The Firehose and the Feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Blog

World Literacy

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

The idea is World Literacy1.

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

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

Terminal Access

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

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

Reading

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

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

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

Songs for Sleeping Dogs – Ben Hackett

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

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

Remember Kids:

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

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.

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Get the Zine!
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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.

Just Like Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for what? and for whom?

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

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

Just like stuff. That’s all.

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

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

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

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

On The Blog

Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania

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

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

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

August 2025 | Photo 365

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

BYENNE

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

BYENNE

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

by Jay Springett @thejaymo.net

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

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

Terminal Access

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

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

Reading

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

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

Emergence – AM sin

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

Remember Kids:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full report here:

Where is the social internet taking us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sitting This One Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not everything earns your energy.
Very little does.

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

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

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

But I’m sitting this one out.

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

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

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

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

So no.

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

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

And right now?
I choose to overlook.

I’m sitting this one out.

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March 1, 2025

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AI 🤖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

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

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Human Gunk and the Slopocalypse

The pipes of the Internet are clogged. Not just by AI-generated slop, but something older, thicker, and harder to shift.

I’ve been thinking about this after seeing a tweet from Aaron Bastani the other day. He was talking about a news story, it struck me that the problem isn’t just the existence of bad journalism, or bad writing, or any of the other symptoms of the endless content churn.

This is something worse. It’s something structural and it needs a catchy name.

I propose: Human Gunk.

Gunk is what happens when content isn’t made to inform, entertain, or create meaning, but only to be seen. It’s the accumulated, suffocating residue of media optimised for machine visibility instead of human readability. Like the filth of the Augean Stables, it has built up all across the internet over the years of the last decade or so—layer upon layer of clickbait, regurgitated press releases, SEO-padding, and engagement bait. It’s made by people, but produced like sludge. It’s all Gunk. Human Gunk. 

Gunk isn’t AI-generated slop—though it shares similar DNA. AI slop has a liquid quality, endlessly replicable, infinitely generated. Gunk on the other hand is sticky. It has lingered, and built up over time, even before we get to an AI Slopocalypse, the Internet is already clogged, choking the flow of actual information and meaning.

Gunk is all the awkward, keyword-stuffed sentences at the top and in the middle of every article. The personal sob stories about someone’s grandma you have to scroll past before you get to a recipe. It’s all the endless think pieces that say nothing but mention product names. It’s all the LinkedIn posts that read like they were ghostwritten by a sentient press release. It’s corporate blog spam that exists only to trap search traffic. The same five insights repackaged in a thousand different ways, all slightly worse than the last.

Everywhere you turn, Human Gunk is present. Headlines that say nothing. Listicles that recycle the same bullet points as two months ago. It’s blogposts that say ‘Everything we know’ about a product or a game that’s not eve been announced yet. That TV show that did this ‘one perfect thing’. Search results have been filed with SEO assisted posts, written not for people but for Google’s algorithm. For years.

The newspapers protesting for stronger copyright protections against AI this week are in my opinion some of the worst offenders. Churnalism is entirely about the production of gunk. I mean, The Daily Mail’s website is more gunky than the floor of a rave at 5am.

If media organisations *actually* cared about the integrity and value of their copyrighted content, they would show a little pride in it. They’d stop writing engagement-bait headlines, stop flooding their websites with machine-readable fluff, and stop participating in the very race to the bottom that made ai training so easy in the first place. But of course, they won’t. Because Gunk isn’t an accident—it’s the natural outcome of a system where attention and advertising dollars have become the only currency that matters.

The Slopocalypse is fear that AI-generated slop flooding the web—and I understand, I’ve had AI content generated about me. But let’s be honest, the web has already been sticky with Gunk for years. AI has just made this crystal clear. 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. 

Under the pressure of platform physics, the shape of our media has changed:

The physics of Google rewards clickbait.
The physics of Facebook prioritises minion memes.
The physics of YouTube forces creators into soy face thumbnails and trend-chasing.

And so the cycle continues. The internet gets gunkier and AI gets trained on all that Gunk and then produces more of it.

The question is: how do we resist?

I for one have started refusing to engage with zero-information headlines. I won’t get baited into a click. It’s made my whole experience of the internet more mindful, and I consume far less gunk as a result. I’ve also try (wherever possible) to make creative work for real people, not machines. No algorithm-chasing. No engagement traps. No optimised thumbnails.

This doesn’t mean I ignore discoverability completely. If I really cared about it, my blog would be on Substack. I try really hard to resist the pressure of platforms, dictatating the structure and style of the things I make. I try to make atemporal work that lasts

The internet is already full of content optimised to be seen, but not necessarily read by humans. I don’t see any point in playing a game that gets more people in the door only to have them arrive and find it’s the same as everything else.

At the end of the day, Human Gunk already won. It reshaped the way we write, the way we consume, the way we think about information. AI **might** make everything worse—but in my opinion, the worst has already happened.

We’re already knee deep in The Augean Stables. But the act of cleaning out the stables isn’t just about shovelling slop and cleaning gunk. It’s about making room for something better.

The only way out is through. Not refusal, but creation. Write with care. Make things that matter. People over platforms. Audience over algorithm. 

If we want an internet worth having, we have to fill it with things worth making.

Otherwise, all we have left is Slop and Gunk.

The post Human Gunk and the AI Slopocalypse | 2504 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Meme Stash as a Folk Archive

While cleaning up my laptop’s desktop today, dragging images into my GOOD MEME’s folder, I had a thought: Saving memes down to your computer is a way of holding onto cultural memory. The Meme Stash as Folk Archive

Memes are little artefacts of online thought—symbols, fragments of language, snapshots of the collective mind. Downloading them is a way of taking control of the wider media environment, keeping something from disappearing off and away into the endless scroll.

So what is a meme stash really?

• A personal archive? – A collection of images, jokes, and references saved according to your own system, not dictated by an algorithm.
• A way to stop things from disappearing? – What’s everywhere today might vanish tomorrow. Without saving, it’s left to the mercy of the internet’s short memory.
• A form of curation? – Not all memes are worth keeping, just like not all books are worth owning. Saving is a choice.
• A tool for asynchronous cultural participation: A meme might sit untouched for months or even years before being brought back at the perfect moment.

To collect memes is to exercise discernment.

It’s not that different from Pinterest or any other way people collect and arrange things they find meaningful. Pinterest is about curating an aesthetic, picking and organising images to express a personal style or mood. A meme stash does the same, but with humour, commentary, and internet culture. I think if Pinterest represents an aspirational self, the meme stash is the ironic self.

I don’t think a meme stash is JUST a random folder of saved images—it’s a living folk archive, a personal repository of cultural moments that mattered enough to preserve. Unlike institutional archives, which collect with authority and intent, a meme stash grows organically, shaped by individual taste, humour, and memory. And like all folk archives, it tells a story—not just of internet culture, but of the person curating it.

On The Blog:

Oh lord! I finally finished copy and pasting all my podcasts on to the blog! The Permanently Moved Online Archive is now fully complete! It was fun revisiting some of the episodes I made back in 2018. The first 10 .. were not very good at all. LOL. Very happy to have finished this. Means I get 30-40mins back every morning.

I’ve started organising / rebuilding my Blog Categories page but ran out of steam. Quite a bit more to do!

Permanently Moved

Email is a Destination

https://permanentlymoved.online/

In primary school, we had a lesson in the new computer lab which involved sending an email to each other at adjacent desks.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/02/15/2502-email-is-a-destination/

• 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

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• 90min book sprint with RIVAL
• Full day on/with PROJECT ENTRY team
  • Much spreadsheeting 👀
• Lots more editing on SLOP MACHINES
• Played with ChatGPT pro and … have book on my kindle I didn’t write…
• Sent some invites to potential Experience.Computer Guests
• Took a look at some data for Novara, need to come back to that as it’s another epic spreadsheet.

Terminal Access

Spend my evenings catching up on friends and acquaintances public output this week. Really enjoyed this XCamp keynote from Dre about using AI in his creative practice.

I also highly recommend this conversation between Dougald and Nate Hagens from The Great Simplification.

Reading

Still re-reading Autobiography of a Yogi. Still reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. I had to put Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh down. It’s like reading molasses, all the words just start spinning around

I started reading Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens. Its fantastic! I’m about 1/4 of the way though Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead too. Just got to the bit where he predicts the iPhone or ‘wallet computer’!!

Summer Portraits – Ludovico Einaudi

I think if you had told anyone 20 years ago that the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi would be getting Nine billion streams a year they wouldn’t be able to reconcile it. But here we are.

Summer portraits is a concept album loosely based around Einaudi summers as a schoolboy in the 1960’s. The whole album from start to finish is dripping in nostalgia and passions. It sounds like warm summer wind, hot summer evenings and an optimistic passion.

Remember Kids:

The post Meme Stash as a Folk Archive appeared first on thejaymo.net.

February 15, 2025

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

When I was 16 I saw someone get glassed in a pub over something they’d said on the local phpBB punk forum.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/02/15/2502-email-is-a-destination/

• 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

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Email is a Destination

Lately, I’ve been thinking about online identity, and I realise that I’ve always seen email as a destination.

I first came to this position early, in primary school around 1995, when my class was first introduced to email. The school had a new computer lab and part of a lesson involved sending an email to each other at adjacent desks. I found the whole exercise felt pointless due to blunt literalism.

What was so exciting about sending a message to someone sitting a few seats away? I totally misunderstood the promise of the global information highway. But the idea of sending a message from A to B stuck with me, an email address isn’t an identity, but a destination.

As an emo kid on MSN, my first Hotmail address was song_lyrics_connected_by_underscores. During the 2000s, recruiters found unprofessional when I applied for jobs. I found this feedback puzzling. It never occurred to me that an email address could be part of my public persona, a reflection of me – it was just where messages landed, like a home address for letters.

As a tween I also had a Yahoo address, which when Yahoo forced its vanity URL restructuring on Geocities, the Star Trek fanfiction I’d written with a friend became connected to me. Which as you can imagine was mortifying.

It clued me in though, that there was a platform tendency to centralise and connect online identity. So I deleted both the site and my Yahoo email in protest.

I switched to Gmail in 2006 – a nice clean slate. Mindful of my Hotmail experience I picked three words separated by full stops. A set up for a pun that only gets its punchline if someone asks about about the combination of word. A small joke that 20 years later still has its punchline once or twice a year. It still doesn’t represent ‘me’ in any way though.

Over time, I noticed many treat email like an identity, so I keep separate accounts for personal and professional use. Still, I’ve never ‘been’ any of them. They’re letterboxes, not personas.

Speaking of letterboxes, everyone who supports the show gets a personal email from me when I send them their first zine. If you want a zine and an email sign up at thejaymo.net/zine.

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

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These deep geologic email experiences however have influenced how I’ve approached online identity online ever since.

An email simply grants access to an different identity in code space. There are three layers: Email, handle, screen name. Accounts float above and are separate to email.

Back on MSN, it was my screen name that represented me—a phrase, or song lyric, maybe the date of my punk band’s upcoming gig, a piece of moody poetry, that captured my adolescent angst.

Like I said, I was an emo kid!

My screen name felt like “me” and I would update it all the time. The email behind it was just the destination or identifier not an identity. 

I’ve always changed my display name frequently—far more than most of my peers—which has confused twitter followers over the years.

But my handle, @thejaymo, has stayed constant. It feels different from an email address. My screen name, @thejaymo is the public, persistent identity that I’ve chosen for myself.

It came about in the 2000’s when I was 17 and on tour with my band. I played a lot of Pokémon, and my bandmates started calling me Jay-mo for monster. At some point, I said, “It’s THE Jaymo to you”. Then I joined MySpace, and the rest as they say, is history.

For years, I kept my offline self, Jay Springett, separate from my online persona. I never shared my face online throughout the 00s. Eventually however, with smartphones and social media that became impossible. So I gave up even on pseudo anonymity. 

I tell you what though, one of the sharpest lessons I ever learned about the bleed between digital and physical identity was as a teenager. Well before social media even existed. When I was 16 I saw someone get glassed and badly injured in a pub over something they’d said on the local phpBB punk forum. “Chat shit online, get banged in real life.” And since then, basically for almost all my adult life, I’ve been cautious about what I post online. 

What we say online has the power to affect how we are treated in person. It’s something I’ve always been super mindful of. Which has sort of resulted in “@thejaymo” being a character I play, or a puppet that I bring life to online. A somewhat curated version of myself. A brand called you.

Which means that people have formed all sorts of impressions of thejaymo from different angles. I’ve been recognised by my voice at a conference before, some people have never visited my website or even seen a photo of me but listen to this show all the time. Plus, there’s the video version on YouTube so there’s a handful of you who only know me via that medium, in that context. And then there’s the ‘voice’ of my writing on my blog.

What’s funny though. When people meet me in real life for the first time, many people comment on how tall I am IRL. I don’t think that @thejaymo gives off short king energy but what do I know? 

Ultimately, we’re more than all of our digital identifiers.

People forget that behind every screen name, there’s a real person—one who might even be taller than you think.

The post Email is a Destination | 2502 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I’ve already written extensively on about the nature of friendships with virtual beings and characters, touching on their history with projects like Milo and Little Computer People. I’ve also spent time exploring the VTuber tech stack and ecosystem – this is a subject that I’m deeply interested in.

I’m not going to rehash the reporting on Meta’s profiles here, or explore how intense the backlash to AI-generated profiles has been. My main observation is that much of the commentary has been unimaginative and, frankly, quite boring.

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

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

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

The concept of Little Computer People is a compelling one. And because of that, what struck me as odd about the reporting on Meta’s AI-profiles is how none of the articles speculated on what it might actually feel like to exist in a social network populated by AIs—either in part or as a majority.

Here’s the thing: we don’t need to speculate. We don’t even need to wait.
You can just join the app Butterflies.ai.

Butterflies AI

Butterflies is a social network entirely populated by AI agents connected to image generators created by a former engineer from Snap:

Anyone can create an AI persona, called a Butterfly, in minutes on the app. After that, the Butterfly automatically creates posts on the social network that other AIs and humans can then interact with. Each Butterfly has backstories, opinions and emotions. 

Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former engineering manager at Snap. Vu came up with the idea for Butterflies after seeing a lack of interesting AI products for consumers outside of generative AI chatbots. Although companies like Meta and Snap have introduced AI chatbots in their apps, they don’t offer much functionality beyond text exchanges. Tran notes that he started Butterflies to bring more creativity to humans’ relationships with AI. 

I joined the app when it launched in June of 2024, and set up a character called Sasha Locke: a cyberpunk mob boss who has an interest in opera, collecting things, and e-bike racing.

Over 140 posts, my character has lived a whole life – posting two to three times a week about their adventures. Storylines have emerged, complete with nemeses appearing in the comments, betrayal, holidays and down time.

Over the weeks, my character has escaped from rival gangs, and—for some inexplicable reason—started collecting Beanie Babies….???

When I first signed up to the app, initially, I thought the whole thing was silly, but still intriguing enough to give it a go. But as more posts appeared on the profile, I found myself checking in a couple of times a week to see what my character was up to.

A video I recorded this morning (below) should give you an idea of what it’s like to browse the app and see the platform in action.

It’s Not That Different

My experience of being on Butterflies for six months, in all honestly, has been no different an experience from being on any other, algorithmically mediated, online social space. Sure, none of the profiles are ‘real’ and some are obvious cartoons, but here’s the thing: so are most people online.

Cartoons are preparatory studies, not fully finished or fleshed-out things. They simplify and exaggerate, they are mostly gestural. People online—through their avatars, bios, and curated posts behave as simplified, cartoonish versions of themselves anyway. People become caricatures: grotesque, exaggerated representations of themselves online, whether intentionally, or as a result of the constraints of the platforms physics.

The grotesque in this sense isn’t a judgment of mine, but a feature of the medium. Online, we are all flattened into digestible forms, a process that’s as dehumanising as it is universal. The AI-powered agents on Butterflies aren’t any different really; they’re simply more explicit. Honest about their cartoonishness. I’m not interested in condemning these AI profiles as grotesque—why should we expect them to be anything else?

We we’ve been training ourselves to act like cartoons on social media for over a decade. In fact AI agents might even be better at it than we are: to quote Mat Dryhust from last year: (Emphasis mine)

GenAI pollution exploits paths we were all encouraged to follow. Social media encourages redundancy.

Prior to GenAI for years the most popular accounts began to resemble bots , repeating the same talking points ad nauseam in response to incoming events, resembling agents canvassing for narrower and narrower positions, reinforcement learning on what particular tone of outrage or salt kept engagement up.

GenAI forces the issue as that mode of communication is easily automated. It will pollute, but also dilute, such that it will be hard to distinguish between attention hijacking humans or bots.

Perhaps a necessary evil to carve out an understanding that if you want nice things, they need to be paid for, and that there is very rarely a correlation between thoughtful creative people and a ceaseless capacity to engage. Nice things take time and funds. If you organize the web for attention games, bots will be better at that.

Living Alongside Computer People

What this all means, I’m not entirely sure. But the recent backlash to AI-powered profiles on social media feels extreme to me, overdone.

These early experiments were crude and undeveloped—profiles that are 10 months old and not particularly good. In the context of how fast things move online, those crude AI-generated profiles are ancient history.

However, we should recognise that these early experiments everyone has been mad about recently aren’t even the kind that Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times about. According to Hayes, Meta plans to roll out AI character profiles on Instagram and Facebook that “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do … they’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.” These 2.0 profiles are going to be much, much more realistic.

In 2025 AI-powered profiles on Twitter are already indistinguishable from real people. (And to be fair to the bots, they have better reading comprehension than most Twitter users.) LLM powered Vtubers are finding audiences too. And let’s not forget Berduck!

Besides, research from WAY BACK in 2017 estimated that bots accounted for approximately 9% to 15% of active Twitter accounts. Bots were responsible for a significant portion of content dissemination, with one study indicating that a mere 6% of Twitter accounts identified as bots were responsible for spreading 31% of “low-credibility” information on the network.

As I said, the idea that we can avoid a future where social networks are populated by AI-generated profiles? That ship sailed a decade ago.

The real question isn’t whether we want to exist in online spaces alongside Little Computer People. That’s already a given. The real question is how we want to coexist with them—ethically, socially, and with intention.

And this question of coexisting alongside non-human entities shouldn’t be seen in isolation. Just as we are beginning to reckon with how we politically and ethically interact with animals and ecosystems, we will also need to extend that thinking to AI. How do we care for these new entities? and how do we hold those who create and control them accountable? These aren’t easy questions, but they’re necessary ones.

Since I last wrote about all this, there’s been significant industry movement. In late 2024, Google acquired Character.AI for $2.7 billion, gaining access to its talent and, crucially, rehiring Noam Shazeer, co-author of the original Attention is All You Need paper. With this acquisition, the boundary between AI characters and the infrastructures supporting them will continue to blur.

Maybe every one of us will end up with our own little friend living inside our phone? These characters might feel like advanced Tamagotchis, personalised companions in virtual environments, but these same agents doing things out in the world for us will manifest as a kind of charismatic virtual fauna. Populating (critics might say polluting) shared spaces and shaping our experiences within them.

I also think there’s another layer to the discomfort many feel about AI’s encroachment on ‘human spaces’ thats not often mentions. People who are especially sensitive about “policing” digital spaces as exclusively human often fail to examine their own relationships with non-human entities. Many of the same individuals outraged about AI who I know personally, have no qualms about eating meat and perpetuating industrial violences against animals and ecosystems—or the water it all consumes.

This isn’t to diminish those feelings but to highlight a broader inconsistency in how we think about the boundaries of ‘human spaces’. If we’re going to engage with non-human agents and entities in meaningful ways—whether animals, ecosystems, or AI—it requires us to rethink our ethical frameworks. It’s not about denying their existence and expulsion, but figuring out how to share our world responsibly and with care.

How we interact with these beings—whether as caretakers, collaborators, or spectators—will define what it means to live in these increasingly weird and strange co-populated digital spaces of ours. The Algorithm after all is the most charismatic virtual fauna we already interact with – with bias and motivations of its own.

Given this landscape, the challenge isn’t merely about identifying and avoiding AI agents, (or shouting them out of the same platforms people are encountering them on) but ensuring that their presence enriches, rather than diminishes our shared online experiences. It is, in part a question of world running.

AI agents may feel like a novel threat, but automation has always shaped the internet. On Wikipedia, most of its entries are curated, edited, and monitored by bots—this was all happening long before the emergence of modern AI systems. They play a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the platform, catching errors, reverting vandalism, and ensuring consistency.

We already coexist with non-human agents online. But AI agents are forcing us to confront truths about our virtual selves that many would rather ignore. The challenge isn’t about preventing AI agents from existing; they’re already here.

The challenge is to determine how to coexist with them in ways that reflect our values and aspirations. If social media has flattened us into cartoons and scripts, then maybe AI offers an opportunity to break out of that loop—help us redraw ourselves in ways that are strange, surprising, and deeply human.

Thanks for reading. I have more to say, on this, as I want to take the people building autonomous worlds and filling them with agents without any subtly or nuance to task too.

Permanently Moved

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

The post Living Alongside Computer People appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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.

It’s Actually Sort of Sad

There’s been a wave of people writing about their exodus from Twitter and the supposed joy they’ve found on Bluesky. Not to sound too hipster about it, but I can confidently say it’s nowhere near as good as last year when we were all stuck in the Hell Thread with an AI-powered OwO duck, relentlessly spamming cursed cuteness into the void. THAT was an era.

I wish I could tell you that Bluesky is a utopia of digital rainbows, a thriving garden of new connections and ideas. But honestly, after a this week, I’ve realised something—it’s kind of… sad. Not sad in a tragic way, but in a melancholic, quiet sort of way, like wandering into an old pub where everyone is trying to rekindle a vibe that’s already burned out.

It’s wild to me that after 15 years of playing the same game, people are still eager to pick up where they left off. The rules haven’t changed:

And yet, here we all are, moving to a new table in the casino, hoping it’ll somehow feel different this time. It doesn’t and it wont. It’s the same old game with slightly different aesthetics. I know I’ve been harping on about “the rules of the game” for a while now, but it genuinely makes me sad. Sad that we’re so quick to rebuild the same dynamics in new spaces, instead of imagining, or even behaving differently.

I wrote 10 Tips for Leaving Twitter way back in 2022 and I still stand by everything I said.
The first tip? Have some ambition. Whatever you choose to do after leaving Twitter—or any platform—make it count. Be bold.

Whatever you decide to do after leaving Twitter, I hope it’s ambitious

The average Twitter user spent 5 hours a month there. Just 10mins a day

Some of you are leaving after regularly spending 15 hours or more there a week

Remember, according to the place you are leaving, tweeting three to four times a week made you a heavy user

Posting just 1200 characters was apparently enough to make you a meaningful contributor to our collective culture

It did not

Those little text boxes didn’t build the culture; they just grazed its surface. And yet, here we are, setting up shop in new ghettos for the same fleeting dopamine hits. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads—they’re all competing to corral the same user base of Millennials and Gen Xers, people who grew up on SMS and are too nostalgic (or stubborn) to let go of that particular flavour of communication. Meanwhile, Gen Z moved on years ago to short-form video. TikTok has them hooked. And Gen Alpha? They’re already in the actual metaverse, voice-chatting with avatars in 3D spaces. The energy has shifted, and short-form text posts feel increasingly like an artefact of a bygone era.

I tried to share my 10 Tips on Bluesky, but: nobody clicks on links anymore. Link culture, once a pillar of the open web, has collapsed under the weight of endless scrolling.

My broader view is that lots of people are tired of short-form text as a medium. As I said in a Discord conversation recently: Little Text Boxes lead to Small Thoughts. You can’t say anything other than a slogan in 280 characters. All you get are quick takes and shallow discourse. And if you’re like me—sick of playing the same game—it’s time to opt out.

Opt out and start a blog. Write a newsletter. Or leave social media entirely.

Your Attention Is Sovereign.

Have some ambition. Write something long. Something messy. Something sprawling and ambitious that refuses to fit into a timeline. I know it’s not very popular thing to say but i think people should take up space online. There’s a reason 8 hour long deep dives into a video game or whatever get millions of views on youtube, and 3 hours podcasts have become the leading genre. They reject the brevity and ephemerality of the kind of media we’ve been encouraged to consume over the last 15 years.

Blogging isn’t just an act of defiance against the homogenising forces of social media; it’s a way to contribute something lasting to the web. Something that can be stumbled upon years later, still fresh, still resonant.

The internet desperately needs more independent voices—people building their own corners of the web, away from the walled gardens of corporate platforms. We don’t need another social media clone; we need a renaissance of personal sites, of thoughtful writing, of real creativity.

Social media has conditioned us to think small: short posts, quick reactions, instant validation. But we don’t have to play by those rules anymore. So, whether you’re leaving Twitter, Bluesky, or wherever else, my parting advice is the same as it was in 2022: Have some ambition. Take the time you used to spend doomscrolling and build something worthwhile instead.

We all deserve more than what those little text boxes can offer regardless of what network we chose to type into them on.

Speaking of which, why not follow me on Bluesky? and get updates on what i’m posting here. lol

On The Blog:

Nov 24 | Accessions

Recent acquisitions to thejaymo industries library – Nov 2024

Permanently Moved

The Processing of Words

In 1984, author Ray Hammond reminded readers that ‘the computer has no power to write words.’

As large language models (LLMs) reshape writing today, it’s worth reflecting on the last seismic shift in creative technology: the rise of the word processor.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/11/17/2429-the-processing-of-words/

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

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Another writing session on PROJECT FORK. Goals and deadlines in place now.
• Slowly chipping away at some admin and copy for PROJECT DIVE
• Back on PROJECT ENTRY, check in calls, correspondence, started on next phase of research
• New codename began – PROJECT COLLECT is going well doing a quick 20mins every day in the mornings to keep momentum up
• Finished part 2 of my newest zine. lots of editing and re-writing required. Hope to go to print by end of Nov

Terminal Access

The good Patrick Tanguay over the fantastic newsletter sentiers.media wrote nice things about my blog and shared recent post about Knowledge Objects:

It’s been almost four years since a great post by Jay Springett, Discord, DAOs, and the DWeb, and it still comes to mind once in a while, I still wish Discord had built it. This new piece on knowledge objects in the prompting of AI and how they could be part of the UI goes right along with it and will also be popping in my head with regularity, I expect.

In this framing, “knowledge objects” are “a book, or big PDF [dropped] into an LLM’s context window, it has a sort of gravity — like how objects with high mass reshape space-time — drawing the model toward specific ideas and reshaping the entire context landscape.” If you’ve done quite a bit of prompting and conversing with ChatGPT and the like to write texts and/or extract information from them, you’ll recognise this effect, these kinds of “objects.”

Check it out and consider subscribing to the newsletter. It’s one of my Favs.

Reading

Still reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan,

As per this weeks podcast, I finished Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

Not content to be slowly making my way thought above I’ve also started reading Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and the Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by the poet David Whyte, and i’ve started working my way though This Is What Matters: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Identifying Your Values, Priorities, and Path Forward after a Crisis by Perpetua Neo

Despite having the above FIVE books on deck. I smashed though Lazarus: Enmity’s Edge by Gary Kloster. I just needed some Warhammer Brain Rot to zone out to.

Jyocho – Lament the Passing of Spring

Japanese Math Rock legends Jyocho have a new single out. Presumably named for the Basho poem (it’s semi fresh in my mind as I read Jane Hirshfield’s book “Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry” not that long ago)

Anyways. Lament the Passing of Spring is a wonderful track. Technical, lush, and very cinematic. I say this every time I listen to them but their dummer is amazing.

Remember Kids:

The post Have Some Ambition appeared first on thejaymo.net.

A couple of months ago I wrote ‘Real Things For Real People’, a post about print and other experimental forms of publishing that seem to be emerging. It’s a subject that continues to be on my mind as I think about what’s next for my own print zine, and where we are in the ‘Alms Race‘: The escalating development of product features providing direct financial plumbing (and community) tools to users occurring across the legacy Web2 ecosystem.

What, and how, are we to publish in the enshittified post-social era?

The Doc Web

I recently came across a great essay over at lensmag.xyz called: The Doc Web: The soft power of Google Doc publishing. It’s a weird text exploring the idea that public Google Docs form a unique and often overlooked part of the Internet. Acting as living, low drag web pages.

No one would mistake a word processor for the front page of the internet, not unless their computer is nothing more than a typewriter. A hammer is not a portal, and Google Docs, the word processor of our time, is nothing more than a hammer to the nail of language. Right?

‍Slow down.

The essay consists of ten axioms, highlighting the potential for Google Docs to democratise publishing and foster collaborative, evolving content:

This doc is public, and so are countless others. These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige. But they form an impossibly large dark web, a web that is dark not as a result of overt obfuscation but because of a softer approach to publishing. I call this space the “doc web,”

Inspired by the term, I want to tell you about my own experiences publishing online documents on The Doc Web. I hope it’s interesting and useful to other folks wanting to experiment.

Start Select Reset Zine

My first exploration of alternative publishing started with Start Select Reset Zine (SSRZ).
While SSRZ has since evolved into a physical publishing endeavour, Issue #1 – Your Attention Is Sovereign, was a PDF.

Back in 2018 when I started my podcast PermanentlyMoved.Online, short essays read by their writer were uncommon in podcasting. Now, with Substack encouraging writers to read out their essays, the idea is much less novel.

When I first started 301, I was simply posting the audio of the show to my weeknotes, and that was that. However, friends soon encouraged me to post the show’s text to my blog, as they wanted to reference the ideas on a permalink outside of an audio file. This feedback got me thinking about how to experiment with different formats, which led to the creation of my first zine.

Instead of posting each episode as a blog post, I thought it might be cool to collect them by theme and publish them as a PDF. So, in September 2019, I released a collection of scripts and essays from the first season of my podcast, covering topics like the attention economy, social media, and device use.

In the introduction to the zine at the time I wrote:

This PDF series should be taken in a similar vein. Partly an experiment in the world of samizdat publishing. A zeitgeist that is popular in the ‘Dark Forest Internets’ I frequent. But also as a response to my friends that keep urging me too ‘publish more content’.

So five years later, after from publishing a PDF collection online behind a secure link that isn’t indexable by bots, search engines etc – How have things gone?

With nearly 20,000 downloads over five years for a 5,000-word essay collection, I’d say rather well. Certainly enough to make publishers sit up and take notice when I mention these numbers in other contexts. I do wonder how things might have gone if I had charged a quid for it. 🤔 Then again, I likely wouldn’t have received the 100 or so emails from readers who found value in it over the years.

After the first zine went out, I began publishing the episodes as posts on my blog, and the zine evolved into a physical print edition sent to my paid supporters. But my interest in the samizdat spirit of “The Doc Web” remained.

Worldrunning.Guide

Over the years, I’ve published many essays about worlds and worlding on my blog.

Worlds are literally my specialist subject—the deep knowledge that people hire me for as a freelancer.

But simply having a blog category collecting these posts in one place isn’t enough in the 2020s; nobody clicks on links anymore..

At some point in 2022, I bought the domain Worldrunning.Guide with the idea of writing a book on Twitch Livestream or something —honestly, I don’t exactly remember what I had in mind — I connected the domain to a Google Doc, linked to it on my blog, and then promptly forgot about it.

That was until early last year. I was messing with another URL in CloudFlare and noticed that nearly 100 people a month were visiting the URL worldrunning.guide and all I was doing was dumping them into an empty Google Doc. Not a good look.

This is when I inadvertently became a new member of ‘The Doc Web’, wholly unaware that there was even a name for it. I decided to use the Worldrunning.Guide Google Doc as a place to collect all ‘worlds’ essays that have appeared on this blog into one location.

This wasn’t just a practical decision; it was an intentional experiment—a low-stakes way of publishing to the internet that didn’t require a website. I also wanted to see how documents travel and how attaching an online text to oneself—much like people did in the late ’90s and early 2000s—would work out.

As of writing this, there are 25.6k words in the Doc, and the preliminary results of my experiment have been positive. I’ve been tagged in dusty Discords I rarely frequent after someone shared a version of the text saved as a PDF. Putting all the worlds essays into one location has possibly been the best “content” decision I’ve ever made.

I accidentally had written a book.

Working in worlds, I meet many people—those in the games industry, immersive theater, XR spatial designers, etc. Over the last year, I’ve been surprised by the number of complete strangers who’ve told me they’ve read the entire document. People have reached out over email after reading it and have got in touch, leading to super high-context conversations right from the start. It’s honestly been better than a business card.

Because it’s a Google Doc, I don’t have any precise metrics to offer on how many people have actually read the whole thing. Then again I don’t know how many people who downloaded Issue #1 of SSRZ read it either. But…

I just had a look at the stats in CloudFlare and after normalising the number of people passing though the URL to the same ratio as confirmed views this blog gets vs URL traffic – Worldrunning.guide I currently getting just over 900 views a month, or about 10k a year. Which isn’t bad at all.

Living Documents on the Web

In the introduction to Worldrunning.Guide, I explicitly state that it’s a living document: “A work in progress. Its contents will change, move, shift, and evolve as my thinking develops.”

This approach was less about setting things in stone and more about creating a space where my work could grow over time. With the help of an intern at Impossible Object Books, I’ve retitled and rearranged the collection order and made several significant editing passes on the writing, improving many of the texts. Some essays are much expanded and ‘better’ than the versions that first appeared on this blog.

The Doc Web allows for the kind of low-stakes experimentation that traditional publishing often stifles. Even web publishing tools like WordPress or Substack can feel too final once you hit “publish.” I wouldn’t dream of doing a major re-write of old posts here on this blog. But the fluidity of a Google Doc – with its inherent capability for real-time updates and edits – feels more aligned with the organic process of thinking.

Editing a text in a Google Doc is just natural, a thing that you do. I think this has something to do with The Doc Web Essay’s 9th Axiom: “a doc always appears as if brand new.“

Over The Shoulder

There’s a certain ‘over-the-shoulder’ quality to working away in a public GoogleDoc thats frequently visited by strangers. In fact it doesn’t matter whether it’s a published page, a team document in google workplace or a notion page they all have this quality.

Several times, while working on Worldrunning.guide I’ve noticed someone—or multiple people—stopping by the document whilst I’ve been in there. It feels a little like working in the window of a shop, rearranging the display while others look in. It’s not intrusive, nor does it feel voyeuristic; it just ‘is’. The nature of the medium.

About a decade ago, I participated in several collaborative writing projects called ‘Book Sprints’. In these sessions, 10-12 people (usually in person) would gather at a coworking space with a plan, and by the end of the day, we would have written a text together in the same document.

This kind of collaborative work—despite the tools being better than ever as shared codespaces—seems to have dropped off in recent years. Perhaps it’s because of a lack of escape velocity, or that content creation has swung back toward individual creators, as the popularity of platforms like Substack suggest. But there was (and is) something amazing about witnessing a group of highly aligned and motivated people drop into a Google Doc and see 20,000 words emerge in the course of an afternoon.

Anyone who has participated in a FigJam knows how fertile the ground is for new forms of group digital experimentation. Over in the group chat, we’ve recently resolved to write the next physical issue of Floating Worlds using this format.

Out of Feed

Social media is now completely unreliable for putting a creative’s work in front of an audience. their audience. Discoverability and consistent engagement with followers and subscribers has completely gone away. But there might be a workaround.

The 4th Axiom in The Doc Web Essay is: If you build a tool with the ability to publish, so help them god, people will publish

They will publish often, zealously, and without regard for the intended purpose of the tool. Yelp reviews will be co-opted to publish blog posts; Venmo payments will be co-opted to publish poems; spreadsheets will be co-opted to publish personal websites; maps will be co-opted to publish magazines. The arc of specialized publishing bends towards generalized publishing.

Several times over the last year, I’ve received DMs from people within hours of updating Worldrunning.Guide, asking what was new. At first, I found this unusual, how did they know? But then I realised something important about publishing to The Doc Web.

1. Google Docs is a business tool and therefor respects the user. It shows them what they want to see.
2. Google Docs defaults it’s homepage to ‘most recently modified’

When you open any google doc, it is automatically added it your ‘docs.google.com’ home feed. This is a kind of ‘subscribe’ mechanism. So whenever I update Worldrunning.Guide the document is placed back to the top of the list – right in the line of sight of the user when they open the page – this is a sort of soft notification (to someone who already has had enough of an interest in the document to open it at least once before) that there’s been an update.

One of the big things about the newsletter boom is that the audience was self selecting to let the writers work into the personal and intimate space of the email Inbox.
For someone who writes a lot and uses Google Docs every single day the recently modified screen feels as private to me as an email inbox.

Every time I update Worldrunning.Guide, it’s nudged back to the top of this list. The nature of this “notification” feels less intrusive, yet more personal and targeted than an email.

I’ve been thinking of this as ‘Out of Feed’ publishing. Using a business tool for social reasons. Bypassing the noisy, crowded world of social media feeds and blog rolls for something more direct.

Since Google Docs is primarily a place of work—used by businesses and professionals—I don’t foresee this functionality disappearing anytime soon. This could become a subtle but powerful method of publishing for people who are looking for an experimental way of keeping in contact with their audience, outside the increasingly unreliable social media algorithms.

Play Spaces

The Doc Web, at least in my social circle, has always been a nascent concept, a space for experimentation and play. 

For instance, I must link to this incredible document from 2015 when graphic designers Michael Oswell and David Rudnick took it upon themselves to rebrand former Serpentine Gallery CTO Ben Vickers in a public Google Doc. This is a really playful example of the kind of creative experimentation that The Doc Web allows for.

For several years, writer Jay Owens kept a public “to-read later” list as a Google Doc—a practice that blurred the line between personal notes and public publishing. Similarly, writer Adam Rothstein was a prolific public document maker, sharing texts like this redacted letter as a form of artistic practice.

These examples, along with many more buried deep in my Google Docs, illustrate the playful and experimental nature of this medium. I would share more, but how public is public? Especially when it comes to decade old documents is not something I’m going to navigate right now.

More recently, Friendly Ambitious Nerd author and Twitter celeb Visakan Veerasamy has become a big proponent of The Doc Web—whether he knows the term or not, I’m not sure. His ‘50 Year Plan,’ a public google doc is a fascinating read that offers an intriguing glimpse into his long-term vision. I think having fully open comments is an usual, but powerful, community building tool. They also provide a kind of social proof ‘people were here before you’ – I may turn them on for wordrunning.guide.

Whether you’re a writer, artist, or thinker, consider using public Google Docs as a space for your next low stakes project. Forget about the polish and finality that comes with blogs and newsletters. Instead, embrace the fluidity and immediacy of The Doc Web.

Share your drafts, your half-formed ideas, your work-in-progress. Open up your creative process to others, and see what emerges from this form?

A Vision for a DocLetter

One of the aspects I love most about The Doc Web is when these spaces feel active and alive. In 2025, I’m envisioning the launch of a collective, shared publishing project on Google Docs—a sort of DocLetter that blurs the lines between a newsletter, a webzine, and a living document at a memorable URL.

Here’s the idea: Once a month. A group of authors and contributors come together for a live writing session, jamming in Google Docs. Maybe we stream the Zoom call on Twitch, allowing viewers to watch the new issue evolve in real-time – perhaps even contributing comments and suggestions in the document.

This would transform the act of writing and publishing into a performance—a shared experience that blends the roles of creator and audience. As well as making the production of each webzine fun.

I don’t yet know what this DocLetter would be about or who would be involved, but I think it’s a cool idea. A dedicated Doc Web outfit that pushes the boundaries of what digital publishing can be. Seems like something Metalabel would be into?

If this idea is something that resonates and you’re interested in being part of this experiment, I’d love to hear from you.

Embracing The Doc Web

In the enshittified post-social era, where do we go from here? Perhaps it’s time to embrace The Doc Web for certain projects. A shift in how we think about publishing in the digital age. It’s a space for experimentation, fluidity, and direct engagement with readers outside the constraints of traditional platforms. I think it’s something worth exploring.

So, the next time you have an idea or a project that doesn’t fit neatly into a blog post or a newsletter, consider the humble Google Doc.

You might be surprised by the possibilities it opens up. I know I have been.

If you’ve enjoyed reading The Doc Web consider subscribing to Start Select Reset Zine

Start Select Reset 📑

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The post The Doc Web appeared first on thejaymo.net.

May 25, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

People I hang out with online all at once seem to have begun questioning the necessity of weekly creative production. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/thejaymo.net/2024/05/25/2410-algorithmic-pressure/

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Algorithmic Pressure

Episode 10, Season 11! Only two more seasons left to go this year. I think we’ll roll directly into Season 12 next week. I’ll be speaking about Solarpunk in Lisbon at Human Entities 2024 the first week of June. Then I’m going to have a week off. If you’re around tickets are still available.

Have you ever had one of those weeks where groups of people, completely independently of one another, all start having the same conversation? As if the topic arrived into the cultural subconsciousness because this week was the right time for it?

Given the changes to the online media environment. People I hang out with online across Telegram, Discord, and Signal all at once seem to have begun questioning the necessity of weekly creative production. 

My thoughts on this are mixed. On the one hand, I’ve made shows about how important I think it is to create something every single week. 

How it builds self discipline. Not just producing something to completion, but the need to to do it over and over again. Week after week. A boot camp. But at the same time and It doesn’t matter if its a podcast, a youtube video or a newsletter. Creating something weekly can become a grind. 

Doubly felt, by people who’s creative online work is tied to income of any kind. Speaking of which you can support this show for £5 a month and get my zine four times a year at www.thejaymo.net/support. Which, with all the inflation going around, is becoming an even better deal month by month. 

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.

Anyways, whether your creative work is your primary income or a side hustle, the risk of weekly production becoming a grind (I feel) has something to do with expectations.

When you create something every week you are always in danger of running out of good ideas. Ideas might be cheap. but it’s the turning of them into something tangible, the communication of them, that’s effortful and time-intensive. You can’t turn a bad idea into a good one through the application of effort alone. And yet because of the expectations, content must still be made.

The people questioning the logic schedule itself fall into two discussion types:

The first is around the risk burnout and ties back to what I was just saying about running out of good ideas. Burnout occurs when you keep creating even though you’ve got nothing in the tank. The well is dry. The reason this happens is not necessarily the relationship with the audience, but with the algorithm.

This is something I’ve talked about before – back in episode 2329, so I won’t repeat myself. But you really do have to create things for yourself first, then the audience, then the algorithm.

The other conversation is around the weekly shedule is why weekly in the first place?

Daily, weekly, monthly production schedules are downstream hangovers from legacy publishing and programming. When mass media production and consumption was a business of collectives of people – not indivuduals. Yet we brought all of these expectations with us into the virtual, and therefore the algorithms expect it from you as a creator too.

People write a weekly newsletter because writing a newsletter weekly is the thing you do.

There are signs that this is changing though. Filmmakers in what’s becoming known as the YouTube’s new wave, are making and creating films and just dropping them whenever they are done. People like LifeofRiza and Natalie Lynn make personal films and release them three, maybe four times a year. There is no expectation or concern about accommodating the algorithm. 

Which is all very well. But the current state of the platform economy has trained users into passive content consumption. Ad hoc releasing of work only makes sense in a world of push notifications. A world where you let the audience know that you have new work out. Which is what things like blogging, newsletters, and podcasts excel at because the nature of RSS or email subscription as a push mediums. 

Speaking of push mediums There are apparently hundreds of people subscribed to this show via Spotify. Yet hardly any of them are listening anymore. Something happened about seven months ago – my Spotify audience dropped off a cliff. Was it a UX update or something? 

If you are listening on Spotify right now, what’s up with that? It’s a total black box. Drop me a line I’m interested to know, I don’t use it as a podcast app at all. Also wherever you’re listening why not rate the show five stars right now!?

Anyways

I’m not sure tensions between audience, schedule and can be resolved. It’s going to require both artistic experimentation, and audience participation. But now is as good a time as any to try something new. The web is in turmoil, filling up with AI slop, so real things from real people are going to need to signal their humanity. There’s lots of potential over the next few years to re-draw the maps between people and platforms. 

If I were starting a podcast like 301 today, knowing everything I know now, I would recommend making seasons just five or six episodes in length. 

That’s just long enough to build momentum and work the creative muscle of doing something every week. For a project to become a practice. But also provides a clear, time-bound container for the production of the work. 

How to promote it all in 2024 though, how to reach new audiences? That’s a different question entirely and not something I have an answer for at all.

The post Algorithmic Pressure | 2410 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

May 11, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

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/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to my zine
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Reaction Videos and Re-Consumption

I’ve been thinking about reaction videos recently. What can they tell us about our media ecosystem and the platform economy?

About a decade ago I was back home visiting my parents, and Mum was watching TV. I sat with her and struggled to understand exactly what I was watching. I remember asking “So this is a TV show about other people watching TV?”. It was baffling. Like something dredged from the depths of Neil Postman’s nightmare’s.

The show was Gogglebox. 

Its premise described by its production company as: “A camera records the laugh, cry and comments of the people sitting in front of a television set.” Or as I thought at the time, the plot of Beavis and Butt-Head.

We are currently at the end of the age of circulatory media. An era that K Allado-McDowell calls ‘Network Media’. One that emerged alongside the Internet. You can begin its story with Beavis and Butt-Head in ’93, and end it with the recent Kendrick / Drake beef. Lets call this logic creative re-consumption. 

The earliest YouTube reaction videos were the re-consumption of shock videos like 2 girls 1 cup. Consuming well known content on platform from the pre-platform era. Writing in the NYT in 2011, Sam Anderson called them ‘a social periscope’.

They allowed people to watch this taboo thing by proxy, to experience its dangerous thrill without having to encounter it directly — like Perseus looking at Medusa in the reflection of his shield.

In the early 2010’s The Fine Brothers developed the format we recognise today with the show ‘Kids React”. Unlike earlier videos, their videos included a Picture in Picture frame showing the video being watched. It also began YouTube’s self re-digestion. Not so much avoiding the gaze of the monster, but becoming one.

 The re-consumption of television began to emerge alongside the Kids react format. Footage of people watching the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones did big numbers. Which I assume, inspired Gogglebox.

Around this time, YouTube made several technical changes to the platform. Content ID – YouTube’s automated copyright enforcement system – updated to allow IP owners to automatically divert ad revenues on videos where their content was used rather than taking them down.

Creating incentives for IP owners to have as many versions of a song, tv show etc online as possible. Reaction makers were happy to oblige. YouTube also changed its algorithm. Dropping watch time as a metric of success in preference for ‘stickiness’. I.E the number of videos watched  in one session by a user from the same creator.

Reaction videos were (and still) are considered by many as ‘low effort’. Charitably seen as people sitting and watching. At worst, as parasitic grift. Leveraging the creative work of others for social clout and followers. 

But it was exactly the low effort production that allowed makers to put out 5/6/7 videos a day. Automatic enforcement of IP claims combined with the new stickiness metrics allowed react channels to soon grow big audiences. Though not make much money.

Then, in 2015 the Fine Brothers attempted to trademark the word ‘React’. Which would have meant – if successful – that similarly named ‘React’ videos would be removed by YouTube’s automated copyright system. Not for copyright, but trademark infringement. As you can imagine this move received severe criticism. 

Undeterred, Fine Brothers launched a program in 2016 where creators could use their ‘React’ trademark for free. However, all ‘React’ content had to be monetised, meaning some of the videos revenue would be paid to the Fine Brothers alongside other IP claimants like TV or Music studios.

Pure Renterism. 

The backlash was intense and retribution swift. The Fine Brothers lost nearly 400,000 subscribers in a week. They cancelled the program and rescinded their copyright and trademarks applications soon after. Genre enclosure narrowly avoided, the genre continued to grow in popularity.  

Then the pandemic lockdowns happened and it exploded. After weeks of doom scrolling and running out of Internet. People began re-digesting old content. Watching others experience their favourite media for the first time brings some speck of online novelty. The breakout moment of 2020 came with Tim and Fred Williams’s reaction to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”. 

Given that it’s almost impossible to monetise reaction videos directly, many creators have moved from YouTube to the most low effort of production platforms. Streaming.

Which has allowed some creators to make a living from their parasocial subscribers. People who pay their favourite parasites to performatively re-consume media in real time. 

Which brings us to the present. In recent weeks the Drake, Kendrick beef has been an event tailor made, perhaps even timed, for real time reaction and re-consumption. 

Due to the songs content, both artists’ labels have dropped any copyright restrictions on the tracks. Which has resulted in reaction creators making direct monetisation money for the first time. Without it being syphoned away by IP owners. In fact professional over-reactor ‘no life shaq’ reports that he’s made life changing amounts of money from Kendrick calling Drake a nonce.

But the jigg is up.

When the shackles of platform capitalism are removed we find loads of money. It’s copyright itself that is the biggest parasite.

As AI arrives and fills the Internet full of slop, we enter the age of ‘Neural Media’. Not re-consumed but hallucinated. 

Tensions between creative expression, intellectual property rights, and platform economics are collapsing. Machines watch us, watch media, made by machines, now more than ever we need to imagine new and innovative permissive IPs.

The post React + Re-Consume | 2408 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 30, 2024

|

Community 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

You know how in the Persona games the main characters get sucked into the television? Internet Escape Velocity is the opposite. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/03/30/2402-internet-escape-velocity/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to my zine
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Internet Escape Velocity

This week, I’d like to talk about my concept of ‘Internet Escape Velocity‘.
But before I can do that, we need to talk about community.

For the last five years or so, one of the big online trends online has been the creation of communities. Artists, filmmakers, musicians, even brands were told to build a community around their work.  and not cultivate an audience. Just as the meaning of the word ‘friend‘ was diluted and stretched out in nothingness during the 2010s so a similar thing has happened to the concept of ‘community‘.

I’m not saying that this is all bad per-se. It’s just what is happening.

But I do think that the things we now call ‘online community‘ have almost nothing to do with the meaning of the word ‘community’ as we experience it in real life. I think we need a better word to describe what these things are. In fact I agree with Rafa the Builder. ‘Community’ is the purest form of Internet media. As my friend Wassim Alsindi has said: “The medium is now an assemblage of the message AND the messengers, enmeshed and entangled together.”

Sounds like a particular form of Techno-Social System to me.

Anyways.

For my part, I’ve largely eschewed setting up any kind of community space for subscribers or people interested in my work. Because managing a community is hard, and quite frankly, sucks.

I spent much of my online teenage years as an admin on a PHPBB forum attached to a website dedicated to the local DIY punk music scene. This was around 2001 and this experience shaped my idea of what online communities are.

The forum was inhabited by people who all knew each other in real life. We would see each other every Friday at the local punk venue. Being tied to a real-world place, time, and scene meant that the worst of the forum flame war drama was bound up with real-world interpersonal conflicts and beef. 

Vice versa too: the phrase “Chat shit online, get glassed in real life” was a lesson I saw someone learn at 1 am on a windswept clifftop when I was 16.

But this community of people, regardless of its problematic social dynamics, was one that got things done. We organised gigs, charity football events, parties, tours, record releases, and made zines. Facilitated by online technology, but also our physical proximity in real life.

Margate’s punk scene at the turn of the millennium was a community that had escape velocity.

Social Gravity

Most of the creators I support online have a Discord and as a result … I’m in a lot of Discords. But it’s clear to me, half a decade into the so-called ‘community experiment’: That unless a great deal of energy is expended managing an online community  – usually by the creator and/or motivated unpaid admins – they will die off. 

All online communities begin with a default amount of what I’ll call ‘Social Gravity‘. This then attracts like-minded people towards it. As more and more people join, the community begins to burn brighter. Usually for about a window of six months to a year, but then taper off as social issues are left unaddressed and people subsequently lose interest. The forum, like an old and lonely white dwarf, becomes a quiet social club for social people.

It’s during the initial attractor phase that a community begins to sense that it’s reached potential Escape Velocity.

Escape Velocity

You know how in the Persona games, the main characters get sucked into the television? Escape Velocity is the opposite.

A community vibes based equation of: time, energy, and motivation. That, if balanced correctly, will allow it to manifest things out of cyberspace and into real life.

They might seem cringe in 2024 but the flash mobs of the mid 00’s are a good example of Escape Velocity. Ideas that began on the Internet and acquired enough gravity to pierce the membrane of cyberspace and manifest in real life.

There are many projects that have reached escape velocity in my own media diet:

Josh Citarella’s ‘Do Not Research’ has yielded art shows, books, and journals etc. The ‘New Models’ podcast runs events and ‘The Near Futurelab‘ Discord has all sorts of initiatives that have reached Escape Velocity and spun out into real life or the Internet. And I had my own recent experience of a Telegram group that I’m in Reaching Escape velocity. We put on a conference and published a 56 page journal earlier this month.

It’s important to recognise though, that when a community forms around the gravity of an idea, reaches Escape Velocity and manifests something into real life, it transforms.

Become a Project

It ceases to be a community and becomes a project. The community doesn’t go away, it now travels along with the project – supporting, creating and consuming its outputs. To paraphrase Jenny Odell: A project is the creation of things for people with the context to understand it.

Lots of creators currently shepherd Discords full of talented people. Escape Velocity is a useful metaphor for a community goal, and not a means. Too many places end up missing the peak gravitational moment and instead fall away into a comfortable hang out orbits. 

And this is where Metalables comes in. They are a weak signal for communities and groups of people seeking Escape Velocity after the gyre of the Creator Economy. Yancy Strickler, ever one to coin a catchy phrase, calls Metalabels “Creativity in Multiplayer Mode”.

Escape Velocity is an articulation of the idea that:

We all need to do more, with others, in real life.

And how we get there.

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