Notes on Whipping Room Live The Whipping Room is a new foundation for creative activity. Its primary goal is the authoritative presentation of art and literature. Its scope encompasses work at every stratum of artistic and historical importance—from shitposts to the canon—and it aims to contextualize them within a singular public record. Typography & Governance We believe that authority is based on competence and that the current social media and publishing platforms either present art and literature incompetently, are governed incompetently, or both. It is for this reason that The Whipping Room is particularly focused on typography and governance. Web typography has been influenced almost entirely by advertising. Across the entire internet, one is constantly being screamed at by headings that are dozens of points too large, laughed at by websites that are like typographic clown cars full of grating personalities, or bludgeoned into stupidity by brutal, high-modernist “neutral carriers” set entirely in lowercase. Typography, perhaps more than any craft, develops dialectically. The Whipping Room, in contrast to most websites conceived by Silicon Valley modernists, is dialectical rather than idealist, and aims to reconcile itself with the tradition of book typography while committing violence to the visual pollution of advertising wherever possible. Our views on governance follow our views on typography. We believe that matters of government require an artistic preoccupation with particulars as they are revealed in time. Most social media platforms attempt to encode their ideals into their software at the outset, and the governance of these platforms is assumed to be an automatic byproduct of these encoded ideals. We aim to govern the platform manually and humanely. This entails intelligent curation of valuable content, privileging real talent, and exercising just punishment when necessary. Our primary goal is to engender a productive and meritocratic culture. Practical Structure “The Whipping Room” or “Whipping Room Live” is a communication platform to be hosted at the domain whippingroom.live. We also hold the .com, .net, and .org. It aims to be “live” in the sense that the platform has real-time features like “posts”, “replies” and “likes” that appear instantaneously without refreshing the page. It is also “live” in the sense that it may have an occasional radio show hosted by special guests or recurring opportunities for communal voice chats akin to Twitter Spaces. It should have a dignified graphic design that can present the communications of its users without distraction. library.whippingroom.live The library is a collection of canonical literature published using sophisticated, conservative typesetting. Its goal is to be an authoritative reference library where the public can access hundreds or thousands of books presented in a classical manner without distraction. The library is enabled by a publishing agent that has a consistent, automated, human-in-the-loop workflow that converts any PDF into a nicely typeset website using our house styles. journal.whippingroom.live Or, perhaps, magazine.whippingroom.live, which may be more approachable. This is a place for publishing curated contemporary work, similar to a magazine or opinion column, though it’s not limited to writing. Contributions of visual art and music would be very desirable. notes.whippingroom.live Or, maybe, news.whippingroom.live or blog.whippingroom.live. A simple blog to publish official Whipping Room communications. News, technical notes, etc. shop.whippingroom.live This is a place to sell nice objects. There is an idea to produce fine, semi-hand-crafted book versions of our library publications with a semi-automated process, but the economics of it are unclear. Next Release Following the positive response the I Ching publication received, I thought it would be good to publish something officially under the Whipping Room domain. Publishing the King James Bible has always been a goal of mine, and The Greek Anthology was recommended by Hole. Both books are excellent choices that represent the strengths of the web medium, which enables people to carry large reference texts that are otherwise very cumbersome in their pockets and navigate to any passage quickly. I had an idea for Hole and perhaps Kantbot to write introductions for the Whipping Room edition of each of these books. Admittedly, I am nervous to ask, but their writing would lend a lot of legitimacy to this project and help it garner more interest. I’d be very flattered if they were interested in contributing. I’d also like to write a blog post or two. It’s not clear to me whether now is the time to write something akin to these notes in blog form. I suspect it’s too early, but I do think it’d be a great time to publish some technical information about how the publishing agent works. Lastly, I’d like to leave some kind of mysterious, aesthetic display at the root domain, whippingroom.live, as well as an equally mysterious email input so we can start building a mailing list.