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

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

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

But since I never re-listen to my interviews, I can’t remember exactly what I said!

You can listen to the full episode below, or click though the links to your podcatcher of choice here.

Neomania Episode #09

Exploring solarpunk as a memetic engine, cultural fracking, and how worlds are the medium of the 21st century.

I’m joined by Jay Springett (@thejaymo), solarpunk steward, world-runner, and author of thejaymo.net. Together we dig into how cultural fracking has left our collective imagination hollowed out, what it means to treat worlds as a creative medium, and why protocols and infrastructures may be the real artforms of the future.

We discuss copyright battles from Napster to Disney to AI training data, the parallels between hip-hop sampling and machine learning, and how solarpunk thrives not just as an aesthetic but as a generative memetic engine for imagining alternate futures. Along the way, Jay traces a line from D&D in 1974 to MUDs to corporate canon world-running, unpacks “protocol art” as artistic gestures upstream of production, and argues that futuring itself can provide a laboratory for testing ideas for what comes after the fall of empires, because as Jay tells us, you can’t fight a culture war unless you’re making culture.

Start Select Reset 📑

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The post Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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

A year later, he invited me back.

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

We talked about what I learned from making the show, how I feel now it’s finished, and what comes next. The conversation also touches on physical media, podcasting, and monetisation in 2025, as well as my future creative direction.

I shared where I’d like to take Permanently Moved and how it’ll intersect with my own zine, Start Select Reset.

Enjoy!

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.

The post Talking 301 on Wolf Pod appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I was recently interviewed by Dirk Songuer for his book: Fieldnotes from the Metaverse which “documents the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse” and the interview is now online.

We had a great conversation about identity in techno-social systems and the metaverse as medium. Naturally, we also discussed in detail the core thesis of my own book: that Dungeons & Dragons is the most important Social Technology of the 20th Century.

How D&D allowed players, for the first time, to step into the simulation (or the metaphor) of another world, and how in turn this shift influenced the creation of the Internet, virtual worlds, and our understanding of the Metaverse.

It was a great chat that covers a lot of my thinking and position on various topics that Dirk was interested in exploring for his own book. It was a great chat that covers a lot of my thinking and position on various topics that Dirk was interested in exploring for his own book. It’s also a bit of an honour to be included in the interview list, alongside Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Julian Dibble, Dan Hunter, and Edward Castronova – some real legends!

You can read the full interview here.

I’ve included a few quotes below:

Dirk Songuer: You also mentioned Dungeons & Dragons, and how it shaped the way we think about identity within these worlds. What do you mean by that?

Jay Springett: The innovation of Dungeons & Dragons as a social technology is that, for the first time, we were able to come down from the bird’s eye view of war gaming, chess, or other types of board games, and step into the simulation (or the metaphor) in the first-person. I often think about the amount of cultural vertigo that this must have caused in the 1970s in people discovering the game for the first time.

As Emanuel Derman says: “All models are metaphors” and people stepped into the metaphor or model, as in world model, or simulation – I’m using those terms somewhat interchangeably.

And these games people were all over at MIT at the time, meeting at the MIT Strategic Games Society. People like Mark Swanson, who then designed several D&D campaigns. Or Tim Anderson, a famous computer scientist that co-created Zork. These were also the first people that looked at things like the SQL database whitepaper. They’re thinking about multidimensional systems, keys, identities, and identity as a cluster of ordinals. And so, in 1976 we got Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther, and then by 1978 we got MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) by Trubshaw and Bartle.

I think that’s the major insight about Dungeons & Dragons’ influence. You step into a metaphor, which immediately has these implications for how you understand the computer system

Microsoft built a global real time voice network in 2005 but there were absolutely zero governance mechanisms whatsoever. And as my friend Ben says, the experience of his first 10 years on Xbox Live was “character building”.

The post Fieldnotes from the Metaverse | Interview appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Over the last few months, I’ve been in conversation with Eddie Rathke from Wolf Newsletter about William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy as part of his ongoing book club. Eddie has taken on the challenge of reading all of William Gibson’s books in order this year, and I joined him for the Blue Ant Trilogy, often known as the ‘Bigend Books.’

Each month, we explored the themes, characters, and plot of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, sharing our thoughts on the transition from Gibson’s signature cyberpunk style to a more realist form. I think this shift in tone provided Eddie a refreshing change from what had come before, even though the genre’s underlying concerns are still present in the series.

I’ve linked to the individual Wolf Newsletter posts and embedded the podcast episodes below:

Blue Ant Trilogy

Wolf Pod #009: Patten Recognitions

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking with Jay Springett, writer, thinker, worldrunner, and podcaster. You can find him at his website, his Permanently Moved podcast, or on substack at Experience.Computer.

Today, we’re onto Pattern Recognition, the first novel in the Blue Ant Trilogy. We talk about the internet, Gibson’s career more broadly, and a host of other things. Here’s the interview with Gibson that Jay mentions as well.

Wolf Pod #010: Spook Country

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking with Jay Springett, writer, thinker, worldrunner, and podcaster. You can find him at his website, his Permanently Moved podcast, or on substack at Experience.Computer. Check out his recent appearance on the Ecogradia podcast! It’s great.

Today, we’re onto Spook Country, which reminded me more of Gibson’s previous novels. And so your mileage may vary with that, but I think it’s a bit of a reversion.

Wolf Pod #011: Zero History

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking with Jay Springett, writer, thinker, worldrunner, and podcaster. You can find him at his website, his Permanently Moved podcast, or on substack at Experience.Computer. Check out his recent appearance on the Ecogradia podcast! It’s great.

Today, we’re onto Zero History, the conclusion to the Blue Ant trilogy, which feels like the most Blue Anty of the books in the trilogy.

The post Blue Ant Trilogy | Wolf Pod appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I was recently invited to join Nirmal Kishnani on season 5 of EcoGradia, the architecture and sustainability podcast, to talk about Solarpunk.

We had a great conversation about Solarpunk, its visions for the world, and the challenges we face in building sustainable futures. I talked about the role of storytelling, design, and technology in imagining better futures, and how solarpunk can inspire tangible action today.

The solarpunk movement in fiction, art, fashion, and activism imagines a sustainable civilisation and considers how we get there. After gaining traction for a decade, how does it align with the latest thinking in regenerative design?

Jay Springett is a British writer, podcaster, and strategist with a background in tech consulting and the philosophy of arts. He has been stewarding the solarpunk community as an admin on solarpunks.net since 2014, and has written, given interviews, and delivered talks on the subject for years.

Looking beyond science-fiction speculation, he talks to Ecogradia about solarpunk via actionable initiatives such as permaculture, keyline design for landscape rehydration, urban agriculture, and solar panels as sites of individual agency.

You can find links and more info about the topics we covered in the episode here. Or watch it below – EcoGradia’s Video podcast production is next level!

The post How Solarpunk Envisions A World We Will Want To Live In | Ecogradia appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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

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

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

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

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

We talk about:

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

Listen

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

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

Here’s the full list of topics covered:

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

Subscribe to the Agitator Patreon for Agitator Z

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

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

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

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

Listen

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

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

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

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

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

Check it out:

Watch

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

Earlier this week had the pleasure of speaking with Timo Peach host of Unsee The Future Podcast. I was honoured to be the first guest as part of the new 10 episode season on the show called: ‘The Hopeychattybits‘. We spoke about Solarpunk, futures, narrative strategy, world running and a whole lot more.

I first spoke with Timo last year during the pandemic/lockdown after the release of Unsee The Future Podcast Episode #31 on Solarpunk. It’s a fantastic piece of radio, I highly recommend checking it out.

It was great to speak with Timo again for the hopeychattybits, a really fun chat. I hope we get to speak again some time soon.

UTF: The Hopeychattybits – Jay Springett

Timo Peach meets artists, solarpunks and changemakers re-imagining the stories we think we’re in.

In the first of this ten-part series, Momo meets writer, theorist and strategist currently specialising in the distributed web and world running. Co-founder of solarpunks.net he’s been a central figure in the solarpunk movement for most of it’s existence. He’s also the maker of 301 Permanently Moved podcast and host of Come Internet With Me.

“We have access to an abundance of independently created art from all over the world. And yet the kinds of movies being made, and the types of stories that are getting told seem to be totally unoriginal, regurgitated or rebooted.”

Listen

Watch

Next week Timo will be speaking with fellow Solarpunk steward Sarena Ulibarri, writer and Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press.

The post Unsee The Future | Podcast appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Earlier this year I found my way into the Near Future Lab Discord, and I’m so glad I did.

Julian invited me to be a guest at NFL’s General Seminar No9 on Synthetic Media/Synthetic Brands back in September.

As a follow up, I recently had the honour of being the least accomplished guest he’s had on the Near Future Laboratory Podcast. It is really nice to be on the show alongside so many familiar faces and for it to also feature a bit of flash fiction from Andrew Dana Hudson.

It was a great chat and we talked about all sorts: Crypto, Headless Brands, and Power Fandoms, Solarpunk, Blockchains, Governance and Gaming and more.

If you find yourself with a spare 1h10ms and are up for listening to Julian Bleecker and I have a freewheeling totally unstructured conversation then the show below is for you!

Jaymo a/k/a Jay Springett is a writer, podcaster, strategist, currently specializing in the distributed web, metaverse, and world running. He works with individuals and organisations to create cohesive worlds. Hybrid environments made up of people, places, technologies and the cultures they create together. You can find him and his work at thejaymo.net.

Here are some links to some of the material, references, and topics we covered:

Interdependence Ep. 22: This is All Happening Right Now: Solarpunk, cultural fracking and the real Jurassic Park with Jay Springett

Permanently Moved Podcast

Headless Brands Essay

“The indifference Engine” (also The Indifference Engine – An Ecological Characterisation of Bitcoin)

Olalekan Jeyifous

“Olalekan Jeyifous Is Imagining an Afrofuturist Brooklyn“

— Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/julian-bleecker/support

The post Near Future Laboratory Podcast N°22 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I recently spoke with builtin.com about Solarpunk and technology. This article is the result.
It also features other friends and colleagues: Williams, Wilk, Flynn etc.

Check out the full write up here: Solarpunk Is a Tumblr Vibe. It’s Also a Practical Movement

I think every article like this serves as a small speed bump toward solarpunk being co-opted by a big media entity somewhere.

Heres some quotes:

So why, when I ask Jay Springett — longtime co-administrator of solarpunks.net — about what solarpunk looks like in practice, does he talk about an old phone box that was converted into a seed library?

“That wouldn’t be out of place in a solarpunk story,” Springett said. “But also it’s real life”

And for all of solarpunk’s openness toward technology, there are always broader considerations beyond gadgetry, said Springett, who was as eager to discuss the work of rainwater-harvesting designer Brad Lancaster and 3D ocean farmer Bren Smith as he was Scuttlebutt.

The post Solarpunk Is a Tumblr Vibe | Press appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Episode Summary

Back with a conversation with a special person and close friend of the podcast Jay Springett

Jay is a writer, theorist and podcaster who falls into a special category of people where we can say with some confidence that whatever they are thinking about will be commonplace in a few years. We discuss a passion of his, Solarpunk, cultural fracking, universe construction, permaculture, Russia’s real jurassic park, K pop and the factory model, reality modelling and aerospace, conspiracy theories and much more.

Can’t recommend enough that you check out Jay’s various cultural contributions, and hope you are all having a wonderful week.

Just a quick note to say that I was a guest on Holly Hendon and Mat Dryhurst’s excellent podcast Interdependence.fm this week. The first free 1h 16m are embed above. If you want the full fat interview and access to all the other uncut interviews with some amazing guests better than me you can subscribe to their Patreon.

Both of them are such generous hosts, it was an honour to chat to some friends and be on the show!

The post This is All Happening Right Now | Interdependence.fm appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Back in July (2019) I went to Barcelona to speak on a panel with Marta Peirano,  Xenia Ermoshina, and Ash Sarkar at Sonar+D.
We were asked to speculate on future of the web; and a future that it is open, free and sustainable. I talked a lot about trees.

The Long Now Foundation just published a lengthly article on Sonar Festival. Calling it a “Trips Festival for the Digital Age”. I am honoured to have a lengthly quote from my presentation on the panel included.

“There is a deficiency of long-term thinking in western culture,” Jay Springett, a London based theorist, said at a panel on the future of the internet at this year’s Sónar+D. “It will be vital that we think at multigenerational time depths about everything from internet technologies to tree planting, given the challenges that humanity faces. Our modern world seeks to focus us towards the short-term, and praises quarterly growth. But in the real world, away from high frequency ledger entries and global capital flows, it takes 100–120 years for an oak tree to grow from seed to full canopy height. It takes three human generations to grow a tree. This is real growth. And I’d like to propose that everything that occurs in the duration between the decision to plant an acorn to the tree’s full grown crown is short-term thinking.”

Source: A Trips Festival for the Digital Age

It really is wonderful to have such a long pull quote featured in an article by Long Now Foundation. They have been such a huge influence on my life since I first had my horizons broadened by full fat internet at university in the early Noughty’s.

The video of our panel is supposed to go online at some point. I will post about it once it comes out and link to it from the talks list on the homepage.

The post A Trips Festival for the Digital Age appeared first on thejaymo.net.

When I was at Unsound Festival last week I bumped in to Journalist Jacobo García from Spain based Clot Mag. He told me over the deafening noise of Dreamcrusher that an article based on an interview I did with him at Sonar+D Festival was now online.

According to Jay Springett, one of the most regarded SolarPunk theorists, there is a set of cardinal differences between SolarPunk and traditional Sci-Fi. Solar Punk is born on the internet and it’s developed there, without a central authority or a literary canon defining the background and rules of the universe. Only a small corpus of books have been printed, mostly collections of short stories. Being originated on the internet, the visual component is as important as the writing itself. Browsing through SolarPunk dedicated websites, Tumblrs and forums one can observe a mixture of real-life images taken out its usual context. Stills from movies and video-games, every imaginable type of fan-art -even sketches and designs – all put together framing a concept-art narrative. 

Right now, SolarPunk kind of lives in financial limbo, still underground. But given its horizontal and open ethos (where everybody can contribute by starting its own website), there is a real concern of losing the central values of the genre. It’s not difficult to imagine a literary company appropriating it for-profit or a video-game being released using the catchy name, eliminating on its way the defining values of SolarPunk.

‘Solar Punk, a framework for hopeful futures’ by Jacobo García

What I hope comes across in the article is how I think of Solarpunk as a Memetic engine. It’s a world first, a set of books, and narratives second.

Here’s a slide I’ve previously posted from my talk at Unsound:

You can read the whole thing here

The post ‘Solar Punk, a framework for hopeful futures’ appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I’ve been in the media the last week:

Can Science fiction save the planet?

I was profiled/interviewed by French online magazine ulyces.co

The piece is in French but as you can see in the screenshot above, Google Translate does a very good job with it.

The interview covers Solarpunk, My Sonar+D talk, Stacktivism work and more. Really happy with it.

Siglo21 – Interview (Radio 3)

I was also on Spanish Radio this week! It’s one of the interviews I did at Sonar+D. I’m dubbed into Spanish and sound very handsome.

I speak about Solarpunk, Infrastructure and Deeptime.

You can listen to it here ~40mins in: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/siglo-21/siglo-21-angel-olsen-01-08-19/5359463/

The post Profiles and Radio appeared first on thejaymo.net.