One Million Monkeys Typing

» see 1000000monkeys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

One Million Monkeys Typing was a fiction site where a story was a tree. A user posted a snippet, somewhere between fifty and three hundred words depending on the limit in force, and up to three other users could graft a continuation onto it. Each of those could take three more. An opening paragraph could therefore end up with a dozen second acts running in parallel, none of them official, none of them cancelling the others out.

Nina Zito, a web designer, and Ilya Kreymerman, a developer, built it after a conversation about people writing new endings onto classic books. Zito posted the first story in March 2007. The site's vocabulary committed to the joke all the way down: writers were monkeys, a starting snippet was a trunk, adding to one was grafting, and the five-point rating scale was measured in bananas. The name comes from the theorem about enough monkeys and enough time eventually producing Shakespeare.

It was small and it never stopped being small. In July 2008 it had around 600 users, and the banner advertising had earned its two founders roughly thirteen dollars across the preceding year. Everything on it went out under a Creative Commons noncommercial license. The site was gone by the middle of 2011, with no acquisition and no public collapse.

My own writing in those years went into forums, in Turkish, about hardware and games, and English was a language I read documentation in rather than one I would have tried to write fiction in. That is the honest distance here and it is language-shaped. The structure was familiar from the other direction, though. A forum thread also branches the moment two people answer the same post, and the branch nobody replies to also just stops, with no notice that it has stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the tree worked ~

The three-branch limit is the whole design. It is small enough to force a choice, since the fourth person to arrive at a popular snippet has to find somewhere else to attach themselves, and wide enough that no single continuation owns the story. What grows out of that is not a novel with many authors but several parallel novels sharing a first chapter, which is what one group of researchers meant when they wrote that the site created parallel story worlds instead of expanding one.

Pruning happened by neglect rather than by moderation. Snippets could be rated and commented on, popular ones attracted continuations and unpopular ones did not, and there was almost no editorial control past that. A branch that stopped getting grafts simply sat where it was. Nothing got deleted. Things just stopped growing.

~ thirteen dollars ~

The thirteen dollars is the most useful number in this grave. It is not a failure of monetization, it is what banner advertising was actually worth on a site with 600 writers in 2008, which is to say nothing at all. Two people built a working piece of literary infrastructure and the market's assessment of it, in cash, came to about a dollar a month.

Everything that came afterward learned this and priced accordingly. The collaborative writing sites that survived did it by getting enormous, and the ones that stayed at community scale ran on somebody's spare time until the spare time ran out. There was never a middle. Six hundred people writing carefully to each other is a beautiful thing with no business model attached, and the founders paid for it themselves for four years.

~ what the scholars kept ~

The site is better documented in academic literature than most of what outlived it. Isabell Klaiber, a literary scholar, used it repeatedly as a case study and called its community astonishingly harmonious, noting that criticism there arrived as absence rather than as attack. People did not write negative comments, they simply declined to continue your branch. She read the comment threads as a second plot running above the fiction, where you could watch the authors negotiating what the story was going to become.

Johanna Drucker was less charmed and called the whole ethos a primary school space where everybody shares nicely, the output a mixture of children's diversion and surrealist game. Both readings are fair and they are describing the same property. Take the editor out and you get generosity and no standards at the same time, and which of the two you notice depends on what you wanted from the site in the first place.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »