The Backrooms as Permissive IP

A lot has been written about the commercial success of Backrooms in the last week: a movie by a 20-year-old director, shot when he was 19, which has become A24’s highest-grossing opening film.

I criticise the cultural platform logic of equating financial success with artistic merit in Slop Machines (It’s nearly finished I promise), but it’s obvious why Backrooms success has become a mirror to Disney’s latest attempt to frack the last of the nostalgium out of the Star Wars franchise.

I think what’s more interesting is Backrooms as a cultural and media phenomenon. Over the last few years, my work on worlds, world-building, and online culture means I have opinions from which to step back and look at it more broadly.

Beginning life on 4chan in 2019 with the pairing of an image and another anonymous comment, The Backrooms formed the basis for a cultural blooming: an emergent, post-commodity story world. A kind of cultural myth-object, completely outside the logic and control of the of legacy 20th Century cultural stack.

It’s the clearest example of the sort of thing I was talking about when I wrote about Permissive IPs back in 2020.

The Backrooms almost immediately blossomed into a vast sprawl of wikis, video games, and communities of people engaging with, and expanding the world.

There is the Backrooms Wikidot, which is probably the closest thing to the “literary” Backrooms, with the community world building out levels, entities, objects, phenomena, and multiple competing canons. There is also the Backrooms Fandom wiki, which has its own flavour of lore. There are Reddit communities posting collecting photos of liminal spaces that feel like the Backrooms; imageboards, YouTube creators, Minecraft maps, Garry’s Mod maps and much more.

Then there are the games. Escape the Backrooms (2022), Inside the Backrooms (2022), Backrooms: Lost Tape (2022), The Backrooms 1998 (2022), Enter the Backrooms (2021), and dozens of smaller horror experiments on Steam and itch.io.

None of these games are “official” in any meaningful sense, at least now as we understand officiality through the logic of late 20th Century franchise media. They are all products of different people picking up the myth-object and turning it around, and producing folk art about it.

The Movie Is Downstream From The Folk Art

This expansion of The Backrooms as a piece of mindshare in the cultural sphere is entirely dependent on another case I’ve written about: world literacy.

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.

Audiences now arrive with expectations around the grammar of a world. They understand that a story is often just a window onto a larger implied reality, and they brought knowing how to already “read the world” all of this to The Backrooms.

The important thing is that The Backrooms is a collective idea, a piece of modern folklore which, much like earlier online bloomings of this phenomenon like Slenderman, immediately generates folk art.

The key point is that The Backrooms is a permissive entity within the mindshare of franchise media. An immediately understandable reality. An immediately understandable fiction. A door into a pre-existing, previously uncharted location in our collective cultural vector space.

One of the important learnings is that the world of the Backrooms is a “place”. Or rather, it is the minimum viable location. Yellow wallpaper, carpet, buzzing lights, and the sense that something has gone wrong with the structure of reality. Is all that’s needed for an audience with a high degree of world literacy to begin inferring the rest.

Backrooms (2026)

Kane Parsons, the director of A24’s Backrooms, released the first version of his own particular Backrooms universe on YouTube at the age of 16. It was an enormously successful piece of media made almost entirely in the open source software tool Blender.

If you have ever asked yourself what you would have done during the pandemic if you had been 14 years old, the answer for Parsons was: download Blender and filmmaking tutorials from YouTube directly into your brain. Two years later, this culminated in the following film on his channel Kane Pixels:

If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching. You can immediately see from its execution why producers at A24 immediately reached out about developing a feature-length version with him.

Because The Backrooms is a Permissive IP, Parsons did not need to own the whole thing in order to make a world inside it. With The Backrooms (Found Footage) parsons created his own branch of the world of The Backrooms. Developing its lore with: research footage, government or corporate experiments, missing persons, and institutional dread and intrigue, are all part of his particular interpretation of the world.

Even with the movie Pearsons hasn’t created ‘the whole’ of The Backrooms. He has created a Backrooms. A very successful Backrooms. And whilst the movie is now in theatres with institutional backing, it still sits inside a wider field of folk production.

I think what Hollywood is going to take away from the success of the movie is the wrong thing entirely. They will look at The Backrooms and see “IP”, commodity franchise dollar signs, instead of recognising a cultural object whose value emerged from permission, participation, and the absence of a single canonical owner.

Bedroom Tools

In 2021, I was working with Rival on the strategy for a large-scale, multi-use, permanent home in West Berlin for an art x technology foundation. During that period, and ever since, I have been trying to get my Millennial and Gen X peers, especially those standing at the gates of cultural institutions, to understand that this kind of “folk art” is the future.

In fact I remember saying something to the effect of, “right now in their bedroom a 14 year old is using a game engine to create a super important cultural artefact.” and they were!

In addition to world literacy, we also have to talk about ‘digital literacy’ and what it even means in the mid to late 2020’s.

When I went to university in 2003 my welcome pack included a quick start guide on how to use Microsoft’s Office Suite and step by step instructions on how to access my university email. Digital literacy meant a familiarity with a set of common programs: word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint, etc.

My university machine was my first ‘personal computer’ not shared with my family. Some of my flatmates arrived at university without a computer at all, and had to use the library’s computer labs to write all their assignments until their next loan came through.

Nevertheless we all arrived with a baseline familiarity with these tools required of us for digital literacy in the early 00’s. In fact, the first six weeks of my first year music and technology module consisted of an extremely boring introduction to DAWs. The course was designed in 2000, for students arriving having never used a DAW in their lives. Whereas I arrived being ‘literate’ in Logic, Cubase, FruityLoops, and trackers, hardware interfaces etc.

In the mid-2020s, there is now an entire generation, exemplified by people like Kane Parsons, at the lower end of Gen Z and the upper cohort of the emerging Generation Alpha, who have a comprehensive grasp not just of word processors and spreadsheets, but of game engines and 3D modelling software.

Perhaps they were never formally taught these tools, but they have ambiently absorbed them through daily life: Blender, Roblox, Fortnite Creator, Minecraft, YouTube tutorials, Discord servers, lore videos, modding communities. They also have a highly developed sense of spatial aesthetics and arrangement, developed by spending time inside virtual worlds.

Yes, my Millennial manager friends will moan in the pub about young people straight out of university arriving into the workplace without a clue about how shared drives, folder structures, and SharePoint work. But there is an entire cohort of people in the workplace who have a deep familiarity with video editing, audio editing, 3D modelling software, game engines, spatial composition, sound design, meme formats, lore videos, and publishing.

There is a much wider argument to be made here, and is my contribution to The Culture Stack, but I think the point is made, and Kane Parsons is basically my go-to high-profile example of this phenomenon.

I won’t romanticise it though, there are plenty of young people who are bad with computers, just as there are plenty of people in general who are bad with computers. Email, and SharePoint will always remain obscure occult systems to many of them. But there is also a generation of people who have grown up inside a much broader media tooling environment. They know what a render is. They know what a editing timeline is. They know what an asset is and what a game engine does. And via fandom they know how lore can be collectively made, uploaded, discussed, and iterated.

This interview with Backrooms millennial cinematographer is really interesting to hear how much he learnt from Parsons about using Blender. The whole film was pre-vis’d in Blender, lots of camera tests and experiments done virtually, the world was then exported to CAD software the the sets were designed and constructed. The source of knowledge however was always the blender file.

The success of The Backrooms film points to an audience who interacted with, contributed to, or thought about the Backrooms in the context of it being a Permissive IP. The success of the commercial media is downstream from the folk art.

Protocal Art

Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are currently out there in the media mines trying to explain Protocol Art to people. In its shortest form based on my understanding: art made by designing the conditions under which culture happens.

Which is exactly what Permissive IPs cohere into as well. They are not just “open franchises”. They are intellectual protocols: cultural objects that establish the conditions under which folk production can occur at scale. Objects people can pick up and use to generate more culture. Like Solarpunk as memetic engine.

The anonymous person who posted that image on 4chan in 2019 almost certainly wasn’t thinking about any of this. Nor was the person who wrote the reply. But together, they set the conditions under which a world could unfold. Hollywood can’t buy or replicate this under the conditions of 100 years of copyright inertia and media commodity thinking.

This doesn’t mean Permissive IPs can’t be designed, managed, or stewarded. They absolutely can. That is the work of world runners. People who understand that the value of the world is not held in a single canonical text, but in the ongoing conditions that allow others to enter, contribute, elaborate, and make more culture.

A world runner does not ask: how do we control this?
They ask: what does this world need in order to keep unfolding?

Experience.Computer– Van Neistat

https://experience.computer/

IN THIS EPISODE

Jay Springett and first-generation digital filmmaker and artist Van Neistat explore the mind’s eye as an editing bay and cinematic “hard cuts” in the imagination. Then they discuss: text and video as physical raw material, setting creative boundaries with AI, and consider the YouTube algorithm as ultimately just a mirror of ourselves.

Also in this episode:

• Typewriters, ribbon ink, and treating text as a physical raw material

• Why traditional cinema is Formula One, but is YouTube professional skateboarding

• Visualising to find lost items in physical space

• The “good enough” threshold and Tom Sachs’ Crusty Seal of Approval

It was a real pleasure to meet and speak with Van! please do give it a listen!

On The Blog

May 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 5. Photo-a-day for the month of May 2026.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Lunch with Bobby Fishkin from Crowddoing
• Long call catching up with BV about his Venice Biennale successes.
• I edited next episode of the podcast end to end!
• Had a call with a financial adviser
• Call about Liquid UX
• Spreadsheets and projections for one of the orgs I advise.

Terminal Access

I normally post something thats come out recently that I feel is timeline. But Venkat’s 2025 piece “Welcome to the Cosmopolis” has been doing the rounds again, it’s popped up in several group chats, and finally this week I read it properly.

It’s a really chewy piece and unlocked something for me, that I’ve been thinking about but been unable to articulate. Worth reading if you haven’t come across it already!

The element of design enters a cosmopolis as a functionally narrow but composable unit of behavioral logic, the protocol. The architecture of a cosmopolis is a result of a vast number of protocol-design decisions made around a powerful new core technology.

Protocols exist within the territorial logic of nation states and network logic of metropolises too, of course, but they are constitutive in the case of cosmopolises.

In other news RIP John Blanche

Reading

I picked up Duncan Barford of Occult experiments in the home/Baptists Head fame’s first novel The Going Down.

When longtime friends Bailey and Steve perform a final ritual in a house they once shared, the dead and the underworld haunt their lives and challenge their friendship. And when Steve’s girlfriend is drawn in, a dark secret binding Bailey finally comes to light.

Expertly written, The Going Down is not just a work of beautiful fiction but also a transformative work of magical dreaming.

“Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Fantastic book. I’m enjoying it so so much. Never read anything like it.

JYOCHO’s – Singles 26 (EP)

Aside from listening the shit out of last years Headache album *again*. This week I spent a lot of time with Japanese math rock masters JYOCHO‘s new EP collecting the last year or so of singles.

My favourite single on the EP is Strong Body.

Remember Kids:

The post The Backrooms as Permissive IP | Weeknotes #442 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Telephone

I found out this week that the information passing parlour game “Chinese Whispers” as it was called when I was growing up (“Telephone” in the USA) isn’t some super old English name for it. It’s a relatively recent term first used in print in 1964! Drawing on racist stereotypes about how Chinese people must all be communists and whispering secrets and speaking in a way that was deliberately confusing to Westerners.

Before that, Victorians called it “Russian Scandal” (1861) and “Russian Gossip” (1880s). An even older 16th-century Italian precursor was the “game of the ear.” Ironically, in China, the game is just called chuánhuà (传话) “passing words.”

Whilst game of the ear is the oldest written name/evidence we have for the existence of the game, it seems to me that the phenomenon of oral transmission mutating from person to person must be tens’s if not hundreds of thousands of years old? Sitting around a campfire and passing a narrative around the group from ear to ear is something we could and would have done for the history of humanity. ‘Gossip’ is a much better metaphor and name than telephone or whispers.

Later on in my wikipedia binge I found this cool PDF from 1945 from the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) a lecture by Gordon W. Allport and Leo J. Postman on The basic psychology of rumour. They say that rumours arise when highly important events are shrouded in ambiguity, a combination that thrives during periods of high societal censorship an shock events like Pearl Harbor.

They classify rumours into three broad categories: “fear,” “hostility,” and “wish”. Each providing a dual psychological function: explaining away personal anxiety and providing people an emotional outlet to vent anger at convenient scapegoats, like minority groups or the government. To understand how rumors distort reality, the authors conducted experiments showing that stories undergo a three-part “embedding process” as they spread: leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. 

• Levelling strips the story of most details to make it concise and easy to remember.
• Sharpening selectively exaggerates a few specific, often emotionally charged details that stand out.
• Assimilation reshapes the remaining facts to fit the listener’s pre-existing cultural stereotypes, prejudices, and expectations.

in the end, the objective truth is completely replaced by a subjective narrative that reflects the group’s collective anxieties and biases, meaning that by the time a rumour has traveled through a chain of people, it is no longer a valid guide for belief or action.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this with regard to the neo-oral, or post-truth condition. The authors of the paper never envision the world we are in today. When fact checking, and verifiable sources of information are themselves subject to the same distrust and ambiguity pressures that cause the rise in rumour/conspiracy etc in the first place. If you can’t rely on external “secure standards” as they call them, instead you have to lean on internal and social safeguards that the authors didn’t fully anticipate or explore but are logically implied in the text. Rumours (conspiracy) are, to use Postman and Allport’s words a “barometer of social strain.”

If you work in media today, you need to understand this: if a meme or rumor goes wildly viral, the rumor itself is the truth about the underlying fear, even if the facts are totally wrong. You cannot fight an emotional rumour with a spreadsheet of facts. You have to address the anxiety behind it. Which is the exact opposite of the institutional fact checking industry like BBC verify are trying to do. Because “Feelings don’t care about facts”.

But institutions face massive pressure to manufacture optimism. If millions of people feel like their country is sliding backward, and an outlet like the BBC refuses to validate that reality, the broadcaster becomes part of the “ambiguity” fueling the conspiracy in the first place. Admitting that we are in deep trouble is dismissed as unpatriotic or “doomerism.”

But we don’t need manufactured hope; we need a return to emotional truth. Which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently with solarpunk. Luckily, emotional truth, rather than fact is exact the sort of thing thing the Arts and Humanities do best.

Start Select Reset 📑

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£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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Terminal Access

This is pretty cool. The entire catchment of the River Wye has become the first in the UK to be formally granted legal rights as a living ecosystem through a new charter.

While much of the Wye, or Gwy in Welsh, is protected as a special area of conservation, and the rights in the charter are already recognised across existing legislation and regulatory frameworks, the river has suffered near ecological collapse over the past decade.

Campaigners say excess nutrients from the rapid expansion of industrial chicken farming in the river’s catchment area – aggravated by sewage spills – have caused algae, fungus and weed growth that has suffocated the ecosystem.

Reading

I finished reading Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald. It’s a really engaging history, and is told really well with a blend of personal anecdote/history and original interviews/reporting. A whole career’s worth of interivews make the history feel lived though. Highly recommend it!

I started reading Hive by Dan Abnett. It’s an absolutely mammoth two part Warhammer 40k novel. Super cool setting. Feels like he has a story to tell and was exhausted by the wider setting and needed a change in setting.

Castle Rat – The Bestiary (LP)

Now.. I’m a sucker for doom, stoner rock, and psychedelic metal band. Especially if they dress in 70s hammer horror esq costumes and the whole thing is a concept album telling the story of mystical creatures preserved by “The Wizard”.

Commenting on the album, The Rat Queen states: “‘The Bestiary’ is a conceptual book of beasts… containing a collection of mystical creatures from a world forgotten. The last remaining souls of each have been gathered and preserved by ‘The Wizard.’ Cautionary tales of each beast and The Wizard himself are woven through the power of traditional heavy metal song and spell.”

This band RIPS!!

Remember Kids:

The post Telephone | Weeknotes #440 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This post moves from the macro to the micro. It starts with my thoughts on the “Butlerian Jihad” and the ongoing cultural reception of AI, shifts into why I think the “Social Media Winter” has become a nuclear one, and I also talk about why I’m still blogging on the open web.

I also talk about some of the bigger professional achievements and projects I’m proud of this year: cybersecurity games and on-chain interactive fiction, my “Little Guys” (AI companions) writing, and a couple of other personal bits and bobs too.

It turns out that when you stop scrolling and start thinking, there’s was a lot to say. It’s a big post. Feel free to take your time with it, and don’t forget to leave a comment below.

Culture War Iconoclasts

Genocide and other horrors aside, the most dominant thing in the cultural sphere last year was, of course, the further acceleration and cultural reception of AI. By AI of course I mean the now 9 year old technology known as the Self-attention-based Transformer. Which currently falls under the catch all word of “AI”.

I wrote an episode of Permanently Moved early in the year called “The Information Age Iconoclasm”. I still stand by that framing.

But as the year progressed the contours of the cultural divide (war) over the reception of this new technology solidified.

Butlerian Jihad

Using the term from a religious holy war Dune is quite apt, because there are supporters on both sides of the argument with both high and hard opinions that I suspect are never going to change.

More reasonable Anti-AI folks think of themselves as Neo Luddites, taking the position of being against a new technology harmful to the commonality which is fine. But in many people in the latter half of 2025 have taken on postures more akin to religious zealots. More like the iconoclasm of the Byzantine Empire than political actors.

There have been a few articles in recent weeks that to my mind put the data centre energy and water issues to bed. This one on why the zealots don’t care is also very good.

Off the top of my head there are several currents inside the Anti-Ai camp:

• The labour and consent people, who are basically saying: this is extraction; this is wage pressure; this is unlicensed training; this is enclosure of the commons.
• Artists and craft defenders, for whom the entire point is the integrity or sacredness of art; not just “I want to get paid” crowd, but “Signs and images are what make us human”.
• Environmental and infrastructure critics, who see the whole stack as an emissions and compute arms race.
• Epistemic doomers, who are worried about the infinite media machine; fraud, spam, persuasion, the corrosion of trust, the collapse of shared reality.
• There’s a moral panic; the “think of the children” contingent who treat the whole thing as a kind of cultural contamination.
  • That AI-generated media is a solvent on development and taste, that kids will be raised on slop, that nobody will learn to write, draw, read deeply, or struggle through the apprentice stages because the machine will do it for them.
    • In its softer form it’s a legitimate anxiety about education, attention, and the conditions for becoming a competent adult.
    • In its harder form it turns into a familiar reactionary posture, where “protecting children” becomes a rhetorical trump card and “no one can read and write” is a blanket story.
• Then there’s the purity wing, who are the iconoclasts proper. Taboo. Using the tool is a stain, touching it makes you complicit, and any beneficial application is still treated as contaminated by the original sin.

Things have grown so bad in this final camp that in late 2025 over on Bsky, people were expressing Anti-Ai opinions so fervently that they were effectively ‘pro-cancer’. Frothing at the mouth about the use of transformer technologies in early cancer detection. This is not a normal response to a new technology?, at least not in my lifetime so far, that’s for sure.

Speaking with friends, close friends even, who are anti-AI for their own reasons and fall across the camps listed above, their position sometimes registers to me almost as irrational as the Christian / Conservative satanic panic campaigns I experienced the tail end of first hand during the late 90s/early 00s. The difference, of course, being that the Satanic Panic was a “hallucination of harm”, whereas the AI-resistance about the “harm of hallucination”. I just think that when arguments slip from ‘how do we get paid?’ to ‘this technology is inherently demonic,’ the wider movement loses its political utility and becomes a purely aesthetic exorcism.

None of my friends in this camp, I think, I hope, would go so far as to be pro-cancer. But nevertheless, the level of zealotry is really concerning. It’s also very weird interpersonally given that we agree on 80 to 90 percent on other things; politics, culture, taste in books, etc.

And to be clear, I share some of the very real concerns from across the spectrum of Anti-AI camps. And I’m also not saying that things are any better over in the the Pro-AI camp either.

It’s all hyperbolic, hype train all the time over there too. I think you can also sort the pro-AI side into a few churches, most of which are operating on some flavour of inevitability.

• The accelerationist wing doing Silicon Valley eschatology; we’re building God, history demands it, anyone resisting is a peasant with a torch.
• The aliens are here: theres a weird new thing inside of the computer and it’s talking to us.
• Competitive geopolitical realists; if we don’t do it, China will (and they will).
• Builders; who just want to see what they can do, make useful tools right now, and society will patch the harms later. (the WWW approach)
• The abundance crowd, selling a near-future where everyone gets a tutor, a lawyer, a doctor. We’ll cure cancer and live forever. Scarcity is over bro.
• Safety freaks: “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies “
• And the Vulture Capitalists who don’t have any opinion on anything beyond number go up.

The Butlerian Jihad does not have a unified front, on other side. Both are landscapes of competing anxieties. But so is the rest of the culture war too.

Thinking about the warring sides, you’d be forgiven for wanting to opt-out entirely. But unfortunately we are all, by virtue of our participation in this culture, in the present moment, in the mid morning after the dawn of the Information Age, already conscripted into the consequences of the silicon transistor. And I find my own coordinates firmly established.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am very much in the pro-AI camp, but then again I’m also pro-metaverse and pro-blockchains too. And I genuinely think that the confluence of AI, new monetary technologies and, worlds are in the medium-term the future and where all this is going.

I’m an ‘The aliens are here’ pro-AI guy. This anecdote sums my own position up I think:

Late last year I was in a meeting with a bunch of folks and got asked what I thought about AI, and I replied:

“I cannot believe that it exists. A fucking alien intelligence is arriving. It’s insane that the application of the raw transcendent qualities of mathematics to a substrate of a vast majority of all of human culture resulting in the creation of a hyper-dimensional crystal has machined into existence a monster inside of my computer.”

I realised after the words came out of my mouth that I had misread the room. They had only wanted to know what I thought about the newest version of ChatGPT.

The Information Age

I was back on New Models podcast late last year talking about forthcoming book SLOP MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE.

Here’s the promo clip, as I think it’s a useful recapitulation of some of what I wrote nearly 9 months ago in ‘Information Age Iconoclasm’.

That conversational riff is basically a shorthand for a much larger historical anxiety I’ve been chewing on for a while. We often mistake the tool for the event. But when we look back, the tool is just the spark for the fire that follows.

Everything that we know about the nature of quote-unquote modernity: nation states, well-informed citizens, and Westphalian governmental arrangements etc are post the invention of the printing press. But they are also all ideas that emerged after the end of the Thirty Years War.

The wars of religion didn’t happen after the invention technology of the printing press itself. But over the consequences of the invention of that technology.

In history class at school we’re taught that the printing press gets invented, and then 100 years later, someone stuck a pamphlet on the door of a church, and then … 8 million people died.

Would it really be so surprising to read in a history book sometime in the future about the world-changing invention of the silicon transistor, and then less than 70 years later we arrived at thinking machines… and then lots of people died?

The crystal fire of the solid state transistor was second Promethean moment for humanity. You, I and everyone alive right now are living though the early consequences of that moment. We live in the Information Age.

This invention of mathematical Self-attention-based Transformer and its consequences are downstream of the transistor. If we all like our super-fast MacBooks, iPhones, televisions, Xbox’s, then AI also comes along with it I’m afraid. And so too does the ubiquitous surveillance state, cyberpunk corporate stacks, and everything else that’s bad about the current era. It’s all bound up in our early period of living inside, and with, computational culture.

The last century saw its own fair share technological development of course. In media; photography, film, radio; television etc All of them shaped our understanding of what media ‘is’. And just as for people who lived through the advent of film or photography, it raised questions about the nature of the image, of what it is. We face those questions too.

2026 marks the beginning of the true age of infinite media machines.

And we now must face the questions that this raises. What is an image? What is a piece of text? What does it even all mean?

I guess if you don’t want to face, or bother with the question, you join the Butlerian Jihad.

But for the rest of us, the task of 2026 isn’t to smash the machines, but as I said in 2022, we need to figure out what kind of humans we intend to be while standing alongside them.

Social Media

2025 was to my mind also the year we all finally stopped calling it a “social media winter” and admitted the truth: the epoch has turned its actually a nuclear winter. The tectonics of the web have shifted and things have moved on. The short-form, text-based medium most millennials think of a ‘social media’ is over.

In retrospect, the Web 2.0 idea of Twitter, throwing the entire world into a single massive group chat seems like a fundamental category error. Once we were actually all inside in the global village, we mistook proximity for community.

I called Bluesky a “ghetto” about eighteen months ago, and despite using the platform myself, the label still sticks. These replacement platforms are all just smaller rooms built around the same flawed assumptions. I just don’t know why we are all still trying to hold “the discourse” inside an architectural framework that can’t support it. To answer my own question: Because it’s “Fun” sometimes? I guess?

For the last half-decade or so “creators” have had to live with a bifurcated consciousness. You don’t write or make anything for people; you make it for the code space you’re operating inside of.

As Kevin Munger says in his essay ‘The Youtube Apparatus” the primary audience on any platform is the algorithm. The secondary audience for anyone online is actually real human beings. (To complicate things further it’s been clear since the release of GPT 2 that LLMs are a also a kind of future audience.)

Anyways, to succeed online, you need to be legible to the code space you are inside of. To be distributed, you must obey the “physics” of the feed.

What this has lead to is a massive economic rot, the entire medium was built on an incentive structure that rewards velocity over veracity and outrage over insight.

On social media platforms attention is the main bottleneck, the friction they monetised. Platforms are incentivised to keep you on the app, not to keep you informed. In an ad-supported model, the narrative economy always selects for the “small thought” that sparks a thousand angry replies. So the incentive becomes “harvest attention at any cost”. The good news however is that LLMs exist now, and as my buddy Deepfates said recently: “The attention economy was caused by attention being scarce. When we can turn electricity into attention, the bottleneck moves as well.“

In addition to the twilight of the short-form text apps, I also get the sense we are seeing the sunsetting over short-form video too. I’ll admit that it fully still currently dominates, but its delivery mechanism is so tightly bound to the algorithmic feed and so dependent on the same bankrupt incentive structures, I think that is beginning to cannibalise itself too.

In that post about Bluesky I said that “Little text boxes produce little thoughts.”. I honestly have come to believe that you cannot have a high-functioning society when the primary medium of communication demands the truncation of the human intellect.

I highly recommend reading Jacqueline Fendt’s essay Democracy, Neo-Orality, and the Unraveling of Political Norms (thanks New Models podcast for surfacing this!)

Democratic norms are unraveling amid a deep transformation in how we know, feel, and communicate in public. This essay argues that what we are witnessing is not merely institutional decay but a shift in the epistemic and affective foundations of democratic life itself. Drawing on media theory, political communication, legal scholarship, and post-truth studies, we introduce the concept of neo-orality to describe an emerging mode of political discourse defined by immediacy, affect, narrative, and performance.

I think we might just need to write off the entire medium of short-form text for a generation. At lest for a few internet epochs anyways. This isn’t to say short-form text based ghettos will disappear. Mailing lists, blogs, newsletters, forums, all remain the old-growth forest of the web.

But the era of the short-form text based media as our primary lens for reality is finished. The new season has already begun over on Roblox and Minecraft etc. But anyone older than the very youngest of Gen Z probably won’t be participating in it. For the rest of us all we have is ‘The Great Retreat’.

In my 2023 in review post, I was already trying to articulate what lay on the other side of this collapse. Having argued since 2019 that ‘Your Attention is Sovereign,’ 2025 was the year I think that ‘The Audience’ finally realised that reclaiming that sovereignty requires a structural break from the platforms designed to monetise our distraction. They needed to change their behaviours.

Health

In 2023 I wrote about my anxiety and the effects that taking Inositol had on it. This year i have other health news to report: and quite possibly the most important news of the year. A biological plot twist I didn’t see coming.

After living with Crohn’s disease since I was 17, this year’s “big event” was my colonoscopy in November. I’ve had loads throughout my life but the results this time were different: No evidence of active Crohn’s.

When I spoke to my consultant about the results earlier this month, he said was genuinely “made up” for me, though he admitted that seeing this level of activity after 23 years of active Crohn’s is so highly unusual that we’re now both in a bit of a “now what?” situation.

When I asked about coming off the meds he was refreshingly honest, telling me “your guess is as good as mine” and said that the official guidance he’d been reading in preparation for our call was vague at best.

Because we are both in such uncharted territory, I’m going to be tapering my meds down to 1g a day (halved from 2g) while he passes my information along to the ongoing study I’ve been apart of since I was diagnosed 23 years go to help them make sense of long-term cases like mine.

Not out the woods (or the ward?) yet though, as I still have other on-going problems with my guts. He mentioned/warned that I’ll likely still need an operation for my hiatus hernia and Schatzki ring at some point in the next ten years or so, but for now the Crohn’s is taking a back seat. So regular visits to the outpatients will drop to just once a year.

On The Blog

I think my 2018 decision to re-embrace blogging as my “primary means of online communication”, remains the single best decision I’ve ever consciously made about how I behave on, and interact with, the Internet.

In 2025, thejaymo.net had a good year. I wrote 123,382 words over 104 posts. Which I just noticed (while looking up the figures in my dashboard) is actually the least amount of words since 2021 and the fewest number of posts since 2019. Not that any of that matters per-say, this isn’t a competition.

It has just been a good year around here though. Several posts were shared more widely than anything I’ve written in a long time, resulting in conversations and connections that were both monetarily valuable, and intellectually stimulating. Thats to my mind sort of the whole point of having a blog or a personal website: it’s yours. You can put whatever you want on it, and people might read it.

One of the biggest differences between a blog and a social feed is the nature of the “scroll”. Only a psychopath scrolls through years and years of short-form text posts back to 2020, but people occasionally will, and do! spend hours browsing this site and reading the things I’ve placed on it. Because a post is addressable.

This speaks a little to what I wrote in “The Doc Web” back in 2024, about people reading lots of your writing and then reaching out leads to extremely context-rich conversations at the point of first contact. Just recently, I met someone in the pub after a conference event who said, “Oh yeah, I know your blog. I’ve read a couple of the posts on X and Y.”

And this I think is where the whole value of producing an archive of thought online comes from, it compounds. Every post might be someone’s first contact with you. But to speak to the reaction above, you do need to write for an audience rather than the algorithm.

For a long while now, I’ve been thinking about this website the same way I talk about my podcast, Individual posts are just entries in a larger hyper-textual object I’m constructing. The object is the entire website in its entirety, not the individual posts. The whole site becomes the project, which I think is a useful way of thinking if you want to start one of your own.

I can assure you that starting a blog in 2026 will not result in a massive readership any time soon. To illustrate the scale of things, this blog gets more views a week now, than it did in the entirety of 2018. But none of that matters, the most important point is that a blog is a place to put your writing. Even Substack with all it’s built-in mechanisms for reach, faces similar challenges with disheartened early stage writers. And even then I suspect the “discovery” dial on that platform will be turned down throughout 2026.

Some of my friends with websites have, over the last year or so told me that they feel like they are the last holdouts in a ghost town, but I don’t see running a website that way at all. I feel more like a middle aged gardener out in public in the sunshine, enjoying his garden. I’m thrill whenever anyone swings by, and it feels a little like speaking to my neighbour over the fence. Everything, I feel is quite casual and informal around here.

I would however, like to note before I close that unlike social networks or Substack, running a website costs actual money. I don’t just mean the domain, but hosting fees and the other literal expenses of its existence. The fact that independent bloggers and website owners put money down to stay outside in public, out in the sunshine, I think is an important distinction that should be recognised, or mentioned more by folks with blogs.

Finally, as social media continues its retreat, one of the things I want to do in 2026 is re-engage with the long-neglected comment economy. I think it would be worth while to move beyond my own walls and leave my thoughts, comments etc on the blog posts I follow. It’s always a thrill when someone leaves a comment here, I assume the feeling is reciprocal.

A return to ‘Comment Culture’ feels like a good way of acknowledging the archipelago we’re all still building together.

Permanently Moved

I spent two whole episodes in the summer reflecting on the completion of 301 episodes of Permanently Moved at the time, and I’ve already written about what’s coming next year on the blog, so I don’t particularly feel the need to repeat all that here in my year review.

However, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everybody who has stayed a paid subscriber during the six months that I haven’t made an episode. That will change very soon (I’m working on it), but I really appreciate people’s trust and faith in me. Monetarily supporting my work and my creative output even when the feed was quiet.

The last six months, in real life have been extremely weird and wild in my personal life. The fact that all this coincided with ending the weekly production of the show, feels somehow arranged by the universe. Anyways, six months on, I definitely understand the impulse that have when YouTubers when they say they’re taking a break and then disappear for years. The grind of regular content production, while a fantastic creative exercise, is exactly that: a grind. And this applies just as much to people writing newsletters on Substack as it does podcasts etc.

I personally think my new decision to move from weekly 301 second long episodes to much longer, more deeply considered and edited pieces of work a year is probably the right cadence for the current moment. I imagine other online writers would also like to move in that direction too. Throughout the 301 episode run, I always tried to keep the subject of each episode of Permanently Moved fairly perennial, even if they were inspired by current events. I think that any any shift away from chasing the present and keeping the algorithm satisfied, and towards longer pieces, by anyone is something that would benefit culture at large.

I know several friends with quite large Substacks who publish every week because they feel they have to, and they tell me plainly that this is affecting their overall creativity. But nevertheless they still post because they feel like they have to.

So I’m still aiming for four episodes a year, along with the zines (which I’ll come to in the next section) but I already envision a situation over the coming years where shows simply drop when they’re done. All the things I make from now on will just take the size and shape that they need to be, and that might result in making more than four things a year.

But because of the economics of publishing and shipping the companion zine for each one, this is something I need to play out for a bit for my self. I need to get a sense for the time, effort, and energy columns across the balance sheet, as well as the literal cost free shipping for paid regular subscribers.

Speaking of which:

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

Start Select Reset Zine

Producing Start Select Reset zine over the last few years has become a real pleasure of mine. Because, long before the blog, podcast, and websites, I was a punk rock scene kid making zines I can only imagine what 20 or 21-year-old me would think about the production runs of SSRZ as it is today. “For a per-zine?” He would say. For a “per-zine?”

The first physical episode of the zine was titled “The Return of the Real” and that is exactly what I’m doubling down on now that I’ve had a few years of zine-making under my belt. I think I’ve gained a solid understanding of the costs associated with zines, shipping and publishing, and I’m finally ready to expand the zine into a substantial multi-page booklet—essentially serving as high-quality ‘merch’ for the show. Which was the plan from the beginning.

As I’ve mentioned, you can read about all of this in more detail elsewhere on the blog, and if you want to subscribe to support my work and secure free shipping on all future issues, you can sign up here.

I do want to be transparent however, and mention that I’m pretty sure that I’ll be putting the prices up mid-year in 2026. But only after I’ve published and shipped at least two new episodes of the podcast and accompanying issues of the zine. As I suspect that by then, I’ll be running up against the rising complexities of international postage and US customs costs, and the price will need to reflect that reality.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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BYENNE

I wrote about Byenne: One Hundred Notes On Storydwelling at the end of last year too. But I neglected to mention it’s a sort of sister thing to SSRZ.

Inspired after reading, Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, the initial seeds of the project began during the pandemic. Last year when I began posting them on my leaflet.pub, (A Bluesky native blogging platform), I had written about 77 of them written, and was setting aside some time every weekend, to read through spiderweb of thoughts on Worldrunning and storydwelling in my Obsidian and turn them into poems or abstract koans. Abstract compressions of thought. It was very cool to start and complete a durational publishing project inside of one year.

The 100 entries in the collection, to my mind actually represent a great deal more thought than the total word count. And I’m very pleased, personally, with the corpus, how it turned out.

Somewhere down the creative project priority list is collecting them together by theme, and I hope to put 100 Notes out as both a PDF and EPUB later on this year. By then I’ll have the pre-order mechanism properly set up; and If anyones interested I might do a short publishing run. Probably as an A6 artefact. The first thing from my nascent publishing label: Family of Giants.

Experience.Computer

I only managed to get two episodes of Experience.Computer out last year. Which is a shame because I still think the core concept and hook for the show is really strong.

Despite lack of consistent publishing, the shows downloads from month to month continue to be remarkably robust. Even with just those two new entries this year, the first 90-day download figures remain in line with Permanently Moved, which puts the show in the top 10% of podcasts globally. Which is a bit mad for a pet project.

Expect the sporadic posting schedule to continue through 2026. E.C isn’t a primary priority right now for me. I’ll simply record and release episodes as the opportunity arises. That said, if anyone has guest ideas or can make introductions to people who fit the show’s vibe, please feel free to reach out!

Experience.Computer 🔊

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

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

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Consulting work is always a boom bust cycle of feast and famine, and that was certainly the case again last year. So much so as we head into 2026, finding full time employment has become priority #1 in my professional life. Which I fear might be difficult given how weird and illegible I am. As it was, the pursuit of full time employment contributed to the some of the “craziness” I mentioned earlier regarding the back half of 2025.

Nevertheless, I did get some very cool things done last year some of which I can talk about:

Off Grid: Red Team

Last year saw the play-test and the completion of a full vertical slice for a cybersecurity game I produced at the award winning UK indie developer Semaeopus. A project I’m enormously proud of.

The game involves exploring a 3D world, solving puzzles, and interacting with real-world websites, requiring the player to “hack” them. Interestingly, the sites are built in hardened Python, and they appear to the user via the browser inspector as a PHP server and are vulnerable to many of the common PHP exploits.

We originally built the tool with hiring and training in mind, but once we got it into the hands of teams within the cybersecurity industry, we realised from senior leader feedback very quickly that it would be a fantastic tool for personal development and onboarding.

Developed in collaboration with cybersecurity professionals…

The game replicates real-world scenarios while maintaining an engaging, game-first experience.

During our initial testing phase, untrained players were able to progress using real websites and techniques, showcasing the game’s authentic approach. By the end of their playthrough, they had a stronger understanding of common security risks—and how even simple precautions can significantly improve the protection of personal or professional data.

The games specific focus is on teaching people to “think like an attacker” rather than just defending from one. All the puzzles and missions in our demo level align with real-world CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK statuses and in a future iteration, it could essentially cover full compliance methodologies for SOC2 etc.

The project was extremely well received, and the whole team was very happy to receive a nomination for a Serious Games Awards in Utrecht at the end of the year. We didn’t take home the trophy, but our lead designer attended the ceremony and was able to showcase the game to key figures across the serious games industry.

You can read more about it, and watch V1 of the trailer (made after the first playtests, but before the full vertical slice was complete)

The O’Ruggin Trail

Over at archetypal.tech this year, I helped produce The O’Ruggin Trail, a parser-based interactive fiction game built entirely on the blockchain.

A satirical interactive fiction game about survival, bureaucracy, and impossible choices. Step into the boots of a licensed Trail Guide and lead a ragged band of pilgrims, outlaws, and opportunists across a fractured wasteland toward the fortified city-state of Usants.

Building a fully functioning lexer within smart contracts was a significant engineering challenge, but we got the engine stable and fully operational in the end.

We released the first part of the four-act game and held a playtest period in the Autumn. The project picked up some great momentum, including an interview with Rich and I on the Fully Onchain Games podcast and a write-up in the Bankless newsletter.

One of the key features of this implementation is that the game instances themselves are NFTs, meaning a specific playthrough can be passed from one player to another, the full game state etc.

But the “secret sauce” and the thing I’m most proud of is that upon completing the demo (and the main game), players receive access to our own editing tools to expand the story further. You can add new rooms, objects, and puzzles, and if you have NFTs from other projects like Loot or Realms / Eternum in your wallet, you can even write your own branches from rooms based on those games.

It’s all extremely novel in the world of on-chain gaming and autonomous worlds and we have some really ambitious plans if funding is acquired.

While I’m not currently active on the project, the full version should be out sometime this year. If parser-based interactive fiction is your jam, you should check it out. Its honestly a bit of a blockchain engineering marvel, and shows the level of expertise that the Archetypal team can build/impliment.

Companions

Regular readers will have noticed I wrote a lot about ‘Little Guys’ here on the blog last year. AI companions and the history of how we got here etc. There is much more to come on this front.

For the first time, I secured a research contract that had a relatively short “dark period,” after which I was allowed to write publicly about the same topics, and I’m really grateful to said team for allowing that flexibility.

The reason this gig even came about—and this brings us back to my point in the earlier section about the value of the archive—is because I was writing about AI companions and Little Guys here on my blog in 2024.

Those posts were actually surfaced by an early ChatGPT deep research search, so I effectively got a gig last year via ChatGPT. Which I think that is incredibly cool, and a total sign of the times. It’s also definitive proof of why maintaining a blog and simply posting your ideas online can be valuable.

Anyway, I have plenty more to say about Little Guys and LLM companions in 2026, particularly bout ‘putting them into vessels’ and other form factors. Which leads me to another piece of work I definitely can’t talk about, but I did get to visit a robotics lab late last year to see what they were messing with.

I saw the cutting edge of soft robotics and non-humanoid form factors with agentic LLMs living inside of them and… wow. I think the people laughing at the stupid humanoid robots currently being marketed (and they are stupid) are massively under-indexing on the real state of cutting edge robotics.

I don’t expect much of this to be productised for the consumer market just yet, but it is coming. The 90s are back, baby.

Forest Bed

On a more analog note, my cosmic country / alt-folk Americana band, Forest Bed, had a good year.

We played a bunch of shows, recorded an album, put out a new single and made a music video. It even picked up a great review in Americana UK, which was a real highlight for us.

We already have several shows booked for 2026; we’ll be playing the High Tide Festival in Twickenham this summer, and we have a gig coming up very soon —we’re playing “What’s Cookin’” on the 11th of February in Leytonstone.

It feels good to have that physical, musical outlet alongside everything else and to see ‘the boys’ on the regular at band practice, without the need for the presence of alcohol to bring us together.

Photo 365 — Year 4

I also completed another year of my Photo 365 project. That’s four years of taking a photo every single day. I think 2026 will be the final year for this particular project; five years feels like enough, especially when I realised that five years represents roughly an eighth of my life!

Nevertheless, as is tradition here on the blog, here’s some highlights from 2025.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

The post 2025 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I wrote for nearly 3 hours straight over two train journeys at the weekend. It was mostly, just a big rant about everything and everything. Written whilst having a terrible cold, and under the influence of strong cold and flu medicine. lol ‘Narrative Bubbles’ is one of the sections I dashed out in my journal that I’ve tried to tidy up.

Narrative Bubbles

Almost to the same extent that I find the current moment ‘thrilling’, I also find it extremely annoying. Mostly, I’m exhausted by ‘discourse.’ The behaviour and level of maturity on display by both sides of the ongoing culture war over almost everything, but especially AI is irritating.

Personally, I find it hard to gauge if we are actually in a financial bubble around AI, as fundamentals are extremely strong, and economics are complex and still unfolding. But what is very clear however, is that we are in a Narrative Bubble.

Having spent so long in crypto, I’m relaxed and maybe even a bit cavalier about bubbles and quite relaxed about volatility. But what I have realised is that its really important to try and decern the source of the bubble. Is it a narrative, or a financial bubble? So enmeshed as we are within the attention AND financial economies, there is always a feedback loop between the two. It can be one or the other, or perhaps, a bit of both. But broadly put it will come from one of two primary drivers: a financial bubble is about asset prices in the financial economy; a narrative bubble is about speculative participation in the attention economy.

In a narrative bubble, it does not really matter if what is being said is true: it only matters that something is being said.

Examples of narrative bubbles include: Gamergate (2014) The Dress (2015) Brexit (2016), Pizzagate (2016), Q-Anon V1 (2017), Russia Gate (2019), Q-Anon V2 (2020), Gamestop / WallStreetBets Short Squeeze (2021), AI-Generated Drake & The Weeknd Song (2023), and Moo Deng (2024).

In a Narrative Bubble, the point is that if you post, meme, quote-tweet, or subtweet, you might harvest a sliver of attention, status, or virality for some kind of gain. It’s about clout chasing, rather than profit taking.

Narrative bubbles produce what @akhilrao.bsky.social on BSky called at some point, the “bullshit equilibrium”.

A state in which talkers talk bullshit and listeners listen to it. In this equilibrium, everyone knows that truth is an orthogonal concept to the observed talk, but everyone also knows that everybody else will act as though the bullshit is true for the sake of participation. The payoff isn’t tied to the narrative’s veracity, but to its memetic fitness. This equilibrium allows the bubble to inflate, powered by a collective suspension of disbelief. In markets, investors rush in, expecting prices to rise simply because others are buying. Online, engagement works the same way: the more people interact with a narrative, the more platforms amplify it, further reinforcing its centrality in the discourse.

In older old media cycles, TV shows end, a book finishes, or a newspaper editor kills a story and everyone moves on. Narrative Bubbles however don’t have built in end points or conclusions. They can’t resolve only deflate.

Whilst the bubble is inflating, the narrative market within the attention economy is driven by speculators who fall into two main archetypes:

The Boosters (Long)

Evangelists, Hype-Merchants, Bag Holders, Trend Surfers, Cheerleaders, Opportunist Influencers are all good names/terms for the different kinds of narrative niches that boosters can inhabit throughout the expansion phase of the narrative bubble in the media ecosystem.

In the attention economy these participants are betting on the “up only” narrative. If you do not get on board immediately you will be left culturally or financially destitute. Selling anxiety around getting left behind, clout comes from inflating the perceived value of the story in the moment.

The Bursters (Short)

Denialists, Doomsters, Curmudgeons, Rejectionists, Anti-Hype Beasts and Naysayers are good names for roles that derive status from performative “sanity” and loudly predicting failure. Personal brands on the premise of a future pay off of “I told you so” or “this will never work”.

In financial terms, they are shorting the narrative. They are betting that the bubble will pop, and they want to be the ones pretending to hold the pin when it does.

In any Narrative Bubble, both they are functionally interfacing with the same mechanisms of the platform apparatus of the media. And both are grifters. Betting on narrative volatility in the Attention Economy.

The “Anti-AI” influencer needs the “AI Bro” just as much as Joker needs his Batman. Both sides are locked in a loop of dunking, quote-tweeting, and debunking each other. I strongly belive neither side cares if the tech works right now, how it works, or what the mundane realities of actual implementation looks like. They only care that the post hits and generates clout.

Both are feeding a cultural machine that rewards polarisation. Nuance has absolutely no liquidity in the attention economy at all. This is not to say that it doesn’t exist in the wider landscape, it does, but in general it yields no great return on attention. Nuance i think the ultimate long position and will provide consistent returns in retrospect, as it is closer to reality in the moment. But the down side is that the dividends only arrive well after the Boosters and the Bursters have moved on to the next narrative trade.

All Narrative Bubbles, ultimately, are an extraction mechanism, a con that tries to convinces us to pick a side, and pretend or feel like we are participating in history. When in reality, we are just providing narrative liquidity for someone else’s clout. I personally think both hype-men and haters play us for fools. Honestly some of the things that people are writing (and then others are sharing) is just embarrassing.

People think they are too smart to be manipulated, but really everyone is just playing in the casino now.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Recorded Epsiode 302!
• Had a long call learning about the role of desktop CNC mills in Ukraine conflict.
• Did some spreadsheet work
• Fleshed out some more of SLOP MACHINES.
• Booked sorted out hotel and flights for Berlin tomorrow.

Terminal Access

This short piece in the Observer about ‘The next status symbol is an offline childhood’ is interesting.

I suspect that the millennial babies in my life and the corners of my Instagram feed, obscured with many emojis, will grow up into children who will be lovingly protected from the dangers of the internet to the point where they will become a sort of neo-luddite. They will be encouraged to partake in sensory play, gentle-parented away from Cocomelon. They will be educated at forest schools – the fees for which, in my local area, can exceed five figures per term (though some branches are free) – and know the value of a good honest hike. Screens will be verboten to the point they will not know how to turn on an iPad.

Reading

I’m still reading Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova but I also started reading Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete.

I also started ‘Elitism: A Progressive Defence’ by Eliane Glaser. I’ve had the book on shelf since James interviewed her on Novara FM during lockdown. Really good!

Sessa – Pequena Vertigem De Amor

My barber DM’d me on instagram to tell me to listen to this album. It’s a hyper contemporary take on bossa nova. It’s not ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ but instead something very modern, quiet, and dreamy. The thing that makes this album stand out to my ear are the rhythms in the Brazilian percussion section. Absolutely hypnotic though out, everything else floats over the top. So good.

Remember Kids:

The post Narrative Bubbles appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The Voltage Of The Age

Facebook launched it’s Slop Machine the other week and now OpenAI has launched its own.

As I said earlier this year, I think we are living though the (first?) Information Age Iconoclasm. Like when I overdosed on AI music the endless stream of uncanny short form videos that have my friends in all sorts of improbable situations ig giving me a similar feeling. Though, I still think my observation about social etiquette of sharing AI material is a good one.

A new social etiquette for sharing machine dreams is required. I’ll happily listen to your dreams over a beer, especially if they involve me. But in general, in polite company? You don’t share dreams. And perhaps people shouldn’t be so quick to share the raw dreams of the machine either.

But nevertheless. What is going on with media, what is happening to media in this present moment is absolutely thrilling. It feels like a redux of being 14 years old and learning about the existence of Napster and the total disregard for the entire structure of recorded media. Only this time its everything. A century of media theory, and centuries of common understanding around what media is, and what it does is collapsing around me.

All of media is dissolving into a grey goo in front of my eyes and its thrilling.

I use the word thrilling because it genuinely is the only word I can find to describe how I feel about everything that is happening in the world.

I few years ago, I wrote about my over half decade long battle with anxiety and how I started taking inositol and it went away. I suspect that if I was still an anxious person I would a quivering mess. But I’m no longer that person and I’ve realised that I do still detect responses in my body to the state of the world, to things that are happening to me and around me. But I am no longer registering them as anxiety. The same sort of somatic response, just processed differently.

I don’t mean this in a positive light AT ALL, the meaning of thrilling you might be reaching for: The causing sudden excitement, pleasure.

But instead I mean the feeling of intense emotion—especially from suspense, danger, or unexpected joy.

Every single day right now it seems like I’m waking up in the morning to some new piece of bullshit. Some new AI thing, some new crypto thing happening, some new insane crypto AND AI thing, politics is mad, war is happening and only going to get worse every where, a genocide is playing out in full view of the world, biosphere collapse, the news of AMOK collapse risk, there is no end to the horrors.

The sea is so very big and my boat is so very small.

But what a time to be alive, to be living though all of this, inside the churn.

It’s not that I want any of this to happen. It’s just can help but watch. As I said to someone the other day, my body keeps registering the ‘voltage of the age‘. Translating my former feelings of anxiety into something like exhilaration from the acceleration around me.

I want to stress that when I refer to something thrilling, it’s not joy I’m experiencing, nor am I feeling exhilarated by doom. Things are very very bad indeed, and I’m as big a doomer about things as the next person.

But nevertheless there is a kind of raw charge in the air, the feeling of contact with reality as I’m experiencing it. To be alive right now is to be pressed up against the membrane as it melts. The dissolution of everything, the end of Modernity, the entire of the Post Enlightenment era is coming to an end around us.

I opened this post with that Flusser quote which floated by on the New Models Discord this week, because its a great quote. And it realised on reading it that it points at a kind of path to follow.

The only response to this whole unfolding crisis is to stay fully awake inside the gyre. To resist being programmed into unawareness even as the slop machine churns out it’s dreams. We may not be able to slow the velocity of the ongoing circle, but we can at least pay attention to the circle itself, not it’s products. We can name the feeling as ‘voltage of the age’, and refuse to forget that we are in fact still here, alive, and can care for one another, as it’s all happening right now.

On The Blog

It’s that time of year when traffic to my Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal Setup picks up. Ahead of the curve, I updated the post with the 2026 layout spreadsheet.

BYENNE

Just broke the half way point in the 100 notes on storydwelling I’ve been posting over on my leaftlet pub

The stories you grew up inside

are still with you.

You don’t leave them.

They re-stage you.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Put the game out. Will blog about it soon!
• Had dinner and some beers with matt from webcurios on Monday. Super nice to meet and chat. Had a great evening.
• Long call about the design of fetch quests vs collectathons in game design — super interesting
• Learnt a lot about the emerging $100,000 dollar Reko Robot fight clubs that are emerging in SF. Extremely sci-fi.
• Caught up on advancements/current state of the art in world of gaussian splatting and drone mapping. Reached out to a youtube creator and we’re gonna have a call.

Terminal Access

Huw Lemmey guest posted at in the margins mag, writing about boredom and his experience walking the 1400 kilometre Camino route from Barcelona. Lovely piece.

I don’t think I found myself; and anyway, much of what I did find, I didn’t like. But I did at least see it, and the smallness of myself, which felt reassuring. Most of all, I felt myself delivered of a new kind of boredom, an active, productive boredom in which I didn’t want to reach for entertainment, for other human voices. I just wanted to pass through the world. It was in this state that I noticed a new physical sensation; a few hours into each day’s walk, my heart rate would rise, and for a short period – perhaps twenty minutes to half an hour – I would enter a euphoric state in which my perception of the world and my place in it was heightened to one of great joy. I began to think of this state as a Transcendental Boredom, in which my lifelong obsession with the consumption of mediated images and ideas dissipated. I simply was, and was bored, and was boring, and walked, and that was fine.

Reading

I finished An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi. An absolutely fantastic book. I was saying to someone the other day that reading this book at 40 gave me the same feeling as reading a long duree history book when I was younger. All these empires, kings, queens, battles, myths legends to learn and find out about. Amazing.

Finishing that I decided to listen to the audio book edition of Impro by Keith Johnston. It’s been well over a decade since I first read it, and I already realise now I’m in a much older (wiser?) frame there is so much more to unpack and explore.

Still chipping away at Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic and I’ve been reading a little bit of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte on the train.

Hiromoi – OUT THERE

I just got around to listening to Jazz legend Hiromi’s new album from earlier in the year. It features here Sonicwonder ensemble who played on her 2023 banger Sonicwonderland.

Whilst not the version that is on the album I direct you to this live rendition of the second track on the album ‘Yes! Ramen!’ for KEXP radio. It gives you a real flavour for what’s in store if you put the album on. Which btw is a fantastically paced affair.

KEXP is tbh my main source for new music theses days. Proper aging millennial situation lol.

Remember Kids:

The post The Voltage Of The Age appeared first on thejaymo.net.

NoAI LoFi

A couple of days ago the writer and my friend Andrew Dana Hudson sent me a YouTube link with the following note: “I’m obsessed with these youtubers who make “no AI lofi” but in doing so perform, with their live action bodies, the cozy archetypes of lofi beats station anime characters”

Like Andrew, I’m obsessed now too, because it’s really wierd example of where culture is at in the midst of the first Information Age Iconoclasm. It’s eating it’s own tail.

Everything about it is just so absurd, a culturally recursive symptom of our moment, a kind of high-concept emptiness that demands investigation.

The question I’ve been trying to answer is: why are they doing this? What the hell is going on?

Loop Culture

The answer of course spirals out of the Lofi Girl phenomenon. But before we can talk about her, I want to return us to the jurassic period of the internet, to a time when websites were destinations.

The first musical loop site I remember is Leekspin (or Loituma Girl) an anime girl spinning a leek, accompanied by a chopped up sections of the scat singing Finnish folk song “Ievan polkka”.

In the flat I lived in after university, we’d just leave it on in the background while playing videogames. The repetitive audio dissolved into habituated ambience; like the sensory adaption to the ticking of a clock in a room. Someone would eventually come home hours later and ask what the hell was going on and why were we listening to it.

Leekspin of course isn’t the only example of this, but it was the first I remember. The hamster dance in the late 90’s became an enormous cultural phenomenon. YTMND another, and of course HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA he-man video

All share the same early internet grammar, born from looped GIFS. They are relatives to the Dancing Baby and the Dancing Banana GIF form the 90’s that became paired with ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’. My first year at university is punctuated by the emergence of the Badger Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom flash animation.

Thought the late 00’s and early 10’s the internets loop culture continued to evolve. Looped media reminiscent of the loop sites became durational works. HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA for 10 hours, or this visual loop of Gandalf nodding to the Sax Guy solo from Eurovision for 10 Hours, or keyboard cat.

Of course shorter containers were also available, and this mode of expression, the loop paired with music had become the default mode for music visualisers by the mid 2010’s

The most famous to my mind being Nyan Cat. Nyanners who I’ve written extensively about before, posted a similar visualiser for her 2014 cover of NIki Minaja’s I am UR Leader. Both are embedded below to demonstrate the form.

The looped Gif aesthetic is in these videos could best described as placeholders of motion, and netlabel micro-genres like chillhop and vaporwave ran with it.

I do for a moment want to mention Hyperpop. In 2014 Cultural terraformers PC MUSIC post the video for Bobby which apes the looped visualiser Gif aesthetic of the era, but it’s GFOTY as the looped subject.

For a bunch of reasons I don’t have time to get into right now, I think this song and video represents a really important moment in modern cultural canon.

Youtube first introduced live-streaming in 2011, but it wasn’t until the middle of the decade that netlabel produced 24/7 streams really took of, which because of YouTube video first posture, also adopted the looped gif aesthetic for their video element.

It was out of this visual culture that lo-fi girl emerged

Lofi Girl

Literally this week, as I was sitting down to write this 404 Media published a fantastic long read on the history and rise of the Lofi Empire which I’m really glad about so I can just link to that.

Key points of the article useful for understanding this NoAI LoFi are the following quotes:

The livestream, which is one of the longest running live broadcasts on YouTube, is often hiding in browser tabs, leaving the perpetually busy Jade (the Lofi Girl) to lazily take her notes behind whatever Wikipedia page or spreadsheet you’ve got open. But she is always there, the googly eyes stuck to her headphones wobbling as she looks up from her notes, to peek in on, to study with, or to chill to—the details of the music become secondary to the vibe.

ts music has largely dropped the hip hop. Lofi Girl’s music is now simply its own genre: lofi, where the soft, tonal consistency means it can be hard for the average listener to even see its works as distinct songs. The drum beats of the “chill beats to relax/study to” sometimes even take a backseat to the rounded, flighty melodies Dr. Jenessa Williams, a music and fan culture researcher at Stanford University, called Lofi Girl a “deeply valued background noise community.”

The New York Times, in 2018, declared that 24/7 channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music were “unlikely to have a broad impact on the music industry,” representing “an underground alternative to the streaming hegemony of Spotify and Apple Music.” They were wrong. Lofi Girl’s core audience might not be able to name a single artist broadcast during a livestream (even if it is driving listeners to Spotify and paying dividends for artists). They may not have even known Lofi Girl has a name. But Lofi Girl is hardly underground

In my opinion, the goal and place for Lofi music in the current moment is to be the auditory equivalent of a beige wall. Over time Lofi Girl sanitised itself into a “homogeneous sound” so palatable to the ear that is become audio wallpaper for the chronically online generation.

As one of its own collaborators aptly put it, this isn’t about artists expressing themselves anymore; it’s a record label curating a “functional” experience. The creative brief of lo-fi girl in 2025 is to produce something so predictable and “search engine-optimised” that its greatest selling point is that you hardly notice its presence.

This is important as it’s one of the things I think is insane about the NoAI LoFi couple.

Stylised stillness

The defining visual gesture of LoFi Girl is what in theatre we would call a kind of ‘stylised stillness’. She studies forever, a perfect, looping machine of productivity.

These “no AI” performers have taken this as a creative challenge: to become the animation. The human presence is insisted upon yet their performance is entirely within machinic-constraints, a stylised stillness as empty content, lacking narrative, or any progression. They are capturing a moment, a vibe.

Looped media has of course always meant to be lived with, not watched. Think of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, durational works defined by consistency and mood. Time suspended; attention cushioned rather than captured. LoFi Girl industrialised that and created a perpetual ambience machine.

The music itself is empty too. The same creative brief as LoFi Girl, calling it ‘low-effort’ is generous of me. Improvised guitar lines with predicable progressions that don’t go anywhere over chill hop beats. This genre’s popularity is another example of the smooth flatness of all media in our era that I’ve written about before. It’s lowest common denominator online ambience. Music made not for your ears, but for the cold, dead heart of the algorithm.

Let me be clear: I couldn’t sit on a picnic blanket in a park for an hour and noodle on a guitar without fucking up. But nor would I like to try, I would actually rather have AI generate it for me.

I genuinely find the spectacle on display in this video quite breathtaking: humans, desperate to prove they aren’t AI, performing as looping, predictable machines to create SEO-friendly wallpaper audio. Content and commentary fusing to absurdity. Presence over plot.

Of course this format thrives on YouTube. There are pragmatic reasons.

1. Watch-time incentives: they are long in duration with low narrative overhead.
2. Video compression: tiny gestures read well on small phone screens even if out the corner of your eye.
3. The lamps and contents of LoFi girl’s room, the couples blankets, LoFi girls rainy window all contributes to instant vibe recognition.

Agency Fetish

In their ‘super lecture’ Non-Player Dynamics: Agency Fetish in Game-World, Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo of Disintegrator podcast talk about how “the commentariat is flushed with images of humans spending their time play acting as AI… this trend has gotten kind of weirder and more literal”

They use the example of Pinkydoll and the other NPC TikTok streamers. Performing canned phrases with repeated gestures mapped to gifts. They are in themselves real-time human loops; bodies as event-driven interfaces, like the human statue street performers of Covent Garden reimagined for the digital age.

When someone sits live on YouTube and performs the “study girl” loop, or when Pinkydoll repeats NPC gestures on TikTok, these people are adopting ‘machinic patterns of presence’; they become non-player characters in their own streams. The performance of the loop is a ritual of surrendering agency to platform dynamics, while simultaneously trying to reclaim it through human embodiment.

Their lecture argues that under “exocapitalism”, labour is less about production and more about representation work: stylised gestures, narratives, or symbolic performances that slot into algorithmic loops, and live-action gif loops are exactly that—representation of “studying” or “relaxing” as an endless gesture, consumed as ambience.

The performer isn’t producing knowledge or beats; they’re embodying a ‘node of affect’ in a network of platform aesthetics. They turn themselves into an interface.

In The YouTube Apparatus (2024), Kevin Munger describes YouTube as a dynamic feedback system in which creators, audiences, and infrastructure shape each other in real time. The whole thing is a a Supply and Demand Framework: creators produce, the platform quantifies audience response (views, likes, comments, watch time etc), and these metrics rationalise future production.

My poetic aspiration is that whenever you read the words “YouTube Creator” you think instead of “Audience Creation.” Social media does not create powerful Influencers but rather powerless marionettes, dancing jerkily to quantified audience tugs.

One of the important points Marek and Roberto share with Munger about the algorithmic environment is that whilst platforms deliver the feeling of agency; the actual capacity for action within them narrows. Performance on them becomes constrained by pre-given moves; dictated by platform, by human, and by algorithm. This couple’s “no AI” tag signals agency reclaimed, but in practice they are ceding their creative agency entirely to the platform and the algorithm.

They have become the human equivalent of that cosy fireplace video on Netflix.

Human Wallpaper

I’m sure the NoAI Lofi couple are lovely human beings, but I’ve just written a lot of words to justify why I don’t like something. Which is ironic considering the theme of last week’s weeknotes. But you can just not like stuff too I guess. Their loud signalling that there’s no AI is all very well, but then going on to produce work/art thats completely empty of meaning is to my mind insidious. Foregrounding your own humanity only to turn yourself into human wallpaper is baffling.

But I remind myself that most ‘creators’ on the internet are not creating things for viewers, or for me personally. The algorithm is always the primary consumer. Everyone else is incidental, including the audience. It might as well have been entirely produced by AI to begin with. Thats what people are hearing when they listen to this low effort gunk on Spotify anyway.

These live action videos are the non-player dynamic made flesh, and reveal how far the “agency fetish” has gone: we can celebrate creative self-performance, but what’s really happening is recursive modelling, the human becoming infrastructure.

The whole thing is a sort of Turing test in reverse. The artists are involved in a competition to see if they can be as flawlessly bland and algorithmically pleasing as possible to the machine.

In anyways this sort of thing is the apotheosis of ‘content’ laborious and artisanal production of work so seamless, so devoid of friction, that the only remaining purpose of it all that I can possibly see is to generate enough training data to then go on to automate the whole thing.

On The Blog

I’ve basically been sick all week. But I have been posting over on BYENNE

If the shape isn’t stewarded,

it collapses.

And the stories leak out.

You won’t even notice

until it’s too late.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• 2 Calls.
• Working on the game launch.

Mostly been sick.

Terminal Access

Tracy Durnell wrote a fantastic piece this week called ‘Online feels truer than material reality’ its really worth your time. A bricolage of sources and thoughts from across the blogosphere:

Because most people online are funneled into a handful of websites, the signaling environment is competitive. “Status” isn’t like a leaderboard with direct rankings, but we can be high or low status within our taste world. Social media rewards our desire for status with attention and validation for treating every pursuit as an opportunity to signal. 

Reading

Not had that much time this week. Still reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. And still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr

I picked up An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi on Audible but I’ve only just started it. Badawi is fantastic at performing her own words.

Condemned to Torture – Must Kill

UK thrash metal band Must Kill have a new album out. It fucking rips.

Lead single Nightmares come to life is my favourite track:

Remember Kids:

The post NoAI LoFi | Weeknotes appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Everything is Fine

Last week cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase launched a new marketing effort in the UK. The centre-piece of the campaign being a satirical piece of musical theatre about the state of the UK economy, called Everything Is Fine.

Alongside it is a print/visual campaign simply stating facts about the UK economy. Here is a photo a friend sent me of the back of a London cab over the weekend: the poster that simply says, “Real wages: stuck in 2008.”

I sent the person who took this photo the accompanying campaign video and they just replied, “Pure cinema.”

It’s had me thinking, what does it mean for a cryptocurrency exchange to be producing one of the best pieces of satirical media about the current state of the UK?

Keep Calm and Carry On

The advert strikes a chord I think because we live in a society where the-people-who-are-in-charge seem to think a better future is not possible—or even desired.“Everything is fine” is basically the ruling ideology/mantra of the media class in the UK.

I belive the “Everything-is-fine-ness” of the media class is the logical endpoint of the most pernicious meme to enter the British psyche in my life time: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

The original Keep Calm and Carry On poster (if you belive the lore) was discovered in a bookshop in 2000. A powerful piece of World War II-era government propaganda intended to be displayed alongside “Freedom Is in Peril / Defend It With All Your Might” for deployment in a worse case scenario if the Nazis ever directly attacked the UK beyond the Blitz. Of course, it was never deployed, because things never got bad enough for it to be used, and all copies were supposed to be destroyed, leaving only a handful remaining.

It’s hard to express to someone who isn’t from the UK just how much gravity the Second World War (80 years on from is resolution) still exerts on the British cultural psyche. Boomers sing wartime era songs at dinners and dances, and pretend they won the war personally on social media all the time. We dress our children up as evacuees at school and get them to pretend they were caught up in it too. And we have newspapers that considers not wearing a Remembrance poppy on television or at formal events in the month of November basically tantamount to treason.

Whilst the original poster may have been re-discovered in 2000, it took nearly a decade for it’s sentiment to diffuse out fully into public consciousness. All it took was the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession and the Coalition/Tory government’s imposition of austerity on the county.

The public sort of ‘self deployed’ the most powerful piece of World War II propaganda ever created on itself. And the British cultural psyche ate it up. A way of avoiding the effects of austerity etc.

Coinbase’s ‘Real Wages Stuck in 2008’ is a fact. The slow bleed out of the UK economy over the last 17 years. We’ve dealt with austerity, Brexit, pandemic etc. The looting the elite engaged in during the final years of the Tory rule was basically ‘stiff upper lipped’ and tollerated by the general public by keeping calm and carrying on, and buying cupcakes.

The death of possibility that this mantra had on UK culture was given a name by Tom Whyman at the time back in 2013: “Cupcake fascism.”

this constellation includes “tea-drinking, knitting, cycling, sorting out one’s recycling properly, organic food, free-range eggs and local produce, gin, real ale, Cath Kidston bags, throws on the couches, making your own chutney, and Rugby Union.”

It is rather in what these things come to symbolise. They are all ‘nice’ things and they are used as expressions of how it is nice to be nice and how life would be better, perfect indeed, if people were just a little bit nicer. The possibility of ethical life comes to be contained, for people, in these objects, which means that for people who enjoy them the possibility of the world functioning well comes to end up looking like: if everyone behaved a little bit more like, and enjoyed the same things as, me, a nice middle-class boy or girl.

Keep Calm and Carry On was a cultural mantra and delusion that, in the post 2008 world, suggested that if everyone (and in particular the middle class) just collectively ‘wished hard enough’, things might change for the better.

Of course, that didn’t happened.

2008 was of course, also the year that Bitcoin launched. Another idea based on the same stucture: the idea that if one wished upon it hard enough, it would make it true.

The difference being that our collective wishful thinking was a passive hope, while the Bitcoin bros’ was an active form.

Britain throughout the 2010’s didn’t wish hard enough, but the Bitcoin bros did.

Which is why this is relevant to the Coinable advert.

Exit Through the Casino.

I’m currently about 1/3 of the way through the final edit of a text I’ve been working on since January called SLOP MACHINES. It’s about 40,000 words focused on the post 2008 fusion of code and capitalism and the world that it has created. So I’ve been thinking about crypto and culture all year tbh.

Coinbase’s advert is, I think, effective satire because it’s true. Since 2008 everything really has gotten worse. “keep calm and carry on”, the most powerful memetic weapon the UK government ever devised has run out of juice. “Everything is fine” really feels like the only line the elites in this country seem to muster.

Yet, we all have eyes and can see that it’s really not.

The advert itself, with its melody reminiscent of Oliver Twist musical; also contains a threatening subtext—one aimed squarely at the middle and credentialed classes. Everything is fucked, and if you you don’t do something you’re going to be driving for Deliveroo.

The implied message and solution of Coinbase’s advert is basically “a brighter future through finance”.

This image from my post on playability and systems the other week sums this sentiment up:

‘Gambling it all on hyper finance’ is, in my opinion, one of the only avenues of perceived agency that people have to escape the rot economy they find themselves in.

“If you want out, you need to exit via the casino.”

The other seemingly being “Blame migrants.”

You may think that I’m being cynical, but this sort of ‘casino culture’ is everywhere in the UK.

This recent Novara interview with Dr Eliza Filby author of Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad is interesting as she talks about the cultural explosion of financial advisers, financial podcasts, and people telling you how to manage your money we have seen since the pandemic.

In fact 46% of Zoomers in the UK own financial instruments, and 28% of the 18-34 year olds own crypto.

Rachel Reeves despite being part of Starmer’s “Everything is Fine” government, definitely knows that everything isn’t fine. She also sees “exit through the casino” is a viable avenue for exploration for the popualtion. Just last month she announced plans to nudge savers into buying stocks and shares instead.

The Coinbase campaign is effective because it’s speaking to the public’s justified anger, and explicitly names the rot that we have all been told to ignore: a nation that’s been economically frozen since 2008. But it channels us away from collective political questions and towards individual financial risk.

As good as “Everything is Fine” is, the ad’s satirical despair is basically a marketing funnel for its preferred solution: “exit through the casino.” It reframes systemic failure as an opportunity for a personal gamble.

As casino culture becomes more and more mainstream, and the government validating it as a legitimate escape route, the crucial question becomes: what happens when this bet fails for the majority?

What are we going to do when the ‘exit through the casino’ proves to be a revolving door?

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June 14, 2025

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Culture 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed only on television and in toy boxes. A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien. 

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More Distant Than Ever

Growing up in Britain in the 1990s, America felt like a country that existed only on television and in toy boxes. A place across the pond that shared a language, but also seemed so alien.

America was the source of things: cartoons, comics, the music I listened to, and along with Japan, the computer games I played. And then there was Phoebe on TV, playing guitar again, in a coffee shop, in a city I thought I’d never visit. All these cultural products felt like they arrived from nowhere, created by no one. They simply just were. I had no notion that their creators—authors or the musicians in bands—were real people. US Presidents were characters on The Simpsons; Bill Clinton was a man who did not have sexual relations with a woman, and played the saxophone.

Even my young understanding of US politics felt like a fiction. The first Iraq War played out in grainy green night vision on the evening news, a conflict conducted by a faraway country in another faraway land. Later, a teacher told my class that democracy in America was dead, because a man in Florida had ruled on an election and given it to his brother. Far away news from another planet. And yet its cultural empire was present in the action figures on my floor, but the country itself was a distant myth.

Then the towers fell and everything changed. America didn’t just lose its mind; it exported its crisis. Its abstract anxieties became our domestic policy too: mass surveillance, invasive security, and a creeping authoritarianism under Blair, justified by an American war. The conflict was no longer a grainy TV show. Friend’s older brothers from school went off to fight, and as the war on terror ground on, my own friends went too, and some of them died. The American Empire arrived in the 2000’s, and it was / no longer an abstraction.

At the same time, a different kind of proximity was collapsing distance. On MySpace, I exchanged DMs with a member of one of my favourite American emo bands. For the first time, I realised, Americans were real people, living real lives, in a real place.

And thus began a decade’s long tension: it’s empire crept closer impersonally, while its people came closer too.

For me, the early 2010s were the years of convergence. Occupy emerged shortly after our own student protests, and it felt like we were all part of the same conversation. The same struggle happening in London, New York, Egypt, Spain, and Turkey etc. Everyday Americans felt closer than ever. The Web 2.0 internet and the iPhone erasing the final feelings of distance.

American voices became a constant presence in my life, strangers on screen, literally inches from my face. Their thoughts and arguments unfolding right alongside messages from my family and friends.

During the last decade, American culture, politics, and thinking seeped into the global consciousness. Looking back, 2016 feels like the high watermark. In the UK, the national trauma of Brexit blurred into the American spectacle of Trump 1. Online, it felt like the same psychic battle waged on two fronts. The media narratives, the populist anger, the cultural divisions—they were all / reflections in a mirror. Proximity was total.

The empire wasn’t just influencing us; its platforms had become the code spaces in which we lived our lives. Every movement in the American cultural sphere moved us in the UK too. We were all, captured in totality by its Empire.

I started checking out, but the pandemic sealed it. 2020 was a truly shared global experience, perhaps for the first time in history. But it revealed just how differently everyone processed it. No longer a distant myth, but an alienating alternate reality and beginning to drift away.

That summer, when protests erupted across Britain following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, America. The shared info-sphere caused Brits to adopt the language and framework of American struggle in our own policing protests. I could only understand it as events in the Imperial core had spurring unrest out in the colonies.

Today, to me, the United States as a country feels more distant than ever. I look in on social media and see American’s still posting. A disconcerting culture, hysterical, and strange. They speak English, but they aren’t like me. And yet, America’s material empire is closer than ever. I walk down the high street and there’s a Starbucks, a Wendy’s, a Five Guys. I use American platforms to host my blog, check my email, and watch cat videos.

This is all a paradox / to me. I am surrounded by the material and digital infrastructure of the American empire, yet its state of mind is half a world away. Middle-class Brits who fixate on American politics believe they are being international, but really it’s a symptom of being provincial—living so deep inside the imperial bubble you can’t see anything else.

I resent the last fifteen years of cultural exhaust. UK newspapers report blow-by-blow accounts of drama 5,000 miles away, yet because of the colonisation and its destruction of my info-environment, I have no idea why three ambulances, two fire engines, and the police were at the train station the other night.

There is trouble here too in Air Strip One. But many eyes still look elsewhere, across the pond, at an empire that is everywhere, but still very far away.

I struggle with America as state of mind, versus America as… state.

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This post about the UK’s funding for creative technologies got a little moany – dangerously close to breaking my rule about not being negative on the Internets. But I did try to end it on an upbeat note! I’m also aware that there are many bigger and more pressing issues going on in the world right now but I had to get it off my chest.

A Future Funded Elsewhere

At the start of the year I wrote a little despondently about ‘the state of things‘ in the UK.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the UK right now is a deep and pervasive incuriosity among those who control the money in these sectors. The lack of vision is staggering. Take grants, for instance: I recently looked into an AI Arts funding opportunity for a project I’m working on, only to discover it required a 50-page form for a maximum of £15,000. I bailed. The effort-to-outcome ratio wasn’t worth it.

What’s maddening is the sheer potential of this moment. Things are moving at breakneck speed—entirely new technologies, mediums, genres, and shared experiences are emerging before our eyes. Yet, there’s little to no opportunity to execute or take advantage of any of it, at least not in the UK.

Which is why Flow winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature last night is such a big deal. A film made entirely in Blender—the free and open-source 3D software—on a budget of just €3.5 million.

In 2022, my friend Cade Diehm wrote an important research note over at New Design Congress on open-source creative tools: The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point. He wrote the following about Blender:

Blender – an open-source 3D modeling and rendering tool – has a similar historical trajectory to Godot’s. Founded as an open-source project in 2002, Blender’s 20 year history is the story of committed community development and strategic investment from both direct partnerships and distributed funding. Following a major UX overhaul in the 2010s, Blender has enjoyed a stratospheric rise to become an industry standard despite hundreds of millions invested annually in competing commercial alternatives. Blender’s powerful modeling and rendering tools and its best-in-class user experience make it incredibly versatile, yet easy to learn and master. Its status as an open-source and extensible project has fostered a blossoming plug-in ecosystem and – more importantly – allows professional teams from a variety of industries to customise and integrate Blender safely into their workflows.

And here we are in 2025: a movie made in Blender just won an Oscar. If you’re interested in how Flow was made, the animation director did a deep dive at Blender Conference last year:

There’s also a great write-up over at The Animation Obsessive today on why Flow’s win matters—not just technically, but because the film exists at all:

Hollywood loves Flow. It’s been praised by Guillermo del Toro; Barry Jenkins called it a “masterpiece.” Yet it couldn’t have been done in Hollywood — it’s too odd for the people who call the shots. This is a movie with no stated story, about animals that don’t talk, filmed in long, immersive takes that can last for minutes. Plus, it’s indifferent to the visual fidelity race: certain execs might dismiss it as previz.

Flow succeeded anyway. It earned $20 million — far more than it cost — and swept awards season. This comes as Hollywood animation is reeling from executive mismanagement: cutbacks, canceled movies, poor treatment of artists and a chronic aversion to risk. Today, only a few animated films are happening there at all.

“Animation is performing better than ever, but Hollywood studios are asleep at the wheel,” Cartoon Brew argued last month. “Their theatrical schedules are barren at a time when they should be brimming.”

Flow got made through the European co-production model, pulling together funds from multiple small regional sources, which is how it scraped together its 3.5 million budget. Try replicating this under Hollywood’s system of blockbuster budgets, huge marketing overheads, and creative committees—it’d either balloon in cost or never get past the pitch stage.

Flow is basically, everything that large, risk-averse studios hate. And yet, here it is: finished, lauded, Oscar-winning, proving that open-source software can now compete at the highest levels.

Flow and Blender’s success proves that open-source tools can blow past their “amateur” reputation and become serious contenders—challenging incumbents like Autodesk or Adobe etc. As Cade argues, if Blender can do it, so can the game engine Godot. A while ago, just like Blender, Godot was a niche open-source project that only indie devs used. But it has a real chance of becoming the Blender of game development.

But here’s where I have to sigh loudly about how the UK is nowhere near ready to seize this moment. While Europe invests in riskier auteur works through robust co-production schemes, the UK dishes out micro-grants with monstrous application processes that sap your will to live. Tiny pots of money, convoluted processes, and a total failure to see that investing in creative tech now means shaping the future, rather than forever chasing it.

Meanwhile, the European model—drawing funding from multiple sources in countries like France, Belgium, and Latvia—allowed Flow to sidestep Hollywood’s bureaucracy. Director Gints Zilbalodis and his team had the freedom to embrace a dreamlike vision and use Blender, a tool with no licensing fees and a massive user community. That’s the power of open-source. If a director in his early 30s can do this with a ragtag network of co-producers, imagine what else is possible.

This success story should be a wake-up call for UK. You’d think Flow winning an Oscar on open-source software would spark new grants, multi-year funding schemes, and proper support for the creative arts. But here we are, still stuck with forms longer than screenplays, max awards that barely cover a couple of months cashflow for a small team, and a mindset int he media that sees this kind of creative work as niche or frivolous.

Blender and Godot open up incredible creative opportunities for so many people, the UK is doing absolutely nothing to capitalise on them. The BFI Short Form Animation Fund caps at £120,000—nowhere near enough to produce a feature. Independent animators and video game creators compete for broader arts grants, with no recognition that animation and games require different support structures. The UK Games Fund offers up to £30,000, but only for prototypes. That’s fine for a tiny experimental project, but useless for a full game. CreativeXR, meanwhile, focuses on “immersive storytelling” but it’s mostly tied to big institutions, sidelining solo developers and small teams. I know £500,000 for VR projects sounds substantial, its distribution across 10–15 teams results in grants too small to offset the UK’s rising software and motion-capture costs. And don’t get me started on the recent AI fund’s requirements.

Compare this to Europe: France’s CNC funds animation directly, and Screen Ireland provides structured, multi-year investment in animated films. That’s why Flow was possible—because the European model backs creative risk.

In contrast, UK funding remains a bureaucratic nightmare. Forms longer than screenplays. Grants that barely sustain a few months of work. Endless hoops to jump through, insane reporting requirements. There is just no joined-up thinking across the creative technologies sector.

And it’s infuriating, because the talent is here. There’s ideas here too and the tools are nearly free. But the people holding the purse strings remain stuck in a mindset that sees work in these areas as experimental, rather than recognising that animation and games are the future of cultural production.

If you’re an animator or game dev in the UK, you’re probably already looking at co-productions with Irish or mainland European studios. Because that’s where the money, curiosity, and boldness are.

But here’s the thing: this shift is already happening, with or without institutional support.

More students are arriving at university with hands-on experience in Blender, Unity, Unreal, or Godot—not because they took formal courses, but because they grew up in a digital world where these tools are second nature. Gen Z instinctively understands video editing, 3D modelling, and game engines, just as early-2000s students arrived fluent in Word, Photoshop, and basic web design. With Fortnite’s Unreal Editor, Roblox Studio, and thousands of Blender tutorials on YouTube, generations are learning these tools long before stepping into a classroom. Open-source and game engines aren’t the future—they’re the present already.

The real question is whether the UK will embrace this shift or keep throwing money at STEM initiatives while ignoring the creative industries that actually shape culture. Maybe we’ll just spend it all on a war. either way the outlook is grim.

Flow’s win should be a reminder to everyone that open-source tools are levelling the playing field. The cost of production continues to fall. AI and virtual production will also play a major factor in all this too. I think anyone who is investing money, time and resources into this area today will get to shape the next decade of animation and video games.

It’s time for UK funders to wake up. Because the future isn’t waiting.

On The Blog:

Didn’t post much on the blog this week as I’ve been busy elsewhere. But I cleaned up some misspelt tags and merged some other tags that were the same word but with a plural. Just gardening, you know how it is.

Permanently Moved

Human Gunk and the Slopocalypse

https://permanentlymoved.online/

If you find it hard to distinguish something written by AI or a human, don’t worry, I can’t either. Humans spent the last decade writing like machines. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/03/01/2504-human-gunk-and-the-slopocalypse/

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

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Went to a friends Exhibition Launch
• Went to a friends book lunch
• Reading lots and lots of technical documentation.
  • It seems like the older I get, the more things I want to do require code
• PROJECT ENTRY – Catch ups, spreadsheeting and reporting with the funder
• Spent some time messing with Deep Research. Though I feel like I need to save/horde my precious credits its insanely good. I think my first/current use case is having it produce tailored tutorials on ‘I have an idea, write me an introduction / tutorial about how to do something I want to get done, but have no idea how to do/where to start’

Terminal Access

Hot on the heals of Ben Bratton’s talk on AI, earlier this week K Allado-McDowell gave a talk about ‘Neural Media’ at Long Now Foundation.

Reading

I finished reading The Bell and the Blackbird by the poet David Whyte.
I also read Leontus: Lord Solar by Rob Young which was … ‘ok’ but its a Warhammer book very much designed to sell a model. It ‘humanised’ the protagonist too much and I think its inappropriate to the grimdark setting.

I’ve started re-reading Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer – as if I don’t already have 10 other books on the go FML.

Colin Self – respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis, aka r∞L4nGc

Colin’s new album is out. I posted the first single from it last year. Across the whole album there’s 2 step, 80s horror vibes and transcendent ballads. The whole album windsdown towards the album closer ∞ . Which is a 10min journey across layered vocal harmonies and crushing club music. Quite unlike anything you have heard before, or are even prepared for.

<3 Colin. Hope I get to see this live.

Remember Kids:

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You Copied Me

It’s surprising how quickly “You copied me” appears in a child’s vocabulary. It’s one of the first phrases we learn to defend ourselves—not our bodies, but our ideas. A drawing, a turn of phrase, a knock-knock joke recycled too soon. The accusation is swift and cutting. To be copied is to feel seen—but in the worst possible way.

It’s a primal reaction to a perceived infringement on ones identity, creativity, and autonomy. Whilst imitation is essential for learning, as we develop our sense of self, we begin to guard our ideas as extensions of our identity.“You copied me” reflects a deep fear: that one’s uniqueness is being diminished or stolen.

Unlike other behaviours seen in children, our culture allows this reflex to carry though into adulthood. In fact it’s reinforced by the systemic logics of copyright. “You copied me” is both a moral claim and a market imperative. Yet, one of the most impactful things I’ve ever heard in a marketing course was this. “It needs to look new, but feel the same.” a phrase that drives all of consumer culture.

Copyright and capitalism have elevated the playground squabble into industrial warfare. Musicians suing over chord progressions or startups getting Sherlocked. The wounding when someone steals your joke and tweets it again without credit. The feeling is always the same: That was mine, and you took it.

Modern copyright battles are literally “You copied me” arguments but with better lawyers and higher stakes. Marvin Gaye vs. Robin Thicke over Blurred Lines or Miley Cyrus’s Flowers allegedly infringing on Bruno Mars’s When I Was Your Man is just capitalism attempting to litigate a psychic wound.

Media in our contemporary society is a social interface. I spent my entire time at university in the early 2000’s thinking about this. Writing about copyright wars and aesthetics, and here I am still doing that. I know I bang on about cultural fracking but the metaphor applies. Copyright has scarred our cultural landscape, fencing off the commons—the rich, fertile ground of shared imagination—in service of profit. Instead of nurturing creativity, it extracts and exhausts it, leaving a barren monoculture of endless remakes and recycled ideas.

In this wasteland, perceived originality has become a kind currency. It needs to look new, but feel the same. No wonder “You copied me” feels so high-stakes—it’s no longer about pride but survival.

This tension is also what is driving the backlash against image synthesis and generative AI tools. On one hand, AI feeds on copyrighted material, accelerating the depletion of the cultural commons. On the other, it produces so much derivative content that it threatens to overwhelm traditional ownership models, forcing us to rethink the very idea of originality. They are a totally new cultural technology.

Speaking of originality. I could spill some tea about a well known academic who has stolen one of my ideas without credit. But I’m not a very jealous person, and wounds of imitation don’t harden inside of me, so I haven’t ever brought it up publicly.

Anyways..

We Like this

If “You copied me” is about guarding what makes us unique, then “We like this” is the opposite compulsion.

One of the most important shifts in my lifetime has been the way media has become a social interface for connection. Shared media consumption, particularly post internet, has become central to identity construction – and also another behaviour we find in the playground. People define themselves not through what they create but what they consume. Sega vs Nintendo, your Football Teams, Star Trek vs Star Wars, whatever.

Fandom logics now rule everything around us, media consumption fosters a collective identity. They share a World(view). Loving something becomes a foundation for belonging. Yet a tension still persists. Gatekeeping, ship wars, and canon debates reveals how “We like this” can still quickly turn into “You copied me” or “We are not the same” over small differences when personal identity feels threatened. Media as a social interface only magnifies these deeply human conflicts.

Social media is a techno-social system that rewards derivative work. TikTok trends, YouTube reactions, and Instagram reposts thrive on iterative media, the mechanism by which culture is propagated. Yet the entire system is designed around maximising dwell time to show us ads, not maximising culture itself. In order to protect ourselves in these hostile space fandom logics – Identifying with the media one consumes – has become the glue that forms collective identity.

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.

“You copied me” and “We like this” are two sides of the same coin. Both about identity—how we see ourselves and how we relate to others. Copyright has become a sort of mirror to Community. One defends boundaries; the other dissolves them.

Often, the same people fiercely protecting their work from being copied (by AI or otherwise) are those who also find belonging in shared love for someone else’s creation. We defend the individuality in what we create, but crave sameness in what we consume.

To move beyond the collapse of Web 2.0 social media, and deal with the rise of AI we have to wrestle with this paradox.

The post You Copied Me appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Entity Not A Person

REINCANTAMENTO over at DROPS newsletter wrote a great post on the Kendrick Lamar – Drake beef and its wider implications for cultural production in our age. The post draws on lots of ideas from across my part of the blogosphere, including thoughts from Mat Dryhust, Paul Graham Raven and myself amongst others. I thought I’d throw in my tuppence worth.

I really like this section on Drake as an entity not a person:

But who is Drake? At this point, Drake is likely a brand name, an avatar for a broader collective construction. Borrowing an analogy from Mat Dryhurst, Drake can be seen as a “Formula 1 driver.” Just as a Formula 1 team designs the optimal engine for a driver to achieve success on the track, a creative team crafts the perfect framework for a pop star to excel in the industry. This team conducts market research, analyzes data, curates the artist’s social media presence and public image, and handles legal arrangements for collaborations, among other tasks.

A couple of years ago I wrote about how the opposite is always occurring: “Brands are acting more like people online, and people are acting more like brands.”

Brands are acting more like people online

This is for better or worse of course, but it’s a thing that’s happening. Sometimes called “Human Era Brand Behaviour”. You know it when you see it. A recent example is the banter between UK supermarket chains on social media about M&S’s lawsuit against Aldi over there Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake.  

Let me repeat that one more time as it’s a 2021 kind of sentence. “The banter between UK supermarket chains on social media about M&S’s lawsuit against Aldi over their Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake.“ 

US Fast Food chain Wendy’s is known as a pioneer of Human Era branding. But I’d also add The Museum of English Rural Life and Sotheran’s of London as other leading examples.

It doesn’t matter which direction you arrive from these ‘Entities’ Drake of Wendy’s tweeting like a relatable person online, both should be seen as a sort of puppetry. I mean I have a whole category on this blog about puppetry – so of course I’d think that. But anyways, I think that the people inside of these entities, or the entities inside of the people(?) aren’t so much F1 drivers, but more Gundam pilots (another post about brands as entities with people inside of them).

Anyways, co-sign all of this too:

When an individual is presented as a brand, it allows for a more authentic and protagonistic narrative, akin to a hero’s journey. This positioning can be beneficial for concealing the corporate operation behind the scenes. A person can evoke feelings of authenticity and strength, qualities that might be harder to attribute to a corporate entity. So, for simplicity, I will continue referring to Drake as an individual in this article, even though he represents the embodiment of shared intentions and collective agency.

We can also see the same ’embodiment of shared intentions and collective agency’ happening with entities like BTS, Beyonce, and megastar, and former human being Taylor Swift. I have thoughts on the new sorts of responsibilities that come with ‘becoming a brand’ but i’ll leave all that for now.

Pulling in the language of neoliberalism in to describe his approach to his career as a diversified portfolio. And talks about the Reincantamento later goes on to talk about Drake as a template for the streaming era:

Cultural Frackling is, on the other hand, an appropriate response to the diffusion of user-generated content and the perils of participative cultural practices, like edits, remixes, fan fiction, etc. The major distributors can’t leave these in the hands of people these profitable stories and need to re-affirm their monolithic sovereignty over them.  

The Drake Era is the perfect iteration of Cultural Fracking within hip-hop and pop music. Drake has acted as a gateway for Universal to be able to frack many of the possible novelties that emerged on the music scene. With his co-sign, Drake not only signaled his respect for an artist or a style but also the interest of the industry for the newcomers. Drake as an index for market potential. Drake, the playlist-era popstar, the jack of all trades, always with a different costume but never with a real persona.

Its a great essay. Love the essays conclusion:

We can only save ourselves by telling our stories and distributing culture on our terms. Miles Davis, once said: “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself”. As the Drake Era fades away, it’s time to awaken our desirefor autonomy and artistic freedom. To embrace the bustling global overground network in our cities and online. It may take a long time. But by determining our sound, we will find the polyphonies for these mutating times.

Permanently Moved

Short Term Thinking

I propose that everything that occurs between the decision to plant a tree and the full expression of its canopy is short-term thinking.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/05/18/2409-short-term-thinking/

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Plotted my Solarpunk talk for Lisbon
• Call with ADH
• Had a call about worldbuilding
• Met up with Novara Crew for drinks.
• Reached out – without success – to a client thats been quiet
• Finished up notes on a product pitch, call next week
• Started reading about world building in dance
• Had a discussion about doing a print run of worldrunning.guide !!

Terminal Access

I said the other week that lots of people has been reading and discussing Arnaud’s Trust Infrastructure essay. Well, Baz at Tonk.gg recently dropped a long essay of their own on the subject: You should design trust infrastructure

I’ll cover:

1. How trust shapes our shared social flourishing;

2. The invisible infrastructure we all take for granted when cultivating trust, from markets to contracts and culture;

3. How the internet broke those ancient tools by forcing us into feudal networks and isolated monocultures;

4. Proposals for a new trust infrastructure, and why I think they can usher in a web that’s more productive, more liberated and way more fun.

Warning – yes, I am going to talk, in part, about blockchain and cryptography. Strap in.

It’s a long read, but its a good overview about the current state of think thinking in this area.

GPT-4o Must Die?

ICYMI I wrote about the OpenAi’s new model announcement and conversation AI:

Millennial and GenX readers. Please be mentally prepared for the possibility that you might pop home this summer and discover that a virtual assistant talking like a flirty 20 something valley girl is now your parent(s) new best friend. 

Dipping the Stacks

Threads is the gas-leak social network – by Max Read

Some friends and I have taken to calling Threads “the gas-leak social network” because that is the basic experience of using it: Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage.

The chocolate price spike: what’s happening to global cocoa production?

The Easter Bunny is having an expensive year. Cocoa prices are going through the roof. In the last week, they’ve surged to more than $10,000 per tonne. That’s nearly twice the record set 50 years ago.

Are We Watching The Internet Die?

These stories are, of course, all manifestations of a singular problem: that generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms.

Not Right Now — TANKtv

Despite its discursive revolt against the vague and totalising spectre of capitalism, art is nothing if not a highly processed asset class, as many artists, art critics, art historians and art dealers regularly bemoan, with both sincerity and cynicism. Every day, major works are bought and sold and careers are made and unmade by arms dealers and pop stars because their financial advisor suggests Julie Mehretu as a hedge against platinum futures.

The Brazilianization of the World

the coming apart of formal employment and of the rise of precaritization—is the root of the whole phenomenon of “Brazilianization”: growing inequality, oligarchy, the privatization of wealth and social space, and a declining middle class. Its spatial, urban dimension is its most visible manifestation, with the development of gentrified city centers and the excluded pushed to the periphery.

Reading

Author Michael Marshall Smith wrote about James Hillman’s Force of Character recently. It’s a book I’ve had around for years, i’m not even sure where I picked it up. But this from Smith made me open its covers:

I first read The Force of Character about ten years ago, in my mid-late forties. It’s about being older, and what that means. How much I valued it is proven in the number of highlights I made. There’s a lot. On the second read I’m undertaking now I’m adding even more, tons more, in fact: there are chapters where half the text now has a pale yellow stroke across it. A sign, perhaps, that this is an even better time in my life to be reading it — non-ancient though I still (usually) feel (on some days).

I started listening to Jonathan D Beer’s debut Warhammer Crime novel The King of the Spoil. Not so much a ‘who dun it’ but a ‘Why dun it’ story. As I’ve said before, I think Warhammer crime’s domestic sandbox world of Varangantua is a brilliant move on their part as Beer’s novel picks up characters from another authors short stories. You don’t need to have read it to understand whats going on, but it brings a depth and richness to world that I really like.

hijouni kireina JYOCHO – JYOCHO

The new single from Japanese melodic math rock legends (previously on the blog) JYOCHO is absolutely out of this world.

Some of the most virtuosic emo squeezed into 1m26 seconds. And flute of course! I can’t even begin to imagine what watching them play this live must be like. I wonder when their new album is coming.

Remember Kids:

The post Entity Not A Person appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Settling In

People have been fretting about the acceleration of culture and new technology for as long as there’s been a culture and new technologies to speed it up. In 1858, an unnamed New York Times correspondent complained:

There can be no rational doubt that the telegraph has caused vast injury. Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes?

How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column? It snowed here, it rained there, one man killed, another hanged. 

That was in the 1850’s! Since then we’ve had the influence of the mass paperback novel, film, radio, television, and the Internet. Culture responded to them all, digesting, re-digesting. In my lifetime I’ve seen the rapid acceleration of culture with 24-hour news, the web, then social media, the emergence of fast fashion, music streaming etc.

The rapid feedback loops between creation and consumption work upon each other, spinning the flywheel ever faster. ‘Consumerism’ is what we call the response to this state of affairs. It’s found across the board: Clothing, cars, phones, products, fashion, art, movies, books, comics whatever. Physical goods or otherwise. There’s always a ‘new thing’ someone wants you to buy or consume.

In the current moment, creatives make art (commercial or not), and we the consumers have to try swallow as much of it as we can before the next thing comes along. We sense this in our personal lives, we describe it as ‘information overload’, ‘social overwhelm’ or whatever. But if we’re feeling this as individuals, I can’t help but wonder what its doing to ‘The Culture’ at large.

The rapid creation / consumption cycle leaves no space for anything to ‘settle in’

Despite being my mortal enemy – This week I was happy to see Disney announcing that they are scaling back the release schedule for its Marvel properties:

“We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told shareholders during Disney’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday (via Variety

The key line came later in the investor call when he mentioned ‘quality’

Disney CEO Bob Iger told analysts that the company is finally moving away from “a vestige, basically a desire in the past to increase volume.

“I’ve been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality, that’s particularly true with Marvel,”

As per ‘Cultural Fracking‘, Disney has been treating culture like a commodity. Therefor under the logic of consumerism, more product is better product- regardless of quality.

Whats been happening for the best part of a decade, with social media and the explosion of metrics beyond crude numbers like ticket sales etc, is that our cultural overloads owners have managed their releases/products solely towards what they can measure. Engagement online on Twitter became part of a media properties measure of success etc. Not just box office receipts or sales.

The peak of this thinking has got to be from the brain of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek:

Spotify’s billionaire CEO Daniel Ek informed artists that in the streaming age “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists today that are making it realise that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

When you are a streaming platform, the only cultural quality that matters are the streaming numbers. Under his logic you have to be continually releasing new music and new content in to the fast feedback loops of consumer culture to survive. An artistic practice built around the gesture of the album, a self contained world of sonic ideas once every 4 years isn’t enough according to Ek.

But thats not how culture works – culture needs to marinade. Work needs to settle in to the collective psyche. Albums are super important.

Art takes time to act upon culture

The idea that a new work must come out, be consumed, burn bright before we all collectively move on to the next thing is a crazy one. It’s rotting peoples brains, its rotting culture.

The other week a friend was bemoaning in the group chat telling us about the following interaction Her newest book came out in February, and she was being interviewed on a podcast. During the conversation the host apparently straight up ask the following (I’m paraphrasing): “Why are you still talking about your book? what about AI? what about xyz? whats next for you?”. Translated: Why are you still, 4 months on, talking about the book that took you 3 years to write?

Rapid cycles of media consumption prevent any kind of deep cultural engagement and collective sense making from occurring. True engagement with art requires time, attention and taste – which the current pace of media release does not allow for. ‘Content’ needs time to embed and resonate within societal and individual consciousness. One thing needs to influence another, be juxtaposed and in dialogue with one another and the audience. It’s from this psychic vibration that responses can begin to flower.

Take for example, Netflix and other streaming platforms approach of dropping whole seasons of TV shows at once – the season binge. This release strategy leads to brief, intense periods of discussion followed by a rapid falling away on social media towards the next ‘new thing’. But this only ever leads to confused commentary. Who knows how far any one has got though the series on day one, two, or three after release? Little sense making can occur when just as everyone finally gets on the same page, it gets immediately turned but the industry that funded and created the work.

I don’t watch much TV – but I did binge the new Fallout series whilst I was back home on the chalk at my parents the other week. It’s the first TV show I’ve watched since the last season of The Expanse. I liked it. Nothing more needs saying.

Had the show dropped weekly as ‘appointment viewing’ we’d all still be discussing it. And thats just better for culture. Fallout would have stayed at the edge of the cultural zeitgeist for 8 weeks, not 10 days. Its release would have had a bigger, deeper cultural impact. It would have had a chance to begin the process of ‘settling in’.

Fandom is part of the problem + the solution

What passes of ‘settling in’ in our current media environment has become endless long tail proliferation of SEO optimised articles like the ones that show up in my Google Discover. ‘Culture websites’ baiting me to click on them to read what fucking stupid dross or opinion someone has.

They are always empty of actual information. Articles about speculative fan theories, canon issues, ranking who’s the best, fan drama etc. It’s not digestion or the marination of cultural works, but fan bait to grab eyeballs and show ads. All stuff I couldn’t give a fuck about.

Even Lord of the Rings isn’t safe, look at what showed up on my discover this morning! I didn’t click it.

Dune used to be my favourite of all online fandom. This 2018 article in The Outline was something I identify with very much:

Beyond that, Dune is not a corporate cash cow, and being a fan doesn’t carry with it that icky feeling you’re doing an unpaid PR internship for Disney or AT&T Time Warner. You’re not being cultivated when you make a Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim Appreciation Thread, the way you are when you do something similar for, like, Harley Quinn or Groot. Nor are you helping billionaires whitewash their crimes if you point out politically positive aspects of the series, like its environmentalism or its bone-deep skepticism of leader cults.

I wrote about Dune and people shouting ‘spoilers’ at me over a 60 year old book back in 2020. For literally my whole life online I enjoyed reading things about Dune. Thoughtful essays, critiques, and observations from people newly discovering the book series. Discussion of its themes and characters etc. Dune was influential in our culture for far longer than it has been ‘relevant’. But the new movies have ruined it all. Dune has been sucked into the media consumption cycle like everything else. It’s no longer marinating in the cultural psyche. Google search Dune and you get the movie not the books. This is no way to organise culture.

None of this should be seen by anyone as evidence of ‘settling in’ at all. It’s just the exploitation of ‘fandom culture’ to ensure that every last drop of monetizable attention is rung from an idea before everyone has moved on.

Settle Cycle

The thing is, as works of culture ‘settle in’ their relevancy diminishes, their influence may grow. Which is bad for owners of the IP who need relevance to sell stuff but good for audiences.

Fandoms keep old books, tv shows, movies alive in the long tail of culture. Consider all the podcasts out there with large audiences watching and discussing a 90’s TV show episode by episode or whatever. Or think of the fans that kept Star Wars influential (but not relevant) for 20+ years. These are the people who (rightly) got fucked off when Disney blew up the canon.

Right now, everyone in my extended circle seems to be reading and discussing Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. I don’t think anyone would say that this book is very relevant to the present, but its influence ‘right now’ on people who make and create culture seems to be enormous. Ed Rathke is currently writing a chapter by chapter breakdown on his substack. The Agitator boys talked about it on Getting Lit Pod etc etc.

The Book of the New Sun has settled in. This is 40 year old culture still marinating.

Last week I wrote about competitive Tetris, and the need to go deep on subjects. How paying attention to something for a long time allows you to develop your taste. I don’t want to sound like an again Hipster, but there is immense value in paying attention to things that aren’t mainstream. Taking time with the content and culture you enjoy.

Hopefully Disney slowing down the MCU juggernaut is a sign that culture owners have seen that fast release cycles does a disservice to the art and our culture. No one is still talking about the Barbie movie, but I have (personally) noticed that folks are still talking about Oppenheimer.

Some of my favourite conversations about media I’ve consumed recently has been about books I read decades ago, or albums that I’ve sat with for a few months or years. Prolonged exposure and discussion among audiences allows culture to settle in. It allows us to digest it, consider it, sit with it. Culture that is settled becomes more valuable to us all.

Permanently Moved

React + Re-Consume

Reaction videos were (and still) are considered ‘low effort’. At worst a parasitic grift. Leveraging the creative work of others for social clout

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/05/11/2408-reaction-re-consumption/

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I updated my online essay collection worldrunning.guide this week. It now totals 22 Essays. About 23.7k Words.
• Finished up some feedback for a start up
• Wrote some more of the impossible object text (next issue of my zine)
• 1 meeting in town
• 3 zoom calls about potential projects

I’m currently open to/for work.

Terminal Access

Ol’ buddy ol’ pal Andrew Dana Hudson is currently in Italy. The reason for his visit was a residency at the Sci-Fi Economics Lab. He’s now at the Turin book fair.

In todays newsletter he covered some of the thinking that came up during his residency and raised the idea of a ‘Planetary currency’

So I started asking the economists at the residency, as an icebreaker, how they thought a planetary currency would work.

It was a surprisingly underexplored idea, even in a room full of SF-loving heterodox economists. What would we even call it? GeoDollars? Planetary Pesos? UN-Yuan? AllCoin? Terrabucks? Unicash? ‘Credits’? Would we even need a name anymore? I’m very open to suggestions.

I would call it Bitcoin imo. Seems like a catchy name.

Dipping the Stacks

Waging Culture Wars Justly

This is all an imperfect analogy, to be sure, but analogies don’t have to be perfect to be helpful. The main thing, I think, is that we who believe that culture matters enough to fight for it ought to have equally strong convictions about how to fight – or not to fight. Otherwise, we’re part of the problem.

The Great Joy of Returning to Your Childhood Hobbies

I started practicing at night in my acoustic-blessed bathroom. Outside the door, my daughter applauded at the end of every stanza. A week later, my husband shyly told me that he was inspired by my renewed creative energy and wanted to take guitar lessons. Between his daily practice and mine, our house is now full of music.

On Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation – by Clinton Ignatov

Squint your eyes, and almost every book or conversation on in this subject can be reduced to four words: “It’s the phone, stupid!”

How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services.

There is way too much serendipity – by Malmesbury

While researching novel uses of sucrose and its synthetic derivatives, Phadnis was told to “test” a chlorinated sugar compound. According to an anecdotal account, Phadnis thought Hough asked him to “taste” it, so he did and found the compound to be exceptionally sweet.

Reading

I finally finished reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. It’s a 2005 collection of interviews with 19 of the top Non Fiction writers at the time of publication. Lots of New Yorker writers, Atlantic writers, Pulitzer Prize winners and long form non fiction book authors. A theme of the book is around the legacy of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism of the 60’s and 70’s. The book suffers in 2024 by being produced in the Interregnum between the personal computing revolution and the internet. Especially the questions around the prospects for long form journalism. None of them saw whats coming. It amazes me that some of them wrote two 10k pieces a year and made a living! A big portion of the authors are now dead, some are in their 60’s grinding out Substacks.

On a recommendation from a blog reader Tom, after my post about motivation and todolist woes the other week I started reading “Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked” by Devon Price Ph.D. I’m afraid I bailed on it after the first 50 pages. The book is mostly for chronic workaholics. There was nothing in it for someone like me with the twin issues of having a self castigatory nature towards not doing enough AND lack of intrinsic motivation. Ditched. DNF

I wanted something to burn though so started the Warhammer novel Harrowmaster by Mike Brooks. its not my favourite subject mater/lore topic but Brooks is a good writer and I’m enjoy it. Nearly done!

Sunshower – Taeko Ohnuki

Suns out here in the London, so I’ve been listening to Japanese 70’s lounge pop legend Taeko Ohnuki. Perfect summer sunshine music.

The post Settling In appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Find the Others

Last month I wrote about game designer Paul Cezge’s new newsletter and titled the post ‘Real Things For Real People‘.

My own efforts making a zine over the last two years – creating, printing, and mailing physical items – stem from a belief in the importance of tangible connections with people.

The act of sending and receiving real things – be it a zine, a newsletter, or even a one-dollar PDF to real people is an important antidote to the impersonal nature of the kinds of digital exchanges we currently find ourselves with. 

Maybe it’s a legacy of having grown up in a DIY punk scene or because I’ve been making zines since I was 10, but making and creating real things and putting them into real peoples hands is something that I’m increasingly feeling more and more passionate about as we head into the mid 2020’s.

A few people have asked me how I square his with my consulting job being almost entirely about techno-social systems, virtual worlds and narrative metaphors. But I honestly don’t see any disconnect at all … We live inside of techno-social systems.

The Internet (and the virtual worlds that precede it) is for meeting people. It’s always been about discovering a shared place online and subsequently sharing your ideas, time, and attention with people who have the same interests as you. The Internet is about meeting people and facilitating/coordinating action in real life. I’m not just talking about politics here, I’m talking about everything.

The memories of my 20’s are punctuated by secret warehouse noise raves, guerrilla gardening mobilisations, and beach parties. Remember how weird and wild flashmobs were in the mid 00’s I went to a few of them too? All of this stuff was organised online. The most important socialweb era ‘social technologies’ are in my opinion, things like meetup.com and Facebook events – before they got weird, shit and spammy.

Party’s aside, these technologies facilitated other things in my life too: The Murray Bookchin reading group I used to attend in a squat, RPG design meetings in cold and draughty social club spaces, and things like WordPress or camera nerd meet ups.

My point being, that because of the way that the Internet has impacted my life, I have an unshakable understanding that it’s a coordinating mechanism for finding others. Building community, and then meeting real people and doing real things in real life.

Check out this 1995 video of Bill Gates talking to Letterman about the Internet and ‘how you can use it to find people with the same interests as you‘:

Almost all of Letterman’s ‘funny man’ objections through out the interview are him pointing to existing cultural coordination technologies that dominated culture back in 1995 – the example in the clip I queued up – Magazines. Unfortunately for us 30 years later, magazines are all gone. And trying to find the others on social media in a way that isn’t algorithmically mediated by ad-tech is almost impossible.

Floating Croissant

In the 2020’s ‘The Others’ are mostly found the Dark Forest. I’m not sure how you, but I’m in lots of little Telegram and Signal groups chats, plus Discords both big + small. And one of these group chats is called ‘London AW Floating Croissant Chaos Agents’.

During DevConnect last year an existing Telegram group chat was used to pile London based people into as we met each other around the convention. It’s a group of people all interested in building Autonomous Worlds on the blockchain.

The group chat is a lively one. Full of artists, programmers, theorists and games developers engaged rolling discussion about books and articles on virtual worlds, metaverse legislation and recommendations for locations of finest baked goods from across London. The group chat’s name still retains an element of its original function – to coordinate a breakfast meeting on a narrowboat on the Regent’s Canal.

Unlike other groups I’m in however, this one has enough escape velocity to manifest things in real life. There’s been several whole chat group meet ups since November 2023 and some smaller impromptu pub meetings too.

There’s a lot of energy in the chat as it’s made up of a collective of people who have all had several ‘lives’. As a result we all have a lot of motivation and skills to make things happen. And earlier this month two things happened…

Open Croissant + Floating Worlds

First, a few people in the chat who are founders at two companies building in the scene decided to run a fringe event on Autonomous Worlds to coincide with ETHGlobal London 2024. They named the event ‘Open Croissant‘.

Upon hearing the news, I and a few others decided it would be cool if the group produced a semi-regular journal/zine on the subject of worlds. Just 10 days later, all 56 pages of Floating Worlds went to print. Then we waited 7 working days for delivery, and then further 2 for the conference.

The zine included essays from Tonk, J David Osborne, AWTNMY, Me, A manifesto from the AUTONOMOUS CULTURE RESEARCH BUREAU, OPNPC, and Kitty Mayo. And includes a games corner with a word search and a pastry related solo RPG.

I went though a weekend crash course in print design and layout, and Goblin Oats from tonk.gg did all the art.

As an aside, its the first time I’ve used print.work – the company single handedly keep the zine economy alive in the UK – and my experience was great. They held my hand though my PDF export as print PDFs are more complicated than literally rocket science! No issues (apart from the ones on my end!).

Playmint got some mech made up, a dice and a nice tote bag, and the conference where we handed them out went really well!

It was well attended, with lots of familiar faces and some Twitter handles materialised into meat space as actual people. Tonk.gg gave a talk and several of the Playmint team also spoke. The zine came out of Tonk’s marketing budget, but in future Floating Worlds is going to be funded by dues at our meet ups to ensure that we can print/make another issue later in the year.

It was quite amazing that we managed to go from *we should make a journal* to *here’s the journal* in side of 10 days. Folks in the chat are the sort of people who had essays ready to go.

I’m super proud of our little London based worlds chat group. I learnt a lot (and a hard lesson) about doing more ambitious print things for my own zine.

This zine isn’t for sale or anything, they are all gone. A limited run for a single event/conference.

REINER 6 Digit self incrementing mechanical number stamp

Speaking of zines. Because this was a blockchain related event, and we all know that crypto people sure LOVE a non-fungible collectable. We thought that Floating Worlds should probably be a numbered edition.

Let us all Un-fung the fungible with numbers.

When I come to making my own 50-60 page edition of Start Select Reset (SOON) I’ll be using this stamp to number the copies too. As of right now my amortised cost of the mechanical hand stamp is 50p per use. But that will come down further as I use it for the rest of my life making my own zines lol.

Anyways. If you have a chat group with high escape velocity. Make a zine or do something IRL.

The post Floating Worlds appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 3, 2022

|

Culture 🏛️, Permanently Moved 🔊

Steady state capitalist realism and cultural fracking has got so bad they are rebooting the damn moon landings.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2022/12/03/301-2243-what-the-hell-is-going-on/

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What the Hell Is Going On?

“What the hell is going on?”.

It’s a question that seems to be coming out of the mouths of almost everyone I’ve hung out with this year.

It’s taken a while, but the rising damp of psychic anxiety that permeates every aspect of our culture and society has finally started to peel the wallpaper. Less and less people can go on ignoring it.

Last year in episode 21-40 I said that the light the media was pointing to at the end of the pandemic tunnel was in fact the headlamp of an oncoming train. We’ve all come staggering out of the lockdowns into a world that is objectively worse than when we went in. 

In the UK, politicians have been actively making decisions that make our lives worse for a decade. But more recently, their motivations have been laid bare. 

The only political program the elites have for this country is looting it. 

A man with a net worth of  770 million was recently crowned prime minister by the bond markets. The same man was also responsible for letting the rich loot roughly £15.7bn – £20.1bn pounds out of the country and told the treasury to not worry about it.

The Queen died, a prime minister deliberately crashed the economy. The richest man in the world now owns a car company, a solar panel company, a rocket factory and a social network. Supermarkets are half empty and Britan has no eggs.

Kanye West – the 15th biggest selling solo musical artist of all time – dressed in a morph suit and praised Hitler on Infowars. Even Alex Jones was shook. We have a real time war reported blow by blow on live blogs and Epstein apparently killed himself.

It’s like we’re living upside downland that operates on dream logic.

Nobody has any idea what’s going on.

I’ve been broken since 2015 to be honest. I watched a live stream of US celebrity ride down an escalator. Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World blasting, he took the podium to announce his presidential run. 

Something inside me went ping. I was witnessing the inertia of the Universe. I haven’t been the same since. 

Commenting on the state of things a year later, a friend told me he had fallen out the back of the wardrobe and he couldn’t find his way back to reality again. I feel like people are having similar personal epiphanies all around me. Waking up from one dream world, and wishing for a different dream.

Amongst the madness the only thing I am absolutely certain of is that I have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on.

What’s worse, we can’t even look to quote unquote mainstream culture to help us understand what’s going on. Because according to the culture industry, there’s nothing going on at all. 

There’s nothing going on except cultural fracking.

Filmstories reported recently that there are 114 reboots, remakes and sequels in various phases of production. How can we even begin to make sense of the world when the culture is stuck selling resurrected corpses and trading on former glories. 

I saw the trailer for the new Transformers movie the other day.
Beastwars – the seventh instalment in the franchise.

There’s only so much good will you can extract from a generation before you have to find a new mark. After pumping every last profitable molecule from 80s nostalgia, and the first iteration of the toy franchise. It makes sense to move on to the second wave of toys.

The cultural clock, the geologic layer of cultural fracking has moved forward to 1996. The Beastwars trailer even features Biggie’s track Juicy.

The oldest kids who grew up playing with the Beast Wars toy line would have been 11 when the first live action Transformers movie came out. Now in their mid 20’s, they have presumably been waiting for the opportunity to have their own nostalgia fracked by the culture industry. 

Welcome to the club Gen Z.

The world is moving into the future at a faster and faster pace, yet the owners of our culture are desperately trying to arrest it. Tiktok trends explode and die within days, yet it takes 18 months to publish a book. Politicians are looting the country in broad daylight whilst arguments over the merits of a sequel to a live action reboot of a cartoon based on a folk tale rage online. The ice caps are melting, the planet is dying but don’t worry proles, the football is on at christmas. Late stage capitalism is transitioning into end state capitalism. And the second decade of the 21 Century might mark the end of the long 20th. The runout continues. 

The problem of static steady state capitalist realism and cultural fracking is so bad they are rebooting the damn moon landings. 

All part of the greater, wider, deeper culture war. It’s a fight over the type of world and reality that gets reflected back to us by mirror of culture. Another reason developments in AI are so important. Whats going on is a battle for control over the type of dreams we are going to have next after the current one ends. 

Because as the world gets worse, reality isn’t going to get any better, just weirder and faster.

Watch

The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post What the Hell Is Going On? | 2243 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Since I discovered this Pharrell and Rick Rubin interview I think I must have watched it 5 or 6 times in its entirety. I posted it to my Tumblr when I first found it, but its grown and grown on me.

There’s a bit where they are talking about the sub-genre of Funk – Go-Go. Pharrell, lists off all the areas of the country where you could find it being played in clubs.

It’s wild to me that I remember when genres and scenes were geographically isolated too – with hardcore punk. But Pharrell calls this phenomenon a ‘world’. He also makes reference to the song Rubin Produced LL Cool J’s Rock the Bells. “All the chains? and that music? You had no idea what you were doing to us in Virgina”.

I went to a 40th birthday over the weekend and for about 2 hours of the night it was wall to wall Jungle and Drum n’ Bass. LOL. Me and my friends were talking about how mass culture seems to have unravelled post internet. An argument I’ve made a few times my self.

But then again… compare these two songs:

The thing that they have in common, is that they both came out within months of each other in 1996.

The Spice Girls were this huge cultural juggernaut, ‘girl power’ flattened everything in its path. They were the culture – the mass culture.

But at the same time Super Sharp Shooter with the Ganja KRU came out and to jungliests, Super sharp shooter changed their world.

Obviously there must have been some overlap between ravers and pop fans, but really they are literally, figuratively – worlds apart.

Yet both tracks to my mind are equally as influential as one another on UK culture, and music more widely.

I wonder if art/music/culture creates the world around it juts as keenly as it is created by the world that the art inhabits? We will recover, culturally from the shock of the internet i’m sure. All these people going about their lives living in different realities.

It’s probably closer to what pagan societies must have been like? Dunno.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Working on the new show.
• Final lecture of part 1 of the new centre course with Wassim
• Been getting a lot of ducks in a row
• Been building a wall for ducks
• I finished the first draft of the BAYC litepaper overview – its just over 15k words. I think I might split it up across 5 posts and post one a day for a week.

Dipping the Stacks

Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds | Vi Bilägare

The results speak for themselves. The worst-performing car needs 1,400 meters to perform the same tasks for which the best-performing car only needs 300 meters.

Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2 – Et tu, Cthulhu

Point-and-click adventures make up a fairly broad genre with many different art styles. I’ve focused my attention on a sub-genre that hews close to the style of early 1990s Sierra and LucasArts adventure games.

An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism

How an unforgettable performance in Red Alert 3 became legend.

Why Japanese Iron Kettles Cost So Much

For centuries, Japanese artisans have made kettles by pouring molten iron into molds and hammering them out once they’ve cooled.

The Four Dirty C-Words of the Internet – Paul Jun

There are four c-words that have become very problematic: content, culture, community, and creator.

Reading

Still reading Wired Love: a Romance of Dots and Dashes. But I’m nearly finished.

Still reading The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself by Susan Bell. A passing familiarity of the Great Gatsby is required in the fiction editing section, but not necessary. Really good book.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Himera – Sharing Secrets

Really into this album. It has Hanna Diamond as a guest on it which is why I found out about it. Its a wild mix of hyper-pop, rave, and video game music.

The track Umbrella is a good example of what you’re in for.

This is the track with Hanna Dimond on:

The whole album is very sonically coherent and it sounds like complete sonic vision thats been delivered. Totally uncompromising. I really like it. It’s also super autumnal and despite all the electronics, it sounds like the forest and mushrooms and dreams and rain. Very cool.

Remember Kids:

The post Grown and Grown appeared first on thejaymo.net.