The media momentum in the mid-80s was very much towards the elective affinity niche: people who took themselves to be anti-system dissenters* had pioneered the communication micro-cluster as a supposed zone of resistance (the indie label, the avant-garde movements, the specialist journal, the theoretico-critical discipline), but the system they declared they were resisting was actually not at all unhappy with this development. Self-balkanised geometries relocate (and quickly muffle) dissent. Freedoms of choice; freedoms of association: knowledge and intelligence arrive and evolve as a consequence — of course — of a degree of unfreedom in both choice and association. There was a knot here, a contradiction inside a conflict inside a conundrum: fuzzily but very strongly, I wanted start from the established reactive niche to push in another, much wider direction, against the encroaching self-quarantine around me; to shake up all the little comfort zones of specialisation. What would a magazine look like that covered everything, from every perspective? What would its production routines and technical shortcuts be? How would this ethos shape its editorial tactics and strategies?

(I should write this whole story up properly. Actually I have been writing it up properly, in the guise of a review of a record no one likes, including me and its makers. Read it when I finish it aka THE INDEFINITE FAR FUTURE dot dot sigh #smh)

Anyway, like Paul I too left The Wire, my project not at all finished — luckily with a few professional skills I could barter into a (much less ambitious) working life. For a decade or so, from c.2000, I had been giving a good part of my time — and surely more significantly my emotional energy — to my parents’ welfare: they were increasingly old and increasingly ill, and I owed them the best of me. Now that this duty is properly discharged, I’ve been returning to the projects of my youth, and wondering again — pretty ludicrously, given all the changes in media and how you get paid — about running some kind of magazine. Knowing full well that I have neither the resources (time/money) nor (in certain basic ways) the temperament, lessons I learnt the hard way the first time round. What should I be doing instead? The internet very much suits my temperament and habits, in good and bad ways. How can I shape these into a thing that’s useful — or anyway beguiling — for others (as I like to believe I briefly did, long ago, in the aftermath of Virtual Space issue zero, which helped get me an editorial role at The Wire).

At a minimum, I’d like to be pointing readers to the various writers that I routinely turn to, and see what transpires. If I could even get people squabbling debating in the comments-threads here, and attract traffic as a consequence of the smell of blood in the water quality of the discussion…

Have fun starting arguments? Light the blue touchpaper and lean in? No: those may have been my mottos at The Wire more than 20 years ago, but I don’t think they helpfully apply any more. Firestarting is hardly the problem on the internet: it’s how to bring together mutually inflammatory material and not set off exhausting flamewars. It’s something patiently grown-up, not something cheekily adolescent. Grown-up but enticing; catching, even. Hmmmm.

Let’s pick a scatter of who I might mean, and you the reader can do the math. Bearing in mind that my attentions will shift from month to month — I read a lot, and I likeread more a lot more than I hateread (though as you’ll see this somewhat means I merely hateread vicaroiously). I’m a magazine journalist: by definition I honour my boredom as hidden critique. If the butterfly-brained refusal to settle is the manifestation of one kind of symptom, incessant re-appearance at the same spot is another. This would be a very rough sketch of a possible ground; let’s just say that, and not pay attention to the clangour of everything that isn’t here.

• Marcello Carlin (here being nice about me). We are pals, of course. Whatever the thing is that I’m building, it can’t be hostile to fellowship or intimacy; and so must take into account the issues that can arise from this.

• Frank Kogan: here with an oldie that adverts to a tradition of writing and thinking which is not so distant from what I have in mind. Aside from the late Richard Cook, the two figures whose aesthetic I most wanted to fuse at The Wire (or clatter against each other, as a way to talk about all kinds of music) were Greil Marcus and Frank. I wasn’t really there long enough (and also hadn’t entirely had my head round Frank’s thinking, I suspect).

• Seth Edenbaum, and a PDF of a work-in-progress. In some form this should already have been a published book (for several years). As with Marcello and Frank, a friend — and I feel a slight squirmy degree of embarassment that I’ve haven’t been able to do more to draw proper attention to his work, and to him. I used to be good at this; or at least, I once briefly had a platform I hoped to do this kind of broadcasting with. Which some people remember fondly.

(Already we possibly recognise an underlying question: what is wrong with the cultural world we face, that these three are all basically outlier minds, their marginality less a function of their own often daunting rigour than of the failure of what — further up — I termed the routines and shortcuts and tactics and strategies of editorial practice and production?)

Plus some more (rather younger) names: outsider I’d guess more by choice than unspoken decree.

• Alex Harrowell, the Yorkshire Ranter.

• That Tasmanian Devil of prose Hazel Robinson (who is also my extremely close friend off the net as well as on).

• isabelthespy, writing a streak on Britney just before xmas.

And for now I’m stopping at just six. Because I’m imagining even just these guys in a room, debating I don’t know what, and I can no longer hear myself think >:D >:D >:D Though the project would certainly also include the blog I started with Tallita Dyllen, if we work out a way to encompass doing it while living in London and Beirut respectively; and any material that Victoria DeRijke writes, once she frees herself from the horrible clutches of academia. sadface emoticon.

I’d only want to do it — but do what? I literally have no idea how to realise this practicably — if it could be a space bending towards curiosity, generosity, mischief and so on. Is it doable? Is it something you’d like to see, or be part of?

But there wasn’t time: the practicalities — where could we find to store it all? — intervened. His colleagues in the comics world were adamant that his comics be rescued as an important resource, but much of the rest, inevitably, was scattered to wherever unwanted books and CDs go.

Anyone my age, in my trade, will have experienced something similar, I imagine, when that friend passed on who’d filled his flat or house with curiosities, sometimes going back decades. And sometimes it’s a collection that’s focused and specific enough that official institutions — museums, libraries, universities — can be persuaded to take it, preserve it, make it available for future study; especially if the collector was an artist or author or anyway a “person of note” whose work will likely generate research. But these institutions are all under enormous funding pressure — public libraries especially — and what I suppose I’m getting at anyway is material that would tend to fall outside an ordinary museum’s or library’s archival remit. Or — to put it slightly more polemically — would possibly stretch the institutional or bureaucratic imagination beyond its (fund-finding) limits.

One person I chatted with was semi-seriously wondering if his large collection of obscure films taped off the telly wasn’t a resource — and of course it probably is. Yes we live in a time of apparent cultural plenty, with “everything” in instant reach — but it really ISN’T everything, quite a lot has quietly been left out of the easy-access cornucopia. And the cornucopia is only possible through quite rigorous formatting and pre-emptive categorisation, and both these can strip out historical context and (for want of a better term) the traces of social curation; the why of the original gather, the principles of use-value in the first quirky instance. And it’s the latter that nags at me: that put in mind the idea of the co-operative archive. Of some sort of resource of this kind of material, “curated” — in the sense of gathered together and kept safely, somewhere where it could be accessed when needed — in some kind of (yes, massive handwave here) crowd-sourced fashion.

The basic problem for orthodox public archiving is space: suitable buildings are expensive, and need extensive staffing. Because space and funding is limited, there’s a constant process of triage — things not being selected, things being deselected, prey to exactly the streamlining decisions, about value to the public and such, that will cull the material I’m imagining being archived. My tentative proposal is what’s already having to happen be what’s further encouraged and enabled: that these collections, though they have to be dispersed physically, will be moved into spaces owned by friends, colleagues, admirers, and looked after there.

But they will all also remain linked on a centrally maintained database: which contains details of the original collector, what’s being held and where. The masterlist of items would be public searchable and accessible — the specific details of where held perhaps to subscribers, along with message-boards for information exchange and discussion, and potential for enquiry and suggestion — ways people can be put in touch with one another. There’d be a cost to maintaining it, certainly — accurate inputting is dreary and timeconsuming and should be appropriately reimbursed, but this cost is nothing to the problem of housing the material. There’d be issues of security for some items perhaps — though the point I’d stress here is that this is largely (by self-selection) material which has value in the setting provided, but very little once split away from it.

Could this be kickstarter-funded? Would it be a charity? How would it work? Could it work? Does it already exist? What haven’t I thought of? Who would be interested in participating? Do people know of material that might fit this? (Tell me in comments!) I see it as a map of eccentric passions, a crowd-sourced network of minor wunderkammern — inevitably incomplete, partial, skewed towards the relevant interests of those likely to become involved (the self-documenting classes?) but this would be a strength rather than a weakness. Not excluding records or books or quite ordinary items, if there was something interesting about the mind behind the collection, and that mind’s world, that’s apparent in the collection. Is there something to this?

(Kitten’s Wedding (detail), from eccentric Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosities: my friend Dr Vick took me to this in Cornwall a few months before it was closed, its items unexpectedly split up and sold off — Damien Hirst had wanted to buy the whole collection and keep it in one piece, but for reasons both melancholy and unclear this didn’t happen.)