“The need is absolute.”

I’m quoting Peter O’Toole playing T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Two incredibly interesting and problematic twentieth century people one filling in for the other to tell a story.

That line, which O’Toole says in reaction to the question of the need of phones in a recently liberated town taken from the Turkish Empire, rings in my ears. We do need connection. Whether postal mail or telegraph or the signal fires of Gondor, we must have connection if we’re to survive. It’s the basis of civilization. If civilization sounds too much like “empire” to you, let’s say that connection makes community.

In that spirit I mention a book thing called “The Internet Phone Book”. The website I write this on: artlung.com, is in this book. I’m on page 31. From The internet needs a phone book:

Internet Phone Book
By Living Web Institute
For those in the know, there’s nothing better than when the new phone books are here. In this case it’s not the yellow pages of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but a new yellow book: the Internet Phone Book. Created by collaborators Kristoffer Tjalve (of the Tiny Awards) and Elliott Cost (who previously worked on The Creative Independent), the Internet Phone Book is a physical directory of 700 websites in categories like Publishing, Ecology, and Atmosphere. Across 176 pages, some of the most unique and hard to find spaces around the web are lovingly indexed. The first edition sold out in just hours. This second edition, released exclusively on Metalabel, has only a few of its 1000-run of copies left. Living internet history!

Purchase a copy, if they’re still available.

I’d have purchased the book even if I didn’t have some surface area on its pages. The world needs more interesting self-publishers. Artists, writers, animators, creators. Telling our truth. And owning our sites and not being beholden to a faraway empire.

And shout out to Zachary Kai who I met in IndieWeb circles. A prolific writer, I’ve never been in the same time zone as Zachary at the same time, but he’s a friend. Zachary has a curated list of things one might do on ones website. Before that list of things, peppered with links to sites I frequent often: indieweb.org, microformats.org, MDN, and Wikipedia, he writes:

So. Take a breath, dear reader. Your journey to carving out your space in the digital infinity starts here.

So, start now.