The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Creating communal computers (Interview)

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Spencer Chang caught our attention with the alive internet theory website, but he creates all kinds of computery things to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. Spencer's experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the internet alive and flourishing for years to come.

Hello again, or for the first time. If you are new to us, I'm Jared, and you are listening to The ChangeLog. We're each week, Adam and I interview the hackers, the leaders and the innovators of the software world. We pick their brains, we learn from their failures, we get inspired by their accomplishments, and we have a lot of fun along the way. On this episode, I'm joined by Spencer Chang, who caught our attention with the Alive Internet Theory website, but Spencer creates all kinds of computery things

to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. His experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the Internet alive and flourishing for years to come. But first, a big thank you to our partners

at fly.io. That's the public cloud built for developers who ship. We love fly. You might too. Learn all about it at fly.io. Okay, Spencer Chang, creating communal computers on the changelog. Let's do it. Well, friends,

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Again, go to tigurdata.com to learn more. Today I'm joined by Spencer Chang, who made my day earlier this week, Spencer, you made my day with your alive with your alive internet theory. emailed you even before I think put it in change dog news I'm like I got to talk to this guy guys making me happy so welcome to the show thanks for having me jade so I have been fretting the dead internet theory yeah for probably the last 18 months off and on whether it's in change dog news or just in conversation on the show because I feel it I feel the encroaching of the robotic content increasing the upward swing And so the theory to me feels like a very good one.

And the recent news or the recent study that showed they've found about a 50-50 break and AI generated content versus human-generating content. So I'm thinking, well, that's if half the internet, at least new stuff being created is taking over, then this theory has some legs to it. You came out with a competing theory and on a website. I'm not sure how theoretical your theory is. Or if you're just trying to make us all happy about the alive internet, and kind of saying, don't freak out everyone.

Like, you know, the humans are here. We are here and we're staying. I'm putting words in your mouth. But that was kind of the gist, right? Like, let's celebrate the humanity out there. You want to tell the story of this alive internet theory? Yeah. And I mean, yeah, I didn't come up with this name.

I think I, it's interesting. I think it just sort of emerged naturally on. Like I found a lot of social media like random like Tumblr posts referencing this like TikTok posts some people made YouTube videos about it and I think it just like it naturally emerged in response and it's basically like the essence. Yeah, like humanity will always be here. Like we've created the internet so much of it so far and like we're not going away. My take on it, I felt very inspired like coming across the stuff. And you know, I've also been thinking about the dead internet theory. And. And. I created this, the prompt of it was I was commissioned to do a piece for the internet archive. Okay. And it felt very fitting to sort of bring these two things together because they've, you know, archive so much content that have been created by humans for like more than the past, yeah, like three decades or more.

Three decades, pretty much. They have like tens of millions of content, which is like a, it's just like a very crazy scale to think about like each of these things was like uploaded by a human, like in some point in the past. And I was just like going through like the archives contents from like different years. And it's very cool to see, I don't know, it's just like, it's very cool to see this content from the past because there's this human touch to it. And I think, I don't think that's lost in today's world.

I still feel a lot of that like, even in like social media spaces where like, you know, a lot of bots flourish. Like, I think every day, like there's just like. Like, I feel like people are finding just crazier and crazier ways to show that they're human, like, really pushing the human ingenuity. And I'll just see videos that's like, like, I don't know, it's like pieces of like, like, like someone animating like a piece of bread. Or it's just like them throwing a piece of bread on the ground. It's like, AI would never like think to do it. You know, it's like too, it's like too weird.

Yes. Yeah. There is a fluidity and kind of a roundness to AI generated content that humans don't exhibit. it like we are a jagged little pills as they say yeah and there are things that we can do that you know at the current crop of technologies are never going to be able to do maybe now maybe the next crop will will pin us down a little bit better but yes the essential human aspect of of creation is not to be matched by what's out there which is why we still can feel we can feel the encroachment because it's it's still obvious like yeah that's not that's not funny or that's not

interesting. Now, humans wielding AI to do new things. You start to get some pretty crazy creations. You're like, you know what? That is actually pretty smart, but it was the idea behind it that made it what it was versus the actual execution, which is totally fine. So tell me about this website. I know how it works. I've described it on the show. You, you load up a time period and then you, you know, hit go. And now you're just like throwing like a collage of just like insanity at our faces. That's pretty much the idea, right? Like, that's how it works. How do you, how'd you do that? I basically just, yeah, I just pull random content from the archive for a specific time period.

And it's just filtered by like media type. So I'm pulling images. I'm pulling audio and I'm putting video files. And there's no, yeah, almost no like curation whatsoever because I wanted it to be a very, I wanted it to be like an authentic luck of like the spectrum of things that are on there. So there is like, you know, you might run into like, NSFW content as well. Right. Because that's just, yeah,

that's part of what on the internet. Because you're not curated, you know, it's not going to return, you know. Because if I curated it, it would be like my, you know, version of the internet. And, yeah, part of me, like, making it this, like, overwhelming experience was I thought there was this paradox where, like, you know, the internet archive has archived all this human content.

And, like, we also know that it's one of the big sources that a lot of AI companies have trained on and I sort of imagined like an LLM like training on the archives like if I like visually if I picture what that would look like it would probably feel a little bit like this like they're just right it's like the LLM's fire hose of what it had to consume yeah exactly so I don't know there's an interesting like empathy with the machine a bit right experience as well that was trying to get that that is interesting so I'm not sure how long you've been around I've been around for the majority of it.

Do you remember Flickr? Are you a Flickr? Were you a Flickr? I do remember Flickr. I barely. Barely. All right. So you're quite a bit younger than me.

That's fine. A lot of people are. Flickr had this really cool thing. And of course, for those who don't know Flickr, it was kind of the original Web 2.0 image site where you're sharing your pictures. And it was very popular, very good, built by the same fellow who built Slack. Is that right? I think that's right.

Check my work there, but going off memory. And the reason I bring it up is because Flickr had some of the most interesting pictures in the world on it for a very long time. And they had an interesting sort, you know, where it was like, give me pictures and you could search an area or a word or tag and stuff. And then you could say sort by interestingness. And I always love that concept of like, well, you know, give me everything. But let's go ahead and like somehow, I'm sure it was some fuzzy math they were doing inside of Flickr or some hard coded things. who knows based on like stars who knows what it was views probably just start with the most interesting and work your way down from there and i loved that inside a flicker and i wonder if the internet archive

at least has one of those buttons where like yeah you're not curating it but you could be like please send the most interesting things because i don't want to bore people as they enjoy the alive internet or you're just like you're just fire hosing it whatever they got i'll take yeah they don't have any, they have like, you know, the basic sorts of, like, you can sort by views and stuff like that. But it's almost like, because this is historical content, like, I'm curious, I'm wondering what, what you saw on a given day when you, on Flickr, when you would turn on that filter, because this isn't like something that, you know, this content isn't something that people are like actively going to or like returning to. Like, you would, I don't even

know how someone would, like, stumble upon it. Like, maybe only if you're searching for that specific kind of content. So it's almost like for this case, it's almost like it's better at that like the more interesting stuff is the stuff that's buried. It's funny that you say stumble upon.

Now, do you remember stumble upon? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I was like, I don't know if I knew about it when I was using the web, but I do know about it. Yeah. So stumble upon used to be,

it was a Firefox extension. I'm sure it's still out there in some form or the other, probably bought by three different private equity company. at this point. It was just for fun and discovery and it was a Firefox extension. It was probably other browsers too that you would throw in your in your tab bar when you're bored and you would just click a button and it would send you to a quasi random place on the internet. And they had

curation, I think, and they were like trying to send you interesting stuff, which is kind of why you appreciated it because you're going to stumble upon some pretty cool stuff. It's not, it wasn't terrible, you're almost guaranteed to enjoy what you're going to land on. And this, your, your website reminded me of that because it's almost like you hit stumble upon and you just like click in the button like 75 times and just loading them all into the dom, you know, that's what it felt like. So they hired you to build this. That would have been nice.

They asked you to build this. Oh, you mean a lot stumble upon? Yeah, yeah, the air and archive. Oh, you mean stumble upon? Yeah, no, no, I don't know what, I don't know who they are or where they are. saying like you this wasn't uh you caught a random hair this was like or wild hair so yeah they well they asked me to make an art piece to celebrate they recently hit like a trillion web pages and yeah i i was trying to figure out what is the best what yeah what could i make though did you have to

pitch it back to them or do they just let you go go wild it was pretty just like um you know a lot of flexibility cool for the artistic vision yeah as long as i used like archive content, or like, you know, was inspired by it. Yeah, like use our stuff somehow to build something cool. Yeah. And you certainly did. Well, friends, I don't know about you, but something bothers me about getting abactions. I love the fact that it's there.

I love the fact that it's so ubiquitous. I love the fact that agents that do my coding for me believe that my CI CD workflow begins with drafting tumult files for get abactions. That's great. It's all great. until, yes, until your builds start moving like molasses. Get up actions is slow. It's just the way it is.

That's how it works. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry because our friends at Namespace, they fix that. Yes, we use Namespace. Dot So to do all of our builds so much faster. Namespace is like GitHub Actions, but faster, I'm like way faster. It cashes everything smartly. It casts your dependencies, your Docker Lake. your build artifacts, so your CI can run super fast.

You get shorter feedback loops, have your developers because we love our time, and you get fewer, I'll be back after this coffee and my build finishes. So that's not cool. The best part is it's drop-in. It works right alongside your existing GitHub actions with almost zero config.

It's a one-line change. So you can speed up your builds, you can delight your team, and you can finally stop pretending that build time, Build time is focus time. It's not. Learn more. Go to namespace.com.S.O. That's namespace. dot.S.O. Just like it sounds like it said. Go there. Check them out. We use them. We love them. And you should too. Namespace.com.S.O. Is this a common thing for you or you like pick up grants or what do you call them like people

give you money to create or is this an uncommon thing? How's this way? Yeah. It's, I wouldn't. say it's common, but I guess I now wouldn't say it's uncommon. Okay. It's, I've been, I mean, yeah, I was sort of still even now like figuring out what it means to be like this independent artist, designer, technologist. It's been almost three years now of doing this full time. I started in January of 2023. Really? Yeah. And I used to, I used to work as an engineer in tech. And I, And I found my, I mean, yeah, it's been, yeah, so every now and then I'll sort of get these commissions from very different sort of organizations, like sometimes it'll be more arts-based,

sometimes it'll be more like technology-based, yeah. And you found this more interesting than your engineering job. Yeah, I mean, I sort of, I sort of stumbled into it. I, and I don't think, I wouldn't call it like a break from my engineering career. Sure. I think it's actually just like, it felt like the most natural progression of it. So I worked at Coda for like three and a half years, which for those who aren't familiar as like in the, you know, document like database editing space.

And I got into that because I was very inspired by, like, a lot of the, like, research and HCI stuff behind it, like, Dynamic Land and Brett Victor and, like, making, creating software a lot more accessible to people. Now, you know, now it's interesting because a lot of that is, like, coming true, at least the democracy of creating software. But yeah, I felt like what we were missing was like, I thought there needed to be a cultural, an equal cultural change as well as the technology change to get people interested and invested in like taking agency over technology. Like I think if you look like four or five years back, there wasn't like a broad societal sort of interest or like even awareness of the like. like political power of software. I think it's changing now with all of the like effects of AI and stuff. But yeah, yeah, I felt like I wanted to bring those two together.

So sort of where I am, I thought that allowed me to like both push for technological change, but also cultural change. And you're pretty good at it because it's allowing you to live, which, you know, the stereotype of the starving artist is not just a stereotype. There's a lot of artists that don't make any money off of their art, but it's nice that you're able to create. You live at this intersection of art and technology, and there's lots of money on one half of that intersection, right?

On the technology side. So it's kind of a nice place to live, right? Yeah, it's, I feel very grateful that I am able to make a living doing this. I feel like, yeah, I honestly not sure. I still like, it still feels weird to be able to say that. I think it's very, like, not as steady of a path, obviously, compared to, you know, working and a standard engineer job. But, yeah, I've found ways to make, like, think about making a business creative as well. And I think that was one big comp by to get over of, like, treating my art and my creations also as a business and looking at it from that lens.

Because, like, it's important that it sustains. Like, if I want to keep doing this work, if I care about the ultimate impact or possible change that I can create from it, I also need, like, it's my responsibility to make sure I can keep doing it. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to two guys in the Ruby community who are a longtime open source maintainers. Yeah. And we were talking about that push and pull between sustainability, finance, your hobbies, your passions. and the unfortunate sometimes result of parlaying your passion into a job because it allows you to sustain it,

but it also turns it into your job. Have you felt any of that where it's like, I love making art, but I don't want to make art today because I have to because somebody hire me to? Yeah. I have felt like slivers of that tension. I have like only in the space where I've had to be the, most business about it, which is I have like a shop for these like internet sculptures I make

where I put digital experiences into ceramic and other material objects. Just because that involves a lot of like manual labor, like I'm making everyone by hand. So there's a lot of like repeated processes. And that definitely is like every time you get an order, you're like, dang it. Sometimes I was like, okay, I'm like spending several hours, like, you know, make all these my head. Like, yeah, you start doing the math. Like, how much am I making per hour on these pieces of art? Well, let's go there because that stuff is so cool. Thank you.

You have this concept that you put on your website of creating communal computers that people gather around and play, connect and create. And it seems like that particular thing that you're making is very communal and is like melding the real world. with the digital world. Can you tell us more about them and where this idea came from? Yeah. So they're effectively design objects or art objects that you would picture putting up for display in your house. I have one that's a ceramic fortune cookie. But what makes them special is I have put RFID tags in all of them

and programmed like a specific digital experience. digital experience that fits the like sculptural form. So the fortune cookie gives you a new fortune every time you like tap your phone to it. And yeah, they're like, they sort of connect the physical to the digital in this, in this interesting way. And it's cool that other people can experience it as well. And I sort of just stumbled upon it. I was taking a ceramics class with with my partner and just making stuff for fun and um i like i was feeling this issue of like telling people my website whenever i met them and uh i literally was just like well it'd be really nice if i just had something i could like give people my website here's my website you hand

him a token and that was yeah exactly and i have this like stamp on my website that's sort of the website logo that's made from my um made out of my Chinese name, basically, so it's sort of like a sigil. So that was the first piece I made. I just like, I wanted something that like represented my website. So I put the stamp in this small token and then put my website on it. And not really expecting too much of it, honestly. I just like, you know, just for my personal use, but people reacted very like strongly to it whenever I pulled it out. And like just like being able to feel like, I feel like ceramic, especially has a very earthy feel that's very different from how you you sort of yeah from how you perceive

software and like it just I could see how the experience of my website connected to that was like so much more meaningful than just like them experiencing it in isolation and so that yeah yeah that's how I just ended up like okay there's something interesting here and how I started experimenting more yeah I love that concept I have heard it one time previously and I can't quite put my finger on it but it was at a conference and there was a person who was like I think they said, do you want my website or something like that? And they handed us a thing. And I'm like, what is this?

And I'm like, you know, and it's an experience or like, put your phone up to it. Like it's, it's a conversation starter. It's different. The technology is pretty straightforward. You know, it's like the same thing as a QR code basically. Like you're just encoding some sort of address that gets open or whatever, but that doesn't make it not cool. I mean, it kind of makes it even cooler.

It's so simple. And yet the melding of the two worlds in a unique way. is what is memorable and unfortunately for this person it's not memorable enough that i can give them a shout out but i've also seen this recent trend at conferences of like coinage being handed out as gifts or as rewards or even just a way to stay in touch and i don't think i've seen any of those and like amazon does one i have one from we're at oxides office a couple weeks ago and they had little oxide coins that are just cool things that you're going to go like i think and put it over on the shelf over there,

it'd be sweet if it had some sort of thing in there that maybe it does and I should go try. No one said that. Yeah. So what other stuff? I think the Fortune cookie one's a cool example because it's not just a URL. It's like a fortune, right?

So what other stuff are you putting into these objects? Yeah. So I did a bunch of experiments like one of the ones, one of the first ones was like this pillow that you put your phone on and it turns on not disturb and yeah I'm finally actually releasing that tomorrow I like that yeah and then so can you sew no it's so it's it's made out of concrete actually oh it's a concrete pillow it's a concrete pillow but it does have like a fat like a fabric tag that you

would expect from like a pillow thing yeah yeah incorporate into it but yeah I like I just like contrast so I wanted it to be concrete because like it looks like a pillow but it's yeah no I like that. I just expected it to be an actual. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I made like this bathtub where you put your phone in the bathtub while you shower and it plays your shower playlist. Is that made out of concrete as well?

No, that was made of ceramic. Okay. Most of my ceramics. They're ceramic. Yeah. I made a Wi-Fi router that, like, gives you the Wi-Fi to, like, your home Wi-Fi for guests when they come over. I made this, like, these tiny, like, it was like a time. tiny, like, photo frame with, like, interchangeable, like, um, like, uh, pictures, basically.

These are all ceramic. Um, and the, the pictures would link to different photo albums. And they would give you a random photo from the album. All the places this idea can go. Are you, are you tapped out? Do you have other ones in the works? Like, are you thinking? Yeah, I still got a bunch. I actually just started like a, like a content series on like, uh, oh really? You know, like Instagram called, uh, bullet internet. Will it internet? Yeah, and I just like put, I just like try to like turn everyday objects into it

instead of like creating a special form for it. So like the first one I did was just on my, this is my like Cassia watch I wear every day. And I just, you know, put a chip on it. And it gives me a photo from like that this minute of this day in the past. So like it'd be right now it's 1232. Right. You know, November 13th.

it would give me a photo that's closest to that, like in previous years, November 13th. So go through your phone, like, you hold your phone up to it. Yeah. And we go through your phone's photo album and find the closest picture to that date in some past year. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's sick. I love that.

And so it's tied to like the minute, which I really like. It's like, if I'm like seeing a sunset, like I might see a sunset from a previous year. It's like, it's tied to the year and the, or the minute and the day. So it's like. How does it pick up previous year? it just finds the closest one doesn't care what year it is it just picks a random one it'll find all of them and yeah picks it right i love that how many different aspects i guess some of it is informed by or perhaps limited by the phones um like what the phone gives you to actually do from

yeah totally like do you have like what all can you access or what all can you do like you obviously you can not launch a photo album to a spot yeah yeah Yeah, it's very... Do not disturb. Like, what else can you do? It's very OS-specific. So, like, this is all, like, pretty... This is all, like, pretty limited to iPhone stuff for Android.

I think you have to, like, get some third-party software. I mean, you can trigger a lot of stuff. I don't know. Because there's all this... It uses shortcuts, basically, on iOS. Or there's a lot of different stuff you can program. Most of the experiences I do, like, rely on just, like, websites and doing interesting stuff there.

But I do wish iPhone in general is very, like, protective about, like, NFC access, which, like, definitely limits, like, what you can do. Well, I don't want you just, like, walk by somebody and get close enough that they have an MC chip, you know, and they get whatever they want to do. I understand why they are, they keep it close to the vest. But it certainly limits the art, doesn't it? Limits the art. Yeah, yeah.

That is really cool. So when it comes to the technical. underpinnings of this, how are you programming the chips and etc? Yeah. So like I mentioned on like iOS stuff, I'm using like shortcut programs to like run programs on the iPhone. Well, you're triggering it from the from the device. Yeah.

Run on the iPhone. What do you actually, is there an API that Apple gives you? Like I don't understand how NFC stuff works. Yeah, yeah. It's just shortcuts. which is this, like, native iOS application. It's literally just shortcuts. Yeah, and you can program it to, like, run a shortcut when you.

So do you write that in, like, in Swift or? It's, no, it's in this, like, they have this, like, no code-esque, like, builder thing for shortcuts. Yeah. It's really, I mean, now it's really a dog. Wow. Yeah. So then how do you get it onto the chip? It's just like, it's just like an address thing.

same thing as a it's like a URL style it's like a app specific URL i'm not actually sure exactly how it works under the hood but yes i imagine it's something like that okay yeah and where do you acquire these chips from that put in the in the ceramic it's like buy them off amazon kind of thing no i bought i bought them just from like some suppliers i found on google uh-huh but yeah i've started to source them directly from like china now just because i need very specialized And you probably need, you might need a lot of them as you start to sell more of these tokens. What about talking to the chip? Is it just like a USB cable that just connects into them or like a firmware thing?

It's just, yeah, it's just a phone thing. So you can, there's a bunch of apps available that like you. Oh, so from your phone you connect to it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. You can tell I've never done this before because I'm completely clear. Yeah.

It's really magical, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. That's super cool. So that's, you call that Internet Sculptures? Is that the name of this? Yeah. Computing infused objects.

I'm reading some of the words off your website. Internet sculptures. InternetSculptures.com is the website for the shop. Yeah. But Internet Sculptures, it sounds, is just a step along the road, perhaps. I move down the path, but you're going further now. Yeah. To computing shrines, which is like,

Okay, similar but different. Tell us about computing shrines. So Internet Sculptures is sort of like the business or the shop like container for all this stuff. The thing you're selling. Yeah, it's like I do these experiments. Some of them, you know, feel cohesive enough, repeatable enough to be like products. They go in the Internet Sculpture's shop. It also serves as a vehicle to do like collaborations with companies or organizations if they want like custom ones.

And the, yeah, the manifestation of all those things is in this latest project, Computing Shrines, which is like a sculptural version of these same concepts where you take larger sculptures and create a digital, a more immersive digital experience that's only accessible at the sculpture. So it creates this like this very direct physical to digital bond. and all of them are basically like collective experiences. So they have some interaction with visitors who have been there before. So one of them is like a, it's like a phone booth made out of acrylic. You place your phone. It's like a phone booth for your phone. So you place your phone booth.

And the website or the web experience is like a voice sharing thing where you hear just the last person's voice. And then once you listen to it, you can record a message for the next person. And that like replaces the message. So you know that only one person sort of your message isn't there forever. It just. Right. It's only the next person in the chain.

That's kind of cool. That reminds me a geocash, you know, your geocash. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because they have that concept of like, leave a thing or take a thing and leave a thing, right? Yeah. This is cool because it's that same concept. There's only one thing. Like with a geocash, you might open it up and there might be a few trinkets in there or whatever it is or notes or memories.

Yeah. And you take one with it. you and you leave your own yeah and then there's still be a few others in there or there might or might not be but with this there's just one one message you're going to listen to that message you're going to leave one message yeah and then only only one other human in history is going to listen to that one yeah i love it yeah i'm really inspired by like geocashian and all of the um just like very uh i would say folk practices of like leaving traces of oneself in public places Like, I even think about like very like, you know, people who like write on chalk or like scribble

something in the sand, like round chalk on like stone or whatever. Like there's all these like small or like stacking stones if you ever seen that. Yeah, I have seen that. When you come across one, you're like, wow. Yeah. Somebody spent three hours or however long it was. And like sometimes you can, you can tell like, you know, that multiple people have added to it like just by the arrangement of it. I like that there's this, this, like, sense of, like, how many people have been here. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, so all of these are sort of inspired by those practices, but using a digital form so that it can, like, yeah, I'm interested in, like, what other, kind of interactive experiences you can do that, like, amplify those practices. And it's, like, you know, some people are, like, there's, like, environmental concerns of, like, some of these practices are, like, you know, tagging rocks, especially.

So this is sort of like a way to keep doing those practices, but without, like, still tying into the physical place, but without having to, like, deface anything physically. Yeah. Well, as we began talking about this, my mind immediately went to graffiti, of which I have two minds about graffiti. Sometimes it's beautiful art. And other times you're like, this is just desecration, you know, this is vandalism. And so, and it's so permanent, of course, you can paint over it, but not without major effort.

So I like this idea of, like, ripples in water, you know, they have the, this ripple effect, but eventually it goes back to calm. And that's kind of what you're doing with these, with that particular photo booth experience. What I think is, I think that's a super cool idea. What are some of your other sculptures you built or are thinking about building? Yeah. So there's one that's, um, so the phone booth is like shrine to voice and the, there's another one that's shrine to earth and it's, it's inspired by the rock stacking practice specifically.

So it's, um, I transformed this like large boulder, um, um, and like embedded it with some chips and the experience is effectively like a rock stacking experience. You like load up the website, all of these rocks like come falling down. And they're all rocks that have been uploaded by someone who like went there. Okay. And so you're able to like offer a rock to the shrine. So you just, it like accesses your photos. It like prompts you to like search for a rock.

It'll like verify it's a rock. I can tell you to put some work into that one. That was very important to you. Just know what I just thought that would be. Yeah. It verifies it. I wanted it to be like, if I could tweak the model, I wanted it to be like, like if someone uploaded like Dwayne Johnson, like the Rock.

I wanted it to accept that. Like I wanted. One exception. Yeah, yeah. But I'm not that. Ah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Now is it set in stone or can you actually, can you actually, can you still access the software side? I can still access to software. Can you upgrade that, sucker? Come on. I'll try it. Somebody is going to, it's going to, you know, you made my day, but that's going to make somebody's weak.

I know. If it rejects other humans, but it accepts Dwayne Johnson, I mean, that's the kind of stuff that goes viral. I know. I love that. I'm just here to encourage you to go ahead and work on that. That's my, that's all I'm going to say. It's the next version.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it, it verifies its wrong. it removes the background and then you see you like you're able to add your rock to the to the pile so are these sculptures then like is the is the selling of the objects funding this stuff that you want to do or is this also commissioned for other because these are like living in public spaces right yeah i mean they're i'm trying to get i'm working on like a public art version of it to

to be installed in, like, a park. Oh, that'd be awesome. Yeah, which would be really awesome. Yeah, I don't know exactly how the funding is going to work, to be honest. I received, like, a grant from San Francisco to try to do this in a park. We'll see it, like, based on permitting and stuff, if that, how that turns out. But, yeah, it's tricky for this stuff. I think, like, especially, like, public art in public.

art broadly is just like, as I've learned more about it, it's like usually just funded from like private patrons or donors because it's just, it's not like a museum installation. It's not like something that like brings in a lot of money. It's like literally like a free thing. Yeah. In public for everybody. It's not exactly a line item on the budget. Yeah. When there's so many other things that they're already paying for. So which is really yeah, I mean, which is interesting. It's like that's the kind of thing I want to do because I like I've worked on open source and a lot of my projects as well, too. And I think, you know, a lot of my philosophy is around technology as a sort of public good. And so this is an interesting, like, parallel to that in a very physical

universe. So, yeah, I'm going to figure out, I don't know how the funding works. But at least for now, it's not, it hasn't gone large scale enough that it's like prohibitively expensive. I guess I'll cross that path when it comes to it. Okay, friends, augment code. I love it. This is one of my daily driver AI agency. use super awesome cly vs code jet brains anywhere you want to be augment code can bring better context better agent and of course better code to me augment code is by far one of the most powerful i software development platforms to use out there it's backed by the industry leading context engines the way they do things is so cool you get your agent you get your chat you get your next

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such thing. So I assume this is aspirational, but I'm curious your thoughts behind that statement. Yeah, I think it's, um, it's, it's funny. Yeah, because we know, we know this thing is not real. Um, but I feel like the aspiring towards it, like allows us to feel like that it's present in various points or various situations. And I think, like, I think I feel that perpetual energy in all these like some of these folk practices that we've like talked about like you know the rock stacking or like seeing these traces of people like there's nothing uh you know physical that like is saying that like this energy is circulating but uh you know I can just make that gesture and like so many people will see it and might interpret it and might feel you know

this like abstract sense of my presence that it feels like there's there's some cycle happening. I think it's the same in like, you know, if we look at the software side, like things like open source or like this public good style technology. Like, and in that case, it is sort of like there's more of a, you know, like infinite possibility because it's like software is free and can be infinitely replicated. But I think you just see like, you know, all these projects building off of one another. And like, I think, one, one, of the things, I think the thing that I strive for most in like the things I make is like that people can surprise me with what they do with it. And that also feels like this sort of

infinite cycle that get a perpetual cycle that gets produced. Like if you, you know, you just come up with one idea or like a project and it like inspires all these other or enables all these other versions of it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like perpetual not through. exerting of energy but through inspiring to exert energy you know it's like that less that old saying creation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration when it comes to the perspiring like there's no perpetual for that that's that's that's good old fashioned like motivation plus discipline plus whatever it is stubbornness but the inspiration part perhaps we can get a little bit of perpetuality moving in that direction where your idea you know ripples

And it inspires another idea, which ripples. Yeah. And inspires another idea. And we still got to put the work in. You know, you still got to go build. You still got to make that new ceramic thing tomorrow or whatever. But there is a perpetuating of the energy of the idea and the human behind it, which I do think is still probably aspirational, but sounds like more achievable than just raw energy perpetuated forever, you know. Yeah.

So that's cool. If you do stumble across that one, let me know, though, because. Yeah. I'm sure we could put it to good use. Yeah, yeah. You could probably fund all your art installations. Yeah, that might be my business. Yeah, this is my sustainability model is a perpetual energy machine.

I'll pitch that to some investors. So much cool stuff, Spencer. What else you're working on? What else you're thinking about? What else have we talked about? Because you have a whole, I just encourage people, of course, check out a live internet theory, but Spencer. dot place, he's got a bunch of stuff on his website. I'm sure you can just dive into the depths of each of these projects you've had.

But what else are you currently working on or mulling on? One of the projects I'm really excited about is more on the software side. It's called PlayHtml. So it's this open source library I made to make making collaborative web elements really easy, as easy as creating like a single player web element. So how it works is like you can just add a single attribute or program interaction as you normally would and it syncs that state to everyone. So instead of like, you know, I have like a lamp on my website, for example, when you can turn it on and off. And like that is the same state for everyone.

Oh, I did that for everybody that was on your website. Yeah. And it persists. So it's like it's like mapping that to like a more permanent. thing. And so, yeah, this is like, I just felt like this paradox of like so many millions of people are using like modern social media platforms at any given moment. But like the actual experience of using the site is very solitary.

Like it's you have a personal feed. Like no one else is seeing the same thing that you are in that given moment. There's sort of like a like a gap between that. And I think this like, like, having this primitive of like every like what you do is like has effect for everyone else like that forms an interesting foundation for like new i don't know digital social interactions yeah so that was sort of the premise of the project and trying to uh make more interesting social digital social spaces using it there's certainly been a lot of interesting

gaming and maybe even just, you know, toy experiences online in the last five or ten years that have been driven by a similar component where it's like we're all experiencing the same thing at the same time. I can't remember who it is, whether it's nil. Fun or there's another website where they create a lot of cool interactive games. Yeah, Nolan? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where it's like it's only fun because there's 7,500 people there and they're all screwing around

on it, you know? If you were here alone, you'd be like, 30 seconds and I'm out. But the fact that, like, there's so many people and everything I do affects everybody else does bring a new, I don't know what it is, a new excitement to what is otherwise a solitary experience, right? Totally. So this is a open source project for other people to build stuff like that. It's not just driving your works, but it's like, you're trying to get this to be a thing. Yeah, exactly. And it's sort of like, it's also like, I guess, an implementation of this.

you know, this philosophy of, like, public good technology. Like, it's, uh, it's an open source library. And I also run the, like, the infrastructure that powers it, like as a, basically as a service. Okay. Uh, like for a free service, basically for anybody use it. So is there like a key value store in the background or? It's basically like, um, yeah, there's like a standard sort of database store behind it.

And I, I run the like real time streaming, um, infrastructure. So you have a server behind this as well as a data store. Yeah. You're basically to donate. So if I'm using PlayHtml, the open source project, I can basically just piggyback on top of your infrastructure or I got to run my own. Yeah, you can basically piggyback off of my. Don't tell you, I know.

I have monitored and I have, you know, some checks in place for abuse. And it's like, you know, set up for like if you're doing tons of data or something, you can run your own infrastructure. You just point it out of the print. Which would be the kind thing to do versus. That would be the kind. to do. Effectively hot linking, which we've all learned is not something that you do on

the internet without somebody, you know, making you pay. Right, right. But I think that's such a big barrier for so many, like, I think people who create interesting experiences on the web, like, when it gets to, like, the back end infrastructure part, like, that's, like, the biggest barrier. And, like, usually these experiences don't need, like, that much, don't need that much bandwidth and don't need that much storage and so it just feels like it's a very high leverage thing for me to do to provide this because I've seen so many like people who are like not from

technical backgrounds but they you know they have like a personality to their websites that they they want to make like enabling them to like create these experiences has been really rewarding yes like if you're trying to make a massively multiplayer version of solitaire that would make any sense version of mine sweeper like you don't have I don't go take a class in data structures to get your mind sweeper game out there. Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. It's just not, this is not, this is the, what a yak shave is.

Like, why am I over here shaving this yak? I'm trying to make a game. Right, exactly. And so that's cool that you're providing that, uh, for everybody. And obviously as an open source project as well, is anybody, have you got anybody to use this thing? Or you got, you know, are you have people saying, thanks, man. I built it to check out what I built with PlayHCML.

Yeah, yeah. And I've run a few like, uh, workshops and like get together. there's been a lot of like it just yeah it's cool to see like what ideas like are possible with it and like like for example someone made like a horse racing game where like it's like there's four horses and then you just like you pick a horse and then you just like click on the horse really fast yeah and it starts moving it's like straight out of the carnival you know yeah exactly you just like point the water at it you know yeah yeah exactly yeah um someone made this like tug of war game where like you click one side or the other

everyone's clicks like are powering it and you just feel like going between the two poles love it yeah it's off the top of it

someone like has on their website like a knock they have like a door and you can like knock on it and you see everyone who's like knocking on it at the same time yeah and then probably the biggest one

it was one I made but it's like this fridge poetry game and basically it's like a huge It's play hml.fun slash fridge. And basically it's just like a huge fridge wall for the internet. Like you can add words and you can move them around and you can delete words. And you just see like these poems emerge on the website.

And that's, yeah, that's had probably like multiple tens of thousands of like players. Like go through that. Sometimes I dream of a world full of love where lightning surrenders with vanishing. tenderness. Just a small sampling from your current fridge wall. That's already nice. I assume you didn't write that. I have all been writing for a while. And you can see the color under each word that's a different person. Like every person has a different cursor color. So whatever color. And then you can delete words off the fridge. So if you're a jerk, you could just delete this amazing piece of poetry that somebody wrote. It does stop you if you're.

It stopped you eventually. Yeah, yeah. It's actually a similar approach that Nolan did for, I think, one million checkboxes where, like, if you're griefing and you're doing it a lot, it, like, tells you to chill. It says, yeah. Yeah. Knock it off, jerk.

Very cool stuff, Spencer. I'm kind of, uh, I'm inspired. I'm also jealous of your creativity and I'm happy that the internet is alive and well with people like yourself, uh, creating cool things. Yeah. Play HTML. dot fun, Spencer. Place, a live internet. Alive theory.net. Yeah.

And, um, lots of euros. Many URLs. Internet sculptures.com. Internet sculptures.com. Yeah. There's a shrine.com. Okay. I have to figure out a funny model for your domain name. Renewals. You know, that's your biggest expense, probably. Yeah. Let me teach you about a thing called subdomains, you know.

They work and they're free. Cool. Love your work. Love your perspective and your attitude on the internet and life. Appreciate you joining me, especially on short notice, to chat about the alive internet theory. Anything else you want to say to me or to the audience before I let you go? Yeah. I mean, first just thank you so much for having me on.

Of course. really enjoyed the conversation and i feel like we should be talking more about this stuff and um i think um also uh like you know it's up to it's all of us to like keep the alive internet um a thing like it's um i hope you know my work is just like a seed for like uh all the amazing things that um you know the person listening to this right now could do um i think it takes all of us coming together to, you know, preserve the internet that we know and love. Beautifully said. And did you hear that to you out there listening to this? Take the seed, plant it in the ground, and hopefully something beautiful will grow.

Awesome. Thanks, Spencer. Thank you all for listening. And we'll talk to you on the next one. Connect with Spencer at his website, spencer.complace, and keep up with his newest creations on his newsletter at News. spencer dot place and connect with us in our zulip chat each episode gets a discussion thread and nice people hang out there you should too join now at changelog.com slash community thanks again to our partners at fly.io and to our sponsors of this episode tigerdata.com namespace dot so augmentcode.com and nordlayer.com slash the change log thanks also to brakemaster cylinder for all of our dope beats We love you BMC.

Okay, that's it. This episode's done, but we'll be back on Friday. Is it a swarm? Is it not a swarm? Find out with us on Friday. Bye y'all. Game on