 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. Yes. Quite extraordinary. Thank you for welcoming. And Jonathan 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 turn out for Berkman Klein Center stuff, so you're turning out for this too? How many people generally turn out for Johnny Sunstuff, so you're turning out for this too? The softball teams create themselves. How many people have followed Johnny on Twitter for at least a week? All right, that's everybody. The rest of you, you have your chance. Any other demographic questions? I think that's great. How many of you are having a good day today? All right, yeah. How many of you consider yourselves an alien? All right, we could re-vote in the end. 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 race ipso loquitur, which is the thing speaks for itself. So we thought to start us off, we might do a little race ipso loquitur with some of Johnny's tweets. Sure, yeah, I'm going to go over here and DJ them. But Jay-Z asked me to pull up some of my favorite tweets that I've done. You want to embiggen it? Yes. How do I... I control plus, usually does something. Or control shift plus. There we go. There we go, embigging. Okay. Do I need to read these out loud or can you all read them? Me, goodnight moon. Moon, night. Me, goodnight stars. Moon, wtf. Me, sorry, wrong number. Moon, who stars? Who stars? Answer me. This was like kind of in relationship to like the Joe Biden Obama memes. Biden, come on, you got to print a fake birth certificate, put it in an envelope labeled secret, and leave it in the Oval Office desk. Obama, Joe. This is kind of like the spirit of my entire writing project. Look, life is bad, everyone's sad, we're all going to die, but I already bought this inflatable bouncy castle, so are you going to take your shoes off or what? Another one of my favorites. On earth, a magician puts his hand in his hat. In the rabbit realm, the hand emerges. It is time, the rabbit council must choose a sacrifice. Thank you. This one's a bit of an explanation, but I tweeted this and I said, OMG, Willow 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 kind of 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 Corrin or something, but this was kind of like, I preceded the fake news thing by tweeting this in, or 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 haven't slapped him since. 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. 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... So run. Lower to the flies. When he isn't tweeting, Jonathan Son is an architect, designer, engineer, artist, playwright, and comedy writer, which is a fairly long list of things. Yes. But tell us about first the title of the book. Authors choose their titles very carefully. They often have second thoughts about it. Everyone's an a-leabin when you're an a-leabin too. Yes. A book. I love how the son title is. Oh, it is a book, yes. Explain what's going on. Unless you think it speaks for itself. I mean, I think this is one of the things... This title kind of came about after I had 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 as 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 outsider dump. And are aliens... I remember my dad once told me that when he went to college there were a bunch of fraternities, and there were people who didn't join the fraternity who joined something called the Non Fraternal Union. Okay. And I was like, dot, dot, dot. Is that not a fraternity? Yes. He's like, no, no, it was the Non Fraternal Union. And we had meetings and activities and... And memberships. Right. So are aliens a cohort? Or is the whole point of being an alien that when everyone else is an alien, are aliens from one another? Yeah. I think there... 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 that's... 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 similarity. Yes. And 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 club had better not have a president. I assume Weird Twitter does not have like a leader. Sure. But certainly a denizen of Weird Twitter. Yes. 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... But how many people would say Weird Twitter? Yes, I identify. All right. So not that many. Yeah. Well, Weird Twitter was like a thing, I think, around 2012, 2013. Sure. Oh, yes. Here, let me do this. Weird Twitter was a thing 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 misquies 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 like totally absurdist, totally surrealist, but also kind of like... Reminded me of the Fluxus movement from the 60s which was like 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. So that's... It'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 outsider-ness or something, or anybody can use weird syntax? 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 like, 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 they were... In a sense, everyone was trying to break Twitter by doing this. 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 useless? Or what caused the end of weird Twitter, as you would describe it? I think so many online communities and online little groups, they kind of have their moment and they kind of work for a while, and then they naturally like fizzle or disband, or people just start kind of... It starts being the small thing and it starts getting more and more dispersed. Would stock can only be so many days before the mud takes over? 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 like a special thing. And eventually it just became more and more popular and I think more and more people were paying attention to it. And because of that, there was this lifespan where you had the genuine first wave of people who were doing this. And then it got some attention that other people 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 kind of look of it was what people were going for. There was some kind of business book, like how to sell your product on weird Twitter. Yeah, and that's kind of like, that's like the weird thing about like the monetization of like internet content anyway, right? Is that as soon as something gets, like catches flame, other people want to use it for their own purposes, whether to grow a following or to get enough kind of eyes on it to sell something. Yes. And so it kind of like became disbanded. Now some of those tweets you showed as demonstrative of your account had tens of thousands of retweets that you've got like a quarter of a million followers. 400,000 now, yeah. God, that happens in a week. Yeah, exactly. And so do you have a secret account kind of like Jerry Seinfeld wearing a mask that you stand up to where you're trying things out? Well, 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. No, he did not answer the question. But I also do not have a secret secondary account. I kind of treat this as like my personal place where I get to voice all this stuff. So I do see it as like my personal account and not a character thing. 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 speaking. And yet I think it's safe to say your representation there and within 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. Right, well I think part of what I'm trying to do is, and maybe not explicitly, but create a positive space online and practice empathy and kind of create little moments of kindness and delight and joy, especially given kind of like the cynical poisonous wasteland of the internet as it is right now, I think having those little moments. Like the record show he's saying that with a smile, which doesn't mean he doesn't believe it. 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 kind of feel a little bit. Do you have a sense of the reception of that? I mean, I imagine your mentions, like what is it like, RIP my mentions? Your mentions permanently resting in peace? Or are you sifting through them? 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 this didn't get good reaction, less of that. Yeah, I mean it's really hard to, I mean part of the joy of Twitter is like 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. It's like during the debate when they turn the dials and Frank Lutz is like, that's it, Trump's gonna win. 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, like my mentions are kind of a mess and you asked about like the kind of harmful speech stuff a little bit. Yes. And I do have like a target on my back and I do have like a very dedicated group of trolls and people who... I was like, props to them for their devotion. Yeah, I was like, shout out to them. Shout out for sticking around for four years and continuing to do this. And you engage with them? Because so much too of your work, almost every instance we see is a dialogue of some kind. Sure, yeah. It's not a pronouncement, it's a dialogue. Yeah. 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. Sure. Whether with people who are either trying to pick the ball and carry it further or just react and say great or react as one of your devoted trolls. Right. I think like 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 like more on the quiet side and someone who would rather kind of learn about everyone else's lives then like 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 kind of take the backseat and listen. And I think that kind of reflects in my... Every alien. Yes, yeah, yeah. I think I would... That kind of reflects my view of like Twitter best practices in a way. I used to like respond a lot to haters and get in fights and kind of pick fights or like retweet them into my timeline so other people would pick fights with them. But now I'm kind of more okay with just like seeing that stuff and kind of being like, okay, I hear that but I'm not going to respond. 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. Yeah, I think there's so much... And this is something like Susan Benish is here and like we've kind of been talking about like 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 like I'm really interested in finding the balance of how to do it in a way that kind of de-escalates the conversation instead of making it... 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 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. Do you find yourself pulling back from something that is humor but you're already anticipating the eight ways that 10% of the people seeing it are going to find it horribly offensive? Right. I mean, I do spend a lot of time figuring out what the right way to write a joke, a short piece. Sometimes I'll spend half an hour just figuring out the wording and figuring out the angle for these things. I think there is a huge danger of... I think it goes something like satire doesn't work if the people who are mainly the fans of it are true, right? There are a lot of... I always wondered about all the people that watch The Office. That's right. People are like, oh my God, those goofballs, when there are many of them work in offices, it might be the goofball? Exactly. There are people who think the onion is like a real newspaper. Spoiler alert. Or the Colbert Report was... Absolutely. There was a big Republican fan base for that. And I think that gets kind of magnified online, right? Because of how short the snippets are, 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. There is 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, haha, gotcha. I'm not actually a jerk. I was just pretending to be a jerk. Kind of like tweeting fake news. Yeah, it's kind of like this weird... Yeah, exactly. So that was in 2015, so I stepped away from that. It was just me being a jerk. Yeah, exactly. But there is... You have to agree that quickly. But I mean, there is something about the online discourse that those misinterpretations, like when we're in person, we can just agree and be like, oh, that's great. And we agree and move on and we get each other. Yes. But then online there's so many ways that these things can get misinterpreted or you pass by each other. Yes. And so sometimes those deep levels of satire or irony I think are more counterproductive than productive. Now, it's tried to call some of these amazing tweets gems, but they have a gem-like quality maybe of I'm curious how long they spend being polished and sort of buffed and prepared. You mentioned 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. It really depends. Like sometimes it just comes out fully formed. Like the Moon one, the Good Night Moon one, it just came out. Yes. It just like fully formed and I just tweeted it. Yes. And I remember it was exactly 140 characters and they're like, this is a sign. This is fine. I'm just going to put it out there. But I think like, I treat it like any other writing project. Like I don't treat it differently from playwriting or sketch comedy or writing essays or anything. Yes. I kind of will, I have this notes thing on my phone that I just like, anytime I think of something I'll just jot it down real quick and then I can refer to it later and just keep going back and like figuring out if there's something, there's an angle or something that I want to say with it. And there is like this process of I guess like 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'm like, I really want to try to like boost like the work that people do on social media as a genuine form of I guess creative output. 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 like a skeleton. It's like it's dead. It's like, oh, this is a baby that's really all grown up. Right. And then somebody else is like don't touch it. Yeah. Next page. Yes. And I'm wondering, I don't know, I could revisit, should I give this to my seven year old nephew? Right. Yeah. And you did a tweet in the wake of one of the recent mass shootings I think that said something like the year 2030. Yeah. And then it was son, dad, what were things like, what were mass shootings like when you were a baby? Yeah. And dad says, believe it or not, son, they weren't every day. Yeah. And like. That's right. That said, so I know I'd be interested to hear a little bit about is there any topic off limits for this modality for you? I think it's just finding finding ways to make it that's a really good question. I think like part of it for me is like finding ways to make it 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, 10 years later and something that you can go back to and both see it as like a snapshot of what was happening at the time and then also still like relevant or applicable later on. I don't think that by like, by principle there's anything that I want to like shy away from but I do think there are a lot of topics that I recognize as like a straight, like cis-het 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 like a platform to get 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 something. And does that mean a healthy dose of like retweeting without comment kind of stuff? Absolutely, yeah. And finding people that I really, whose perspectives I really appreciate and kind of boosting, signal boosting and then kind of finding ways to do that productively. And are there people who did that for you back in the day? I think so, yeah. I think that's kind of how like 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 like the cool thing about Twitter is that even though it is like it's through text, it's short pieces, oftentimes you don't even know like 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 have become like my very close friends. Yeah, and like there are so many cases where I feel like the first time I meet them in person, if I follow them for a while, I already know who they are. And like I've skipped like the first five times hanging out with them and like I'm on to, there's like already being their friend and we kind of like start, it's like we're picking up a conversation instead of starting one. 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 Hot Pants 15. Yeah, exactly. 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. There was a dialogue with, 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 of any you might see yourself wanting to make to it? I think like the biggest issue Twitter has right now is with issues of harassment and abuse still. It's been the problem with the platform I think since the beginning. Yes. And I think it's like, I understand it's like a very difficult situation but amongst like everyone, like all my friends on Twitter and I guess amongst everyone I kind of interact with, the common thread is like if we can get, if we can kind of curb the amount of like 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 like a lot of kind of targeted stuff. 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... Yeah, I mean there are like some very, I think there are basic things like finding the neo-nazi groups and like banning their accounts or something. Which there was a piece that I saw recently where I think like, Twitter banned neo-nazi, had like deleted neo-nazi accounts that originated from Germany because that was German law, but refused to do it in other accounts from other countries, which means 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 in the country. So I think there are elements of that as well. Got it. Certainly that's what we'll 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. Thank you. Thank you, it's nice to see you. Feel free to say who you are. I'm Sarah Newman. I am 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. Yeah, totally. That's a great question. So like I'd also been like working in visual arts for a long time and this was kind of like a thesis on well, this was basically a tribute to like the types of books I read as a kid and like there's a bit of like Bill Watterson, like Shell Silverstein, like Morse Sendak, all of the like kind of delightful and a little bit dark and a little bit like thoughtful writer-illustrator type people and that's kind of the spirit I wanted to get across with the illustrations. I've also was very interested also in like the parallel to Twitter and like creating a metaphor to the experience of being on Twitter through the book which is like very loose but I was interested in like creating drawings that were very iconographic and reduced to like this minimalism and simplicity that allowed you to kind of see them as like icons or avatars and stand-ins for actual people and so that was like 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 like would pick it up and just see it and be like this is a strange kind of cute thing and maybe either I'll like it or like my kids will like it and again it has the reassurance that it is in fact a book it is in fact a book and I was very excited that my editor let me put a book on there because he was like everyone's gonna know it's a book but I thought that was like a cute little it was also like a cute thing to say like you might know me from like my work on Twitter but this is very adamantly a different form like a launching point into a different kind of medium other questions over here we have to get a mic over 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 like 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 do you have an auto incorrect tool? I wish I did that's a great question I mean like the fun thing about the typos and like again like that messing up of like the aesthetic and the visual was I think people attribute it to me now because I think I'm the only one who kept doing it who maybe the only one foolish enough to keep doing it but like I think when like around the quote weird Twitter like zeitgeisty thing everyone's kind of playing with form and like playing with messing up typos or grammar and syntax and stuff and there was this spirit of like just breaking the English language and so I kind of found my own way to do it and like my inspiration was kind of like the fat thumbs kind of thing where most of the typos I make are not phonetic but like keyboard based like adjacencies so like a li e ben the b and the n letters are next to each other at the keyboard so you could do a Dvorak version of your misspelling yeah that's right yeah somebody should write that too yeah but a lot of the yeah that's right and a lot of them are yeah are based on like the the keyboard adjacencies there's like b n's and then replacing n's with m's a lot and things that eventually I actually created a style guide for my copy editor for the book because when they did your copy editor get danger pain? yeah I mean like seriously when they when like they I met about doing the book with Harper Collins they were like our copy editor is going to like 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 like they had to cross reference my actual style yeah so there is like a consistency to it and something that I tried to create I love that you could be so punctilious about typos but only the right kinds 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 would be but this is not that this is just yeah and it's a little bit of both because I think like I mean growing up like as someone who wanted to be in comedy but was an Asian male I was very aware of like 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 an inclusive thing and part of the like the learning a new language aspect of that which I do want to keep in this was really creating like a new type of grammatical error because I didn't want to fall back on like English as a second language type humor or like immigrants coming to America and having to learn English type humor I really focused on like creating a voice that was different and unique from that and hopefully separate from that type of literally alien rather than the terrible deployment of the word for people not from here exactly Susan play this irresistible adorable cute bewildered creature sure, 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 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 yeah, well yeah I think like part of the thing that I stumbled into with the account is that I found like actually having a bit of an avatar and a bit of an identity distance or like crafting a new identity has actually allowed me paradoxically to be more honest and to be more myself I feel like if my face were like literally attached to this and my like full properly spelled name were attached to this I wouldn't be able to be as honest and to divulge as much like information as I do with this account I'm really sure what that phenomenon is but I'm really appreciative of that I also think there is like this balance between character and personal that I've like 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 like a skepticism to accounts that are character accounts or accounts that like specifically try to be one thing especially online now because you see so many people trying to use that as a way to monetize this 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 like just interjecting my own voice into it and creating that balance sometimes I will drop the typos and like tweet as me and now like 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 Workman Klein Center and it's like a difficult thing to balance but I also like trust people online to be smart enough to like know when it's me tweeting and when it's like me tweeting as this creative project and I don't think I need to create like Jonathan signed author account and like Johnny signed character account so yes over here and while we're warming up over here also curious just word or sentence association brands online engage with brands do you poke fun at brands do you know their arrival there are 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 like a social media landscape right it actually is reporting on which words are looked up now and like the accurate definition of words considering that the people in power right now are misusing language so that so I think that's like 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 like hilarious and this wasn't like the SpaghettiOs account had a thousand followers and I was kind of just like talking to it but I got talking to it as a credulous like was it thinking that you were just another consumer or were you oh I think it was like yeah I was kind of like well I love SpaghettiOs well you send me SpaghettiOs and I had this little thing I actually got to Kansas SpaghettiOs 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 it became less saucy yeah exactly that was my alter ego speaking but you can tell when that happens and there's like I think that's part of the skepticism with brands too is because you know that it's not from personal place or you know that it's from this company paying this person to do this and so like to close that SpaghettiOs story a year later I tweeted back saying hello old friend and like they just said like hi if you have a problem with SpaghettiOs please contact me and I was like no it's like the skeleton just reanimated it was undead rather than alive exactly yeah yeah Sasha hi so you talked a little bit about the tweet around the mass shooting and I'm wondering you know 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 you know 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 like infrequent and occasional and have you been tempted given the recent turn of events to do more of that type of thing especially thinking about the Supreme Court's hearing the alien bound yeah I think it's like such a balance because I never want to seem to be using like the platform and the account and the voice to sort of like pander in a way to like current events and like current issues is the audio still working by the way I'm just concerned that it's going on that sounds more so yeah I never want to like pander to that or treated as like a talking point that I could just use to like put something out there and so I've like 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 it's I think I have like I have a responsibility not only to like 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 as well another question might be in the middle yeah wherever the mic can get to and then up here I am Justin Emmerich I don't know if I'm maybe the person that's farthest away I'm from Ohio I just happen to be in Boston I follow you on Twitter I feel like we know each other well I know you I need to like 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 in my classroom to discuss the tweet about from the stars like 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 and just the depth in this 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 oh man I am not actually thought about that and if you were to prepare a derivative work called a teacher's guide I would absolutely not sue I think well part of like the academic side of this was again like creating a metaphor like I think the mission for this was to kind of to take that like the writer author illustrator type book and update it for for an audience that kind of is primed for social media now like for an attention span or for I mean attention span is such a shitty word so not an attention span for just like a prime for like that sort of narrative form I guess and so this really reads as both like a concise narrative piece that has a beginning middle end but also jumps around characters a lot and jumps around different narratives and things intersect and weave in and out much in the same way that I've observed the timeline like the Twitter timeline or the social media timeline working and so part of the mission like the theoretical mission of this book was to take that type of online narrative and put it into I guess like a more traditional form so I don't know if that helps but yeah and then the other like the other thing is like all the characters sort of represent a different a different kind of idea or anxiety or like personal internal struggle of mine and so I feel like I've split myself into like 8, 10, 15 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 and this is 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 but Pepe the frog is one of the most remixed, transformed characters in history how do you feel about if kids or others were to take up your own characters, add one who deploy them in their own directions it's such an interesting thing because like the internet has like thrived so much on remix culture right but I think and I don't know what like the IP or like the copyright side of things or just like the ownership side of things I would love for the for this book to kind of be taken and like used however the internet wants it to to a degree I've been telling everyone like who wants to use it as a coloring book to like use it as coloring it's their book when they have it it's no longer mine when it's kind of in your hands and so like he could assign his students if they wanted to write some continuing adventures you can see doing some templates right yeah absolutely I mean like a green screen challenge absolutely yeah I mean that's something that I think that's inevitable anyway and that's for me like I spent so much of my high school writing like fanfiction and like writing taking like characters that already existed imagining them in new situations I wrote an Indiana Jones comic and like this like graphic novel that I think it was about what was it about it was about the monkey king and I was kind of like based on an existing script that got denied for like the fourth Indiana Jones do you realize your agent is like come on but like I mean 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 try to like 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 like I grew up like drawing Calvin and Hobbes over and over again until like I figured out how to draw and how to make narrative in visual ways just by like copying my favorite art and kind of like working and playing with that so I first found your Twitter account when I was a graduate student living abroad so it was a really like 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 is it the same or are there distinct processes that you go through I think it starts out the same like I think it starts with like a spark of an idea and then it's about for me it's about like figuring out where that is supposed to be slotted in or which like mediums I want to play in I like I think the way my brain works is that if there's something I'm a fan of I really just want to like do something in that style or in that genre or in that platform right and so for me it's kind of what the idea is and where I think it should go and like what I want to play with at the moment so whether that's like taking this one-liner thing and trying to turn it into a play or thinking about like a space and saying oh this is like this would be really cool if there was like a thing here and then working to create like an installation that's like site-specific for that place but it all comes from like the idea first and for me it's also like what the challenge is right like maybe not necessarily taking it the most simplest way like for the book this was originally supposed to be like a web comic and I just thought like maybe I just illustrated 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 gonna do that instead but I think like that challenge is like part of the fun right like I think at the heart at the heart of it like creativity is just puzzle solving and so that's how I approach I think everything that I do 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 and the fox is somebody who is into a lot of things and just any new thing might interest the fox write something here, build something there and I think Berlin was on team fox and the hedgehog is like I'm gonna get really good at this one thing like sound or whatever it is 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 hedgehog-y so I'm just this is a little bit Barbara Walters what's next what's next is it continuing to do spread spectrum or you know might it be like I'll see y'all in five years after I've built a new airport for Belgium sure, yeah I actually don't know I think like 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 imposter syndrome and I thought like well the thing that I actually have a grasp on that can like 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 like a place like this surrounded by like geniuses and feeling totally overwhelmed is there's this like there's a lot of pressure involved with that I don't want to let him yeah I do want to continue working on the 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 got it, one more question from this zone I realize I've been positioned diagonally wherever the mic finds itself hi so you've been talking a lot about sort of different identities and separation between identities 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 I think they're like total I think they're all part of the same thing like I don't really see them as like separate things at all just because I think I just want to make things for my entire life and so for me it's just about what where the fun is in making the thing I'm so trying to figure out what food you would prepare if you were a chef and really there's cinnamon in the steak it's a typo it's an intentional one the recipe caught for kadama yeah I don't know I do think it's I consider it all the same and I'll have you over for dinner with me and we'll see very good salt and bomb maybe for the last question make it a good one no pressure I actually it's a quick follow up to the typo question is the bee in alien meant to be silent or is it alien 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 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 I'd rather just hold it up and say memorize this book this is what it's called but I've been calling it alien because I think part of it is these are keyboard typos and so they're still intended to be spoken as words there's just a massive SIC at the end and they've had to do that a lot in the press releases and stuff we actually have time for one more bonus question unless there's something more let's do one more back here this is much more personal a bit more interesting looking at what you do and the range of several things that actually catches your interest what's your me time like what do you do what's your ideal 24 hour scenario what do you do prioritize things do you take a particular thing a day or something to the other within the span of 24 hours 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 I'm wasting it in a way it's maybe an unhealthy habit but I do tend to kind of see that and be like I need to find a way and then whatever 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 a very little structure and I'm trying to work on it and is it right to describe you as an introvert yeah absolutely it's just the way you recharge is to do something but alone actually I really like making 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 like a thing here and all that happened was I like sat down and I like I willed it into existence and isn't that cool and like now can't I share it with everybody and be like you can do this too and isn't that cool or something a mere hour ago there was a big pile of burritos there are fewer and yet we are enriched 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 this was fun thanks a lot