A quick pointer to zines...

Very excited to have had my first zine review over at Sea Green Zines - I then just realised that my exmosis.net domain doesn't link up very well to the stuff I sell, so if you're looking for zines, then my Etsy Shop is the place to find them.

Must actually update my website one of these days. I haven't changed it in over 10 years.

Nomadic identities and updated other places

I've been getting back into experimenting with homegrown and free tech networks recently - this week I finally signed up with SDF.org (heh, link died just as I wrote that...) and have been exploring. the original intent was to try out setting up a gopherspace/phlog, but will see how that goes in time. Meanwhile, as the last leaves drop to the rising puddles, it's nice to see a place with a sense of community, not just a thirst to suck in as many individual identities as possible in order to sell them stuff.

But it's left me feeling exploded again, not in a bad-or-good way, just in a way. I'm enjoying not feeling like there's "one true site" which you have to use. The whole "Facebook vs Twitter vs Snapchat vs Instagram vs etc" thing is such a sham, like the whole Britpop concoction back before most people were born. It's a trade-off invented by a capitalism, amplified by a media looking for a) a battle to cover, and b) lists of top tips they can trade to the unadventurous.

I don't feel like I need to be or not be on any of them right now. Except Facebook and anything owned by them. I feel like I need to not be on them.

So I'm on Twitter, XMPP, Gnusocial a lot. I've updated my Find Me page to reflect this, and offer some more modern choices than tribe.net - have a look and subscribe to what you might like. Or use it an excuse to get into a new tech, a new network, expand the horizons, travel a bit. I don't care.

Of course, it still doesn't have everything. A man has to have some privacy...

Money as the original AI?

A great ago, India basically cancelled a bunch of currency notes without warning. There's a good reflection on the year that followed which raises the question - is currency a force in and of itself? Does it use human social interaction as a medium by which to exist as a flow? Is it alive?

"India’s central bank, the RBI, recently reported that of the estimated 15.28 trillion rupees ($239 billion) in currency taken out of circulation by demonetization, almost 99% had been returned to the banking system."

Money has value, and people will take this and route it and liberate it as is useful to them, circumventing government if the need outweighs the risk. Is currency the original AI, a technology released without truly understanding the impact it would have on the people it brings together?

Why Quantify the Self?

Just (finally) finished reading the fourth and final part of a series on the theory on the "Quantified Self". My brain is buzzing, as it peers into the cracks and shadows around personal "computing" (devices, but also increasingly identities, and associated data - or "dot joining"), global state-level agendas of economic progress ahead of anything else, and an apparent rise in the personal quest to be better at... 

Better at what? In among all the hype and technology and excitement and innovation and hand-wringing and threat and celebration, what are we actually striving to be "better" at? And more fundamentally, why? 

The last 40 years have seen a strange and confusing tide to move us (in the UK, at least) towards a paradoxical mix of individualism and social conformity. We have discovered a pride in our own selves, manifested through a series of status symbols: everything from cars to phones to breakfast cereals carries with it a socio-political connotation: If it doesn't indicate how rich you are, then it indicates what alternative definition of "success" you have. 

On the other hand, we find ourselves clustering into diffuse tribes, enshrined not just through the fashionist symbols we accumulate, but now also through our echo chambers and filter bubbles that we gleefully set up online. Our identities are a mash-up of the branding and trademarks we subscribe to, and the hashtags and social services we affix to ourselves.

A random twitter profile

There's a lot of good thought on the internet these days, really. Too much for me to keep up with. But I find it's increasingly reactive, rather than reflexive. We seem hellbent on picking apart the latest malfeasance or easily-critical topic. We're news-obsessed, and it's not hard to see why: flicking through Twitter, I get attacked by trending topics and emailed with "Moments". Snapchat and Facebook are the same, in different guises. We've become trapped into thinking we need to keep up with all of the news. Why are we doing this?

SEE MORE. You must see more.

Identity as a Container

If we assume that an "identity" is nothing to do with a real person (per se), but is first and foremost a container to establish a related set of dots, then what does the standard process look like?

1. Create a new identity on a service
2. Establish your name, but this is less important than establishing your details: location, interests, who you follow or know, and some more identifying piece of data: telephone number, email address, etc.
3. Connect to others and use service, but connecting is more important. Usage is just a way to ...
4. Have adverts thrown at you, targeted based on the configuration of your identityspace, as above.

Advertisers assume that the social grid you inhabit, combined with the metadata about you, effectively form a space within the wider, overlapping series of connections and interests. This connection tension - between the individual and the larger group (singular, because everyone is ultimately connected to everyone else) - mirrors and reflects perfectly the conundrum faced by all marketing strategists: should I target a niche, specialist market (ultimately an individual), or a broad yet shallow one? Messages lose their power when considering too many, but the broadcast mode is cheap and effective. 

So my "online" (or rather "networked") presence and activity is about defining my similarity and uniquenesswhen compared to others, so that I can be targeted either as a faceless (or identityless) mass, or reached out to in rich and "meaningful" ways. This is worth picking up on in itself - by establishing a machine-based approach to "richer" understanding of a niche market, are my consumption preferences more likely to be similarly richer, and more engaged? Are those with heavier ideals and philosophies in fact more likely to be responsive to this richer, more targeted ("customised"? "local"?) approach to consumerism?

Philosophical Consumption

Let's take things like the Fairphone, for example - which I pick as an example precisely because it's a brand that I am deeply, emotionally attached to, on a personal basis. I unashamedly own a Fairphone 2. But that, there, is the key sentence. I have been through the Fairphone marketing machine and bought into their philosophy - I believe it aligns with my own, but if we're dealing with capitalism then we're dealing with the existence and survival of a company, at the core, not my own survival.

"Why and Buy"

I appreciate the spirit and the openness of what Fairphone are doing. But it is not the values themselves which are important, but the fact that the values exist and that I've bought into them alongside the device itself. This is the richness of consumerism which we live with today, one which binds to our souls as well as our wallets. And "the social network" (whichever service, but defined by identity, metadata, connections, and self-labelling) is the corresponding media for a more direct route to that soul.

TV was such a crude marketing tool, but it suited the mass, general consumption of new, standard devices - washing machines and other white goods, cars, mainstream films, etc. Capitalism was still pretty raw - mass-produced = cheap. 

But these, in time, became staple goods, and didn't need much marketing any more. Gradually everyone had electricity and migrated towards cities - white goods were just taken for granted, and marketing wasn't as effective. A more nuanced model was needed, beyond the simple consumerist warfare of deciding between brands (moreso than models, which are defined by price bands anyway). These days, everything is generic - Android devices built by large multinationals are largely compatible with cheap throwaway devices from Chinese mega-factories.

We still have white goods adverts, of course. But I suspect these will increasingly become linked to sales, not "general purpose" advertising - the lure here is in the price, not the audience. For everything else, we will find what we purchase to be linked to us through our emotional/philosophical self-identification, a double-whammy of rationality and irrationality, happily crafted in our spare time.

sourced

A dead end

Where does this leave us for the "(self-)quantified self"? Why am I here, online, on all these social identity grids? If I were to quit them all, would the UK economy fall over?

(For reference, it's clearly doubtful that many large tech companies interested in advertising pay any UK tax anyway. But could undermining the new form of advertising make the route-to-market for new products, and reasons to spend, less effective?)

I spend a lot of time installing adblockers and plug-ins which prevent tracking. Why bother? Do I really retain a sense of "independence" and impartiality as a result? Is the network I see one which is unfiltered to the point that I can maintain some sort of "authenticity" as a "free" consumer? Or am I just being paranoid about the effect that adverts have on me? How do you even go about measuring that?

On the other side, why bother banning advertising things like cigarettes, or alcohol aimed at under-18s, if they don't have some influence? So am I better off in fact choosing a filter bubble in which I have pre-selected the products and lifestyles which interest me, or blowing away this bubble, and getting the "raw feed", untailored and sporadic, an entropic marketing landscape, (sort of) like in the old days where nobody could choose.

I'm not convinced these are the correct questions to be asking - they lead me into a trap and a dead-end, and anxiety that returns me to the starting point of the whole thing. Why am I on this internet, revolving around garish news items and amateur memes?

At the larger picture, it is not just products advertised to us that we trawl through. When we sign up for a service, we're ignoring the bigger question - what is this service, and what does it want from me? The "convenience" of modern technology has masked its origins, and we're readily, happily going along with that. Adblockers in Chrome is a prime example of the hypocrisy involved in our usage - Google and anti-consumerism do not mix.

Future words

Maybe a future post will look at a way to assess the services that we use, in an effort to make it easier to make these decisions. A convenient anti-convenience measure, to be deployed in the blink of an eye just when we're signing up for something. And/or maybe a way to assess the number of dots we're joining to ourselves.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying exploring services not backed by shareholders. Identity needs to be kept fluid, because disposability is key to agility, and to happiness. I am not who I was a year ago, and there's no reason to connect my memories to my intentions.

Time to fly.

Slices / London [photostory]

Quick new photo story on Steller:

(or click here if you can't see it.)

Choose your own (activist) adventure

(Skirmish thoughts, an attack on my own thinking.)

For some reason there are many chaoses these days. It is hard to know where to start, even when just waking up. The news feeds drag in contempt and despair from the media archipelagos, fresh and raw and bloody like limestone spikes.

I have spent a few years elsewhere. Childbirth and the silence of the tao. These are powerful tutors, they have entwined and entered me, and will be a part of me as much as I am of them from now on. But meanwhile, among the red first, the world is showing the cracks in the plaster and it feels like it's time to address something.

Where to start? Layers on layers - single issues, politics, democratic systems, global power. Technology stacks meet legal infrastructures meet opinion platforms. Everything moves so fast, the world has become a ghost that shimmers around any punches you can throw. One person can't fight an army of spirits.

I spend my time supporting others. But I figure I need to see through the smoke of the shadows somehow. Make a difference. But what difference to make? How does anyone decide?

The pocket watch, resurrected

One of the antipodean effects of growing up with computers is a love of the analogue. Vinyl. Paper. Pens. 35mm film. 


Last week was pretty stressful, or at least tiring. I decided I wanted a way to reflect and flag up my tiredness levels. I thought about mood rings - then I looked them up (never having had one before) and found they didn't work. Something else then. 


Search for "mood jewellery". Same thing. "adjustable jewellery". Nah. I wanted something like a pendant, but I'm too shy to wear things externally. Something I can secrete in a pocket world much better. A personal sigil, hidden like jade. 


The jewellery search threw up a few things though - cheap fitbit watches, and some other watches. Ambient feedback, right kind of area at least. I wasn't sure about an automated monitoring device though. Feedback is so... Personal. Plus, I've come to realise that half of the Art of Feedback is in the doing, not in the feedback itself. A manual process forces us to pay attention. So not a fitbit. 


The search overlapped, chronologically, with the image of a pocket watch which had come up when thinking about steampunk style after the Eastbourne Steampunk Festival a few days earlier. Yeah, a pocket watch. A portable clock, but... not used for time. Stress lives like the threat of an explosion. North Korea and the Doomsday Clock made the silver link, invaded the arena. A stopped clock tells the time twice a day, especially if you set it. Yeah, a pocket watch I could set, to indicate to myself how close to implosion I am. On to something. 


It happened that I actually had a stopped pocket watch. My wife bought me one years ago, before kids. At some point in its era, the tick-tock got jammed, and the pulsing heart stood still, pregnant and primed, yet blocked. I could still set the time though. I dug through my cupboard and pulled it out. Still stuck, excellent. 


I tried it out on Monday - stuffed it in my left trouser pocket, replacing the jagged hills of my keys with the pocket watch's smooth circles and ruby pink gems. I ran through the week's tasks, and fiddled with the watch's hands. Mentally calibrating 12 o'clock as death, I started at 6 purely for its cultish symmetry. Up to 7, 8, 9 o'clock as the morning came flooding in. 


At lunch, I pulled the watch out again. The morning had gone well, I moved the hands back down to 7.30. The silver finish captured and contained the tiny smile I let out, emerging from the emotions derived from a new tool, a successful morning, and the silver finish itself. The circular smoothness entertained and comforted me. 


At the end of the day, I brought the watch back down to 6.30. I had two days off coming up. 


The next day I had to take son 1 to the doctor. We had wrangled a cancelled appointment, but had to divert from school, march up the hill and arrive in under 10 minutes. 


It was on the way out of the surgery that I looked down and noticed the miracle - the watch was beating again. Its spring had unstuck, the tiny wheel bouncing back and forth like a genie fresh from the bottle. I was amazed, relieved and disappointed all at once. Real, analogue time. Jarring with my new sense of purpose. Now with each oscillation, I was apparently getting incrementally more stressed! I set the time and carried on. 


Now I'm counting the days, the hours, until the energy in the spring dissipates, the jewel-studded mechanism winds down, time becomes static. And then, once again, I can find out how stressed I am. 

Into Steller: A brief history of social photo hosting

I'm posting this on Blogger, which is probably the "Web 2.0" site (ha, such a retro term) I've been (ab)using the longest, paying shareholders with my own content (or "data soul" as it's called now). According to my archive page, I started blogging here in July 2003, so there you are.

More recently, apparently some time in 2005, I started using Flickr, which was the multimedia ("photos") poster child back then, before Google bought YouTube and way before I'd crashed out of academia. It was a good time, full of experiments and the excitement of digital and the early nostalgia - pre-Instagram - of analogue re-discovery.

The last few years Flickr has gone the way of MySpace, in my eyes. The community is gone, and large corporates stand guard over the domain like the Collosi of Memnon. I know Internet history, the signs don't bode well. I've been trying to work out where to go next, what the next pin in the map is for data travelling through the cyber realms.

I should probably bring it home, self-host something, but ... photographer "community" is a weird one. Everyone takes photos, but not everyone takes photos. The Brighton Flickr community ran off enthusiasm, liberalism, and cafes. Flickr was a central part of that. The social scene doesn't quite click when it comes to self-hosting. In other words, I'd miss the hearts.

My own photography journey has also crossed a certain ocean. I'm no longer a "catch something intriguing", shoot from the hip, post-ech-frame-as-it-comes sort of guy. I'm hooked on the art of curation, the gentle sculpting of a narrative from images, like instruments in an orchestra. The narrative that speak from between the gaps in frames. The sound of a set of shots echoing around your brain, just behind the eye.

I've been playing with Steller a bit. It's ticking a good few boxes, although I still need to dig into the data usage terms a bit (yes, I'm that much of an adult). But it brings together the ability to weave a thread, jump between a scene and a sentence, feel the hearts again.

Here are my first three photo stories (via Javascript - load this blog post in a browser if you can't see them). What do you reckon?

Love the Block. Brutalism, Modernism. [acquisitions]

Long time @brutalhouse follower. Casual modernist lurker. A sense of respect for all things daring enough to be ugly, a rebellious taunt against the destructive lust for curves and beauty and organicness that we shroud the 21st century in like the Emperor's clothes. A certain truth in those stark lines. A glorious coming together in the emotions and debate they stir up.

Picked up the Gigantic edition of the Modernist magazine yesterday. Never seen it before, but it might be my new favourite magazine (also for being a fiver).

In it, the lyrical entanglement of physicality, design, and big ideas. Each building the outline of a dream of a different society and new world. The necessity of Corbusier struck me:

"But then again, his critics were quite wrong. What cities and humans require, and simultaneously fear, is change. cities are stories of change. ... Change is inevitable, and the Ville Radieuse was one of the bravest attempts to turn that endless process in an ennobling direction..."

Compare with the dimwitted attempts of Brexit to revert to a previous nation, among a world which has changed so much. "At least we're trying something new," the lines scream.

In all places, the architecture of the collossal always seems to be inseparable from symbolism. The magazine also looks at the Konstantynow radio tower, which I shared a birthday with until it collapsed in 1991. A few months later, the USSR also collapsed. It is not entirely clear if the Emley Moor UHF transmitter is a practical device, the symbol of a scientific revolution, or a beacon to guide souls in the right direction as they try to escape this water-bound island. Unlike Brighton's i360, the Emley Moor confuses us with its abilities to remain static, emanate invisible waves, and fail to be a money-spinning tourist attraction. Strange artifacts indeed.

I may have to pick up some back issues.

Loving the weeknotes

Been pretty quiet here again recently. A lot of my writing focus over the last couple of months has gone into my new WEEKNOTES venture, which is a bit of an endurance test, but I'm finding it a very worthwhile exercise. "Episode" 7 of "Series" 2 has just been published - I skipped a week back at week 7 to rest up, but have carried on since, and I'm now using the old 6-episode UK series length as a bit of a rhythm. I think it's good to stop and rest regularly. 

The #weeknotes twitter crowd is also starting to gather legs, and the RSS feed for the Product for the People stream is acquiring new first episodes with every week. I'm really enjoying the glimpse into people's lives (OK, mostly like-minded government data people) like a slow-paced, text-based snapchat or periscope. There's something relaxed yet insightful about the reflective-diary format, which feels like it approaches the "accidental" social absorption that the term "exmosis" always meant to capture. Also, animated gifs.

I never quite know how many read this blog (which is fine - TinyLetter has better stats for people actually opening content, but it's always depressing to be so tethered to harsh reality). And the same with my weeknotes - but I've chatted to a few people who have mentioned they read it sometimes, and it can lead to some good private discussions elsewhere. 

I'm still intending to carry on my other missives of course, namely this blog, Disposable Evidence postcards, and the Grey Pebbles newsletter. But I'm going to have to juggle some attention carefully. Things are pretty busy in the background right now. 

Tide Mills, a brief photo essay

I needed to clear some brainspace after a long election night, and headed out west, to the devillaged skeleton structures of Tide Mill. I had never made it quite that far myself, despite seeing it from the train every day.

After a brisk walk along the Seaford sea front, I followed an iron line onto the crumbled wood of concrete leftovers. I wondered where the windmill stood as a strong wind blew the spray from a high, jade-coloured tide at me. It must have been quite crazy to have lived on top of, and in between, the rush of the waves and their insistent daily yin-yang.




















(Random bonus links...)

I hate the Internet, a lovely review from James

One year of running a tai chi school on the Web (part 1), thoughts from the teapot monk

It's always about the money, a reminder of why unions.

Alternate Universes

I picked up the other FT last week - the Fortean Times - partly because it had a short introductory article on Hookland in it. I used to get the FT irregularly during a teenage period, around the time when it was accompanied by a Reverend-driven TV show and the early X-Files. It always felt - still does - like a childish indulgence to perpetuate the ghost tales and mystery of a world still unknown, still capable of anything. Childish, but not in a bad way. In a necessary way.

The Hookland article spoke of its narrative 'bible', and I was reminded of the dark, conspiratorial wor(l)ds of Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius from Borges. From there, my mind wandered back to an earlier project I helped work on, a sci-fi MUD called simply AU, short for Alternate Universe. 

Together, a small cadre of us created our characters, and partly through code but primarily through imagination, persistence, and momentum, on outwards to create a culture, mini histories, new maps, extinct civilisations, all the way up to grim morals disguised as puzzles. The world lived through us, and vice versa.

Reading about Hookland made me nostalgic, not for AU itself, but for the process of creation, the genesis of a mirror land that, even if no one else ever visits, can let us explore our own thoughts, and reflect back at us through weird, barely understood prisms.

It's been at least a decade since I worked on AU. I want to build a new world again, one that addresses what I know and have learnt and somehow helps me bring it all into focus, and bring it to bear on this chaos we wake up to every day. 

Now I just need to figure out where to begin.

Weeknoting

One of the RSS feeds I've been enjoying a lot recently is the work diary of Dan Barrett, or his "weeknotes" (as put by the monoword branding aspired to by all good net-based memetics these days). I also ended up reading @jukesie's, among others, and particularly enjoyed his talk at OpenTech last weekend on the importance of being open.

I've tried out live diaries for the day at work before, and found it fun and interesting - and hard work, of course. Remembering what you've done, or to write it down as it happens, curating the content to be both sensitive and good for a reader. All fairly time consuming, and I don't have much time these days.

But with a lot of "documentation" and curation processes, the end result can be quite enlightening - and the one big challenge here is to enlighten yourself, at speed. Forget readers, blog for yourself. Find yourself interesting first, because it's your world you're writing about.

So I've made a start a few weeks ago, over at https://6work.exmosis.net/ - the first three weeks are up, and the fourth is under way. It'll be fun to see if it works out.

So far I've been thinking about different ways to keep it "fresh" - I've been adding in photos and links, but might do a full-on photo essay approach every now and then. Maybe a version in tweetstorm form? Time to get meta-creative...

To keep it valuable to me, I like to draw out some interesting reflections, and I want to spin some of these out into further blogposts. But just forcing myself to write and publish something feels like useful exercise. Write til your fingers bleed, delete til there's nothing left. Publish and forget. Practice writing like a flautist practises scales. It's an approach I'm hoping converts to writing fuller pieces as well - lower your own standard, but up your focus. Concentrate on key messages.

(Technically it's also the first time I'm running WordPress on my Pi, and first time using Let's Encrypt to run https. After  three days of hacking about, that 's' in the URL is probably the character I'm most proud of in my professional years.)

Jukesie made the point in his talk that openness can often be quite a subversive way of bringing about change. Given I don't, relatively, have to justify myself too much at work, I think in this case my weeknotes perhaps represent me subvert in myself. An underhand, subconscious stab at my own assumptions and routines.

Write like nobody's reading. Not even yourself.

New mini zine: To The End Of Time

Oh yeah, my new mini zine To The End Of Time, an A7 photography minifesto, is out now.

A tale of two and a half Brexits

Phil picks up on the UK economic delusion covered in the Guardian recently. I'm sure I had a draft post somewhere called "A tale of two brexits" but it seems to be lost for a while. Anyway, Frances Coppola on Britain's trade negotiation position from a few months ago is a must read.

The "two brexits" piece went some way to thinking about this though. It sketched out the two sides of the disjointed discourse plaguing the issue - impassioned, emotional narrative about our country on the one hand, and cold, difficult reality on the other. The real future, like all politics, lies somewhere between the two, with a fair sprinkle of hidden agendas. In reality, we're all deluded about our own reality anyway. Why should Brexit be any different?

Anyone trying to bridge the gap between sides, or indeed trying to work out what's going to happen next, needs to pay attention to both sides - the reality of how economics works, and the narrative spin up in its place for those who don't understand it. In a world where votes are directly tied to Like and Retweet buttons, both sides of the power struggle are equally important. Frictionless, liquid opinion. Pure light speed democracy.

So yes, this country is delusional. Yes, there are deliberate reasons for that. And yes, the harder fight that we're still all missing is not right vs wrong, but how to even decide what our democratic process should look like in 20 years time, when it's running on privatised networks sucking all the wealth upwards and outward.

Bluebell woods in black and white

I'm sure this barn wasn't derelict last time I was here.


We met a horse here.


The woods are full of branches.


Real bluebells.


Tree trunks echo.


We walked along this fallen tree and it felt like we were surfing.


The final forks in the road, ho ho.

RSS shenanigans

Fixed the insecure Javascript element over at https://exmosis.net/ after moving to HTTPS and noticed that certain RSS feeds aren't currently coming through. If you're reading this through the feed, then note that you may be missing Disposable Evidence posts, at the least. Don't worry, it's low traffic.

Given feeddigest.com seems to have stopped letting me access anything at all (?), maybe it's finally time to spend an evening doing my own custom aggregation service...

Update: So feeddigest.com doesn't mean feeddigest.com, I always forget that. Disposable Evidence was disabled in feedinformer because something-something-something. Looks like it's back now - RSS / Atom.

Kew and Kandor, and the mirror of the Empire

Kew Gardens, founded in 1840. Today it houses over 30,000 kinds of plant and 750,000 books. The forecast is rain, but we've been lucky perhaps - more sun than precipitation, jumpers more off than on. 



Kew is a living museum. Somewhere in between the dullness of my feet, the wonder of the architecture's scale, and the raw pink of Kew Palace, I realise I'm in a curation. It's hard to see at first, because I grew up in a curation, and the history and existence of Kew matches my own history and existence that unpicking the two is near impossible. But here it is, a mirror within a mirror. 

There is everything at Kew. South American cacti, a Japanese gatehouse and assorted bonsai, a Chinese pagoda and dog statues, Alpine flowerlets, a high-ceilinged Orangery, rainforest fish, palm trees. Within the huge walled garden, the world. 



It is a curation of the world beyond these walls and beyond these seas, a gathering of flora derived from our civilization's ability to travel and to explore. It is like and unlike Brighton's Booth Museum, which has a stronger sense of focus on the British Isles, and yet still on collection and curation of The Wild. In Kew, a micro cosmos, a botanical Kandor. 



And all the while that we're there, planes fly overhead, one every 60 to 90 seconds, spat out from Heathrow Airport like laser tracer bullets, undercarriage still lucidly displayed. A constant reminder of how the world has got smaller in only a few hundred years. I never adjust to the sound for the whole day. 



Exploration is in the British blood. We think of ourselves as traders, but really we have always been importers - of ideas and cultures as much as plants and people. We crave styles other than our own. We look elsewhere for a sense of adventure, especially so from the age of the Victorians right up to our own cruise- or Lonely-Planet-besotted generations. We thrive on novelty and otherness and escape, and the things we bring back are our badges of freedom, power and superiority. 

So what are we escaping from? 

Things what have affected my blogging

I liked James' post on blogging so much I decided to comment on it. For irony and anarchy, I'm putting my comment here as a separate post too. I like it and want to share it.

Things what have affected my blogging.

1. Phones and tablets. I hate virtual keyboards with a passion – especially because the “convenience” of reading on a device seems to be totally out of whack with the “inconvenience” of virtual keyboards. Reading blogs is ok. Writing them and commenting on them is a pain. Maybe I should get a bluetooth keyboard or something.

2. Microblogging and long form. Twitter and gnu social have really cut it into my short short posts. On the other hand, I don’t have the time or patience for longer articles any more. So the nature of my blogging is somewhere in the middle, which is probably less content overall. Maybe I should get back into microblogging via my blog instead of other places. I use to post links to my blog, instead of to Twitter.

3. Ubiquitous content. I’m slowly rekindling my love of manually duplicating posts and my own content – I run/ran some automatic piping from one source to another, partly to save time and partly to fulfill my bastard database normalisation mindset. I still feel bad if I know someone follows me on multiple channels and there’s the risk they’ll see them same thing twice. BE CANONICAL dammit. no, etc.

4. Kids, obviously.

Oddly, lack of comments or engagement is not a particular influence on my blogging activity. I just like to write.

Dealing with the future under article 50

A long, long, long time ago I got interested in politics. Back when the 'Blunkett is an Arse' blog was winning awards (ok, an award), I was angry with the world, and the country in particular - the people that ran it, the people that controlled it, and the people that pretended to vote it in.

That anger shaped me a lot. It ended up stripping back any pretense of surprise at the machinations of a modern democracy. It pushed me into arguments that caught me off guard. It helped me improve my fact-checking. Ultimately, it remained, but its own yang tempered itself, and made way for something else. Eventually I stopped blogging to complain, and moved on. The stress wasn't worth it.

Cypherpunks write code. It's not a great motto for me to live by because I don't really write a lot of code, when it comes to hardcore maths. But I write code, and more importantly, I write code to be productive (I hope). The underlying attitude is of creation, of progress. If you want to make something better, then stop whinging, and get on and do something.

I'm also not a hard and fast punk either. Instead I straddle the boundary between anarchist and the state, a kind of anarcho-communist paradox. It's complicated. Anyway, there's something about politically angry that encourages that conflict, I think. A sort of fight-or-flight split brain: either put up and improve what's out there, or shut up and go and do your own thing.

(Actually it's not just me, that's just inherent to the internet, maybe.)

So, anger, coding, progress. Historically, nothing has changed here. I'm still angry. I still hate tabloids. And I still wonder why people don't fact-check or go through any deliberation/exploration before coming to an opinion. That feeling has been with me for 15 years or so.

So Brexit today isn't a surprise, or a shock. It's a little unexpected, but only when compared against the hope of a better world. I'm old enough to know that things don't run on Hope. (Dreams and Love are different affairs though.)

The choice is still the same - get stuck in, or get out. Or both. Both have risks, both have opportunities. Same as always. The world is changing faster than you can keep up with.

Those "Leavers" who want a return to the old days - corporal punishment, caning, giant creme eggs, no internet, etc - will be left behind, same as always - the world just doesn't move in that direction. All we have is a new and different direction of change, and the inequalities and schisms that led to Brexit (urban progress, worldwide development, rapid innovation) will still be here, just in a different form. We don't know what that form is, but then we never had any idea where we are now. That's how quick things change these days.

Keep your eyes open. Hedge your bets. Strengthen your reserves. Know when to make sacrifices. Rest well. Make friends easily. Laugh and cry. Write code. And create.

2016 in 2,000 pages

The Internet allows us some incredible opportunities for reflection these days. Resisting the move to Facebook's curation algorithms, I'm posting a round-up of some of last year's more (personally) significant photos over at the Disposable Evidence feed (e-mail and RSS available) along with some thoughts and memories.

Meanwhile, GoodReads has a simple filter to show you what I read in 2016. I can't remember if that was absolutely everything, but I'd say it was an eclectic mix, helped somewhat by being unable to move for a few weeks in June after my appendix blew up.

[Open disclamation: all following links are Amazon affiliate links, which I thought I'd try out for no reason other than a subtle urge for the future consumption of more knowledge.]

The stand-out book that blew me away was Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, which is impossible to describe succinctly, but wowed me most with its ability to describe a world and its characters so vividly and viscerally.

I finally got to read Calvino's Invisible Cities and Stoker's Dracula which were both as fantastic as I'd hoped. Ma Jian's Red Dust were also highly influential though, and I find myself being drawn to the meandering, wandering narrative much more now as a result.

I also have various books on the go that put me in a good mindset of discovery and the not-quite-real. These aren't on the list, but tend to fill spare moments - I picked up Eco's Book of Legendary Lands in the wake of his passing, grabbed The Classic of Mountains and Seas which is an old Chinese book that reads like an insane RPG manual, and have been drip-reading Laura Oldfield Ford's collection of down-and-out London dérives, Savage Messiah in between everything else. This year I'm very much looking forward to reading The Book of Yokai.

With various series on the go (including Gormenghast, and also both The Unwritten, and Lucifer from Mike Carey), I'm looking forward to escaping from the world that the winds of 2017 will bring in...