01 // Currently in production
An audio-only essay podcast from the frontier of digital culture. Written, recorded and edited by me since 2018.
permanentlymoved.online
A long-running audio essay show about digital culture, internet culture, and the changing shape of the web.
The show explores internet culture, artificial intelligence, worldrunning, and the shifting tides of social media — life lived online in the shadow of the stack, and what all of that does to the way we live and think.
Regularly in the iTunes Top 100 personal journal charts in countries around the world, and once at number one.
02 // Two eras of the show
Exactly 301 Seconds
For its first run, Permanently Moved was a weekly essay show exactly 301 seconds long. Five minutes and one second, every week, for three hundred and one episodes.
Any given episode might explore an aspect of the internet and how it changes us; stories about long-dead saints and why they matter; or the existence of a wild crisp conspiracy in the heart of UK supermarkets.
Tightly scripted, yet nakedly transparent about the creative process. A small, sharp thing you could finish before the kettle boiled.
The Long Way Round
The show has changed pace and scale. It is now a quarterly release: longer-form, and more willing to take the long way round.
Episodes are still tightly written, but with more space for detours, context, and the odd obsession to fully unfold.
Each new episode arrives alongside Start Select Reset, its print companion — an essay in the post four times a year, with an introduction and afterword that don’t exist in the audio.
03 // In the charts
For a small independent audio essay show, Permanently Moved is surprisingly well travelled.
In January 2020 Permanently Moved broke into the iTunes UK Top 50 Personal Journal podcasts chart for the first time; only 43 places behind 301’s bête noire Desert Island Discs.
It has since appeared in the Top 50 podcast charts in countries including Brazil, South Africa, and Sweden. In January 2023 it reached #1 in Personal Journals in Iceland — a small but very pleasing moment for an independent audio essay podcast.
04 // Newest episode
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EPISODE #303INTERNET OPERATOR
Social media as theatre: a long-form audio essay about puppets, profiles, avatars, AI, and how identity is animated online.
05 // Every episode
The full archive, newest first. More than three hundred episodes since 2018.
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EPISODE #2428The New Economic Entertainment | 2428
The future of entertainment is interactive, monetised, intertwined with AI and social media, gaming and gambling.
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EPISODE #2427When Is The Audience? | 2427
Instead of optimising for immediate visibility, you always have the opportunity and option to create for a future audience. One that’s somewhere in the…
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EPISODE #2426Shape Thief | 2426
I’ve become a shape thief. Pirating the real world, acquiring artworks, and taking them home.
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EPISODE #2425NotebookFM | 2425
I’m sorry. I’ve made some slop. But only because I really wanted to be a guest on my newest favourite podcast..
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EPISODE #2424Dig Back In | 2424
If you create something that’s to your taste, you have to dig back in. Figure out exactly what it was that worked for you…
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EPISODE #2423Make Something to Your Taste | 2423
You can, you know, just make any creative work you want, and post it on the Internet.
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EPISODE #2422Boycott Hooliganism | 2422
An episode about eponymity—when someone’s name echoes through history, immortalised by their actions or legacy, becoming part of everyday language
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EPISODE #2421Cathedral of Screens | 2421
Apple wasn’t just selling products; they were selling a vision, a glimpse into what the world could be. But now we’re in that future—the…
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EPISODE #2420A Menagerie of AI Models | 2420
I’ve come to think of the collection of tools I use as a kind of menagerie of models. I thought I’d share how I…
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EPISODE #2419Shaping Thought | 2419
The games designer seeks to influence the structure of thought. Manipulating the kinds of thoughts the player thinks while playing the game.
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EPISODE #2418Six Feet of England | 2418
I don’t think there is a single place in England that I know better than those 6 feet of sand in font of a…
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EPISODE #2417Summer Doings | 2417
What I’ve been up to and where I am elsewhere on the web this summer
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EPISODE #2416Hole of Tears | 2416
Ivan, lost in the chaos of modern life, takes a walk by the river seeking solace. A modern fairy story.
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EPISODE #2415First Person Memory | 2415
Due to my SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory), I never remember anything in the first person. This is why I keep a diary.
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EPISODE #2414The Origins of Modern Bureaucracy | 2414
| Where did modern bureaucracy come from? Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, the Father of the Military Academy, or the ‘man who made West Point’. Full…
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EPISODE #2413Conflict of Disinterest | 2413
We should abandon the external ‘Battle for Attention’ and instead engage in an internal ‘Conflict of Disinterest’
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EPISODE #2412Surface Flatness | 2412
Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now? I don’t just mean it’s UX but the whole internet.
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EPISODE #2411Little Computer People | 2411
Right now AI is the worst it’s ever going to be. It costs about £60 a day to house a little computer person powered…
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EPISODE #2410Algorithmic Pressure | 2410
People I hang out with online all at once seem to have begun questioning the necessity of weekly creative production.
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EPISODE #2409Short Term Thinking | 2409
I propose that everything that occurs between the decision to plant a tree and the full expression of its canopy is short term thinking.
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EPISODE #2408React + Re-Consume | 2408
Reaction videos were (and still) are considered ‘low effort’. At worst a parasitic grift. Leveraging the creative work of others for social clout
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EPISODE #2407Going Deep | 2407
Tetris players have gone so deep, and become such powerful wizards, that they can avoid the end of the world.
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EPISODE #2406My Todolist Over Time | 2406
The moment I finished editing this week’s show about Cal Newports Slow Productivity, I realised to my horror that I’d made it before.
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EPISODE #2405Little Wars of the Worlds | 2405
A review of HG Wells’ Little Wars. The book that changed the way tabletop wargames were played, and paved the way for the development…