Watch on Youtube

Listen On Spotify

The post Forest Bed | The Party’s Over appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I posted a while back that I was on the selection jury for this year’s Tiny Awards! We all went through hundreds of websites and selected our shortlist.

Voting has been open for most of August, but there are now just 10 days left to check out some of the best, most beautiful, oddest, and silliest websites of the past year.

The list of this year’s nominations is below, but you’ll need to click through to vote.

Big thanks to Matt from Webcurios and the whole Tiny Awards team for inviting me to join the jury.
It’s been an honour.

The post Vote Now for the 2025 Tiny Awards! appeared first on thejaymo.net.

A while ago I was interviewed and invited to contribute to BBC R&D’s Future of the Social Internet Report, which explores the shifting dynamics of digital social platforms and online communities.

That report has just dropped: Projections: The Social Internet.

The report explores how audiences are abandoning global timelines in favour of smaller, more human-centric spaces and also the influence of gaming and the limits of engagement metrics. It examines the impact of algorithmic feeds, addictive platform design, and what it means to meaningfully engage with audiences online.

I show up in a few places, playing some of the hits I’ve long spoken about here on the blog, the difficulty of getting people to ‘click out’ of social platforms, the alms race, and the destabilising nature of algorithmic feeds:

“If you’re on Twitter, in the old days, when you’re in a chronological feed, you knew where you were in relation to all the content. But as soon as it becomes an algorithmic feed, you don’t know where you are… The algorithmic feed is constantly shifting, so you can’t find your position and that is destabilising.”

We also talk about the changing shape of ‘now’ online and how contemporary platform design has shattered any shared cultural timeline.

Elsewhere in the report you’ll find contributions from Eli Pariser, Angelica Quicksey, Cory Doctorow (via citation), Ryan Alexander, Wendy Grossman, and others. Discussing everything from ‘enshittification’ and mental health, to fandom, moderation, and multiplayer games as scaffolding for social life. Lots of great stuff.

They even gave me the closing words of the main report: on the need for institutional legitimacy, not trust.

Finally as a public service broadcaster, the BBC relies heavily on trust
in our institution. But that trust is declining and just being present in
social spaces will not necessarily increase that trust as Jay Springett
told us: “I would focus on legitimacy as opposed to trust. How do we
increase the legitimacy that we have of the speech acts that we make
in the world?

“Legitimacy […] comes from acting in the spheres that you’re in as
a genuine actor, and especially not rolling in as a sort of patriarchal
agent going we know what’s best, we’re just going to broadcast that to
you. It’s more about engaging on equal terms with the spaces, on the
terms of those spaces.”

The whole thing is written in a thoughtful, accessible way that doesn’t fall into tech-solutionist trapdoors. If you are interested in online media, communities etc, its well worth your time.

Read the full report here:

Where is the social internet taking us?

Report: An emerging crisis for the giant social platforms – toxic and polarised online environments, but enormous potential to transform our world in positive ways.

The post BBC: Future of the Social Internet Report appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I am happy to announce that I am on the jury for this years Tiny Awards!

Which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web, and nominations for 2025 are now open.

The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of personal web projects that tend to get overlooked by more traditional, larger or more commercial awards.

Each year we ask the online world to nominate their favourite creative, non-commercial website built in the past 12 months. A panel of selected expert judges drawn from across the wide world of web-based creativity then pick their favourites. Finally, the entire web then votes upon this list to pick its favourite. The winner, as chosen by public vote, wins a small prize and a small handmade trophy (and we hopefully give an even smaller prize to each nominee).

That’s it.

It was a great honour to be asked by Matt from Webcurios to join the jury. Some of the other names on the list this year are internet hero’s of mine. Huge list.

The post Tiny Awards 2025 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I’ve been talking recently in a group chat of bloggers and website owners about the nature of having an online identity in the post-peak social world we find ourselves in. The social landscape is changing, and that also means there are opportunities to rethink the ‘role of the homepage.’

A couple of years ago, I wrote about How I Use the Web, and How and Where You Can Follow Me which now needs an update as I’ve decided to make some changes to the underlying infrastructure of my online presence:

Bringing It Home

I recently read Mandy Brown’s brilliant piece, Coming Home, over at A Working Library, where she talks about the importance of having a homepage and writing a blog. Two lines really stood out:

The first is about the importance of things being located within a body of work:

Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work.

And the second is about the context of that location:

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context.

For a long time, I’ve been scattered across platforms, apps, and social networks. This sense of fragmentation got me thinking: What if I brought everything back to a central hub? Tracy Durnell’s blog / homepage is somewhat of an inspiration here—it’s very comprehensive, as is Brown’s aforementioned A Working Library. That’s where the idea of taking ownership over context rather than just content came from. It’s not about hosting your material everywhere, but about how it all connects.

This gathering process led me to create two new subdomains, each designed to bring ‘parts of me’ home.

tumblr.thejaymo.net

The first act of this ‘gathering’ has been to re-house my personal Tumblr at tumblr.thejaymo.net.

I love Tumblr, and honestly, it’s my favourite social network. This move wasn’t about “owning” my Tumblr content—I could do that anywhere—but it was about creating the right environment for that content within the broader context of who I am online and this blog.

I still want to participate in Tumblr’s network, but by bringing my profile there under my own domain, I’m reclaiming the context just a little bit.

You can now follow my Tumblr from that URL and add it to your RSS readers if you like.

links.thejaymo.net

The second is a more significant change. I’ve made the decision to move away from pinboard.in as my primary bookmarking tool – despite being paid up there until 2034! After trying out several services, I’ve settled on raindrop.io as my new service of choice.

Since Dipping the Stacks is one of the most popular parts of my Weeknotes, I thought I should do a little more with it. For a long time, I’ve had a firehose link blog (the RSS feed from my Pinboard), so it made sense to turn this into more of ‘a thing.’

I’ve been following Jason Kottke and Andy Baio for the best part of 20 years. Link blogging has a long and venerable tradition, and I’d like to join in. So I’ve created the subdomain: links.thejaymo.net.

The webpage itself should update twice a day, displaying my most recent bookmarks. However, there’s a bit of magic that happens when you subscribe to the full RSS link feed at links.thejaymo.net/feed – you get my Raindrop.io XML.

To make this work, I had ChatGPT write some Cloudflare Worker code. (For those unfamiliar, Cloudflare Workers are scripts that run on Cloudflare’s servers, allowing you to handle data like web traffic or APIs without needing your own server.) In this case, the script pulls my Raindrop.io RSS/XML feed and directs it to thejaymo.net’s links subdomain. I’m just running it in production with no idea if it’s well-written or not—lol.

This means that if I ever decide to move to another bookmarking tool, I can just update my Worker script, and subscribers won’t notice any disruption. In essence, I’ve made myself my own middleman.

I would appreciate it if those of you who previously subscribed to my full-fat Pinboard RSS feed would make the leap to links.thejaymo.net so I can check my logs and debug a few things!! Please let me know if you do subscribe, and which reader you use. Thanks!

If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll consider using some kind of syndication plugin and blogging each of my bookmarks as pages on the subdomain blog and revert back to the native WordPress RSS—but we’ll see!

Owning Context, Not Just Content

I recently built thejaymo.info which returns a super-snappy ‘link in bio’ style page—rather than using some external service. It makes me wonder: What else can I move into or under my own domain?

Owning the context seems like something that other bloggers and indieweb folks can explore, especially as more and more people are feeling fragmented by today’s social platforms. In the age of algorithm-driven feeds, reclaiming your online identity—where you decide how your content is framed and displayed—gives us back a sense of control. By reclaiming the context, I’m deciding how my content lives and breathes online. It’s not just about ‘owning’ the material itself but shaping the environment it’s in. Context influences how people perceive your work, and owning that context means aligning it with your voice, ethos, and values—without any interference.

This reflects the ethos of the decentralized web—using tools and technologies to keep things open, interoperable, and within my control.

I’m trying to take practical steps to gather everything together—social media or link-sharing—whilst still having a unified hub. It also preserves a sense of web independence—whatever that means in today’s fragmented online world—but it feels like the right move. There’s value in bringing it all home.

If you’ve been though the process of consolidating or rethinking your own online presence, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it—what tools have worked for you and what have you brought home?

The post Bringing it home appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I just posted the launch trailer for Season 2 of Experience.Computer, my podcast about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination over on Substack.

Details below:

Experience.Computer is slow radio about high tech.
An interview show about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination

https://experience.computer/rss

• Pocket Casts
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

SEASON 2 – COMING NEXT WEEK

I’ve have another great set of guests lined up who share their unique perspectives and insights with me.

The first episode of Season 2 will be launching very soon, so stay subscribed!
New episodes will be then released monthly.

Experience.Computer hopes to bring you interesting interviews with creative people about imagination and the tools and technology they use to create.

The post ⬛ Experience.Computer Season 2 | Coming Soon! appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The first two episodes of Experience.Computer – my new interview show about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination are out now!

https://pca.st/r5egj5v8

Jay Springett leads author and podcaster J David Osborne through a series of imaginative exercises.

Then they discuss:

• The concept of sensory and perceptual experiences
• The sensation of visualising numbers and mathematical operations
• The feeling of the sacred
• Chat app UX, and social media
• Using different software for writing and more

Read More

https://pca.st/e7kwgro0

Jay Springett leads award-winning British animator and illustrator Julia Pott through a series of imaginative exercises.

Then they discuss:

• The role of memories and emotions in creating art
• The Influence of dreams on creative work
• The process of making animation and voice acting
• The experience of directing a TV show
• Imaginative exercises and their impact on ones art and more

Read More

Longtime readers will know that in 2022 I found out I have Aphantasia – the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one’s mind – and I’m still coming to terms with it.

I have for nearly two years now, been asking lots of people lots of questions about their minds-eye, and how they experience both their inner lives and the world around them. Those questions and my sustained fascination with the topic became Experience.Computer once I started recording them.

Each episode I lead my guest though a series of imaginative exercises. This sensitises them to putting (quite abstract) parts of their inner world into words. Once open to this kind of self-examination, we then go on to discuss their creative life, where ideas come from, memories, art, and how they think about the tools they use to make their work with.

A lot of the topics I’ve written about on the blog over the years are the soil from which the questions that I’m asking my guests have grown from: how software makes you feel, navigating code spaces, cultivating machine touch, in the body and not the brain etc etc.

I am quite confident that you won’t have heard a interview show about creativity quite like this before – ever. I have some great conversations lined up.

Each episode is two people listening to one another – trying to come to some kind of understanding – which to mind makes for far more interesting radio that two people talking past one another as is so common on many other interview podcasts.

In aggregate, this show is about how we all are different from one another. It exposes how are all totally unique. The word neurodiversity doesn’t even begin to capture the extent of how different from one another we actually are.

I’m really happy to be launching this show and do hope that you might give it a go. It’s been a lot of work and is about as far away from Permanently Moved in form as you can get!

The first two episodes are live now and will drop monthly from January. Details of how and where to subscribe are below.

Experience.Computer 🔊

Experience.Computer is slow radio about high tech.
An interview show by Jay Springett about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination.

• Pocket Casts
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

The show examines how people perceive the world, and how they work with the creative tools they use.

The post Experience.Computer | New Show Out Now! appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Behold! after nearly 18+ hours of work, the brand spanking new thejaymo.net!

The blog now has a new, clean and fresh, responsive design based on the Bjork theme.

The last time I did any major work to the blog was back in 2019 – when I celebrating 10 years at this web domain. At the time I had just completed a complicated server move/lift and shift and had applied a new theme etc. Unfortunately almost as soon as I started using my previous theme, it was abandoned by its creators. So like a slowly sinking ship the site passed its 14 birthday with an out of date theme. I has been creaking at the seems for about a year. But No Longer!

Thejaymo.net as it currently stands was fully built and designed in WordPress’ Full Site Editing paradigm. Which in my opinion will be fully ready for prime time with the release of WordPress 6.3 later this year.

I should note that the site was fully designed with ZERO CODE. Everything was done though the site editor. Just to repeat myself, the whole site was modified away from the base theme with zero code. This is an experienced that once had, I don’t think you can take a step back from. WordPress are absolutely changing how the web works with its new block/FSE design framework.

I like everyone else hated it when it first arrived in 2019, but in 2023 block layouts and FSE is robust and very mature. If you haven’t touched WordPress in a while It might be worth a revisit to see where the web publishing and design is going.

Rebuilding the Site With FSE

18hs of my life this week was a long time to spend on this I’ll admit. I had a few pain points along the way but that was mostly the result of 14 years worth of baggage and technical debt that needed sorting out – which is (nearly) all addressed. If I was starting a new blog in 2023, choosing a block-based FSE theme would be a total no brainer.

FSE is of course still a work in progress and the Gutenberg plugin is (sort of) a beta plugin for the next iteration of WordPress before it arrives. I can’t stress enough just how easy FSE is to use to design a website, but it wasn’t without some pain points. So I thought I would write up some of the challenges I ran into using the FSE paradigm as of early June 2023. Using php 8.2, WordPress 6.2 and Gutenberg 16.0.0 – as it might be useful feedback to the wider WordPress community

• It was extremely unclear to me when to use a column block and when to use group / row. This was mostly solved by doing it one way. Testing the site on mobile and realising I needed to achieve the thing I wanted ‘the other way’
• I came across a bug where I couldn’t save changes to global block styles. I had to toggle Gutenberg on and off and save them in stock 6.2 to save styles across the blog.
• When you update the default style in the current version of Gutenberg is changes all the colours in the styles selector pane. However if you want to go back and make another change, clicking the default image/style in the left column in the editor re-sets it. You have to click the pencil icon – this is unclear. If you modify a preset style, IMO it should create a new style in this list.
• I ended up using the ‘create block theme’ plugin as a sort of ‘as a ‘save point’. Essentially flattening all changes to the default theme. I’m not sure if this was a good idea or not long term.
• There is no obvious way of renaming page templates once they are created – or at least I couldn’t find a way.
• There appears to be no way of defining/setting the font size in the sub menu block.
• The current search menu block is .. not great. It needs to get a lot better before I put search back in my menu.
• I couldn’t find a way of making a sticky menu (my left hand column menu)- But I found a plugin called ‘sticky block’ and it works great.
• No clear way of adding / setting selecting system fonts in the Create Block Theme.
  • My theme came with system sans-serif as a fall back font – but I’ve set it as my main font.
• Updating page templates using the bulk edit tool in WordPress was a godsend
• I used a plugin called ‘Find my blocks’ to find old blocks and stuff from plugins I no longer have installed.
  • I also used it to find a bunch of errant payment buttons that have now been updated with. are-usable block and/or links to Stripe.
• The post category behaviour doesn’t stack, it only behaves like a row block. This is annoying.
  • The post category block (outside of the query loop) has no separator setting. This inconstancy in design tools is weird.
• The current ‘Table of contents’ block is … limited. But I’ve gone with it anyway as I wanted to remove the previous block plugin I was using and go back to ‘stock WordPress’ as much as possible.
• I see now that custom HTML blocks should be wrapped in group blocks for design safety/future proofing reasons! Which I had known this.. 3 years ago.
• I really need an easy tool to find and delete unused images and re-generating image/image sizes. I’ll look into this.

Other Things

There’s still lots on the to-do list. Small tweaks and endless noodling that comes after any major re-design. But I’m now in a position where, should I choose, I can just plonk a new theme on the site with very little work other than applying global styles to suit my taste.

I’ve removed a lot of baggage under the sites hood, old plugins that were no longer required. I’ve removed orphaned blocks and almost *everything* on the site is now powered by stock wordpress.

I’ve also removed blog comments – its 2023 social media doesn’t happen in blog comments anymore. In future I might put a ‘contact me’ spiel in bottom of the page footer as – its nicer to email people directly if you have something to say?

All the default sign up links to support my work, or subscribing to my zine are now Stripe checkout powered. No more WordPress account required!

I removed Google analytics completely. I just don’t care about views and/or numbers at all anymore. Plus its 2023. Tracking is very bad.

The site now only uses system fonts. I know that nice typography is great, but really does it really matter? No. My site looks like the rest of your computing environment – phone or laptop. Thats fine with me, it should make you feel at home.

The upside of the new theme and system fonts – is something I’m please about, and something that one person specially asked for when I mentioned the site rebuild – is that thejaymo.net now plays nice with the Kindle browser.

I still need to set up webmentions (Thanks for that email a while back Colin!) and may also self host an activity pub instance here for fediverse compatibility at some point. But I sort of feel I’m over web2.

Lastly, back in February, musing about this rebuild project I said I wanted this site to have a ‘webzine’ vibe:

This *I think* is I think something that I’ve achieved!

The big question is .. how does this all look when jetpack send this post out as a newsletter. I haven’t tested it.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I have had a few calls, but this week was completely reserved work wise for website rebuild as i’m between projects so thats what I’ve been doing.

• Made a few notes toward my New Centre lecture
• Made a few notes toward a workshop I (may) need to give in Berlin in July.
• Read and provided feedback on a grants proposal

Next week is ALL WRITING

Terminal Access

I’m afraid that today I nuked a whole weeks worth of unread feeds in my feedly. If you are my friend/acquaintance and you’ve done something cool this week DM! let me know!

Instead I will use this oppertunity to mention that worldrunning.guide was featured prominently this week in one of the best link log newsletters on the new – Web Curios.

Matt has some very nice things to say – in his classic house style – about the essay collection and my work. Thanks Matt!

Dipping the Stacks

Meta Rediscovers the Cubicle – Cal Newport

“Developers need to concentrate,” explained an amused Joel Spolsky at a conference that year, before going on to add that Facebook was paying a 40 – 50% premium for talent because people didn’t want to work under those conditions. A commentator on my essay pointed to a podcast episode where Facebook insiders claim that the open office was never more than 30% occupied.

Autonomous Worlds Aim to Free Online Games From Corporate Control

Multiplayer titles like Minecraft encourage creativity but prototype games built on the blockchain claim to give players more meaningful independence.

When Right-Wing Extremists Crashed the French Drone Festival | Pitchfork

On Saturday night, as the crowd made its way to the 17th-century church of Saint-Cornély for a performance by the avant-garde organist and composer Kali Malone, roughly 15 far-right Catholic protestors blocked the entrance to the church. They chanted prayers and held signs: “ELECTRO CONCERT IN A CHURCH—WHAT ARE OUR BISHOPS DOING,” and “MY HOUSE IS A HOUSE OF PRAYER.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Moat. Everyone making SaaS on LLMs, including… | by Steve Yegge | May, 2023 | Medium

Google hasn’t said anything, but we do know that Sundar Pichai, who’s been close to this since its inception, started comparing AI to the invention of Fire in 2018, the year after the Transformer was released, and Sundar has continued that comparison to this day.

History of Spielgaben

In the late 1700s, a young man named Friedrich Fröbel grew up wandering the dense forests of Thuringia Prussia. He naturally got into a forestry apprenticeship and worked for a time as a land surveyor. He was skilled at drafting and geometry, so he spent a great deal of time tutoring children. Eventually, he worked for a school based on Johann Pestalozzi’s principles. There, Fröbel evolved his own ideas about the way children should be taught.

Reading

It’s been a really busy week. I’ve made a little progress with Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer but my spare time that I would usually read in has been completely consumed by Zelda. lol

Mun Sing –
Inflatable Gravestone

This weeks recommendation comes by way of Paul, the singer in my band after band practice.“Deconstructed hyperpop out on Planet Mu” he tells me as I’m loading his amp into the back of his car.

And that… is exactly what it is – It’s all a bit Berlin. That said, this album is bursting with ideas. I think it would sound great in a club.

Remember Kids:

The post The Blog Is Now FSE appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The wonderful folks over at the transdisciplinary network that is Fo.AM just published a text called Solarpunk. A remix as part of their ongoing Anarchive project

Solarpunk. A Remix

In Which a Hyperstitional Conversation Takes Place.

Bricolaged from non-fictional texts written by eight physically embodied humans who identify themselves as solarpunks and/or its critics.

Dramatis Personae

Adam Flynn (AF)

Andrew Dana Hudson (ADH)

Elvia Wilk (EW)

Jay Springett (JS)

Paul Graham Raven (PGR)

Phoebe Wagner & Brontë Wieland (PWBW)

Sarena Ulibarri (SU)

Lovely to be in this hyperstitional work alongside so many friends and acquaintances!

Fo.AM has been releasing some wonderful texts recently as part of the project, big shout out to Maja Kuzmanović & Nik Gaffney and the whole crew.

In the process of “anarchiving” FoAM’s multi-decade existence, different projects and preoccupations became threaded together in a set of colour-coded routes. The routes are intended as metaphors describing a reader’s journey through the publication, and the experiences with the material they might encounter along the way.

This page is the guide to the green route, suggesting different ways to cultivate open-ended engagements with the planet and its inhabitants, bringing manifestations of the living world closer to our (mostly) human senses.

The post Solarpunk. A remix. | Fo.AM appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This week I had the pleasure of returning as a guest on everyones favourite weeb show Agitator Pod!

The boys had me on to talk about Terminal Boredom (2021) the short story collection by Japanese proto-cyberpunk writer and actress Izumi Suzuki (1949-1986)

This episode is a particularly unique moment in Agitator’s history… The show stays largely on track! We actually talked about the book!

I say largely on track, look at these show notes!

On this episode we have the host of 301, Jay Springett, on to talk about Izumi Suzuki’s proto-cyberpunk, character-based short story collection Terminal Boredom. This is a unique episode of Agitator, in that we actually talk about the book. As Jay puts it, it’s “punk as f**k.”

We talk about:

Foghorn Leghorn, guests who listen to the show, Hit Parade of Tears, Suzuki’s hand in inventing cyberpunk, her husband’s jazz, SF Magazine, mothers becoming chairs, Black Mirror style, not believing what you see on TV, natural vs. artificial insemination, the GETOZ, cyberpunk vs. slice of life future fiction, sleeping with your phone, people who can’t talk and drive, unlocking the formula of Suzuki’s storytelling, entering people’s dreams, sci-fi as a tool to find out what’s wrong with society, nostalgic for a time when you could make money writing, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, Endless Waltz, talking to people who are off Twitter, you can just turn shit off, where podcast traffic comes from, Kelby reads Izumi Suzuki’s Wikipedia page, keypunch operators, Violence Without a Cause, IZUMI, this bad girl, getting offered a lot of money to narrate a controversial book, the prepper mindset, “it’s not deepfakes to worry about, it’s things being fake deep,” Holly Herndon’s PROTO, getting job interviews with Chat GPT, the difference in Americans vs. British e-mail style, our favorite Suzuki stories, writing lessons we can take from Terminal Boredom, the benefit of translation, Murakami writing Norwegian Wood to become a bestseller, the invention of cell phone culture, figuring out the dumbest thing people can do with technology, primitive time travel, the Mandela Effect, and Cyberpunk 2077 with new ray tracing effects.

Listen

Agitator Z is out Monday (much to my on air grumbling as a patron) and runs for another 90mins. That conversation was all over the place. Super nice to hang out on air on one of my favourite podcasts.

I think my favourite bit was when we were talking about the different email styles between British people and Americans. Then David suggested that my preferred state of affairs was: Me sending short/direct emails and that everyone else should send me nice and polite replies in return.

Here’s the full list of topics covered:

Voting on whether to drop the episodes all at once, listening to podcasts at 3x speed, LitRPGs, the Cradle series, SimLit, KickFlipLit, finding yourself fascinated by things you “shouldn’t” like, Beware of Chicken, Travis Baldree’s books, Scott McClanahan, prose doesn’t always have to be amazing, The Corporation Wars, Alan Watt’s The Book, Vedanta, people as expressions of the universe, David’s Achille’s Heel, being able to understand conspiracy theories, knowing when to privately understand something and play dumb, Victorian hollow earth books, the Flat Earth psyop, “thinking with” ideas, Boomers believing everything they see on the internet, Puffy Coat Pope drip, the dissociation of art with human effort, where do humans go from here?, and internet end times guy, talking in virtual reality, Dream’s MSP roleplaying server, the way D&D reshaped people’s relation to story, the popularity of “lore,” Hamlet on the Holodeck, Synthetic Worlds, hypertext novels, interactive fiction, the failure of “chat room” as a metaphor, Royal Road stories, fandoms influencing a story, protecting your potential vs. using it, the whirlpool element of writing, the fluoride stare you get when you talk about self-publishing, focusing on readers instead of prestige, getting over the idea of “selling out,” succeeding too soon, what we like about writing, getting the cover before you write the book, Rick Rubin’s book as a bible, and the shift away from expertisism.

Subscribe to the Agitator Patreon for Agitator Z

You can also catch me on Agitator #76 back in January talking to David about 2000’s era boxing anime Hajime No Ippo.

The post Terminal Boredom: Proto-Cyberpunk, Mindless Violence, and Predicting the Future | Agitator Podcast appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Last year I was interviewed by the Canada Media Fund. That interview became the starting point for a *whole chapter* on Cultural Fracking in their 2023 Annual Trends Report.

You know it when you see it.

It’s the references, old formulas, reboots, recurring characters, remakes, reheated storylines, sequels, alternative timelines, callbacks, and easter eggs … 

It has come to be known as cultural fracking — a phenomenon that draws on mass cultural touchstones and intellectual property (IP) for a profit. 

According to Jay Springett, who coined the term, cultural fracking is a process of endlessly extracting new value out of common culture from the past. 

“New material must continually reference something from a time when mass culture was more broadly shared,” he wrote in 2019. “[M]ainstream culture has to continually frack the past to create future material.”

Today, Springett says, at least the big tentpole franchises are giving a little more freedom to individual directors and singular artists, “rather than engaging in storytelling by committee.”

Even still, cultural fracking is controversial and a concerning commercial reality for creators operating outside of American cultural hegemony, Hollywood or Disney. 

Treating media as a commodity, like gas, means there’s a lack of investment in new or alternative stories, Springett explains. “When culture is owned and is used as a commodity [to] create returns on an investment, that ties into copyright and the way that culture gets funded.” 

And, much like the act of fracking oil itself, blasting every rock down to its last drop tends to contaminate the water supply and wipe entire ecosystems out. 

It’s a real career highlight to have Cultural Fracking, a concept that I coined back in 2019, show up in a report like this, let along have a chapter dedicated to it. It’s been super fun to see the term slowly percolate out into the world. In fact, it was even been mentioned by Everything Everywhere All at Once director in the LA times!

“The multiverse can be way more than just this corporatized version of it that we’re seeing right now, where it’s basically used for fan service or for cultural fracking, almost — like we’re mining our past cultures just so that we can resurrect them in new arrangements,” Kwan said.

In addition to my contribution to the CMF Report, they also interviewed cultural commentator Brian Holidae, and o’l buddy o’l pal Andrew Dana Hudson about his short story “Voice of Their Generation”.

The other challenge to creating common culture in an internet age is speed: The zeitgeist is distributed, bottom-up and outpacing studios, rather than coming from them. 

“Things can be common culture for like a week,” Hudson adds. “We can never go back [to] that period where there were four channels and everyone knew every show, even if they didn’t watch them.… Mass culture was a collection of things that were forced on us [but] that’s never going to happen again. We’re in a new space.”

The article then transitions away from Cultural Fracking to look towards counter trends. Whilst not explicit the chapter moves towards a Permissive IP approach and I shout out the Fringe movie project.

Never being one to suffer from hubris, the chapter ends with me offering a whole damn country some advice:

“If I was Canada, I would be thinking about creating innovative licenses for IP.” 

The whole report, and especially this chapter on Cultural Fracking is insanely well written, well worth your time.

Check out the whole report here.

The post Cultural Fracking | CMF 2023 Annual Trends Report appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I went on Agitator Pod last week to talk about 2000’s era boxing anime Hajime No Ippo.

Co-host Kelby was out on pat-leave having a kid, so it was just me and David (who guest hosted 301 way back when) shooting the breeze for 2 hours. Agitator is one of my favourite shows (am a patreon subscriber) I had a great time!

Listen

Kelby’s out this week welcoming a new kid into the world, so I had one of my smartest friends, writer, solar punk innovator, host of 301 and the upcoming experience.computer Jay Springett on to talk about 2000’s boxing anime Hajime No Ippo episodes 1-24, getting canceled on a blog, picking one big project, getting in shape, aphantasia, world running, the difference between worlds and stories, Web 3, the internet as a side quest, what Jay’s learned from 10 years of meditating, and more.

The post Worldrunning and the Vertical of One | Agitator Pod appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This Saturday (8th Oct) at 3pm UK time I will be speaking on the panel (Un)Sustainable Perspectives as part of digital art festival, Patchlab Festival‘s online programming.

Here’s the panel details:

(Un)Sustainable Perspectives
Curated and hosted by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou – Creative Director of the FutureEverything.

What does a sustainable world look like? Is sustainability even possible if our capitalist society relies on fast and endless production, supply chains and extractivism? Can we build things differently or produce less? In this conversation, we explore possibilities – and impossibilities – of reframing planetary relationships and shifting our focus to interconnected ecosystems and economies. We are also reflecting on the role of art, design and technology in how these might be shaping our environmental understanding and where we go next.

Other participants include:
Nick Laessing – an artist working with environmental storytelling,
Giulia Bellinetti – researcher and cultural programmer,
Host Irini Mirena Papadimitriou from Future Everything.

The event is free and requires no registration.
If you want to watch live you can catch it here.

The post (Un)Sustainable Perspectives | Patchlab 2022 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at Incredible Machines Conference along side my New Centre co-instructor Ross McElwain from 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔟𝔩𝔢 ⟠ 𝔬𝔟𝔧𝔢𝔠𝔱. Ross is talking about DAOs, I’ll be speaking about worlds and world models. We have 15mins.

You can register here

Here’s our talk abstract:

Movement Between Models

Decentralized Autonomous Organisations were originally imagined by cybernetics and later realized on the blockchain. An alegal organizational model ideal for coordinating both large and small groups across territorial borders, DAOs have become a design space explored notably by gamers, artists, and activists, especially in the field of governance. We foresee DAOs playing a crucial role in the passage between what might be termed hybrid realities, both on and offline. This is a natural consequence of internet-native generations’ sharp awareness of living inside political, fictional and other models, and will constitute a powerful form of critique from within.

The whole event program is two days this weekend. The conference begins at 9am ET and has some fantastic programming.

INCREDIBLE MACHINES 2022

SATURDAY OCTOBER 1

-DESIGNING THE PROBLEM, MODELING THE SOLUTION

9:00 9:10   Introduction Shaun Dacey
9:10 9:20   Introduction Mohammad Salemy
9:20 9:25   Moderator Introduction
9:25 9:40   Ross McElwain & Jay Springett
9:40 9:55   Mi You
9:55 10:10  Zenobio Almeida
10:10 10:25 Benjamin Bratton
10:25 10:55 Q&A

11:10 11:25 Ed Keller
11:25 11:40 Patricia Reed
11:40 11:55 Valentin Golev
11:55 12:10 Daniel Young
12:10 12:40 Q&A

-WHEN TO MODEL, HOW TO KNOW
13:30 13:40 Introduction by Mohammad Salemy
13:40 13:45 Moderator Introduction
13:45 14:00 Elie Ayache
14:00 14:15 Anna Longo
14:15 14:30 Franziska Aigner
14:30 14:45 Katerina Kolozova
14:45 15:15 Q&A

15:30 15:45 Jean-Pierre Caron
15:45 16:00 AA Cavia
16:00 16:15 Reza Negarestani
16:15 16:30 Cássia Siqueira
16:30 17:00 Q&A

SUNDAY OCTOBER 2

-MODELING NOVELTY, FORMING KNOWLEDGE
11:00 11:10 Introduction Mohammad Salemy
11:10 11:15 Moderator Introduction
11:15 11:30 Jason Mohaghegh
11:30 11:45 Julieta Aranda
11:45 12:00 Judy Radul
12:00 12:15 Rodolfo Sousa Ortega
12:15 12:30 Cécile Malaspina
12:30 13:00 Q&A

13:15 13:30 Erica Love & Joao Enxuto
13:30 13:45 Romulo Moraes
13:45 14:00 Stephanie Wakefield
14:00 14:15 Xenia Benivolski
14:15 14:30 Vali Mahlouji
14:30 15:00 Q & A

The post The Model Is the Message | Incredible Machines 2022 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I recently had a pleasure of speaking with Artist / Youtuber / Musician, and all round creative guy Jesse Nickell the Fourth.

We spoke about Solarpunk, artists going uncredited online, how I think AI image generators are benefiting the Solarpunk movement. Worldbuilding, worlding, re-worlding and more. Towards the end of the show, we also spoke about my ongoing puppet project.

It was a pleasure to speak to Jesse for an hour last week. I have been a subscriber to his Youtube channel for a quite a while. So I obviously jumped! when he reached out about being on his show!

Check it out:

Watch

The post Talks With Jesse Nickell | Just Another Podcast appeared first on thejaymo.net.