That’s a real­ly good ques­tion. I think part of it for me is find­ing ways to take a spe­cif­ic thing and kind of gen­er­al­ize it a lit­tle bit and make it a piece that not only applies at the moment but applies like five years lat­er, ten years lat­er, and some­thing that you can go back to and both see it as a snap­shot of what was hap­pen­ing at the time, and then also still rel­e­vant or applic­a­ble lat­er on. 

I don’t think that by prin­ci­ple there’s any­thing that I want to shy away from, but I do think there are a lot of top­ics that I rec­og­nize as like a straight, cishet male that I’m not in the right posi­tion to be the one mak­ing these state­ments. And so I like to use Twitter as also a plat­form to expand oth­er voic­es and to kind of be the micro­phone, and kind of give a plat­form to oth­er peo­ple who I think have a bet­ter per­spec­tive and a bet­ter, clear­er way to say some of the things—

Zittrain: And does that mean a healthy dose of like, retweet­ing with­out com­ment kind of stuff?

Sun: Absolutely, yeah. And find­ing peo­ple whose per­spec­tives I real­ly appre­ci­ate, and kind of sig­nal post­ing, and kind of find­ing ways to to do that productively.

Zittrain: And are there peo­ple who did that for you back in the day?

Sun: I think so, yeah. I think that’s kind of how social media works, is like you kind of make friends and you kind of fig­ure out who… You find like kin­dred spir­its, in a way. And I think the cool thing about Twitter is that even though it’s through text, it’s short pieces, often­times you don’t even know what the per­son looks like that you’re kind of inter­fac­ing with. But I think maybe because of that, you get a truer sense of who they are, in a very strange way. Like I’ve had so many meet­ings with peo­ple that I’ve known through Twitter who had become like my very close friends. Yeah, and there are so many cas­es where I feel like the first time I meet them in per­son, if I’ve fol­lowed them for a while I already know who they are and I’ve skipped like the first five times hang­ing out with them. I’m on till it’s like already being their friend and we kind of it’s like we’re pick­ing up a con­ver­sa­tion instead of start­ing one.

Zittrain: Ten years ago the then-Berkman Center host­ed Wikimania 2006 here on cam­pus. And it was just amaz­ing to see all of the meet­ings of Wikipedians that had only known each oth­er on the— ​“Oh so you’re HotPants15! It’s so great to meet you.” And it was like the first meet­ing of the Arbcom in per­son, the Arbitration Committee. And it’s like you know, you were expect­ing you know…Ruth Bader Ginsburg to turn up and oth­er peo­ple in robes. And it was just like oh… But they still emanat­ed pow­er, let me be clear.

You had a great McSweeney’s piece. It was a dia­logue with a stand-in maybe for you or some­body maybe gen­tly try­ing to push Twitter to increase the char­ac­ter size, and Twitter explain­ing again and again why it would nev­er do such a thing. If you had root access to Twitter what’s the one change, if any, you might see your­self want­i­ng to make to it?

Sun: I think the biggest issue Twitter has right now is issues of harass­ment and abuse, still. It’s been the prob­lem with the plat­form I think since the beginning?

Zittrain: Yes.

Sun: And I think it’s like— I under­stand it’s a very dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion. But amongst every­one, like all my friends on Twitter and I guess amongst every­one I kind of inter­act with, the com­mon thread is if we can kind of curb the amount of neg­a­tive, harm­ful speech get­ting tar­get­ed towards us, we’re all going to want to use it more. And I think a lot of the pub­lic per­cep­tion now is peo­ple are kind of resis­tant to join­ing Twitter and to get­ting on it because they’re afraid of tweet­ing some­thing wrong and get­ting a lot of tar­get­ed stuff—

Zittrain: And do you have an instinct— Is it loose­ly… ​“Come on peo­ple. Just make some decent rules or stan­dards and then invest what it takes to enforce it. We all kind of know it when we see it.” Or is it, ​“No, we have to inno­vate entire­ly new design fea­tures or some­thing to…”

Sun: Yeah, I mean there are some very— I think there are basic things like find­ing the Neo-Nazi groups and ban­ning their accounts or some­thing. Which there was a piece that I saw recent­ly where I think Twitter banned Neo-Nazi— Had delet­ed Neo-Nazi accounts that orig­i­nat­ed from Germany because that was German law, but refused to do it for accounts from oth­er coun­tries. Which means that that there is a capa­bil­i­ty of find­ing and tar­get­ing those accounts but kind of like an unwill­ing­ness to do it unless it’s like doc­u­ment­ed and ille­gal. So I think there are ele­ments of that as well.

Zittrain: Certainly much more to explore there, but why don’t we open it up. Anybody want to ask a ques­tion or make an inter­jec­tion or begin a dia­logue for which we need to get a micro­phone to you, if that’s the case? Sarah, yeah. Welcome back from vacation.

Sarah Newman: Thank you. It’s nice to see—

Sun: Feel free to say who you are.

Newman: I’m Sarah Newman. I’m a cre­ative researcher at metaLab and a fel­low at the Berkman Klein Center. My ques­tion is about the draw­ings. And if you could talk about your style of draw­ing, what inspired it, how you feel it works with the text and also about sort of audi­ence. Whether you feel like it changes the audi­ence, expands it, lim­its it. Or whether there’s dif­fer­ent audi­ences for… Sort of some peo­ple are more drawn to the draw­ings and some are more drawn to the text.

Sun: Yeah, total­ly. That’s a great. ques­tion. I’d also been work­ing in visu­al arts for a long time, and this was kind of like a the­sis on… Well this is all basi­cal­ly a trib­ute to the types of books I read as a kid. And there’s a bit of like Bill Watterson, Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak and all the kind of delightful—and a lit­tle bit dark—and a lit­tle bit thought­ful writer-illustrator type peo­ple. And that’s kind of the spir­it I want­ed to get across with the illus­tra­tions. I was very inter­est­ed also in the par­al­lel to Twitter and cre­at­ing a metaphor to the expe­ri­ence of being on Twitter through the book, which is very loose, but I was inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing draw­ings that were very icono­graph­ic and reduced to like this min­i­mal­ism and sim­plic­i­ty that allowed you to kind of see them as icons or avatars and stand-ins for actu­al peo­ple. And so that was the dig­i­tal design side that I was think­ing of as well.

And I think for the audi­ence, I’d hope that it kind of appeals to any­one who would pick it up and just see it and be like, ​“This is a strange, kin­da cute thing and maybe either I’ll like it or my kid­s’ll like it.”

Zittrain: And again, it has the reas­sur­ance that it is in fact a book.

Sun: It is in fact a book, yes! And I was very excit­ed that my edi­tor let me put ​“a book” on there, because he was like, ​“Everyone’s going to know it’s a book.” But I thought that was a cute lit­tle— It was also a cute thing to say, like you might know me from the my work on Twitter, but this is—

Zittrain: It’s a dif­fer­ent form.

Sun: —very adamant­ly a dif­fer­ent form and like a launch­ing point into a dif­fer­ent kind of medium.

Sun: Other questions?

Audience 2: I had a ques­tion about your spelling, and if there’s any pat­tern about it or if you kind of are just a real­ly bad typer or if you kind of type out what you actu­al­ly want and then go back and change each let­ter. And I notice on your tweets you do the same spelling errors, so I was kind of won­der­ing about that.

Zittrain: Yeah, do you have an autoincor­rect tool?

Sun: I wish I did. That’s a great ques­tion. The fun thing about the typos again that mess­ing up of the aes­thet­ic indi­vid­ual was… I think peo­ple attribute it to me now because I think I’m the only one who kept doing it, maybe the only one fool­ish enough to keep doing it? But I think around the ​“Weird Twitter” zeit­geisty thing, every­one was kind of play­ing with form and play­ing with mess­ing up typos, or gram­mar and syn­tax and stuff. And there was this spir­it of just break­ing the English lan­guage. And so I kind of found my own way to do it. 

And my inspi­ra­tion was kind of like the fat thumbs kind of thing, where most of the typos I make are not pho­net­ic but keyboard-based, like adja­cen­cies. So like ​“aliebn,” the B and the N let­ters are next to each oth­er on the keyboard. 

Zittrain: So you could do a Dvorak ver­sion of your misspellings.

Sun: That’s right, yeah.

Zittrain: Somebody should write the tool.

Sun: Yeah.

Zittrain: If this, then that.

Sun: Yeah, that’s right. And a lot of them are based on the key­board adja­cen­cies. There’s like B/Ns and then replac­ing Ns with Ms a lot. And things that… Eventually I actu­al­ly cre­at­ed a style guide for my copy edi­tor for the book. Because when they—

Zittrain: Did your copy edi­tor get dan­ger pay?

Sun: Seriously. When I met about doing the book with HarperCollins, they were like, ​“Our copy edi­tor’s going to want to kill you.” And so to make life a lit­tle bit eas­i­er I did make a style guide that was like, ​“Okay, if you see this, that’s an inten­tion­al one. But if you see a typo that isn’t on this list that’s prob­a­bly a real typo.” So they had to cross-reference my actu­al style guide. Yeah. So there is a con­sis­ten­cy to it and some­thing that I tried to create.

Zittrain: I love that you can be so punc­til­ious about typos.

Sun: Yeah, no. I love it.

Zittrain: But only the right kind.

Sun: Yes.

Zittrain: But it’s also inter­est­ing because I was think­ing that in a way it was meant to empha­size the alien as new and dif­fer­ent and still learn­ing and all that, the way some­body who has any lan­guage as his or her sec­ond one could be. But this is not that. This is just…something different.

Sun: Yeah, and it’s a lit­tle bit of both because I think like… I mean, grow­ing up as some­one who want­ed to be in com­e­dy but is an Asian male, I was very aware of how my iden­ti­ty kind of became the butt of jokes a lot of the time. And a lot of the time it was based on a mis­un­der­stand­ing of lan­guage, and I nev­er want­ed it— I think because of that expe­ri­ence I nev­er want­ed my humor to sort of be exclu­sive and laugh­ing at some­one for not know­ing some­thing. Instead I real­ly tried to make this some­thing that was sort of an inclu­sive thing. And part of the learn­ing a new lan­guage aspect of that, which I [did] want it to keep in this, was real­ly cre­at­ing a new type of gram­mat­i­cal error. Because I did­n’t want to fall back on English as a sec­ond language-type humor. Or immi­grants com­ing to America and hav­ing to learn English-type humor. I real­ly focused on cre­at­ing a voice that was dif­fer­ent and unique from that, and hope­ful­ly sep­a­rate from that type of— 

Zittrain: Literally alien—

Sun: Yeah.

Zittrain: —rather than the ter­ri­ble deploy­ment of the word for ​“peo­ple not from here.” 

Sun: Exactly, yeah.

Zittrain: Susan.

Audience 3: You play this irre­sistible, adorable, cute, bewil­dered creature…alien, on Twitter. You also some­times at least seem to be very much play­ing your­self and reveal­ing some quite inti­mate details of your own self and your emo­tions. And from what I’ve observed, your fol­low­ers assume that that’s real. That that’s ​“real” in quotes. That it’s you. And seem to tremen­dous­ly appre­ci­ate that you’re for exam­ple will­ing to say ​“I feel sad.” Could you talk a lit­tle bit about that as a part of this phe­nom­e­non. And does it have some­thing to do with why the trolls may sali­vate but not go after you, to pick up Jonathan’s question?

Sun: Sure. Yeah. Well, I think part of the thing that I stum­bled into with the account is that I found actu­al­ly hav­ing a bit of an avatar and a bit of an iden­ti­ty dis­tance, or craft­ing a new iden­ti­ty, has actu­al­ly allowed me para­dox­i­cal­ly to be more hon­est and to be more myself. I think there’s… I feel like if my face were lit­er­al­ly attached to this, and my full, properly-spelled name were attached to this, I would­n’t be able to to be as hon­est and to divulge as much infor­ma­tion as I do with this account. And I’m not real­ly sure what that phe­nom­e­non is, but I’m real­ly appre­cia­tive of that.

I also think there is this bounce between char­ac­ter and per­son­al that I’ve kind of been real­ly care­ful about find­ing that bal­ance. Because I know that there’s sort of a… There’s sort of a, I guess skep­ti­cism to accounts that are char­ac­ter accounts, or accounts that specif­i­cal­ly try to be one thing. Especially online now, because you see so many peo­ple try­ing to use that as a way to mon­e­tize, or… The sort of insin­cere use of the Internet to cre­ate con­tent for oth­er purposes.

And so I like to set up the char­ac­ter thing and then break it by just inter­ject­ing my own voice into it and cre­at­ing that balance—

Zittrain: And is it demar­cat­ed when you do that? It’s pret­ty clear it’s you?

Sun: Sometimes. Sometimes I will drop the typos and tweet as me. And now I’m in a weird place now, try­ing to pro­mote the book and also doing it through this account. Because now I have to write the jokes and write the con­tent, but also be like, ​“Hey, I’m at the Berkman Klein Center.” And it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to bal­ance. But I also trust peo­ple online to be smart enough to know when it’s me tweet­ing and when it’s me tweet­ing as this cre­ative project. And I don’t think I need to cre­ate like, ​“Jonathan Sun, author” account and ​“Jomny Sun, char­ac­ter” char­ac­ter account.

Zittrain: Yes. Over here. We’ll meet up over here. [indi­cat­ing next ques­tion] I’m also curi­ous, just word or sen­tence asso­ci­a­tion. Brands online. Do you engage with brands? Do you poke fun at brands? Do you rue their arrival?

Sun: The most suc­cess­ful brand online I think at the moment is the Merriam-Webster dic­tio­nary Twitter account. Which is so…it’s just at the right place at the right time because it’s doing essen­tial­ly the role of a dic­tio­nary in a social media land­scape. It actu­al­ly is report­ing on which words are looked up now, and the accu­rate def­i­n­i­tion of words con­sid­er­ing that the peo­ple in pow­er right now are mis­us­ing lan­guage so bad­ly. So I think that’s a very pro­duc­tive brand, in a sense, because it’s using the iden­ti­ty of it to actu­al­ly do something.

Fun brands, I guess like— I used to inter­act with the SpaghettiOs account. Just because I thought it was hilar­i­ous. And this was when the SpaghettiOs account had 1,000 fol­low­ers and I was kin­da just like talk­ing to it. 

Zittrain: Were you talk­ing to it as a credulous…like, was it think­ing that you were just anoth­er con­sumer or were you…

Sun: Oh, I think it was like yeah— I was kind of like well, I love SpaghettiOs, will you send me SpaghettiOs, and I had this lit­tle thing. I actu­al­ly got two cans of SpaghettiOs, so. 

But the fun­ny thing with those accounts is like, that social media per­son on that account left at some point. And you real­ize it because—

Zittrain: It became less saucy.

Sun: It became less—yeah, exactly. 

Zittrain: That was my alter ego speaking.

Sun: But you you can tell when that hap­pens and I think that’s part of the skep­ti­cism with brands, too, is because you know that it’s not from a per­son­al place. You know that it’s from this com­pa­ny pay­ing this per­son to do this. And so to close that SpaghettiOs sto­ry, a year lat­er I tweet­ed back say­ing, ​“Hello, old friend,” and they just said like, ​“Hi! If you have a prob­lem with SpaghettiOs please con­tact me.” And I was like, ​“Noooo!”

Zittrain: It’s like the skele­ton just rean­i­mat­ed and it was undead rather than alive.

Sun: Exactly, yeah. 

Zittrain: Sasha.

Audience 4: Hi. So you talked a lit­tle bit about the tweet around the mass shoot­ing. And I’m won­der­ing how do you make the kinds of deter­mi­na­tions around— We have a lot of those kind of moments these days. There’s a lot of polit­i­cal moments you could engage with. My ques­tion is kind of about how do you deter­mine when and how to use this char­ac­ter to engage with the explic­it­ly polit­i­cal. It does­n’t seem like it hap­pens a lot, so it’s infre­quent and occa­sion­al. And have you been tempt­ed, giv­en the recent turn of events, to do more of that type of thing? I’m espe­cial­ly think­ing about the Supreme Court’s hear­ing of the…the alien ban.

Sun: Yeah. I think it’s such a bal­ance because I nev­er want to seem to be using the plat­form and the account and the voice to sort of pan­der in a way to cur­rent events and cur­rent issues. So I nev­er want to pan­der to that or treat it as a talk­ing point that I could just use to put some­thing out there. And so I’ve late­ly become a lot more con­scious of that, and instead what I’ve been try­ing to do is find oth­er voic­es and find oth­er per­spec­tives that I think have a more insight­ful take on it and try­ing to boost those voic­es instead. I think I have a respon­si­bil­i­ty not only to speak some­times but also just to step back and let oth­ers speak, and if I can help those voic­es get put out there then I think that’s a great way to go about it.

Audience 5: Hi, I’m Justin Emmerich[?]. I don’t if I’m maybe the per­son that’s fur­ther away— I’m from Ohio. I just hap­pened to be in Boston. I fol­low you on Twitter. I feel like we know each oth­er. Well, I know you.

Zittrain: And you’re well-labeled with an Ohio State shirt.

Audience 5: I need to get retweets by you so I have 500,000 fol­low­ers or what­ev­er. I just— A cou­ple things. I’m a teacher, and I just want­ed to per­son­al­ly thank you for a few things. First of all thank you for giv­ing my stu­dents that look at them­selves as out­siders or fel­low aliens an avenue, a friend, online. I have mul­ti­ple stu­dents that fol­low you and they are not the kids that talk out or any­thing but I’ll see them retweet you and that’s pret­ty impressive. 

Second of all, some of your tweets have been excel­lent just in my class­room to dis­cuss. The tweet about from the stars… The astro­naut and going back to earth or going to the stars. And just that con­ver­sa­tion. There was anoth­er one about making…it was along the lines of doing things for oth­ers and then that makes you stop doing things for your­self. Just the depth­ness we’ve had from 140 char­ac­ters is pret­ty impressive.

My ques­tion, though, is about your book. How do you see this being used, maybe by mid­dle school or high school teach­ers? Do you see that?

Sun: Oh, man. I have not actu­al­ly thought about that. Uh, let’s see.

Zittrain: And if he were to pre­pare a deriv­a­tive work called a teacher’s guide, would you sue?

Sun: I would absolute­ly not sue. I think part of the aca­d­e­m­ic side of this was again cre­at­ing a metaphor— Like, I think the mis­sion for this was kind of take that writer/author/illustrator-type book and update it for an audi­ence that kind of is primed for social media now. For an atten­tion span or for— I mean, ​“atten­tion span” is such a shit­ty word. So not an atten­tion span, for just like, primed for that sort of nar­ra­tive form, I guess. And so this real­ly reads as both a con­cise nar­ra­tive piece that has a begin­ning, mid­dle, end, but also jumps around char­ac­ters a lot and jumps on dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives, and things inter­sect and weave in and out. Much in the same way that I’ve observed the Twitter time­line or the social media time­line work­ing. And so part of the the­o­ret­i­cal mis­sion of this book was to take that type of online nar­ra­tive and put it into I guess a more tra­di­tion­al form. So I don’t know if that helps.

But yeah, and then the oth­er thing is all the char­ac­ters sort of rep­re­sent a dif­fer­ent on kind of idea or anx­i­ety or per­son­al inter­nal strug­gle of mine. And so I feel like I’ve split myself into like eight, ten, fif­teen dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters and kind of am work­ing through them by work­ing on the book. And so I hope maybe there’s a char­ac­ter guide or some­thing as well.

Zittrain: And just as a quick follow-up on that, what’s your view on remix, as it were? Especially… I mean, this is prob­a­bly the wrong exam­ple to sud­den­ly tilt every­thing towards, Pepe the frog has been one of the most remixed, trans­form, char­ac­ters in his­to­ry. How do you feel about if kids or oth­ers were to take up your own char­ac­ters, add one or two, deploy then in their own directions?

Sun: Right. It’s such an inter­est­ing thing, because the Internet has thrived so much on remix cul­ture, right. And I don’t know what the IP or like the copy­right side of things are, or just the own­er­ship side of things. I would love for this book to kind of be tak­en and used how­ev­er the Internet wants it to…to a degree. [Zittrain laughs] But I’ve been telling every­one who wants to use it as a col­or­ing book to use it as a col­or­ing book. It’s their book when they have it. It’s no longer mine when it’s kind of in your hands.

Zittrain: But like, he could assign his stu­dents if they want­ed to write some con­tin­u­ing adventures.

Sun: Yeah—

Zittrain: You could even see doing so templates…

Sun: Yeah, absolutely.

Zittrain: What about like a green screen challenge?

Sun: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that’s some­thing that um…I think that’s inevitable any­way, and for me I spent so much of my high school writ­ing fan­fic­tion and tak­ing the char­ac­ters that already exist and imag­in­ing them in new situations.

Zittrain: Who were your favorites? 

Sun: I wrote an Indiana Jones com­ic. And this graph­ic nov­el that I think it was about…what was it about? It was about the mon­key king, and it was kind of based on an exist­ing script that got the nod for like the fourth Indiana Jones?

Zittrain: Do you real­ize your agent is like, ​“Come on. [inaudi­ble]”

Sun: Yeah, but so many of… I think the ways young writ­ers learn to write and to cre­ate work is by look­ing at exist­ing things and tak­ing the pieces that they love and try­ing to imag­ine those in new sit­u­a­tions. So there’s no way I would ever want to deny that as well. Because that’s how I learned how to do all this stuff. I grew up draw­ing Calvin and Hobbes over and over again until I fig­ured out how to draw and how to make nar­ra­tive in visu­al ways, just by copy­ing my favorite art and kind of work­ing and play­ing with that.

Audience 6: So, I first found your Twitter account when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent liv­ing abroad, so it was a real­ly kind of cool thing to see. But sec­ond­ly my ques­tion is how do you find that your cre­ative process dif­fers between plat­forms, where you do stand-up and you do Twitter and you do your book and archi­tec­ture. Like, is it the same or are there dis­tinct process that you go through?

Sun: I think it starts out the same. I think it starts out with like a spark of an idea and then it’s about— For me it’s about fig­ur­ing out where that is sup­posed to be slot­ted in or which medi­ums I want to play in. I think the way my brain works is that if there’s some­thing I’m a fan of, I real­ly just want to do some­thing in that style or in that genre or in that plat­form. And so for me it’s kind of what the idea is, and where I think it should go and what I want to play with at the moment. So whether that’s tak­ing this one-liner thing and try­ing to turn it into a play, or think­ing about a space and say­ing ​“oh, this would be real­ly cool if there was like a thing here” and then work­ing to cre­ate an instal­la­tion that’s site-specific for that place.

But it all comes from the idea first and see­ing— For me it’s also what the chal­lenge is, right. Maybe not nec­es­sar­i­ly tak­ing it the most sim­plest way. Like for the book, this was orig­i­nal­ly sup­posed to be a web com­ic. And I just thought maybe I’d just illus­trate my tweets and put it out like three times a week and just make it a thing. But then I was like but, this would also be way more con­fus­ing and headache-inducing if I tried to make it a book. So I’m going to do that instead. 

But I think that chal­lenge is part of the fun, right. Like I think at the heart of it cre­ativ­i­ty is just puzzle-solving. And so that’s how I approach, I think, every­thing that I do.

Zittrain: Isaiah Berlin had this dis­tinc­tion between a fox and a hedge­hog. For aca­d­e­mics, and among oth­er things I don’t mean to accuse you, but you are an aca­d­e­m­ic pur­su­ing a doc­tor­al degree.

Sun: Correct.

Zittrain: And the fox is some­body who is into a lot of things, and just any new thing might inter­est the fox. 

Sun: Sure.

Zittrain: Write some­thing here, build some­thing there, car­toon some­thing there. And I think Berlin was on Team Fox. And a hedge­hog is like, ​“I’m gonna get real­ly good at this one thing.” Like, sound. Or what­ev­er it is, you get real­ly good as a hedge­hog. And a lot of these fields that you have inter­est and tal­ent in…design, engi­neer­ing, writ­ing, they do require lay­ers of stuff. And here you are pur­su­ing a doc­tor­al degree, which is the ulti­mate like year after year of hedge­hog­ging. So I just…this is a lit­tle bit Barbara Walters, what’s next?

Sun: Yeah! 

Zittrain: What’s next for Jonathan Sun? Is it con­tin­u­ing to do spread spec­trum, or might it be like, ​“I’ll see y’all in five years after I build a new air­port for Belgium.”

Sun: Sure, yeah. I actu­al­ly don’t know. I think my role as an aca­d­e­m­ic has been an inter­est­ing one because par­tial­ly what inspired this work is the fact that I was here and feel­ing very lost and hav­ing a lot of impos­tor syn­drome. And I thought well, the thing that I actu­al­ly have a grasp on that that can ground me is by work­ing on some­thing cre­ative. And some­thing that I feel like I have con­trol over, because some­times I think acad­e­mia, maybe just for me in a place like this sur­round­ed by genius­es and feel­ing total­ly over­whelmed, is…there’s this, there’s a lot of pres­sure involved with that. 

Zittrain: [inaudi­ble] out on a limb.

Sun: Right, yeah! But I think I do want to con­tin­ue work­ing on a PhD, but I want to find cre­ative ways to do that and maybe think a bit out­side of the box and fig­ure out how to make that happen.

Zittrain: Got it. One more ques­tion from this zone. I real­ize I’ve been posi­tioned diag­o­nal­ly. Wherever the mic finds itself.

Audience 7: Hi. So you’ve been talk­ing a lot about sort of dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties and sep­a­ra­tion between iden­ti­ties. And and also about dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines. And when I read through this, you’re an archi­tect, design­er, engi­neer, artist play­wright, com­e­dy writer, and also you refer to your­self as an author and illus­tra­tor, which sort of com­bines two sep­a­rate things. Do you see all of these as sep­a­rate iden­ti­ties or lives, or are they all sort of expres­sions of you? Are there over­laps between them or are they sep­a­rate entities?

Sun: Oh, I think they’re like total…I think they’re all part of the same thing. Like I don’t real­ly see them as sep­a­rate things at all. Just because I think I just want to make…things, for like my entire life. And so for me it’s just about where the fun is in mak­ing the thing.

Zittrain: I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what food you would pre­pare if you were a chef.

Sun: [laughs] I’m real­ly good at Italian.

Zittrain: [inaudi­ble] is that cin­na­mon in the steak? You’re like, ​“It’s a typo.”

Sun: Right! It’s an inten­tion­al one. The recipe called for car­damom. Yeah. I don’t know. I do think it’s… I con­sid­er it all the same. And I’ll have you over for din­ner one night. And we’ll see.

Zittrain: Very good. Saul Tannenbaum, maybe, for our last ques­tion. Make it a good one. No pressure.

Saul Tannenbaum I actually…it’s a quick follow-up to the typo ques­tion. Is the B in ​“aliebn” meant to be silent, or is it ​“ali-eh-bin?”

Sun: The fun­ny thing is I’ve always thought of the typos as a pure­ly text-based medi­um and it’s meant to be read and not spo­ken. I think of Twitter as this thing that the pow­er of it is that the read­er is kind of fill­ing in the voice in their head and it’s not meant to be per­formed, right. And so obvi­ous­ly I have this prob­lem where I’m pro­mot­ing a book with a typo in it and I don’t know what to do with it. And I’m still try­ing to fig­ure it out. I’d rather just hold it up and let every­one read it and say, ​“Memorize this book. This is what it’s called.” But I’ve call­ing it ​“alien” just because I think part of it is like, these are key­board typos, and so they’re still intend­ed to be spo­ken as words.

Zittrain: There’s just a mas­sive ​“sic” at the end of the book.

Sun: Yeah! They’ve had to do that a lot in the press releas­es and stuff. 

Zittrain: We actu­al­ly have time for one more bonus ques­tion unless there’s some­thing more you want to to ask every­body or say.

Sun: No no no. Let’s do one more.

Zittrain: Back here.

Audience 9: Well, this is much more per­son­al. Looking at what you do and the range of sev­er­al things that catch­es your inter­est, what’s your me time like? You know, what do you do? What’s your ide­al time 24-hour sce­nario? What do you do? How do you pri­or­i­tize things? Do you take a par­tic­u­lar thing a day or you just move from one thing to the oth­er with­in the span of 24 hours?

Sun: Oh, man. I’m very bad at any struc­ture and any sched­ule. And I think part of it is I think I have a strange ten­den­cy to fill up free time. Like I feel like if I have free time I’m wast­ing it, in a way. And so it’s maybe an unhealthy habit, but I do tend to kind of see that and be like ​“oh, I need to find a way to fill this.” And then what­ev­er kind of inter­est­ing way I can do to be pro­duc­tive is the thing I’ll fol­low and then I’ll look up at the clock and it’s four in the morn­ing. And I’ll be like ​“oh, this was a bad idea” again, to do this. So I have very lit­tle struc­ture and I’m try­ing to work on it.

Zittrain: And is it right to describe you as an introvert?

Sun: Yeah, absolute­ly. Yeah.

Zittrain: It’s just the way you recharge is to do some­thing, but alone.

Sun: Actually, yeah. I real­ly like mak­ing and I think the thing that dri­ves me is just kind of the fact that I can look at some­thing the day after and be like ​“oh, there was noth­ing here before, and now there’s a thing here.” And all that hap­pened was I sat down and I willed it into exis­tence and isn’t that cool? And now can’t I share it with every­body and be like, ​“You can do this too and isn’t that cool?”

Zittrain: A mere hour ago there was a big pile of bur­ri­tos. There are few­er. And yet we are enriched. And we have [inaudi­ble] for the use of this hour. And Jonathan thank you so much for com­ing out and for giv­ing us so much to fol­low in your exem­plary work. Thank you.

Sun: Great. Thank you, Jonathan.