EOY 2025 | Weeknotes

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End of Year 2025

I think this is my last post of the year here on the blog. This time next week, I will be tucked up in bed sleeping off a two-part journey in my hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

I’ll save any reflections on 2025 for proper Year End reflection post in early January. But I will say that I’ve felt like the end of the year has been barrelling toward me since I turned 40 back in July.

It’s been a much quieter year here on the blog, in part because after finishing the last/301st episode of Permanently Moved, it turned out that I needed a longer break than I was expecting. It’s all good, though. I’ve been working on other personal projects in the meantime.

Here’s a list of things you can expect from me in early 2026, and how they are all going to work.

Permanently Moved – Episode 302

How does one crawl back inside the biggest creative project of one’s life thus far and fire it up again? Figuring out how to get the creative machinery rolling in the new format has been more of an emotional struggle than a creative one. How do I restart it all, but new and different?

The answer to that question has been resolved to my own satisfaction, and I’ll be working on the text of the essay/episode right up until we leave for our break. I’m hoping it will be in a state ready to record as soon as I return in early Jan.

Start Select Reset Zine #15

The return of the show means the return of my zine. Like the show, SSRZ will be entering a new era: heavily expanded and printed at a proper zine printer rather than my local copyshop.

In its new incarnation, the zine will act as a supplement/complement to each episode of the show. Each stands independently alone, but together they represent the “complete” piece of media. I’m really looking forward to this model of self-publishing in audio and print.

This does, however, mean that I will no longer be publishing the full text of each episode online on my blog for people to read along at home. I’m fine with this for the following reasons:

1. Future episodes are going to run between 6,000–10,000 words. I’m okay with super-long blog posts, but web publishing is just not the medium for work of this length.
2. The wide availability of audio/text transcription software in 2026 means that if you are motivated enough, you can just rip your own text.
3. I will be publishing full transcriptions for the episodes embedded in the RSS anyways.
4. Future episodes might involve onsite location audio, interviews etc. A zine with text and photos is a better medium to translate the material over.

Lastly, to presage a point I’ll be making shortly: I opened the first paper issue of SSRZ back in 2022 with an essay called ‘Return of the Real’. This is still my over arching thesis about what is going on, and what is important given todays social and media environment. As such I see Start Select Reset Zine becoming the ‘merch’ for the show.

SLOP MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

I’ve been writing a book all year. In fact It’s one of the things that was ‘leaning over’ from 2024 I mentioned really early in the year. Only at the time, I didn’t realise that it was a book. Right now it’s 38,000 words. It’s fully drafted with all the main ideas and chapter titles, but the last 1/4 of the text is still in very rough shape. I suspect that it’ll be closer to 50,000 words by the time i’m finished with it.

It’s quite a mad text about the current moment, tracing the emergence of the post-2008 condition. It’s about how software and finance fused into “Code Spaces” that now script culture, identity, and value as if the whole world were a casino running on vibes, rankings, and derivatives of attention. It’s a map of the Semiosphere: Real / Imaginal / Virtual, and how ordinary people get turned into data subjects. It’s also about AI, and why everything that annoys you about “slop” has nothing to do with the technology itself, but rather the changing nature of our ontology of media.

Quite a few people have read it in various iterations. In fact, I had a extremely wide ranging conversation with New Models Podcast about it, which will be out soon to round out their 2025 season on the ontology of media and neo-orality.

The plan is to release it as an ebook with an extremely permissive Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. Though I’m open to doing an edit on it if a niche publisher were to pick it up and want to do something with it.

BYENNE – One Hundred Notes on Storydwelling

For nearly half a year I’ve been posting 100 little poem-essays over on my Leaflet publication (which, by the way, is a lovely indie blogging platform with deep Bluesky integration, and I highly recommend it). I have now completed the project with all 100 now online.

I just finished the first draft of the afterword this afternoon. All that’s left is getting to grips with the newest versions of Affinity Publisher to lay it out for print and digital.

Although the primary format will be an ebook, I am going to do a short print run that will go up for pre-order / sale. Paid subscribers can expect a discount code for the physical edition.

Family of Giants

All of my creative work that is physical needs a proper home. So, going forward, everything will be housed under an indie publishing name/label i’m starting with some friends called Family of Giants.

As things get going with our own work under the FOG banner, my/our ambition is to open it up and publish other people’s work too. I’m thinking long essays, or short stories, from friends, or collections of blog posts by people that need to be ‘real-ised’ into proper paper archival form.

Printing + Pre Orders

All this is to say that there is going to be a lot of DIY Self-Publishing going on around here starting next year. From previous experience in my 20s, this often results in huge piles of boxes cluttering up an apartment. Since I live in a one-bedroom flat, this is something I would like to avoid.

The plan, as it currently stands, is to release the podcast and announce the pre-order window for Start Select Reset Zine. Since the bulk of my show’s downloads happen in the first two weeks, that’s likely how long the pre-order window will be open. The zine will then ship out a month after the show’s release to allow time for printing and envelope stuffing.

What this means is that Start Select Reset will now be for sale!

I will be installing WooCommerce on thejaymo.net in January and making the most of my WordPress business hosting I’ve been paying though the nose for.

What this means for paid subscribers is… nothing: All paid/regular subscribers will be sent the zine in the post without the need to do anything.

But in line with the “merch” idea, I will have zines for sale with each new episode of Permanently Moved. The pre-order window will just give me an idea of how many zines I need to get printed and ship. My printer of choice works in 25-box increments, so my plan is to always get an extra box on top of whatever I’m initially printing (Subscribers + Pre-orders) to sell in an ongoing way. Once they are gone, they are gone.

Regular subscribers get free shipping; people buying the zine individually will need to pay their own P&P. If you want to sign up now and save in 2026, you can do so below:

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On The Blog

November 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Spent an afternoon running my own forecast/numbers for 2026 for a company I advise.
• Discussed my numbers, (and theirs, and plan and target etc) with the team.
• Spent half a day having coffee/lunch with a really brilliant person in Shoreditch
• Lunch with an old friend
• Calls. So many Calls.
• More edits on 302 I’m up to part 6 (of 10)
• Took another look at SLOP MACHINES.

Terminal Access

This long read in Currant Affairs title AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself is the thing I’m going to leave you with at the end of the year.

When a 21-year-old college dropout suspended for cheating lectures us about technological inevitability, the response shouldn’t be moral panic but moral clarity—about whose interests are being served. Cheating has ceased to be a subculture; it’s become a brand identity and venture-capital ideology. And why not? In the Chatversity, cheating is no longer deviant—it’s the default. Students openly swap jailbreak prompts to make ChatGPT sound dumber, insert typos, and train models on their own mediocre essays to “humanize” the output.

What’s unfolding now is more than dishonesty—it’s the unraveling of any shared understanding of what education is for. And students aren’t irrational. Many are under immense pressure to maintain GPAs for scholarships, financial aid, or visa eligibility. Education has become transactional; cheating has become a survival strategy.

I would actually argue that it’s all much bigger, and much worse than this.

The whole post-industrial schooling apparatus, built in the late 19th century to regiment children while their parents worked the machines and to entrain bodies to clocks and syllabuses, is now colliding with media systems that don’t just carry ‘content’ over wires/pages/television but generate, rank and personalise it all in real time.

When we are arguing over AI, essays or cheating; we are actually arguing over whether people still get to share a single stable world of reference. Which even before AI its been clear with social media, and the internet that people don’t. I personally think we need to #accelerate the whole thing and go as fast as we can. And hopefully, at the other side avoid the years of blood/wars of religion that we got the last time something like this this happened. The printing press got invented and then 8 million people died.

Reading

I’m one chapter away from finishing Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova. Very timely book. Really can’t recommend it enough. It articulates everything that you have probably already intuited about the nature of media in the 2020s

I’m back on my James Hollis kick. This time i’m reading Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places. I’m only 10% of the way in and its a long more … Jungcore than his more popular better known works.

Still plugging away at Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls. And i haven’t had a chance to listen to any more of Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson at all.

Dan Nicholls – Mattering and Meaning

I’ve been listening to remarkable album from London-based keyboardist Dan Nicholls this week. Here’s the bandcamp blurb:

Nicholls’ music uses acoustic piano as its key element, transporting the instrument into new territories that sound remarkably natural and organic, whilst displaying a strong kinship with the world of abstract electronic music. The music utilises piano loops and field recordings as its key elements, forming what might be described on the surface as a fascinating ambient jazz record – but at the same time there’s so much more at play here on deeper levels. Dan’s music sounds at once otherworldly and immensely inviting.

After years of unlearning and unravelling the knots of a music college education – moving from a career in jazz, via electronic music, to a heartfelt embrace with rave culture and the feminist and queer theories which have so challenged perspectives across many disciplines on the objectified world and the values of capitalism – Dan Nicholls has spontaneously reimagined his relationship to the piano, that edifice of the decaying foundations of european classical music

The title track gives you a good introduction to the sonic pallet and world of the album.

Remember Kids:

Still, by limiting its focus to the self-actualization of individuals, the human potential movement contained a fundamental blind spot. It kept the focus inward and human, which meant that it was unable to adequately take into account the relationship between humans and the larger systems that we interact with—especially the natural systems.

The Regenerative Business by Carol Sanford