Taste As Interface Behaviour

The Guardian had a great piece over the weekend by pop culture writer Rachel Aroesti called Have I been influenced, or is this actually me? How personal taste fell out of fashion. It’s about taste. Good taste and bad, and the author’s suspicion that due to the state of social media, we might not have any taste at all any more. What we might think of as our personal preference, is in fact just psychic residue left over from having been shown the same thing 100 times a day by a machine. It’s really good! go read it it.

Six years ago in Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste I was thinking the ‘demonstration’ of taste online. In that game, taste is demonstrated by arranging virtual objects in a toy box world. You perform taste by making a place. Later I argued in Good Taste Online that each platform had its own physics and affordances, and therefore its own way of making taste visible: Twitter has retweets and likes and replies. Pinterest has boards. Tumblr has juxtaposition. Minecraft configurable virtual environments.

But after reading Aroesti’s piece, I would put it more strongly.

Taste is an interface behaviour

Millennials and older might like to romanticise pre-internet media discovery and wax lyrical about the noble struggle of crate-digging, mixtape making, and hanging around in bookshops… I know I do! But none of these nostalgia bait memories are pure encounters with culture. Just like the code-spaces we encounter today, bookshops, libraries, the radio all had interfaces too.

Aroesti writes:

This is no longer the case. We increasingly encounter most aspects of the world through a single aperture: streaming and social media platforms. Or, more specifically, the algorithmic feeds of streaming and social media platforms, plus algorithmically optimised search engines and e-commerce sites, from Amazon to Vinted. In many cases, these are programmed to show each individual specific content based on data gathered from their own activities and those of other users – content that will ideally keep them on the platform for as long as possible.

This is exactly right, though I think “aperture” is too passive. A window is something you look through, the feed is something that watches you doing the looking. It’s an apparatus that observes you observing, then changes its own behaviour based on that observation, which in turn shapes the future view you see though the window.

But, the record shop as taste interface was kinda optimised in the same way too. Genre bins ar ea kind of taxonomy. Staff picks are the recommendation engine. The counter both a record and comic book shop is a social checkpoint, and for better or worse, a site of community moderation. If hardcore punk or UK Jungle was getting popularity with customers, the shop would respond by stocking more of that genre. There is how a big difference between a record shop and the feed.

Latency. A lot of what I think of as taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement. I belive things need to ‘settle in‘ to culture. The immediacy of the feed collapses the delay. The feed responds to you, instantly, and the world it builds next is shaped by the gesture you just made. The shop has a feedback loop measured in months and pointed at a market. The feed is measured in milliseconds and pointed at a person.

It’s a bewildering paradox: these platforms made personalisation a major part of their business model, then synthesised, commodified and automated individual taste into oblivion. We no longer choose what we want to consume; we take what we’re given. And we are being given it in such overwhelming quantities that we no longer have the mental capacity to properly digest and assess what we have encountered.

I understand the feeling here, but I don’t think that we no longer choose on social media. Your Attention is Sovereign. We are always actively making choices on social media; by pausing, not skipping, replaying, hovering, letting the next episode begin. I understand these can be influenced by dark patterns and UX tricks etc, but you are still responsible for your actions. Social media is less a battle for attention than what I’ve elsewhere called a Conflict of Disinterest: the ongoing, internal work of choosing what to overlook. The choices are still yours. They have just been turned into a continuous stream of tiny, pre-formatted gestures.

Online taste though an interface becomes behaviour, that behaviour becomes data, and that data becomes prediction. Then you fall into The Loop. Code Space is Bayesian prediction all the way down. Inside the feed you are being presented with a ‘culture-world’ shaped by all your previous gestures of choice. The self is still in there somewhere, but it’s increasingly buried under its own captured behaviour.

This is also why I am not sure taste has been destroyed. Flattened, yes. Operationalised? gamed? automated? captured? Yes. But not destroyed. Taste has been translated into interface behaviour.

Emily Segal’s recent viral piece on “tasteslop” is also useful here.

To riff on this: if taste classifies (and classifies the classifier), tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens.

Segal is right that tasteslop happens when the classifying function is automated, but I would put the emphasis on individual behaviour. The machine does not really know taste, it knows the gestures that have clustered around taste.

See Marek Poliks’ ’No One Listens to Music Anymore’

I think the internet and social media recommendation algorithms made taste programmable, in the same way it made culture playable. The token is not the taste. Taste is the relation between the object and the person, and the social world in which the judgement is made.

There’s a whole sidequest into the concept of ‘Answerability’ here, but I’m going to leave it to one side as that’s what a chunk of the next episode of Permanently Moved is going to be about.

Anyways, the platform sees media as a collection of ranked ordinal points, vectors in a database, but the person has a relation to the work. This is why so much tasteslop feels dead even when it is made of tasteful parts. It has the references, but not the relationship. If you have a relationship to the media in question, it is answerable, then all good. But to do that you need to explain why:

Segal’s own summary gets very close to this. She writes:

“Taste is not really a property of various objects. It is a socially validated relation between objects, people, histories, scenes, and timing.”

Yes. Exactly. But if taste is a relation, then interfaces matter because the kind of interface shapes the relation. A mixtape and a Spotify playlist can contain the same songs, but they do not ask the same behaviour from either the maker or the listener. John Peel or Mary Anne Hobbs were also interfaces in a way. A mixtape or radio show is a sequence of songs with pacing, and tonal change etc — All the things that make the film High Fidelity romantic. An algorithmic playlist does all of that too, but the platform also makes the gesture searchable, measurable, and reproducible at scale.

Taste is not just what passes through you. It is what culture becomes after passing through you, via a particular interface. This is why Animal Crossing still feels like such a good early example. It gives you a little island and a lot of objects and says: okay then, make a world.

I personally have never thought that having bad taste was the bad thing. John Waters didn’t tell you to have faith in your good taste; he said have faith in your own bad taste. But faith in bad taste is not the absence of discernment, it is a higher form of it.

Which is why I’ll keep hammering on the idea of discernment.

To knowingly like the unfashionable thing, you first have to know it’s unfashionable and why, and step outside that on purpose. That is his whole game. Liking something other people think is bad taste, and being able to say exactly why you like it anyway, is good taste. The judgement is still there, just pointed against the grain. The worse condition is having no taste at all, when your preferences arrive entirely from outside without the practice of discernment. The feed is very good at supplying preferences and very bad at leaving you the latency to act upon them.

Segal lists “Discernment” as the first part of definition of good taste, asking: “Can you tell one thing from another, and can you make a specific, articulated judgment about why one thing is better than another?” I agree with this, but again I would go even harder than Segal does.

If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries. Discernment is not the whole of taste, but in the 2020s it may be the most important part: choosing one thing over another that the feed serves up. Which in many ways we are doing all the time, acticly choosing.

This is the same act I’ve described in the Conflict of Disinterest, but from the other direction. Disinterest is the refusal; deciding what not to spend attention on. Discernment is what that refusal makes possible. Once you have a tighter field of view though the window, you can actually tell one thing from another. I don’t think you can hav the second without the first.

Discernment is the ability to ask and then articulate why you like something, or why you hate something, or whether you have spent enough time with it. Good taste online is the practice of noticing what interface brought the thing and what gesture it is inviting you to perform. The headline “Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?” is actually a very run of the mill millennial crisis of authenticity (which I also think is a silly niche and generational concern). It’s actually I think a crisis of lack of discernment. Being influenced is not the problem online, not being discerning about what is influencing you is the problem. It’s the same with advertising, as the same flattened interfaces that serve you culture, also serve you adverts.

Near the end of Aroesti’s piece, publisher Ione Gamble offers this advice, and it’s very similar to my own.

When it comes to tuning into your own taste, Gamble’s advice is essentially the same. “Always question yourself. Why do I like that? Do I just like it because I’ve been shown it 100 times – or do I genuinely love it?”

But I don’t think you can out-question a system whose whole physics is around the production of rapid questions. You can only take responsibility for where you put your own attention. If taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement, then discernment needs latency. You have to somehow and somewhere put the delay back; to let a thing sit long enough that your relation to it can form before the interface asks what you think about it again.

And once that delay returns, the discernment can move up a level. The wider battle ground in the Conflict of Disinterest not whether this or that video in the feed is to your taste, but whether the entire act of engaging with the form is. Is short-form vertical video to your taste as a way of encountering culture? Is short-form microblogging? Boomer box television? Radio? Podcasts? Do I like the interface and the medium that keeps placing objects in this relation to me?

If your Attention is Sovereign, then taste is what you do with that sovereignty; and discernment is how you keep it from being spent for you. Otherwise you end up with no taste at all. Only a feed-shaped pattern of exposure and reaction.

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Terminal Access

This post on late 90’s UK Emo/Hardocre punk scene is super interesting! The Political War That Tore British Emo Apart — Scuff.

At the end of 1990, Anderson and his schoolmates worked up the courage to form their own band. They took the name Understand, and by the next year, had also welcomed Coleman. They spent their early years trading time as openers between hardcore bands and the more mainstream rock of Revolver, Stereolab and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. For Understand, this separation never existed; Anderson had digested everything from Iron Maiden to Mudhoney to Napalm Death.  Their sound reflected this, honed around the grooving riffs of American post-hardcore groups Quicksand and Fugazi and the melodicism of first-wave British emos Sink and Bad Dress Sense, but also grunge breakouts Nirvana and Soundgarden and the alternative metal rhythms of Helmet and TAD. 

I didn’t get involved in the UK DIY punk scene until 1999 when I was 14, so Understand or Fabric were bands I only ever saw written about in the past tense in Fracture Mag.

Reading

I finished Duncan Barford’s novel The Going Down. It’s one of the best contemporary fiction books I’ve read in ages. As I said last week “Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Never read anything like this written by someone in ‘the west’

I moved on to some non-fiction and spent this months audible credit on Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang of ‘Annual Letter’ fame. Really interesting so far. I wish I lived in a highly competent engineering state. lol

horsegiirL – Nature Is Healing (LP)

If you have been wondering where an album of totally bonkers; euro-rave pop bangers and hyper pop pastiche, performed by an anthropomorphic horse DJ has been all your life then look no further!

This album is fantastic both in concept and its execution. Some potential songs of the summer on here!

Remember Kids:

The post Taste As Interface Behaviour | Weeknotes #443 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Daily Averages

It’s Tuesday afternoon I’ve been into Central London and back. I got half drowned in a storm, it was glorious sunshine, and now it’s apocalyptic rain and thunder again? Always.

Back in 2020 I wrote about how I use my RSS reader. And that is, still. The main way i consume the Internet. But I mostly now use it on my phone, in conjunction with raindrop.io. Ive almost entirely replaced social media consumption with article reading and … talking to the AI that lives in my bookmarks lol.

Anyways, I direct you to that 2020 post, as in it I shared some of the daily average stats from my ‘webtime tracker’ extension that I had installed into my web browsers during the early lock down to try and get a grip on my attention with some hard metrics and data.

I wish I had a screenshot of the whole top 10 but I did share some snippets of the metrics in that old post.

I was spending nearly 26 min on twitter a day in the deep of the pandemic.

I’ve still have the app installed, and 6 years later here’s my total daily averages over the last 6 years.

*interesting*

I note that this tracker data is from the extension installed on my personal chrome profile rather than the one I use for work. So this is representative of where I spend my “free time” when i’m looking at my browser for fun, and not for money.

Anyways. On a whim, I just downloaded the full data set from the extension as JSON and had my pal Claude rustle me up a ‘bar race’ animation in about 3 mins. So here’s the last 6 years of daily averages / websites that I spend time on ‘for fun’ month by month.

I can see in the animation when iIstoped using google docs for my diary and moved to Day One, and then see a further reduction when I moved all my writing offline to Obsidian + iA writer and more recently, my own vibe coded word processor.

The other observation is that over the last few years I’ve consumed way too much Youtube!!?? I blame people like Noah Caldwell-Gervais, and Fimdeg’s 7.5 hour long oral history of the making of Morrowind lol. I love just sticking on a long form things and doing other things around the house, but the clock still clicks on.

On The Blog

AI-Generated Interfaces and the Delamination of Application UI

As AI separates the UI from the application layer, liquid interfaces point towards the next era of software design.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Edited and exported a new episode of Experience.Computer. Out Tuesday
• Sorted out some financial stuff
• Removed nearly 6k words from the next episode of permanently moved draft script lol
• Two calls.
• Got sent a draft of a piece by a friend. I slung it on my kindle
• Lots of reading to do.

Terminal Access

Sarah Friend posted a great piece today on “What Kind of Clock is an LLM? — All computational systems contain a model of time and all of them are wrong.”

It’s so good you should deffo read it.

Once a day maybe, the laptop calls out to an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server to reorient. In between calls, it can drift. On a more machinic scale, it makes no guarantees about task processing. If that laptop were to be for example, controlling a CNC bit spinning at 3000 RPM cutting through a piece of sheet metal, or stabilizing a drone while accepting the navigational commands of a distant pilot, it would stutter. If a rogue process, maybe a defrag or cleanup task took over the CPU, the bit would slow imperceptibly, and the cut would be too short. Somewhere, a drone falls out of the sky.

Reading

I finished Hive by Dan Abnett. Like i said last week, I feel like he had a story to tell and was exhausted by the work he’s done in the wider setting and needed a change. Also there’s a part of me that feels like it was written with a bunch of side eye towards Adrian Tchaikovsky now also playing in the 40k universe.

I also *finally* finished Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network. A really fantastic biography of one of the most important psychotherapists of the 20th C who has, largely, been written out of history. Basically everyone you know was influenced by him.

EXUM – In Russia. A is 9 (LP)

I’ve been really into this super delicate album this week. It’s an eclectic experimental mix of strings, noise, sound art, melodic vocals. All sorts of things really. To just list all those things however doesn’t really do it justice. Looking at the reviews, its quote polarising but I think Its just wonderful.

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Novel Cognition

One of the group chats I am in spent most of last week talking about AI psychosis, the claims around cognitive offloading, and cognition more broadly. What follows is me cherry-picking the threads I found most interesting and trying to make sense of what I took away.

Chatting with an AI does not feel particularly new. As I’ve written before, the interface grammar is inherited wholesale from chat rooms and interactive fiction turntaking. What is novel is that what we perceive to be a conversation is detached from another person and turned into a private thinking space. Chat apps, MSN, WhatsApp, Signal or whatever are all conversations with another person, through a machine. Speaking to an LLM is a conversation with a machine, through an existing form.

Switching gears a little, 160 years passed between the invention of the printing press, and the emergence of the form we now call the Novel. The printing press first made books cheaper and more common. And then over time it made possible new kinds of reading practices: silent reading, private reading, long-form prose, and interior narration.

All these things eventually came together and created the form of the novel. Which we must remember is not a genre or kind of book, but something that created a new (and therefore very recent in the grand scheme of things) cognitive arrangement.

The novel normalised private interiority. It gave readers a way to sit alone and spend time inside another consciousness. It trained a relation to selfhood that now feels so obvious and natural we can barely register it as new or rather novel at all.

I keep wondering whether AI is doing something similar for computation. It’s been 70 years since the invention of the transistor, the Information Age continues to unfold, and where we are at is “thinking with a machine” I quickly becoming ordinary.

Venkat Rao’s blog post this week on “writing liveness” is super useful. If the novel was print becoming a technology capable of influencing our inner life, AI is a kind of writing that is sufficiently alive. Responsive and capable of reshaping itself around the reader in real time. Generated text behaves like an interlocutor, an uncanny monster talking to you from the other side of the screen. The text it produces has enough ‘liveness’ that all the old categories of what text is or does are made redundant.

This is why I think AI needs a wider frame than the simple claim that people are becoming lazy. The worries people have around cognitive offloading seem to mostly be around the value of intellectual labour. We can argue all day long about which kinds of thinking it weakens and which it supports. Instead I think using an LLM is a new variable in cognition entirely.

Looking backwards, the emergence of “Novel Cognition” was met with its own panic. Critics worried that fiction softened the mind, weakened the nerves, blurred the line between reality and fantasy, encouraged “excessive sensibility”, and made readers unfit for ordinary life. Reading was sometimes described in almost medical terms: as dangerous overstimulation or a kind of mania.

Which all sounds very much like the anxiety about what pop culture is calling “AI psychosis¹.” A new medium arrives. It becomes private, immersive, emotionally charged, and difficult to regulate from the outside. Critics worry that speaking to LLMs also destabilises a persons reality, encourages projection, rewards fantasy, amplifies the wrong kinds of feeling. Some of it is most definitely the reflex a culture has when a new cognitive technology arrives (see also: photography, radio, television, film, social media), but it is also the response to something genuinely new.

The simple difference being: A novel is static and an LLM is interactive.

LLM-generated text functions as a new malleable surface of private cognition. It identifies an affective state and reflects it back in a loop. So whatever is present in the context window gets mirrored and intensified. Paranoia, grief, grandiosity, loneliness, or whatever.

All of which is why the available language still feels inadequate. We do not yet have any proper terms for the kind of cognition that emerges when a person thinks in private with responsive text. The first readers of Don Quixote did not have a stable theory of interiority ready to hand either. They had only the sensation that something had become possible in prose that had not been possible before.

This to me is how this moment feels too, and we are still very early. The chatbot may only be the pamphlet stage of whatever this medium eventually becomes. But after 70 years computation is beginning to reveal a new native cultural form. Some still-unnamed form of private co-thinking.

If that is right, we are in a strange historical position, in addition to being the generation that experienced the first globally networked information environment, we are also the first to encounter a new posture of mind that the internet made possible.

I’ve written about why Don Quixote is so great before. And I will only half jokingly look you in the eye and tell you that not only is it the first novel, it’s also the only novel worth reading. So it’s obviously a book that I’m going to keep reaching for. It is after all, among other things, a novel about what happens when a person is unmade by media-induced madness. Completely overtaken by his reading, he mistakes reality for the metaverse because a medium has colonised his sense of reality. In todays vernacular Quixote is suffering from “Book Psychosis”.

Right now I think we are all probably in the same position as the the first readers of Don Quixote were, early enough to sense that something important has arrived, and early enough to encounter its pathologies before we understand its form.

1. I don’t wish to minimise the very real effects of what is happening to people, and what they and there loved ones are experiencing. But what we are calling AI psychosis might just be ordinary psychosis with a new causal amplifier. ↩︎

On The Blog

We’ve Been Here Before

We are a couple of years into AI being in the workplace and I’m starting to see a gap opening. Some teams have developed a real fluency and are doing things that previously only companies ten times their size could do.

Others meanwhile, are still stuck arguing about whether AI can write a decent email?

This post has had quite an enthusiastic response from a number of angles and people. Been interesting to see how it’s landing in different parts of my network. Also, it got a much coveted webcurious feature this week! Thanks Matt!

This, by Jay Springett, is one of the smartest things I have read about workplace AI use and adoption, and how one might helpfully think of the tech and what it can do and how to use it in the aftermath of its recent step-change in performance and the fact you can now just…build stuff. In particular, it’s another useful reminder of something I have been banging on about for several years now – to whit, that the best way to think of these things is as machines with which you can fcuk with information in ALL SORTS OF WAYS, and that the real value comes in thinking not ‘what can the AI do?’ but ‘how might I usefully fcuk with this information to achieve goal X? And how, then, might I use AI to help me do that?’, but it also does a reasonable job of pointing out what a potential nightmare this is going to be in terms of the unchecked proliferation of LLM-generated informational artefacts: “Once ordinary workers can generate disposable software-shaped artefacts in minutes, they will also generate disposable security problems in the same amount of time. A new feral layer in the organisation with new problems involving access, data leakage, and governance. Nobody designs feral databases into existence, but things get made and stick in the gaps of an organisations sanctioned systems. LLM artefacts will do the same and will be even harder to audit than a nested IF formula. The open question for me is what kinds of unofficial artefacts an organisation is prepared to live with, before it has to unpick the mess after something has gone wrong. This sort of thing happens all the time with other software, which is why SaaS and enterprise systems exist in the first place.”

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Call with a very early stage team building software stack and robots for verification and quality control in the construction industry.
• On the final edit pass of SLOP MACHINES
• Went to LGF and Weird Worlds. Played the latest build of Stef’s mid century modern and Belatro inspired wedding game Wedding Planic. Will blog terminal access it as soon as it’s up for wish listing on steam.
• Went to Band practice
• Sat in on a long zoom workshop

Terminal Access

Nice piece on the conflict of disinterest in the walrus recently The War Against Misinformation Is Over. The Lies Won. Well worth a read.

There is a clear off-ramp to our informational hell: Consume less information.

The wonders of the morning newspaper and the evening newscast were that they asked only an hour of your time. You had no obligation to check the newspaper every five minutes to consult what has changed. There was no moral imperative to stay glued to your screen to hardwire into new developments.

Reading

I’m nearly finished with Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica. The back half of the book is broken down into ‘teachings’ on things like prayer, family life, grace etc and within each section are paragraphs of discrete ideas that build on one another. Lovely stuff.

Sunn O))) – Sunn O))) (LP)

Hot damn. New Sunn O))) record. On SubPop too which is cool.

It’s a very different beast to 2019’s Life Metal, this S/T album is very back to basics (only with better production) and because of that, is one of their best albums in years. Man. Per-ordering 00 VOID because I read about it in metal hammer in 2000 and listening to it all summer holiday feels … a long time ago. 👴

Remember Kids:

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The Firehose and the Feed

I’m one of those people who live their life with disappearing messages turned on wherever they are available. Partly because I’m a millennial, who grew up with just enough space for 15 text messages on their first mobile phone. But I also have it turned on because I don’t think of chat, MSN, SMS, Signal or whatever to be “writing” and worth keeping around. It’s a kind of speech. But sometimes I do wish I still had transcripts!

It’s been over a decade since the Brexit vote happened. At the time the group chat was full of people talking about the “bad vibes” on social media and the feeling of experiencing an info war for the first time. I wish I could show you just how sensitive people were to currents on the social seas. We have of course since; found out that 1% of accounts generated 1/3rd of all messages during the referendum campaign period, and most of them were bots.

From the distance of a decade this is all immediately recognisable as Bannon’s “flooding the zone with shit”. But even before the gamergate era , 4chan figured out that platforms could be “played” by making the information environment ungovernable. Earlier coordinated raids got strange or offensive phrases trending and were proof-of-concept experiments. A Demonstration, in the early days of social media, that if you applied enough volume, fast enough, across enough accounts, you could take control of what everyone else was looking at. A real insight into the mechanical physics of Code Space in the early 2010’s for me.

After Brexit and Gamergate, but before Bannon’s “Flood the zone” strategy came to light in an interview in 2018, RAND released a super interesting report called “The Firehose of Falsehood”.

It described in strategic form, what my friends and I had been experienced “being inside of” during the Brexit campaign. That propaganda that behaves less like a single persuasive argument and more “like weather”. Instead of trying to win by proving one true singular narrative, you win by throwing out many stories quickly though multiple channels, repeating them, and keeping the whole bit going even when claims are contradicted or challenged.

The effect being, that the information environment becomes noisier and more exhausting to navigate. When volume stays persistently, attention gets pulled towards whatever is loudest, most emotionally charged, or most easily repeated. Slower and more careful analysis struggles to stay visible.

This is all par-the-course in 2026. I think everyone reading this knows this is just how the internet works now AND that it’s all massively exacerbated by algorithmic feeds. But I think there are two problems with assuming everyone knows this:

1. “All social media is manipulated” as an online background condition isn’t an interesting story to the mainstream media, unless a specific example suits them and their own narrative/manipulation of the weather.
2. Lots of people don’t know! All the millions of boomers out there sharing ring footage of a baby saving a cat from a bear, or liking and posting abhorrent things about immigration. Has nothing to do with slop at all, it’s all info war.

A couple of years ago I read a super interesting paper from Karthik Srinivasan at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business called “Paying Attention”. Which explains why the firehose fits the physics of code space so well.

The paper treats attention as a reward: likes, upvotes, views, and comments are all modelled in the paper as acting something like a wage. Because receiving these things tends to make people produce more content afterwards. What the paper also finds is that ‘the wage of attention’ has diminishing returns. The first units of attention given to someone changes their behaviour online the most. Which means that spreading small bursts of engagement across many accounts, likes, RT’s, replies etc can be more productive than using bots to boot and single accounts voice.

When I read the RAND paper and Paying Attention side by side, the physics of the incentive landscape were made quite a bit clearer to me.

It is worth noting, that similar logics spring up amongst real communities too. The TPOT community on Twitter (the loose, intellectually inclined cluster of writers, thinkers, and other chronically online people) built a strong culture around linking and boosting one another’s posts. It was an unspoken part of participating in the community: people surfacing ideas they found interesting, helping good writing find an audience it might not otherwise reach. But the underlying mechanic is the same as the one describe in the Srinivasan paper. Mutual amplification distributes attention in small, motivating doses across a network rather than concentrating it on a handful of accounts. Almost all fandom communities work this way too.

The attention economy rewards the same behaviours regardless of whether the content being spread is a coordinated disinformation campaign or a genuinely interesting essay. The platform does not distinguish between the two. It just measures the engagement.

There is a practical implication buried somewhere in the above though I think.

That if the first units of attention are the ones that change behaviour most, then being liberal with the like button actually matters. Leaving a comment, sharing a post, replying to something you found worthwhile are small acts that actually work. In the face of “the firehose” the modest counter-move is to be deliberate about where your attention goes, and cultivating the things that you want to see more of.

This is of course, is not an argument that’s new around here, or anywhere else. Your attention is sovereign, and you should engage in the conflict of disinterest.

But I woke up this morning trying to think though the terrain, and what the rules of engagement might be given the nature of the weather.

On The Blog

World Literacy

This is one of those posts that arrives because an idea has come up three times in real life in the last few weeks and when that happens it’s best to write it down.

The idea is World Literacy1.

Audiences now arrive at a media franchise already knowing how worlds work. Not that world, specially, but worlds in general. Audiences have a new fluency, with expectations and a set of standards they didn’t consciously acquire, and they can’t necessarily articulate if asked. They got them from everywhere else. This is quite new. And if you are running a world, it’s one of the most important things to understand about the room you are walking into.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I’m on the look out for work! Short term engagements or a more permanent situation.
Do you like my work and know someone who might find it useful?

• Finished tweaks to final 302 script
• Wrote and recorded pre episode drop. ‘Liner notes’ episode.
• Recorded 302!!!
• Edited 302.
• Did first pass layout of text essay for Start Select Reset
• Sorted out woocommerce so i can sell the zine. (Haven’t flipped the switch yet)
• Long call about agents, and problems that might arise in the near future.

Terminal Access

This piece on the Dutch military jailbreaking the F-35s vendor locked software just like an iPhone is extremely interesting, and seems like Europe really is taking software independence seriously.

Altogether, any kind of jailbreaking of the F-35’s systems would come with a serious risk of legal action by Lockheed Martin and additional friction with the U.S. government. What would have to happen for a country like the Netherlands to pursue that course of action would also likely be just one symptom of a much more serious breakdown in relations with Washington. Doing this could easily prompt a cutoff in spare parts and other support, if that had not already occurred, which would leave jailbroken jets quickly bricked on the ground. To be clear, cracking the software would do nothing to mitigate the downstream impacts of being shut out from critical sustainment pipelines.

Reading

Still reading A Million Years of Music by Gary Tomlinson. I’m about 3/4 of the way though now. We have just got to early homosapien language, symbol abstractions, speach and its impact on “musicking”. This book is a amazing. Just every chapter blowing my mind.

I’m still listening to Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer. Unless i have unexpected long train journey in the next few weeks i might park it and move on to something else. I just cant get past the style of the thing.

I started Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network this week. The the father of psychodrama and *all* group therapy. He was an early critic of Sigmund Freud. Currently reading about origins and impact of Esalen Institute had on wider culture.

Songs for Sleeping Dogs – Ben Hackett

I came across this 2025 debut album by Ben Hackett this week. A solo album thats a mix of indie, folk and new age. Living up to its title, it has a dreamy cadence throughout, but tips in to psychedelia in places. I’ve mostly had this album on as I’ve been working and its very hypnotic and immersive. Really enjoyed it.

My favourite track on the album is Electric Pond Ripple. Here’s a video of him playing it live. On the album it uses piano not synth as the main keys instrument.

Remember Kids:

The post The Firehose and the Feed | Weeknotes #427 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Lock In

Like pretty much every other Millennial, I’ve been hearing the phrase ‘Lock In’ everywhere lately. A Gen Z slang word that’s completely escaped generational containment and out into wider culture.

It means something like to focus; to commit; to sort your life out. The idiom, to me anyways, feels mechanical—like something clicking into place. A latch, a seatbelt, a door bolt sliding home. There’s a sense of safety in it, but also finality. Once you’re locked in, you’ve decided.

Locking in isn’t a new idea, the runners I’ve known in my life have always used it to describe the stretch of time when the world drops away and instinct takes over . But as far as I am aware, the term for Gen Z has come from gaming, to ‘lock-in’ is the button you press in lobby to confirm your load out in League of Legends. Once you click, that’s it. No going back. A whole generation learnt the sensation of commitment through a button.

I guess I first detected the memetic spread of the phrase around 2023? A post pandemic thing. The “When you gotta lock in” clips—cutting from chaos to a dead-serious face—made the phrase into a visual joke. And like with many things the joke became life advice.

People began declaring personal lock-ins: a week, a month, even a whole season of getting their shit together. And then there’s that Gen Z motivational guy on Instagram:

It’s all about cutting distractions, hitting the gym, cleaning their flats, rebuilding routines.

Personally when ever I hear a Gen-Z say they need to lock in I think about the pub. LOL. Doors closed, lights low, time turning fuzzy. Outside of the normal rules of engagement.

Gen Z’s Lock In is all about enclosure and discipline. But both, I think, speak to a sealed space of possibility. To ‘lock in’ is to draw a boundary around your attention, to make a small world. A self-imposed state of exception.

Not that Gen Z’s will agree, but I personally think the post pandemic moment that phrase ‘Lock in’ is having is related to demographics. The oldest members of Gen Z are now 28, approaching their 30s!

I know what this is like, I felt the need to ‘Lock In’ in my mid twenties too, I just didn’t have a name for it.

I had just been through a breakup that had hollowed me out, was working in a new job role and drowning in it. I was unravelling. Drinking too much, playing too much Xbox, and shooting twitter into my eyeballs. I was losing whole days. I remember walking home from the pub one night in the rain, completely soaked and full of dread about going into work the next day. And had one of those moments in my life when I knew something had to change. And the easiest and most obvious thing was Me.

So I made a deal with myself: one hour a day. No distractions. Just an hour spent doing something ‘deliberate’ after work.

Some nights I edited photos I had taken, and the first iteration of this website emerged during this period too. Other days I (unsuccessfully) tried to write, I made music in Renoise, learnt the basics of blender, unity etc, and did an online SQL course to try and catch up at work. My meditation started around this time too. The activity didn’t matter, but the hour did.

I started consuming what is now known as hustle culture media. The Tim Ferriss podcast etc. Though in my mind, back in 2008, it wasn’t grindset stuff, more inspirational. I changed the lock screen on my iPod to say Do Epic Shit. But I guess it helped, each time I saw it, I remembered the promise I’d made to myself.

I deleted Facebook. Started listening to music again. Reading again. Used an app like Finch, but it was called UFYH. Saint Kondo’s magic book about tidying up hadn’t come out yet, but I did do the Discardia program. It didn’t happen all at once, but the compound effect of that daily hour was enormous. Over time small habits become a mechanism. A lock holds things in place, and focus, held long enough, begins to generate pressure…force, even. That force built a life, the one I’m largely still leading and experiencing now.

I’ve been thinking about that period a lot recently. Projects are bigger now, the external noise of social media louder, more insistant. I have a lot to do. An hour a day might not cut it in 2025.

I know there are some Gen-Z folks reading this, and I want to say that Locking-In isn’t about grinding or self-optimisation. It’s about meeting yourself honestly. About deciding who you’re becoming. Where are you going, and what things in this world deserve your attention.

Writing this mostly to remind myself what its like, as I have a lot of shit to do.

Forest Bed

My band is playing two sets at the Lamb Surbiton on the 20th of November. If you are around come down! We’re playing for about 2h in total!

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Multiple IRL meetings
• Couple of calls
• Looked at the manuscript for a thing I wrote for a magazine that never came out and put a whole bunch of the text back in and sent it off.
• Worked on SLOP MACHINES — need to update the GPT
• Took a post Berlin break for a few days.

Terminal Access

ADH has another entry ‘The Love Pyramid‘ in Escape Pod. Another entry in his Rocky Cornelius / capitalist surrealist short story series. Joining uncool hunter and concept shoppe soft-launch defender. Great short fiction. Check it out!

Rocky listened to this creative churn with waning interest. She’d birded writers rooms before, and unless you were part of the discussion, with the same half-built world spinning in your head, it got repetitive fast. The house thrummed and pattered with wind and freezing rain, lulling her toward drowsiness. As a rule, Rocky never allowed herself to sleep around clients, but these were unique circumstances. It had been a very trying day…

Reading

Started reading Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira. Haven’t got very far in, but I can see why this is a modern classic. Spira has had such a massive influence on my life.

The New Eves – The New Eve Is Rising (LP)

I got an instagram advert for The New Eves and was immediately sold. It’s all a sort of anarcho-punk, pagan folk girl band?

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that TNE’s are “reclaiming english folk from the ashes” like some reviews do, as theres plenty of this sort of thing around. But they ARE very good. Cow Song of their new record, and their single mother are both very good exemplars of what they are all about.

Remember Kids:

The post Lock In appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Just Like Stuff

I’ve written a lot on here about Attention. What we do with it, where we put it, how it gets siphoned away online. As part of that current, I’ve been thinking more and more about taste. Where it comes from, how you cultivate it, how you hold on to it Tracy Durnell has been exploring similar territory, so credit where it’s due.

Over on Substack, for the last week or so , my notes feed has been dominated by the seasonal online debate about how genre fiction or sci-fi/fantasy “isn’t real literature” and huge comment threads about what is and isn’t ‘literary fiction’. These arguments and the behaviour of the people conducting them is of course entirely about engagement farming.

I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet.

I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB forums. At university I was immersed in the blast furnace of 4chan for days at a time. Maybe it’s the Gen-X hangover I carry as a Gen-Y geriatric millennial, but I realised in my early 20’s that I just don’t care enough. I spent whole days, whole summers even when I was younger, lost to endless back-and-forth about whether a band sold out, what sci-fi books were overrated, or particular egregiously on my side, what choice of operating system or KDE vs GNOME proved you were secretly a poser. My mind boggles at it all now, the thought of spending my youth in a permanent trial by forum post. I saw the pattern in my self, how it was making me feel and how permanently warfare online was effecting other people so I opted out.

The times I have argued about something on the internet as an adult, have all resulted from a lapse in judgement, and without exception left me feeling guilty and full of shame. Not because of what others might have thought about the argument, but because I had wasted my energy and got emotionally involved in something that just… didn’t matter.

The ad-driven narrative economy of social media has been built around using this behaviour as fuel. Flame wars, quote tweets etc juice engagement and dwell time for networks. All day long people are on the internet arguing about pointless shit. Because otherwise how else are people going to spend long enough logged in to see all the adverts?

Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.

This is why people feel the need to back up every preference with a bibliography or stats. There’s so much ablative language used online. People prefacing their joy with “I know this is cringe but” as if they need to apologise before voicing their opinion. Building shields out of caveats.

But for what? and for whom?

Mostly it’s all done to placate the opinions of people that they’ll never meet.

This is a trap. The rhetorical game that keeps the whole engine of user generated content networks humming. But you don’t actually need to play the game.

Just like stuff. That’s all.

There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.

The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.

If your position or thoughts on something emerge from a practice of discernment, and become an actual expression of your taste, then you don’t owe anyone an explanation about why you like (or don’t like) something.

You don’t need to defend what you like to people whose opinions shouldn’t mean anything to you.

On The Blog

Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania

I was recently a guest on Lance “it’s ya boi” Robotson‘s alt-futures discussion podcast Neomania.

It’s one of my favourite shows, so it was a real pleasure to join him on air. Lance has interviewed a whole cluster of online weirdos recently, and I think the pod will become a fascinating record of where a certain current of people find themselves intellectually in the mid-2020s.

Across 100 minutes we covered many of the usual hits from this blog: Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking, and the importance of Worlds as a lens. We also touched on AI in the present moment, blogging, and making podcasts, and in an unguarded aside I think I shared some spicier opinions about copyright.

August 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 8.
Photo-a-day for the month of Aug 2025.

BYENNE

My 100 notes on storydwelling continues over on my leaftlet pub.

BYENNE

A leaflet about storydwelling. Byenne is what’s left. After the storm. After the telling.

by Jay Springett @thejaymo.net

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• More writing on SLOP MACHINES
• Recorded and started editing a new episode of Experience.Computer
• Several Meetings and Calls
• Wrote all the press and marketing copy for the game i’ve been working on. More to do
• Long call / workshop about next 18-24months. On device inference and what capabilities it we might see.

The ink stamp for Family of Giants logo arrived. Unfortunately my ink pad was at the end of its life, but you get the idea:

Terminal Access

‘White People Spicy’. This recent piece in Vittles mag on how the regulation of spicy food feeds racial anxieties is really interesting!

The danger invoked by Buldak’s spiciness functioned as a proxy for many other anxieties: the xenophobia that finds public salience in questions of food and eating; fears about children’s online media consumption and the ways that the internet can encourage stupid, painful and risk-taking behaviour; and the racial disgust and desire that coalesce around spicy food products. And in doing so, the Buldak ban awakened anxieties of my own: that Asian food products, no matter how popular they become, might never escape their status as spectacle.

Reading

This week I read and finished Family Wealth–Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations by James E. Hughes Jr.

Started reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr 

Emergence – AM sin

Just got round to listening to the new AM sin record, which came out a few weeks ago. I’ve been waiting for a full length feature and this does not disappoint. It’s a real breath of noisy air next to all the lo-fi rock i’ve also been listening to this week. My favourite track is the remix of their previous single The Abyss by Sakr. After finishing the album I immediately went and listened to the newest Sakr album which like this track is all fat distorted kicks and snares. love it all.

Remember Kids:

The post Just Like Stuff appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Turning of Attention

I seem to have been talking a good deal about the weather in these weeknotes of late, and this week is no different. The forecast says it will be fine again next weekend, which is nice. The warmth lingers, though the season has already turned its page. ‘Summer’, and as a measure of time, has gone. September begins, and with it the call to return to work, to school, to the rhythm of study. My partner goes back to teaching this week; the term has started once more.

I grew up in the orbit of the school year, not just because I was a pupil, but because my mum, and my aunties and my uncles were all teachers. The household bent itself around that calendar. And so even now, two decades out from university, I cannot escape the sense that September is a time for new beginnings..

January has always struck me as a false start. It arrives too soon after the years end everyone is tired, broke, and it’s dark at four in the afternoon. September, on the other hand, carries momentum. Now time for the harvest, and new pencils, new shoes, new notebooks. August is a kind of epilogue between parts of the school year, before the clock winds on again.

But since i’m not at school any more, and never will be again, September feels like a time for recommitment. A chance to pick things back up, or begin again with a little more focus. If January is about ‘resolutions’, then September is about momentum; carrying forward all the things conceived in the warmth of the year into the darker months ahead.

The task is always the same: to go on, to be faithful to the work one is engaged in, and to meet the turning of the seasons with our own turning of attention.

On The Blog

Talking 301 on Wolf Pod

You may remember that last year I joined Eddie Rathke on Wolf Pod to talk about William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy across three episodes.

A year later, he invited me back.

This time we discussed the conclusion of Permanently Moved’s 301-second format.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Not much in this week as Eve had the week off.

• Recorded wolf pod this week! I was a guest on one. I was supopsed to record E.C but we rescheduled.
• Research for / on a potential future. Loading the Kindle with pdfs classic
• Only 2 Hours at the games company this week. Working on beta launch stuff for end of the month
• Inhaling the work of someone I met last week. Youtube at 2x etc
• Long call and a did a workshop.

Terminal Access

This 100min long conversation between Aaron and Jason Hickel is well worth your time

Reading

I finished The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination by Adam Zeman. I think i’m going to try and get him on Experience.Computer.

I moved on to listening to, and finished Superbloom by Nicholas Carr. I have had it in my Audible library for a while, but have felt quite burnt out by ‘Social Media Discourse’ so haven’t got around to it. It was ‘ok’.

Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr and Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing Pain by John E. Sarno.

Celebration – Midnight Channel

Hadn’t heard of canadian jazz collective Midnight Channel until this week. But i’m happy to have been making my way though their work. My entry point was their new single Celebration. I can only describe it as breakcore jazz with smooth sax? Like venetian snares level drum madness.

Amazing. I bet this band are fucking killer live.

Remember Kids:

The post Turning of Attention appeared first on thejaymo.net.

July 12, 2025

|

Attention 🎯 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | The Artist 🧑‍🎨

The glowing screen does not possess you. You merely have rehearsed the reflex of the infinite scroll.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/07/12/2518-king-of-mind/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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King of Mind

Artist. And so we end this tract with the most important undertaking.

You must become sovereign of thy own domain.

Just as the Gods command the land beneath the widened starlit skies. So must you as creator, claim dominion over the kingdom of your mind.

Every choice of focus, every tilt of attention is a decree shaping the bounds of thought and deed.

Let none, neither the clamour of the outer world nor the sly whispers of self-doubt seize your seat. Your vision is sacred territory. Each minute you grant to it enriches the realm. Each distraction you indulge invites marauders through the gate.

Attention is the artist’s sceptre with every chosen thought, you breathe life into hidden realms. Forging worlds when none existed. Yet remember, each motion of the scepter is habit, not addiction.

The glowing screen does not possess you. You merely have rehearsed the reflex of the infinite scroll.

Recognise the pattern and refashion it into rituals that feed your craft rather than drain it.

Beware to the multitasking myth.

To split attention is to spill gold upon sand. Every rapid switch spends coin from the treasury of your mind.

The artist must learn to flow like a single deep river. Depth, not breadth carves the canyon. Anchor yourself to one current. Follow it to the sea and green Abundance will bloom amidst your garden. Each sustained breath of concentration lights the fires of creation.

Practice practical feed hygiene.

Cull the retweet and muzzle the metric. Tend your inbox and your timeline always pruning what does not nourish inspiration’s bloom.

A clean stream feeds a clear river.

Clarity breeds momentum and momentum breeds triumph.

Know, too, the ethics of complicity. Every post, every like, lays higher bricks upon the citadels of unseen empires. Each breadcrumb of attention fattens a surveillance marketplace.

Sovereignty of mind is not merely a private privilege, but a public duty. For what you endorse becomes part of common lore.

Each act of wilful attention is a forging of destiny. Like a blacksmith, tempering steel in fire. Let your focus be the anvil and your will the hammer. Together, they shape the Iron of Insight into blades.

It is the heat of steady concentration that fuels the forge of creativity, every unwavering minute is a spark that kindles dormant potential.

O valiant artist protector of the isle. Guard your sanctum as a fortress. Permit entry only to those thoughts that enrich and expand the realm. Refuse quarter to idle gossip and trivial spectacle. Within the hush of walls, your truest works, take root and flourish, sheltered from the weather of noise.

Understand also your sovereignty is yoked to accountability.

You alone hold the keys to the gates of your focus. Every casual scroll, every lingering glance at shallow spectacle is a coin spent from a finite purse.

To cry theft! Is to forget that the purse rested in thine own hand.

Accept ownership of the past, reclaim stewardship of the future. Pay in minutes for what deserves hours and watch intellectual riches accrue.

As you traverse the data lit boulevards of this age beware the snares of the loop.

A ceaseless carousel of apps, tabs, and pings that siphons the lifeblood of your creative fire. Observe its machinery the instant you glimpse the gears, you may step clear of the ride. Close the lid. Lift your gaze. These humble gestures restore rhythm and retune the instrument of the mind.

In a season where every fraction of time seems to clamour for attention, cultivate the art of strategic disinterest. The public feed is not your only dominion.

There remain quiet spaces, hidden groves and gardens, small islands and greener clearings beyond glass and wire. Where thought wanders freely unyoked by algorithmic tug. There true creation breathes.Seek them out. They will nourish both craft and soul.

But heed this final counsel.

There is detox and there is discipline. A week’s flight from the glowing city may cleanse the lungs and spirit. Yet sovereignty is forged in the daily drill. Better the percussion of small deliberate choices than the spectacle of a single grand retreat. Make routine and rhythm, your ally and the extraordinary will follow as page follows page.

Artist. You are not merely a maker of works. You are a maker of worlds. Every focus breath reshapes the fabric of reality itself, wield attention with care and the external tumult, hushes. The inner realm will dawn across its rising hills.

Reign with purpose. Guard your sceptre with honour, let habit serve, distraction kneel, and creativity ascend to its rightful throne.

Upon your isle is a luminous vision. Your life becomes the art there, and the art becomes the causeway by which others may cross to wonder.

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The post King of Mind | 2518 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

A Little More Distinct

I’ve recently gone through another round of unfollowing things in my RSS reader. Mostly Substacks, if I’m being honest. The platform, with its publishing cadence and content mill culture is starting to generate a kind of shared voice. Not just in how people write, but in what they write about. There’s a narrowing happening. I had over 100 newsletters in the feed, and what I don’t need is to read five slightly different versions of the same essay in the space of ten days. It’s not that the writing’s bad, it’s just starting to blur together.

What I’m gravitating towards instead is work that feels more distinct. People who are off doing their own thing, often on personal blogs or standalone websites, self hosted newsletters. Work that doesn’t feel shaped by an algorithm or a platform’s publishing incentives. Projects that are self-directed, weird in good ways, maybe a bit harder to place. What’s appealing is that these creators aren’t trying to be like anyone else.

I suppose, in a way, I’m looking for other people doing things differently—not to copy, but because I find it energising. I’m interested in people working outside of the same loops everyone is inside of.

And it’s probably no coincidence that all this coincides with the end of my 301 format on Permanently Moved. There’s a mental background process running now, almost constantly: What’s next? What do I want to make? What shape could a new project take, now that I’ve got eight years of experience behind me?

Not just another podcast, but something that’s distinct. Something that sounds like me, yes, but also doesn’t repeat what I’ve already done. What subjects am I drawn to now? What style fits the way I’m thinking now? What kind of voice do I want to speak in?

It’s not a crisis. But it is a shift. And it’s asking for a different kind of attention, both from me and perhaps, the audience.

On The Blog:

Tiny Awards 2025

It’s a great honour to be on the jury for this year’s Tiny Awards. Nominations are now open!

Substack Should Have an Editoral Marketplace

I’ve thought for a long time that there are some really good writers that I read on Substack who, if they worked with a good editor could become excellent ones.

All this got me thinking this morning about something I missed in my long ‘Alms Race’ blog post on the creator economy I wrote a few years ago.

For writers serious about honing their craft and elevating their work, it just seems obvious to me that Substack should facilitate some kind of editorial market.

Permanently Moved

GPT Job Losses: Slowly, Then Suddenly

https://permanentlymoved.online/

AI boosters on LinkedIn will have you belive AI will be taking everyone’s job tomorrow, but the anti-AI voices however still say never.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/06/07/2513-gpt-job-losses-slowly-then-suddenly/

Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
Subscriber Zine support the show! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

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Get the Zine!
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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Edited several chapters of SLOP MACHINES, added a new chapter
• Wrote my podcast and then drafted another
• Big slide deck for a project pitch at work.
• Paid my mid year taxes 💀

Terminal Access

Really recommend this essay/talk Cogs in the Crypto Machine by @naomiii, talking to crypto bros about Marx at ETH Ierland earlier in the year:

Alienation in crypto

It’s easy blaming the VCs, but that’s letting ourselves off the hook. I believe there’s largely three kinds of alineation in crypto. Of course, that’s on top of the usual alienation we suffer in modernity ^^

Alienation from our values

Remember when this industry stood for something that wasn’t trying to rug the others faster than they can rug me? When the main goal wasn’t to grow the fastest, to raise the most money, or to hit untenable numbers of users within a week of launch?

Belive it or not, I’m old enough to remember when the crypto industry had values too!

Reading

I finished reading New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. Wow. What a book. In a sense this book is one long prayer. Here’s a wild line: Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. There are so many bangers in this book I made nearly 200 highlights. Since last year, it is still very strange to read a book like this and know what the author is talking about. Not as metaphor but as experience. The last 1/5 of the book, ‘the after’ was extremely valuable.

Back to reading Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation by Mark J.P. Wolf. its such a dense book! A little difficult to follow before bed. But i persevere.

Yvette Young – Outta Sight Outta Mind

New single from Midwest Emo Queen Yvette Young! its 🔥 really contemporary. so much going on. The whole track is anchored by the guitar line which holds it all together.

Remember Kids:

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April 26, 2025

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Attention 🎯 | Dimensino 👾 | Permanently Moved 🔊

As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, the world will continue to thicken with surfaces with signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/04/26/2509-surface-without-substance/

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Surface Without Substance

This week, whilst shopping in town, I listened to two podcasts back-to-back: Gideon Jacobs on the newest episode of New Models, and Never Post with its segment on the disappearance of buttons from our devices.

I’ve written before about the surface flatness of contemporary society, but these two shows reignited the idea. There is, I think, a compelling argument that the physical design of the modern smartphone with its dark, glassy, featureless surface, has reshaped how we perceive reality: a reality now dominated by images, detached from any material origin or anchor.

Jacobs contends that our present media environment has produced a world saturated with self-referential imagery. Reality, he says, has become a loop of symbols, gestures, and signs that point only to more of themselves: meaning without anchor. Baudrillard diagnosed this condition nearly forty-five years ago, calling it hyperreality. Once an academic abstraction, it is now tangible with every scroll and swipe.

This is not merely an aesthetic or media-literacy concern; it is about the broader conditions through which we perceive and interpret the world. The simulation, as Baudrillard put it, has grown so seamless, so ever-present, that the scaffolding of “the real” feels less persuasive than the abstract surfaces it supposedly supports.

In my own writing I refer to this domain as the Semiosphere: a para-reality of signs, symbols, and meaning-making that restructures the material world through the attention we pay to it.

Donald Trump, Jacobs argues, is the embodiment of this shift — an idea larger than the man himself, composed entirely of signs: soundbites, slogans, facial expressions, media feedback loops. He operates within the Semiosphere so fluently that base reality becomes an irrelevant medium. What matters is presence, affect, the high-stakes manipulation of symbol. Trump exudes a distortion field. What the old tales would have called glamour turning the world into something closer to theatre or a game.

No object, save perhaps a magic wand or a conductor’s baton, crystallises the peculiar new reality conjured by the smartphone.

With its smooth, depthless glass, the smartphone is the ultimate surface: no ridges, no contours, nothing to locate you. It denies the body its place in the interface. There is no entrance or window into the Semiosphere via a smartphone, only exposure to it.

You don’t grip a smartphone; you stroke it.

Interaction with symbol becomes pure glide. Nothing truly moves, yet with our fingertips we influence the world. The screen-tap is a magician’s gesture: something appears, something vanishes. “The doing” is replaced by the appearance of something happening. In this frictionless flow, symbols need relate to nothing deeper; we drift, untethered, immersed in the feed. The smartphone is an occult object: a black mirror through which pure image flows, unburdened by resistance.

The home button once provided interruption, reminding you the device was a machine with limits, an actual object. Its removal dissolves the membrane between user and content.

Gestural interactions on a seamless surface are inherently theatrical; every motion becomes performance, aligning neatly with today’s urge to self-mythologise. We don’t merely consume content, we perform our consumption of it. We react and gesture: swipe left, swipe right.

Steve Jobs’s first demonstration of the two-finger pinch-to-zoom was staged for show; the boundary between performance and interaction vanished. Buttons, knobs, and sliders possessed depth. Their erasure from our fridges, washing machines, and even our cars reflects the self-referential nature of our age: everything must resemble everything else, a literal collapse of depth.

Yet this flattening is neither inevitable nor irreversible. I genuinely believe that people who spend most of their internet time on laptops or desktops are wired differently from habitual phone users.

Laptops retain a tactile grounding: the click of keys, the heft of the machine, the edge of the screen with the real world behind it. These affordances anchor the body in reality. There is a boundary, a distinction between self and system. And with that boundary comes a different mode of attention, one less susceptible to seamless surfaces and frictionless signs.

The desktop or laptop is also more sensorial: cords, ports, sounds, even smells on occasion. It demands a place in your environment. Even if the device perches on your lap like a cat.

You look at the internet on a laptop,
but you touch the internet on a phone.

As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, this spiral will only accelerate. VR and XR are approaching fast. The world will continue to thicken with surfaces: shimmering, shifting, signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.

We can no longer gesture at the future; if we want it to be different, we must grip it tight.

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Given that a double-digit number of people unsubscribed from my weeknotes newsletter last week after I posted a poem, I’m going to assume everyone still reading is sufficiently indifferent to the form that I can go ahead and do it again.

One of the things I enjoy doing in my journal is splurging out whatever I’m thinking or feeling without stopping. Over the years it’s become a vital tool for the maintenance of my mental health.

I write in my diary at least once a day, sometimes more. Most of what ends up on this blog, or in my podcast, starts this way, or as a transcribed voice note. But the vast majority of this daily practice is left on the page as lexic exhaust.

But writing always happens in the edit, and compression is an important skill with a muscle that needs regular flexing. Often, if I’ve written something that isn’t going anywhere, I’ll read it back and then try to strip the whole thing down to its bones.

That’s how this post came about. I wrote it this afternoon and then edited it after dinner.

When you compress personal writing to these extremes, what emerges is something like a prose poem, or a lyric essay. But neither of those terms quite captures it. Instead, it feels like a distinctly stylised kind of prose. A form of online writing that borrows tone, pacing, and emotional resonance from poetry, with the clarity and contemplation of non-fiction essays. Close relatives might be found in newsletter culture, blog posts-as-art, or even podcast monologues.

I think there’s value in this kind of writing, and it’s something I produce quite often. And whether or not it fits neatly into a box, I want to share more of it, because I’ve stopped caring about whether I should share it or not.

Sitting This One Out

The market’s crashing.
Tech stocks are bleeding.
Friends are losing jobs. Again.

This is the third real-time crash of my life.
I feel the pull.
I’ve felt it before.

To watch. To know.
And to tell yourself you’re staying informed.

But somewhere Duncan says,
a man is sitting by a waterfall.
No phone. No headlines.
No idea how afraid he’s supposed to be.

I think I could be him.
Maybe that I should be.

I’ve been a good boy since holiday.
Inputs managed.
Lines held.

But it doesn’t take much.
To slip back under.
Into the current.

This morning my alarm went off
I opened the phone.
And there it all was-

Panic, piped in like gas.
Other people’s opinions before breakfast.

It stays with me all day.
A low hum.
Jittery nerves.
By noon, I’m flooded-adrenaline and moral urgency.
But not my own.

Timelines don’t just steal time online.
They shape your world.
They decide what matters.

It’s battle for attention.
And on the other side,
of the dark mirror.
The conflict of disinterest.

A two-step dance.
One step toward what matters.
One step away from what doesn’t.

It’s not nihilism.
It’s a form of care.

Refusal as clarity.
Indifference as strategy.
Not apathy.
Discernment.

Not everything earns your energy.
Very little does.

When I stay offline in the morning: write, make coffee, move slowly,
the day feels lighter.
It’s mine.
Not abstract. Not lost in the symbolic.
Real.

This new crisis, whatever it is, will play out.
It’s just that point in the time line.

I could watch it.
Post about it.
Lie to myself that it matters that I’m informed in real-time.

But I’m sitting this one out.

Posting only simulates agency.
It isn’t action.
It just makes things louder.
And it makes you feel worse.

It’s just noise.
And I don’t want to contribute.

The platforms want your outrage.
They profit from fear.
But not everything deserves your attention.

Yes, things are falling apart.
But panic isn’t participation.
It’s performance.

So no.

Better to hear the voice across the table.
Better to attend to what is here.
What is real.

Because sovereignty isn’t just where you place your attention.
It’s what you let drift by.

And right now?
I choose to overlook.

I’m sitting this one out.

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Hold On

What a wild time to be online right now. Tiktok shut up shop, millions of zeillennial Americans out of spite, have joined a Chinese app called ‘Little Red Book’, Trumps second term begins tomorrow, and yesterday he launched a MemeCoin on the Solana blockchain.

TRUMP Coin has sort of got lost in the noise in UK media due to the Tiktok shut down. But its way way way more insane, and way more significant news. In the last 48 hours Trump’s net worth increased by FIFTY BILLION (ILLIQUID) DOLLARS. Just days before he becomes president.

Now, when I woke up this morning I had thought to write a whole big long blog post about Trump Coin. About why it’s insane, and how we’re totally off the deep end without a map now, but I sort of said the main points on Discord last night:

This is a recapitulation of the real time attention markets thesis from the ‘New Economic Entertainment‘ essay and my post the other month on changing nature of content and identity online:

But we are beginning to see a backlash, users are monetising their own attention. The rise of real time attention markets, economic entertainment, prediction markets (and the coming era of Power Fandoms) are a kind of revenge of late 90’s early 00’s Utopianism. The idea of cognitive surplus. We’re starting to see the kinds of swarm/group intelligences predicted by Shirky / Tapscott – but distorted through contemporary capitalism’s relentless logic. It took super liquid markets and meme coins for them to emerge.

The Real Time Attention Markets essay was written by RM a couple of months ago and is a vital primer to understand where things are going in the short to medium term.

Real-time attention markets are engines of condensation. They take all the complexity of markets—prediction, value, speculation—and boil it down to the simplest, rawest energy: now. Attention, compressed into seconds. Community, compressed into swarms. Control, compressed into the illusion of choice.

But is this efficiency or erosion? A refinement of human interaction, or its ultimate trivialization? These systems don’t ask such questions. They don’t need to. They exist at the intersection of impulse and engineering, where everything becomes a lever to pull.

It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it? Maybe it’s progress. Maybe it’s just momentum.

RM and I, and others have been talking about Trump Coin all day, and basically everything I was going to say in today’s post got discussed in our Telegram group chat. It’s all been neatly summarised by RM in this post: We Control $Trump Now: With great allocation comes great responsibility, or you risk pitchforks.

Their site may claim “no official ties” to politics or Trump’s personality, but in the meme world, that’s laughable. Ideology, identity, and brand are now directly linked to price. Trust is governed by market makers, speculators, and hype cycles.

RM perfectly sums up my point in the screenshot above Trump Coin, and how tying yourself to a ticker of realtime sentiment and attention being insane:

I’m fascinated by this development but question how imitators will cope. Are you ready to have your worth fluctuate with every public move? Will you betray your community for a payout or keep inflating the balloon, hoping it never pops? Are you sacrificing personal freedom to appease believers, forced to cash out incrementally without tanking your value? This is the new face of autonomy—living as a price feed. Fun Fact you might now have unrealized gains taxes on your own self-worth, so you need to sell yourself into community servitude.

The $Trump coin has thrust us into an era where political identity, personal reputation, and memecoin speculation merge in real time.

Anyways.

I don’t often make straight up predictions, but I’ve been involved with crypto for 13/14 years at this point and think I can make one now. I think things are going to get even weirder from here on. BUT the next crypto bull run which is coming super soon, when it’s over and when it crashes, is going to lead to systemic risk to the rest of the economy.

Hold on.

On The Blog:

Over the last few weeks I’ve slowly slowly been putting up blog posts for old episodes of Permanently Moved. Apart from a few exceptions here and there, I didn’t start putting the scripts online until early 2020 – just before Lockdown – this in hindsight was a bit of a mistake but we live and learn.

It’s taking quite a while, and in order to not spend too much time on it all, I’m only doing 2 a day. I’ve got as far back as 2019, and have about 40 more to go if you include almost all the episodes from 2018 I need to do. You can check out these new deep archive pages here.

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• Finishing up 2024
• Big milestone in some contract work I’ve been doing
• Decisions, Decisions
• Wrote a whole brand new talk

Terminal Access

Peter Grey from Scarlet Imprint was recently interviewed by Ranveer Allahbadi on the TRS podcast. One of the biggest English language podcasts in India.

The interview is fantastic. Can’t recommend it enough. The conversation between Ranveer and Pete is very deep, thoughtful and engaged. Totally open, transparent and engaged. If only more western podcasts were like this.

Reading

I finished reading Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink . It’s fantastic a real page turner. I’ve made a note to update history of computing books post at some point.

I used to an Audible credit to get Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence. Haven’t started it yet but very much looking forward to it.

Richard Dawson – Gondola

The new Richard Dawson single is such a lovely. Dawson’s 2022 LP The Ruby Chord was a master piece. I can’t wait for the full album this is taken from to drop.

Remember Kids:

The post Hold On appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Discipline Doesn’t Arrive On Its Own

I am really struggling to get 2025 started. I’ve been pulling the starter cord over and over, but nothing is turning. It’s cold, dark, the news is a trash fire, everyone’s struggling to get work, and the media is making its money from a grim cacophony of crises and catastrophe that feels impossible to tune out.

I’ve got three things I need to get done before the 18th. All of them are half-finished projects I started before Christmas, which means 2024 is still hanging around, trailing behind me like a shadow I can’t quite shake.

I know what needs to be done. I need to do the things that need doing. But here I am, standing in the cold, pulling at the cord.

I thought I had a decent handle on my attention—on being able to focus and hold it until a job is finished. But right now, I just can’t seem to do it. I feel fine, physically and mentally, but for some reason, I can’t close out 2024. It’s as if the self-discipline I relied on has stayed behind, stuck in last year.

Discipline, I’ve realised, isn’t some inborn trait that a few lucky people have. It’s a habit—a mode of action you build through repetition. Like any habit, it takes effort to keep it going. I’ve heard people describe discipline as a muscle, and that works to a point. But for me, discipline is more like a cat. It doesn’t come when you call. It doesn’t follow commands. You can’t force it to show up.

You have to coax it into the room, make it feel welcome, and show it you’re ready to work with it. Sometimes, it curls up beside me when I’m excited about what I’m doing. But most of the time, it hides under the furniture, and I have to sit quietly and wait for it to come back. The trick is not to give up when it disappears—discipline always returns if you’re patient enough to keep trying.

It’s not like I’m missing strategies. I know how this works. I’ve read the books, followed the advice, and built habits. But right now, none of it feels accessible. Productivity tips don’t even register. I know what matters, but I’m just… not doing it.

For most of my life, I’ve been in a fight with myself. A constant voice in my head telling me I should be doing more, that I’m lazy, that I’m falling behind. Even when I’ve been productive, that voice hasn’t gone away—it just shifted the goalposts. If I listen to it too much, I get The Dread.

This self-criticism has driven me at times as a primary motivator, but it’s also draining. It made rest feel like failure and unfinished tasks feel like moral failings. The worst part is, I know it’s not true. Logically, I know I’m not lazy. I know I’m doing my best. But that voice doesn’t care about logic—it feeds on comparison, on the idea that everyone else is doing more, achieving more, being more.

No one shamed themselves into being more productive for long.

Right now however, I don’t feel guilty about not finishing the things I started in 2024—yet. I still have six days. But even so, letting go of the guilt doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s strange to stop tying my worth to my output. It might be freeing—who knows.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt stuck, and it won’t be the last. But I’ve learned that discipline isn’t about being perfect or always feeling motivated. It’s about showing up—imperfectly, inconsistently, but with intention.

No overthinking, no elaborate plans—just me, the tasks, and the doing.

Discipline doesn’t arrive on its own.

On The Blog:

Dec 2024 | Photo 365

Photo-a-day for the month of Dec 2024. End of year 3!

Living Alongside Computer People

I do appreciate where critics are coming from though, but let’s be honest: we already have AI-generated characters—agents—living alongside us in online spaces. Many are even connected to cryptocurrency wallets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And I get it—there’s something deeply uncanny about sharing online spaces with entities that aren’t human.

But here’s the thing: social media has already dehumanised us. It has trained us to behave like robots, to perform predictable scripts, to game algorithms for engagement. In many ways, AI profiles aren’t the cause of this transformation—they’re the proof of it.

The idea that we can avoid a future where social networks are populated by AI-generated profiles? That ship has sailed.

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Terminal Access

dimensions of experience: a (very) preliminary theory of futuring: Paul Graham Rave over at worldbuilding.agency suggests that futures are best understood as narratives. This allows comparisons based on media and storytelling methods.

toward a unified theory of futuring

All modes of futuring produce things that can be understood as narratives—not just experiential and narrative forms, but also foresight reports and projected-profit graphs and architectural maquettes and consumer electronics advertisements, all of which, knowingly or not, manifest futurity.

My main tool for presenting this argument will be the 2×2 matrix which has, for reasons fair and foul alike, become a cliché of futures work. To turn an overused and underexamined method back upon the field as a tool of methodology seems apropos, particularly when it comes to its more liminal and vital practices—but it also provides a simple, accessible way of thinking about the distinct dimensions of a thing. So: when it comes to futuring, we can consider two dimensions along which any given work can be placed. Those two dimensions are scale (X-axis) and perspective (Y-axis).

Reading

I finally finished The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade. I hope we can all stop talking about legibility now. This book draws a line under all that discourse. The final word. We can now move on and begin to talk about what it means to live in such a condition.

I burnt through the Warhammer audio book for Broken Crusade by Steven B. Fischer. A compelling last stand story. It was narrated by BBC actor Alex Lanipekun. He’s got one hell of a voice that fits Space Marines and Grimdark perfectly.

Started reading Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink after a recommendation from a rando on Twitter. This book is about the history and personalities behind ASML the Dutch company that makes silicon chip lithography machines. It’s fantastic. I will be updating my history of computing books soon.

Lambrini Girls – Who Let The Dogs Out (LP)

The Lambrini Girls full length is a belter. Every song on this album is a single. It’s Fucking Punk Rock. Can’t recommend this enough. The video for Cuntology 101 is rad:

Remember Kids:

The post Discipline Doesn’t Arrive On Its Own appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Retreat to Recalibrate

Back in 2021, I embarked on a “word diet”. It was a deliberate, almost ascetic effort to radically reduce my media consumption for a while. At the time, I was grappling with the fallout of the lockdown years, especially the doomscrolling habits I’d picked up in 2020. At the time I was thinking a lot about boundaries—specifically, how to set time for “doing” and “not doing.” I remember coming out of it quite refreshed.

Going into December this year, there is A LOT of ‘doing‘ to be done still and I find myself drawn to that idea again. So I’m considering another “word diet”. This time, though, I think I might step away from the Dark Forest for a bit too. Apart from work purposes (which is time bound) this means not being present in the Discord or Slack communities I frequent and regularly contribute to. So won’t be hanging out in the usual communities or dipping into the ongoing chatter. It feels necessary—a retreat to recalibrate.

I have all my DM’s across all the social networks and Chat apps pipped into Beeper anyway so I don’t actually need to have the apps open. So I’ll still be responsive to people messaging directly if you need me.

As for reading, I also plan to restrict myself to my RSS “favourites” folder. This list is almost exclusively made up of people I know, personal blogs and posts from individuals—real people, not websites optimised for clicks and engagement. Hopefully I will experience an intimate and intentional internet.

As part of the broader “media diet” I’ve also decided to set YouTube aside for the month too. YouTube has been a cornerstone of my media consumption for 15 or 16 years, especially since I don’t watch TV shows or films. But lately, I’ve found myself unsubscribing from channels and watching less and less anyways. So this December might be the nudge I need to finally sever my reliance on it.

This whole exercise is – in part – prompted by the rise in Bluesky and the wider changes to social media, and my own reaction to it. I’m just beyond exhausted by it all. I just need a break.

Marshall McLuhan famously argued that new media technologies don’t just change what we think but how we think. After 20 years of pickling my brain in rich media and real-time updates, I can feel the toll its taken. This diet is an attempt to debug myself.

This is, of course, just another attempt at ‘Stepping away from noise‘, and another front in the ‘Conflict of Disinterest’.

I’ll just be posting here, replying to emails and DM’s if you need me.

On The Blog:

In the Storm, a Fire

Quite a big drop OTB this week. ADH and I co-published our 2020 BSFA long listed Solarpunk short story In the Storm, a Fire. If you have 40mins or so to spare – check it out.

The fire looked recent. The storm must have doused the flames just too late. Chani pulled her bike to a stop, smelling soggy ash, hanging in the breathless air. She could see charred pews, hymnal pages scattered by the wind. A porcelain-white Jesus looked mournfully out of the wreckage.

The Catholic church—was “Catholic” still right?—stood just outside urban Boise. Chani walked around the blackened beams, interrupting the hazy sky like the ribcage of a giant, burnt beast—then stopped short. On the picket fence, graffiti scrawled red and black: “JEZ LOVER” on one side of the gate, “BABY KILLER” on the other.

“On no…” Chani said.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Final edit pass on 3k’s worth of essay
• Short call and 1 writing sprint on PROJECT FORK
• A call about PROJECT DIVE and renewed sense of urgency.
• PROJECT ENTRY: Monthly Report, Monthly meeting with funder, Full stream a head for next funding milestone.
• Replied to lots of nice emails to my contact inbox.

Terminal Access

Really enjoyed a recent missive from Gordon in his post blog incarnation over at Substack on ‘Advanced People Never Don’t Do The Basics’. If you have any kind of spiritual practice it’s well worth a read:

Hormozi’s framing is perfect because it retains the appeal or pull towards mastery. Without that frame, ‘starting with the basics’ sounds like ‘eat your vegetables’ or ‘you can go out play when you are done with your homework’. The basics are not just something you thunder through as fast as possible in order to get to the ‘good’ stuff. Advanced people do not progress from basic to advanced activities. They may add advanced activities to basic activities they always do.

Reading

I finally finished reading: Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J Silvio. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in ages. The book explores how the concept of animation permeates various aspects of Taiwanese culture and folk religion, and how the words and concepts bleed across into modern media and consumerism via traditional puppetry. Animation in the broadest sense in this book is the process of endowing objects, deities, and even brands with life and agency. SO GOOD.

I was convinced by the group chat to read Exordia by Seth Dickinson. it was pitched to me as: “Tom Clancy/Alien first contact/Cosmic Horror” and “What if Annihilation was about the Trolly Problem Meme”. Both these descriptions are highly accurate. Haven’t been able to put it down.

Still reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, and Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and the Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Still a lot on deck. Should finish all this pile by the end of the year.

Agent Elf – Lost In Control

I don’t know if anyone reading ever played Midnight Club Los Angeles on Xbox back in the day.

If you did, you will definitely know the song:

Amazingly, they played a one off 15 year reunion show yesterday and it was wild.

Now, they are buddies of mine – in fact two of them are in my band but it was cool to see them do their thing – what they were all about in their early 20’s. I only saw them once back in the day. In 2008 or something shortly before the broke up.

Remember Kids:

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A Rediscovered Map

One of the benefits of keeping a diary for over a decade and a half is that you can revisit your past thoughts and feelings to see what was on your mind during similar times. Every morning, before I start my day, I read my previous “on this day” entries, and after breakfast, I write in my diary. It has become a sort of ongoing dialogue across time, as sometimes I respond to things I ask myself in earlier entries.

This week, I’ve been encountering a younger version of myself through these entries, and observing how my thoughts from years ago resonate today. In Episode #11 of my podcast, way back in 2018, I read a piece titled “In a Time Like This…”, written by a friend during the winter of 2016/2017. Yesterday, on November 9th, I stumbled across something my 31-year-old self had written in 2016, in a similar vein. I had completely forgotten about it, but re-reading it the other morning I remembered writing it in one sitting, across tube and train late at night – I was in quite a dark place.

It was a cringe-worthy piece in the style of a ‘Notes Toward a Manifesto’. Yet, reading it now, in November 2024, I realise it encapsulates the approach I’ve taken toward life and how I’ve conducted myself online ever since.

The core themes of this blog, my podcast, and much of the creative work I’ve been involved in since I left social media and returned to blogging in 2018 are all present in the text. It’s striking how much of what I’ve explored since seems to trace back to this entry—which, until this week, I had totally forgotten writing. Long-time readers and followers of my blog or podcast will likely recognise these ideas too, as they’ve quietly shaped everything I’ve written, recorded, and created over the years.

Maybe these Notes were, in some sense, a personal manifesto.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2016, with only a light edit:

The above is, of course, excruciatingly cringeworthy. Yet at the same time, everything is there—a map or a landscape of ideas that I’ve spent the last eight years exploring. When I wrote those words I was probably very drunk, but as the decade has unfolded, it seems I’ve acted upon them in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

I briefly considered going through my blog and podcast archives to link every instance where these ideas have surfaced. But that felt like too much effort. Instead, I invite you to click the ‘Random Post 🎲‘ link in my nav bar. I’d wager that within three clicks, you’ll stumble upon something shaped by the thoughts above.

Looking back, this process reinforces a truth I’ve come to believe: if you want to make meaningful change, you must first be honest with yourself. Strip away the facade, the expectations of the center, and write down what you genuinely believe—what you want, what you stand for. Don’t worry about how raw or unpolished it seems. The important part is to put it out there and then act on it.

Over time, those small acts of alignment—between what you believe and how you live—will accumulate. You’ll build a body of work, a way of being, that reflects the things you care about most. And maybe, when you look back years later, you’ll see not just how far you’ve come, but how much of that journey started with the courage to start.

On The Blog:

Oct 2024 | Photo 365

Photo-a-day for the month of October 2024.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Terminal Access

Ewen dropped this debut post/podcast episode into a Discord i’m in and I can’t recommend it enough!!

Incredibly well researched and produced. Fantastic sound design. I love to hear/read anyone make work and talk enthusiastically about things they are passionate about. Give it a listen!

Reading

I smashed though a re-read of Andy Weirs ‘The Martian’ in the car back from Wales … It wasn’t as good as I remember it – at all. The main character – astronaut Mark Watney – has an extremely Reddit brained personality. Quite an unpleasant character to be around for the length of a novel – 2015 was a long time ago… This might be a rare time where I say that the movie is better than the book.

Mount Eerie – Night Palace

Wow.

Remember Kids:

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