A work expanse.
Cut pages and and fixed arguments,
questions wrongly certain.
An hour asks attention.
The hill now measurable.
The Launch and the Climb
The newest episode of Permanently Moved is officially out! Monsters In The Mirror marks the shift to the new, expanded format.
Monsters In The Mirror
On AI, Language, and entities that wear language as their skin.
Everyone around me seems to be arguing about whether AI is intelligent or not. I think it’s the wrong question, and always has been.
The fact that it feels that it’s so obviously the right question, is itself part of the problem.
Monsters in the Mirror is an hour-long audio essay. It starts with mirrors, both physical and metaphorical, and then moves through five centuries of the Enlightenment project, and arrives at the particular civilisational strangeness of large language models being just one of the many downstream consequences of the invention of the transistor.
But what are large language models, really? I argue this question is a trap, and arrive at some conclusions about it all that most writing about AI doesn’t go.
It was an incredibly busy week. Beyond the episode itself, I’ve sorted out the online store and navigated publishing sequence for the “pre-flight” episode, and the physical zine version which is now available to pre-order on Etsy, or just join as a show supporter before Monday.
Reflecting on the end-to-end process of making the episode now it’s out (and I know I spoke about some of this in the pre-flight episode) doing something at this scale is a different beast entirely from writing a 1,000-word essay. From initial notes to launch, the effort needed was immense, and I misjudged it. In all honesty, I suspect the whole thing took at least 5x longer than it should have. And that level of exertion is unsustainable given the time involved and current remuneration from my (wonderful) supporters.
I will of course move further along the experience curve as things go on. Right now, looking at the work ahead feels like staring up another very steep hill. But far less steep than that the first one.
One of the biggest hurdles was the workflow. I wrestled with whether to do the zine layout simultaneously with the audio editing after recording. I ended up going back and forth between the two, which delayed the audio drop by at least a week. But I’ve realised that as I keep the price constant, the exact page in the show copy doesn’t matter as much as I thought? I just need one idea. For the next one, the goal is to finish the audio first, get that out and use to pre-order period to layout the zine.
The writing process itself hit home the value of finishing end-to-end. I caught myself procrastinating several times by over polishing the opening sections while the back half was still just a sketch of notes and loose paragraphs. I spoke to a few friends for advice, and all agreed that I should sit down and write the whole thing from A to B. As i did the “through-line” revealed itself. That first draft end-to-end was nearly 16k words!!! Which I eventually carved down to just under 9,000 for the final audio.
As a teenager, my dyslexia made writing so painful that I used to find it impossible to cut anything because every word felt like blood drawn from a stone. Just … ignored all the writing and editorial advice I got from my lecturers at university for this reason. But from writing this blog, working with editors and making 301, in my 40’s I have fully embraced “killing your darlings.”
I threw away over nearly 6k words in two sessions at the word processor and felt nothing but progress. I a section didn’t support the central spine of the argument it was removed. I only kept two tangents in the show because they felt important to the idea that the Information Age is an ongoing revolution with consequences, not just a past event.
Feedback is starting to trickle in, most positive so far, one person hated it. It’s taken a week for the notes and DM’s to come in as asking someone for an hour of attention for dense prose is a world away from a five minute show. Especially as I tried to follow the “301 rules” for the whole show: a new idea or supporting evidence in every paragraph. Wwhile I’m not sure how this technique holds up over an hour, I’m proud of what I wrote. I also now fully understand why long-form writers work with editors lol.
Looking ahead, my ambitions for Permanently Moved are high. I don’t just want to read essays on the show forever, I want to make radio. I want to go places, record ambient sounds, interview people, and I’d love to produce a radio play. I’ve also in the last 18 months or so been heavy inspired by the “New Journalism” of the 60s and 70s, as well as the “New New Journalism” of the early 2000s writers who worked at the turn of the online/print era. Writing something as good and relevant as Thomas Frank’s “New Dark Age” piece in the Bafler back in 1994 is now a life goal.
I have a whole backlog of topics that I’d like to tackle in a a kind of “chapbook” format. Use the zine for self publishing. One would be a long exposition on “cultural fracking” and a deep dive into the idea of what I really mean when I say the words “Memetic engine” blending what I’ve learned from 12 years in Solarpunk and my professional world running work.
But you can’t find out unless you try. I’m really creativity excited for the show. There is plenty to do.
Pre-Order
SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy
Pre-order Monsters in the Mirror, the print companion to Episode 302 of Permanently Moved. A 36-page A5 zine containing the full essay transcript plus an introduction and afterword that don’t exist in the audio. £18 + shipping.
Pre-orders close Monday March 16th.
Dispatched late March after printing. Please allow an extra 5-10 days for delivery.
On The Blog
Made some more changes on tweaks to various parts of the blog, but things have been busy around here!
February 2026 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 2. Photo-a-day for the month of February 2026.
The Near Future of AI Agents
For most people, even if they are using AI regularly, it’s the thing on the other side of a chat interface. A thinking and doing partner. Drafting, summarising, brainstorming. If they’re using it for coding at all, it’s via the browser interface and copied and pasted.
That’s World One. World Two is a small subculture of people who have given AI agents full access to their computers: credit cards, calendars, GitHub, inboxes, passwords etc and told them to just go and do things across the real Internet.
The circle of people who even know about World two is tiny, The number of people who let these little guys loose is even tinier. But it’s here in World two that the next interface paradigm for Agentic AI is being rehearsed in public. Most people will meet these little guys until 2027 at the earliest; they need to get a lot safer and less strange first.
This post is a primer for people in World One, about the near future of World two.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Updated my résumé of all things.
- Wrote 15k more of SLOP MACHINES. I suspect this book is going to be 80-90k when i’m done, and then the hard edit begins.
- Recorded and nearly finished editing a new epsiode of experience.computer!
- Took a call about LLMs and little guys after my post about the near future of agents.
Terminal Access
Things have been moving so fast that this is a little ‘out of date’ but i really enjoyed all the takes on Multipolarity Pod’s Iran episode on thursday. Malcom Kyeyune is the doomers doomer lol.
Dipping the Stacks
The Most Chess-Obsessed Country in the World
But beyond the elite academies nurturing budding prodigies, and high-stakes tournaments offering the prospect of cash prizes, corporate sponsorships and social media fame, a more modest but notably important outcome has emerged from the humble game of chess in India. It is one in which clubs and districts around the country are sponsoring tournaments and collaborating with chess academies to expand access to the game, recognizing it presents a pathway to educational advancement and a route out poverty for the communities they serve.
‘It’s ridiculous’: publicans bemused by rise of single-file queues to get served
Landlords around the country have noticed the rise of queueing at pubs, with a growing number of people – usually a younger cohort – electing to wait in a single file line, standing one behind the other, before being called forward to order as if going through border control.
The time I didn’t meet Jeffrey Epstein
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my colleagues can say.
AI-generated “slop” is often seen as digital pollution. We argue that this dismissal of the topic risks missing important aspects of AI Slop which deserve rigorous study. AI Slop serves a social function: it offers a supply-side solution to a variety of problems in cultural and economic demand—that, collectively, people want more content than humans can supply. AI Slop is not mere digital detritus; in many cases, it has its own aesthetic value. Like other “low” cultural forms initially dismissed by critics, it offers a legitimate means of collective sense-making, with the potential to express meaning and identity. We identify three key features of family resemblance for prototypical AI Slop: superficial competence (its veneer of quality is belied by a deeper lack of substance), asymmetric effort (it takes vastly less effort to generate than would be the case without AI), and mass producibility (it is part of a digital ecosystem of widespread generation and consumption). While AI Slop is heterogeneous and depends crucially on its medium, it tends to vary across three core dimensions: instrumental utility, personalization, and surrealism. AI Slop will be an increasingly prolific and impactful part of our creative, information, and cultural economies; we should take it seriously as an object of study in its own right.
Super-Modular Chiral Origami Metamaterials – Tuo Zhao – Princeton University – CDFAM NYC 25
Metamaterials with multimodal deformation mechanisms resemble machines, especially when endowed with autonomous functionality. A representative architected assembly, with tunable chirality, converts linear motion into rotation
Reading
In the end I persevered with Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer. I’ve neraly finished the audiobook by… cranking the speed up to 2.8 and listened to it whilst I was doing domestic chores around the house. Probably by the end of tomorrow I’ll be done.
Still reading Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network really fascinating. The term/concept ‘reality exhaustion’ was worth the price of entry alone.
Music
Hunter-Gatherer – Low Standards For High Fives LP
Absolutely gripped by the disease of nostalgia this week, as I recently followed the German hardcore punk label Scene Police on Instagram, who are back putting out records again after a decade hiatus. I was reminded of this classic second wave emo album from 2000 by Hunter Gatherer album. It was in the box of records i had stolen back in 2006 so haven’t heard it in a long time! Saw them live a bunch of times as a teenager.
And Now You’ve Moved On still RULES. For fans of Hot Water Music.
Remember Kids:
immersion in virtual worlds is far more related to psychological and emotional depth than graphical fidelity
Game Physics – Max Hodak
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