Thought Shrapnel

Recently, when I met up with someone who was launching a new council website, they casually mentioned that his team had optimised it for a reading age of nine. This, apparently, is the average reading age of the UK adult population. A few years ago, my brother-in-law, who works for a church, showed me the way that they had started providing church updates in video format. YouTube and TikTok are by far the most-used apps by (western) teenagers.

Are we heading towards a post-literate society? This article by Sarah O’Connor quotes Neil Postman but I think it would be more appropriate to cite Walter Ong on secondary orality, a kind of orality that depends on literate culture and the existence of writing. For example, the updates provided by my brother-in-law’s church depend on there being a script, written updates to share with the congregation, and a programme of events to which they can refer.

Technological shifts reshape how we perceive and process information, and — as I mentioned in a recent post — we live in a world which privileges immediate, emotionally-charged, image-driven communication over slower, deliberate reflections. It’s a difficult thing to resist or change, because like fast-food it’s something which appeals to something innate.

(In passing, I would point out that the literacy proficiency of 16-24 year olds in England is probably due to the introduction of a phonics-based approach in early years, and ensuring young people remain in education or training up to the age of 18)

The implications for politics and the quality of public debate are already evident. These, too, were foreseen. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called Twilight of the Books in the New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliche and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for”. Does that sound familiar?

[…]

These trends are not unavoidable or irreversible. Finland demonstrates the potential for high-quality education and strong social norms to sustain a highly literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improved schooling can make: there, the literacy proficiency of 16-24 year olds was significantly better than a decade ago.

The question of whether AI could alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more tricky. Systems like ChatGPT can perform well on many reading and writing tasks: they can parse reams of information and reduce it to summaries.

[…]

But, as [David] Autor [an economics professor at MIT] says, in order to make good use of a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a decent foundation to begin with. Absent that, [Andreas] Schleicher [director for education and skills at the OECD] worries that people with poor literacy skills will become “naive consumers of prefabricated content”.

Source: The Financial Times

Image: Rachit Tank

Just before Christmas, I headed up to Barter Books with my family. It’s a great place where you can exchange books you no longer need for credit, which you can then spend on books that other people have brought in. I picked up Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, a big thick history book by former BBC correspondent, Martin Sixsmith.

I finished it this morning; it was a fantastic read. Sixsmith serialised the book on BBC Radio 4 so it’s easier to follow than the usual history book, but still has plenty of Russian names and places for the reader to wrap their head around.

As Audrey Watters notes, reading can often be hard work. It’s tempting to want to read the summary, to optimise your information environment such that you can get on with the important stuff. Where “the important stuff” is, presumably, making money, arguing on the internet, or attempting to turn a lack of empathy for others into a virtue.

Appropriately enough, it’s difficult to adequately summarise Audrey’s argument in this post because it’s nuanced — as the best writing usually is. As she points out, an important part of reading widely is developing empathy. For example, while I still hold a very low opinion of Vladimir Putin, make a lot more sense when put in the context of a 1,000 year narrative arc. It would have been difficult to come to that realisation watching a short YouTube video or social media thread.

Reading can be slow. It can be quite challenging work – and not simply because our attention has been increasingly conditioned, fragmented with distractions and disruptions. And yet from the considered effort of reading comes consideration. So it isn’t simply that we no longer read at length or read deeply; we no longer value contemplation.

[…]

If, as some scholars argue, learning to read does not just build cognition but helps develop empathy – that is, young readers become immersed in stories outside their own experience and thus see the world differently – what are the implications when adults cannot bother to tell stories to their children?

Source: Second Breakfast

Image: Matias North

In his most recent newsletter, Ben James shared some “important snippets” from things that he read over the holidays. It included a post from 2019 on ‘The Hamming Question’ which I really like, and focuses the mind somewhat. I perhaps need to think about what the Hamming questions are in the areas in which I work.

Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields “What are the most important problems in your field?” partly so he could troll them by asking “Why aren’t you working on them?” and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people’s attention on what matters.

Source: LessWrong

Well, here we are at the end of another year! My sole criterion for inclusion in this ‘best of’ list is that the articles I reference made me think. Reinforcing my existing views, or being merely ‘interesting’ wasn’t enough to make it. So, after whittling down from twenty or so, here are my top ten Thought Shrapnel posts of 2024:

1. De-bogging yourself — Adam Mastroianni’s topic is getting yourself out of a situation where you’re stuck, which he calls “de-bogging yourself”. I love the way he breaks it down into three different kinds of ‘bog phenomena’ and gives names to examples which fall into those categories.
2. The importance of context — I can highly recommend this conversation between Adam Grant and Trevor Noah. The conversation they have about context towards the start is so important that I wish everyone I know would listen to it.
3. Begetting Strangers — This is such a great article by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Quoting philosophers, he concisely summarises the difficulty of parenting, examines some of the tensions, and settles on a position with which I’d agree.
4. Man or bear IRL — This article by Laura Killingbeck is definitely worth reading in its entirety. Not only is it extremely well-written, it gives a real-world example to a hypothetical internet discussion. Killingbeck is a long-term ‘bikepacker’ and therefore the “man or bear” question is one she grapples with on a regular basis.
5. Philosophy and folklore — I love this piece in Aeon from Abigail Tulenko, who argues that folklore and philosophy share a common purpose in challenging us to think deeply about life’s big questions. Her essay is essentially a critique of academic philosophy’s exclusivity and she calls for a broader, more inclusive approach that embraces… folklore.
6. ‘Meta-work’ is how we get past all the one-size-fits-none approaches — Alexandra Samuel points out in this newsletter that a lot of the work we do as knowledge workers will increasingly be ‘meta-work’. Introducing a 7-step approach, she first of all outlines why it’s necessary, especially in a ‘neurovarious’ world.
7. We become what we behold — An insightful and nuanced post from Stephen Downes, who reflects on various experiences, from changing RSS reader through to the way he takes photographs. What he calls ‘AI drift’ is our tendency to replace manual processes with automated ones.
8. You don’t have to like what other people like, or do what other people do — Warren Ellis responds to a post by Jay Springett on ‘surface flatness’ by reframing the problem as… not one we have to worry about. It’s good advice: so long as you can sustain an income by not having to interact with online walled gardens, why care what other people do?
9. 3 strategies to counter the unseen costs of boundary work within organisations — This article focuses on research that reveals people who do ‘boundary work’ within organisations, that is to say, individuals who span different silos, are more likely to suffer burnout and exhibit negative social behaviours.
10. Dark data is a climate concern — I mean, yes, of course I knew that data files are stored on servers and that those servers consume electricity. But this is a good example of reframing. How many emails have I got stored that I will never look at again? How many files stored in the cloud ‘just in case’?

Thanks for reading and sharing Thought Shrapnel this year! I’ll be back in 2025 🎉

In 2009, seeing which way the wind was blowing, I decided to sell my CD collection and use the proceeds to fund streaming my music via Spotify. Fifteen years later, factoring in price rises and an upgrade to the family version, I’ve probably spent about £2,000. So I reckon I’m about even.

I’ve really enjoyed using Spotify. I like the way it’s available everywhere, including on my Google Home devices and in my car. It’s learned my tastes and I’ve discovered all kinds of music through the service.

However, I’ve felt increasingly guilty about the way that Spotify, and other music streaming services, treat artists. We’re now in a situation where artists have to tour to make a living. I’m not sure that’s necessarily healthy.

Also, given Sabrina Carpenter seems to show up on every playlist I ask Spotify to create at the moment (including ‘hardcore gym rap’!) I’m pretty sure they are also making a lot of money from paid placements. My unease is only compounded with the revelations in this article which details the ways that Spotify have actively tried to reduce the amount of royalties paid to artists.

Perhaps it’s time to move on. Perhaps the answer is to go back to MP3s and use a platform such as Bandcamp? 🤔

According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.

After at least a year of piloting, PFC was presented to Spotify editors in 2017 as one of the company’s new bets to achieve profitability. According to a former employee, just a few months later, a new column appeared on the dashboard editors used to monitor internal playlists. The dashboard was where editors could view various stats: plays, likes, skip rates, saves. And now, right at the top of the page, editors could see how successfully each playlist embraced “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins,” as PFC was described internally.

[…]

Some employees felt that those responsible for pushing the PFC strategy did not understand the musical traditions that were being affected by it. These higher-ups were well versed in the business of major-label hitmaking, but not necessarily in the cultures or histories of genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop—music that tended to do well on playlists for relaxing, sleeping, or focusing. One of my sources told me that the attitude was “if the metrics went up, then let’s just keep replacing more and more, because if the user doesn’t notice, then it’s fine.”

[…]

In a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the ethics of streaming, Spotify’s own employees debated the fairness of the PFC program. “I wonder how much these plays ‘steal’ from actual ’normal’ artists,” one employee asked. And yet as far as the public was concerned, the company had gone to great lengths to keep the initiative under wraps. Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this. PFC was not the only way in which Spotify deliberately and covertly manipulated programming to favor content that improved its margins, but it was the most immediately galling. Nor was the problem simply a matter of “authenticity” in music. It was a matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music. PFC was irrefutable proof that Spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth.

Source: Harper’s Magazine

About a quarter of the British working age population (ages 16-64) does not have a job. There are many reasons for this, but the right-wing view on this is that “benefits are too generous.” I think we can put bed with this chart from the University of Bath (2019):

Reducing benefits that are already some of the lowest in the developed world isn’t likely to get people working again, it just causes misery and has knock-on effects such as an increase in the amount of shoplifting for food and other essential items.

Not only are British unemployment benefits low, but they’re also split in a way which is massively skewed towards housing benefit, as even commentators in the right-wing Sunday Times have to admit:

Unsurprisingly, state-level economics is fiendishly difficult and nothing at all like running household finances. Here’s a very simple system diagram from an article in the journal Social Policy & Administration from earlier this year which discusses 24 European countries and macroeconomic variables:

There are two things that it seems the British political class don’t want to talk about. The first is Brexit, an act of almost unimaginable economic harm that has meant 15% lower trade with the EU, and cost the economy over £140 billion so far. The second is the long-term health impact of the pandemic, with the related effects on the number of people working.

All in all, we need a grown-up conversation about this, based on data. But with Reform UK waiting in the wings, potentially financed by the world’s richest person, the chances are we’ll continue with knee-jerk reactions and shallow thinking for the foreseeable future.

Having a moral compass can sometimes make life more difficult. I literally turned down a ridiculously well-paid gig last month because it contravened my ethical code. While that particular example was relatively clear cut, it’s more difficult when it comes to things like platforms which are used for free. At what point does your use of it become out of alignment with your values?

Twitter turning to X is a good example of this, with some people leaving a long time ago (🙋) while others, for some inexplicable reason, are still on there. I’d argue that the next service to be recognised as toxic is probably going to be Substack. I hosted Thought Shrapnel there briefly for a few weeks at the end of last year, but left when they started platforming Nazis. They seem to be at it again (here’s an archive version as that link was down at the time of writing).

While I wanted to give that context, this post is actually about a particular style of writing that is popular on Substack. I discovered this via Robin Sloan’s newsletter, which (thankfully) is written in a style at odds with the opposite of the advice given by Max Read, a relatively-successful Substacker. What Read says about being a “textual YouTuber” is spot-on. I can’t imagine anything more awful than watching video after video, but I will read and read until the proverbial cows come home.

The other thing which I think Read gets right is something I was discussing the other day (IRL I’m afraid, no link!) about how everyone wants Strong Opinions™ these days and to be the “main character.” My own writing these days is almost the opposite of that: slightly philosophical, with provisional opinions and, while introspective, not presenting myself as the hero of the story.

My standard joke about my job is that I am less a “writer” than I am a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” What I mean by this is that while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing–or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept–and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are invited. This means you have to be pretty comfortable having a strong voice, offering relatively strong opinions, and just generally “being the main character” in your writing. And, indeed, all these qualities are more important than any kind of particular technical writing skill: Many of the world’s best (formal) writers are not comfortable with any of those things, while many of the world’s worst writers are extremely comfortable with them.

So, part of your job as a Substacker is is “producing words” and part of your job is “cultivating a persona for which people might have some kind of inexplicable affection or even respect.”

Source: Read Max

Image: Steve Johnson

I had a great walk and talk with my good friend Bryan Mathers yesterday. He made the trip up from London to Northumberland, where I live, and we went walking in the Simonside Hills and at Druridge Bay.

One of our many topics of conversation was the various seasons of life, including our kids leaving home, doing meaningful work, and social interaction.

Our generation is perhaps the first where men getting help through therapy is at least semi-normal, where it’s OK to talk about feelings, and where there’s the beginnings of an understanding that perhaps work shouldn’t define a man’s life.

What’s interesting about this article in The Guardian by Adrienne Matei is the framing as a “clash of identity and ability.” I’m already experiencing this on a physical level with my mind thinking I’m capable of running, swimming, and jumping much further than I’m able. It’s frustrating, but as the article points out, a nudge that I need to be thinking about my life differently as I approach 44 years old.

In 2023, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a study exploring how hegemonic masculinity affects men’s approach to health and ageing. “Masculine identity upholds beliefs about masculine enactment,” the authors write, referring to the traits some men feel they must exhibit, including control, responsibility, strength and competitiveness. As men age, they are likely to feel pressure to remain self-reliant and avoid perceived weakness, including seeking medical help or acknowledging emerging challenges.

The study’s authors write that middle-aged men might try to fight ageing with disciplined health and fitness routines. But as they get older and those strategies become less successful, they have to rethink what it means to be “masculine”, or suffer poorer health outcomes. Accepting these identity shifts can be particularly difficult for men, who can exhibit less self-reflection and self-compassion than women.

[…]

[Dr Karen Skerrett, a psychotherapist and researcher] emphasizes there is no tidy, one size fits all way to navigate the clash of identity and ability: “There is just so much diversity that we can’t particularly predict how somebody is going to react to limitations,” she says.

However, in a 2021 research report she and her co-authors proposed six tasks to help people develop a “realistic, accommodating and hopeful” perception of the future: acknowledging and accepting the realities of ageing; normalizing angst about the future; active reminiscence; accommodating physical, cognitive and social changes; searching for new emotionally meaningful goals; and expanding one’s capacity to tolerate ambiguity. These tasks help people to recharacterize ageing as a transition that requires adaptability, growth and foresight, and to resist “premature foreclosure”, or the notion that their life stories have ended.

As we age, managing our own egos becomes a bigger psychological task, says Skerrett. We may not be able to do all the things we once enjoyed, but we can still ask ourselves how we can contribute and support others in meaningful ways. Focusing on internal growth and confronting hard truths with grace and clarity can ease confusion, shame and anger. Instead of clinging to lost identities, we can seek purpose in connection, legacy and gratitude.

Source: The Guardian

After reading that “every parent should watch” a Channel 4 TV programme called Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones I dutifully did so this afternoon. I’m off work, so need something to do after wrapping presents 😉

I thought it was poor, if I’m honest. As a former teacher and senior leader, and the father of two teenagers (one who has a real issue with screen time) I thought it was OK-ish as a conversation starter. But the blunt instrument of a ‘ban’, as is apparently going to happen in Australia, just seems a bit laughable to be honest. How are you supposed to develop digital literacies through non-use?

It’s easy to think that a problem you and other people are experiencing should be solved quickly and easily by someone else. In this case, the government. But this is a systemic issue, and not as easy as the government ‘forcing’ tech platforms to do something about it. What about the chronic underfunding of youth activities and child mental health services, and the slashing of council budgets? Smartphones aren’t the only reason kids sit in their rooms.

In March 2025, the Online Safety Act comes into force. The intention is welcome, but as with the Australian ‘ban’ it’s probably going to be hard to make it work.

The kids in the TV experiment were 12 years old. If, at the end of 2024, you’re letting your not-even-teenager on a smartphone without any safeguards, I’m afraid you’re doing it wrong. If you’re allowing kids of that age to have their phones in their bedroom overnight, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not something you need a ban to fix.

Smartphones, just like any technology, aren’t wholly positive or wholly negative. There are huge benefits and significant drawbacks to them. What’s more powerful in this situation are social norms. If this programme helps to start a conversation, then it’s done its job. I’m just concern that most people are going to take from it the message that “the government needs to sort this out.”

Source: Channel 4

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are now an integral part of my workflow. This is true of almost everything I produce these days, including this post (I used this tool to create the image alt text).

I use genAI in client work, and also in my academic studies. It’s incredibly useful as a kind of ‘thought partner’ and particularly handy in doing a RAG analysis of essays in relation to assignments. Do I use it to fabricate the answers to assessed questions which I then submit as my own work? No, of course not.

This article in The Guardian reports from the frontlines of the struggle in universities for academic rigour and against cheating. Different institutions are approaching the issue differently, as you would expect. The answer, I would suggest, is something akin to Cambridge University’s AI-positive approach, outlined in the quoted text below.

The whole point of Higher Education is to allow students to reflect on themselves and the world. It’s been my experience that using genAI in appropriate ways is an incredibly enriching experience. Especially given that my Systems Thinking modules focus on me as a practitioner in relation to a specific situation in my life, what would it even mean to “cheat”?

I was notified this morning that I received a distinction for my latest module, as I did for the one before it. Would I have achieved those grades without using genAI? Maybe. Probably, even, given I’ve already got a doctorate. But the experience for me as a distance learner was so much better than being limited to interactions with my (excellent) tutor and fellow students in the online forum.

At the end of the day, I’m studying for my own benefit, and I know that studying with genAI is better than studying without it. I’m very much looking forward to using Google’s latest upgrade to Gemini Live for my next module, which I found recently to be very useful to conversationally prepare for interviews!

More than half of students now use generative AI to help with their assessments, according to a survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute, and about 5% of students admit using it to cheat. In November, Times Higher Education reported that, despite “patchy record keeping”, cases appeared to be soaring at Russell Group universities, some of which had reported a 15-fold increase in cheating. But confusion over how these tools should be used – if at all – has sown suspicion in institutions designed to be built on trust. Some believe that AI stands to revolutionise how people learn for the better, like a 24/7 personal tutor – Professor HAL, if you like. To others, it is an existential threat to the entire system of learning – a “plague upon education” as one op-ed for Inside Higher Ed put it – that stands to demolish the process of academic inquiry.

In the struggle to stuff the genie back in the bottle, universities have become locked in an escalating technological arms race, even turning to AI themselves to try to catch misconduct. Tutors are turning on students, students on each other and hardworking learners are being caught by the flak. It’s left many feeling pessimistic about the future of higher education. But is ChatGPT really the problem universities need to grapple with? Or is it something deeper?

[…]

What counts as cheating is determined, ultimately, by institutions and examiners. Many universities are already adapting their approach to assessment, penning “AI-positive” policies. At Cambridge University, for example, appropriate use of generative AI includes using it for an “overview of new concepts”, “as a collaborative coach”, or “supporting time management”. The university warns against over-reliance on these tools, which could limit a student’s ability to develop critical thinking skills. Some lecturers I spoke to said they felt that this sort of approach was helpful, but others said it was capitulating. One conveyed frustration that her university didn’t seem to be taking academic misconduct seriously any more; she had received a “whispered warning” that she was no longer to refer cases where AI was suspected to the central disciplinary board.

If anything, the AI cheating crisis has exposed how transactional the process of gaining a degree has become. Higher education is increasingly marketised; universities are cash-strapped, chasing customers at the expense of quality learning. Students, meanwhile, are labouring under financial pressures of their own, painfully aware that secure graduate careers are increasingly scarce. Just as the rise of essay mills coincided with the rapid expansion of higher education in the noughties, ChatGPT has struck at a time when a degree feels more devalued than ever.

Source: The Guardian

Most people probably have a favourite weather app. Mine is the oddly-named Weawow, for three reasons. First, it looks good; second, it allows you to choose the data source for weather forecasts; third, it shows sunrise, sunset, and ‘golden hour’ times in a really handy way.

I stumbled across a website today from Éibhear Ó hAnluain, a software engineer who lives in Dublin. Where I live is within 2 degrees latitude of there, so the timings are approximately correct for my location too. If someone knows a quick and easy way of generating a similar page for anywhere in the world, let me know!

Source: Éibhear/Gibiris

I notice that Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, has co-founded a new social app called Mozi. It’s iOS-only for now, and seems to be reinventing some of the functionality of Foursquare check-ins with the private aspect of Path.

Path is the best social network I’ve ever used. I only used it with my family, but as I mentioned when lamenting its demise in 2018, it had the perfect mix of features. As I also hinted at in that post, for-profit private social networks just aren’t sustainable. We never did find anything to replace it, and Signal chats just aren’t the same.

Mozi seems to be based on people making travel plans and then serendipitously bumping into each other. I’d suggest this is already a solved problem for younger generations through Snap Maps, meaning it’s a firmly middle-aged problem. For that demographic, they’re probably likely to be travelling less. And if they’re British, a good proportion would pay money not to awkwardly bump into people they kind-of know 😅

Williams is a billionaire at this point, so he can do what he likes. But, inevitably, I’ll be pointing back to this post in less than two years when it shuts down. So I won’t be bothering to set up an account, even when it comes to Android.

When you spend your life building internet platforms, it’s hard to quit the habit. So while trying to get a grasp on the people I knew to invite to my birthday, I started thinking: What if we did have a network designed for this purpose? Not just invites, but a map of the people we actually knew and tools for enhancing those relationships?

In other words, what would an actually social network look like?

Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.

Source: Medium

I used to be all about the life hacking when I was younger: optimising my time and ensuring maximum productivity was my goal. It made sense for that period of my life, as when I was in my twenties I was teaching full-time, pursuing a doctorate, and starting a family. Time seemed in short supply.

It wasn’t just me, though. There was very much what seemed a movement around this. Yes, it was mainly younger white men, but I admit to not realising that was the case at the time. This article by Laura Miller reflects on that time through the lens of a new book entitled Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents. Ultimately, was it just about young men finding ways to do things that their mothers used to do for them? 🤔

The notion of hacking “life” arose during a period when technology was achieving one minor marvel after another, and “disruption” could still be touted as an unalloyed good. Yes, a tech bubble had burst at the beginning of the decade, but that was viewed as a failure of business models, not the tech itself… Smartphones seemed almost magical in their ability to iron the hassles and uncertainty out of everyday activities. You no longer had to give people directions to your house, rustle up a newspaper to find out where the movie you wanted to see was playing, or pick a restaurant with no idea what other diners thought about it.

[…]

As you’ve surely realized by now, it is possible to devote so much time to organizing your work that you never actually do any of it. As Reagle observes, several of the early champions of life hacking, include O’Brien and Mann, signed contracts to write books about how to defeat procrastination and attain Inbox Zero and then never got around to writing them. Most of them dropped out of the scene entirely, abandoning their blogs and denouncing the tech world’s preoccupation with productivity.

Others became proponents of minimalism, an ethos that involves getting rid of almost all of your stuff while becoming even more obsessed with the few things you keep. They sold their houses and moved into RVs. Like Marie Kondo on overdrive, they aimed to fit everything they owned into a single backpack.

[…]

Of course, plenty of people live in RVs and don’t own much because they have no other option; nobody asks them to give TED talks about it. Reagle points out that minimalism has been a phenomenon of young, educated, affluent white men supposedly repudiating a middle-class materialism made possible by their careers in the tech industry and lack of family encumbrances. “Minimalism is for well-off bachelors,” as Reagle puts it, and not especially imaginative ones at that. If you make your fortune at 30 and you’re the sort of person who’s never given much thought to a purpose beyond “success,” what do you do with yourself? A common and strikingly unimaginative answer among minimalists was full-time travel. The possibility that experiences can be accumulated and consumed in just as mindless a fashion as belongings can did not occur to them.

[…]

As one anonymous wag has observed, the vast resources of Silicon Valley have too often been applied to the problem of “what is my mother no longer doing for me?” Don’t get me wrong: I remain in the market for solid, practical tips. But life, like a palm tree or any other organic thing, can only take so much hacking before it collapses.

Source: Slate

Last week, I shared a post from this same website, an ‘advent calendar’ of blogging where people reflect what they’ve thought a lot about over the last year.

This entry is about comfort zones and systems change. The author makes their living in ‘systems change’ and points out that it’s natural for things to evolve and change over time. Not to allow this to happen privileges the few over the many. It’s a good way of thinking about it.

I’ve included an image that Bryan Mathers made for our co-op last year to illustrate my anti-establishment tendencies. I’m almost embarrassed for other people when they use the phrase “My boss said…” as if it’s a normal thing. Any hierarchies should be fluid and temporary.

On the surface, it can seem like people’s resistance to making things better is down to their fear of the unknown, and they lean into the idea of ‘better the devil you know’. However, I’m eight years into this gig, and actually, what I’ve observed is that it’s the complexity that comes with imagining the world anew that people don’t like.

[…]

They find it destabilising when new ways of being emerge because – in order to adopt them – it would mean straying from a well-trodden route. New ideas threaten to force people to create new pathways, adapting to unfamiliar scenarios as they go.

The reality, though, is that this is how life works. We can manufacture fixed systems that seek to impose rigid structures – for example, hierarchies, competition and individualism have all been created. But, at its core, the world shifts and alters and adapts. You only have to look at the natural world to see how life constantly evolves, or the universe to recognise we’re constantly expanding.

By resisting change, we are upholding the manufactured systems that we are forced to live within. The same systems that are rigged against us.

Because those systems are familiar. They are societal norms. They are known.

As long as we are resistant to change, we allow power to be consolidated in the hands of a dominant few who get to shape the media, government and organisations which prescribe how we live our lives.

Source: I thought about that a lot

Image: CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery for WAO

I’m not sure if this post by Ryan Holiday is just a form of (not-so) subtle marketing for his ‘Anxiety Medallion’ but he nevertheless makes some good points. Framing anxiety as his “most expensive habit,” Holiday talks about what anxiety “steals” from us.

Without wanting to wade too much into the nature vs nurture debate, I think it’s clear that genetics provides some kind of baseline level here. For me, that’s both incredibly frustrating (you can’t choose your ancestors!) but also somewhat liberating. I can’t remember where I learned to do so, but over the last 18 months or so I’ve started saying to myself “it’s all just chemicals in my brain.”

It doesn’t always work, of course, but along with good exercise and sleep routines — and ensuring my stress levels remain low — I manage to cope with it all. The hardest thing to explain to people is that anxiety doesn’t have to have an object. Existential angst, for example, isn’t just something that 19th century philosophers suffered from, but regular people in the here and now.

It’s not flashy, it’s not thrilling, and it doesn’t even provide the fleeting pleasures that other vices might. And yet, anxiety is a vice. A habit. A relentless one that eats away at your time, your relationships, and your moments of joy.

[…]

Seneca tells us we suffer more in imagination than in reality. Anxiety turns the hypothetical into the actual. It drags us into a future that doesn’t yet exist and forces us to live out every worst-case scenario in vivid detail. The cost isn’t just mental. It’s physical. It’s emotional. It’s relational.

[…]

Anxiety is expensive—not just in terms of the mental toll, but in the way it costs us our lives. Every minute spent consumed by worry is a minute lost.

Source: Ryan Holiday

Image: Nik

I listen to a popular podcast called The Rest is Politics. I remember listening before the US Presidential Election where the hosts could not bring themselves to believe that Trump would successfully win a second term. Why? Because he has “no ground game.” That is to say, he doesn’t have the processes set up to be able to mass-mobilise supporters to knock on doors, get the word out, and encourage people to vote.

Given the results, that’s increasingly looking like 20th century thinking. I’ve heard anecodotes of people knocking on doors and people already having talking points from following social media influencers and watching YouTube videos. If people have already made up their mind based on things they’ve seen on the small screen they carry around with them everywhere, knocking on their door every few years isn’t going to change their mind.

This is why social media is so important. This post argues that we need to be creating new spaces, not just “meeting people where they are.” It’s not an incorrect position to take. I don’t disagree with anything in the post. But how exactly? Mastodon and the Fediverse more generally could have been the ‘ark’ to which people fled after leaving X/Twitter. Instead, they flocked to another “potentially decentralised” social network, with investors and no incentive to do anything other than what everyone else has done before.

I’d like to organise. I’d like to use Open Source software everywhere. I’d like to only buy things from co-ops. However, back in the real world where I need to interact with capitalism to survive…

It’s hard to ignore the fact that progressive movements, despite their critical rhetoric, rely on the same capitalist and surveillance-driven platforms that actively subvert their goals. Platforms like Google, Facebook, The Communication Silo Formerly Named Twitter, and Instagram—behemoths of surveillance capitalism—become the very spaces where activism happens. These corporations profit from our clicks, likes, and shares, capturing our data and feeding it into systems of control that profit from inequality, exploitation, and surveillance.

This ongoing reliance on corporate-owned platforms represents a deep contradiction in our movements. By using these tools, we are feeding the beast—the tech giants profiting from our data, monetizing our activism, and undermining the very causes we fight for. In a real sense, we’ve become complicit in our own subjugation, ceding our autonomy, values, and privacy to the very corporations that reinforce the inequalities we seek to dismantle.

[…]

The phrase “you have to meet people where they live” has been an all-too-convenient defense for this complicity. But this outlook only reinforces the status quo. Shouldn’t a genuinely radical movement—especially a socialist one—work toward building new spaces where people can live, organize, and act outside of these exploitative systems?

Socialist movements throughout history didn’t merely meet people in existing power structures—they created new models of organization, new forms of cooperation, and new spaces for living and working together. From cooperatives to unions, the goal has always been to build alternatives to the capitalist way of life. Why, then, should we treat digital space any differently?

[…]

We cannot keep organizing through the tools of surveillance capitalism if we want to build a post-capitalist future. We must take control of the infrastructure itself—through open-source, community-run platforms. This is not just about technical solutions, but about aligning our methods of organizing with our values and principles.

Source: Seize the Means of Community

Image: Intricate Explorer

I discovered this article via Laura who referenced it during our co-working session as we updated AILiteracy.fyi. As a fellow Garbage Day subscriber, she’d assumed I’d already seen it mentioned in that newsletter. I hadn’t.

What I like about this piece from Casey Newton is how he points out how disingenuous much of anti-AI sentiment is. There are people doing important, nuanced work pointing out the bullshit (hi, Audrey) but there’s also some really ill-informed, clickbaity stuff that reinforces prejudice.

Of course people will use generative AI to cheat. Of course they will use it to create awful things. But what’s new there? A lot of the hand-wringing I see is from people who have evidently never used an LLM for more than five seconds. They would have been the same people warning about the “dangers” of the internet in the late 90s because “anyone can create a website and put anything online!”

The thing is, while we can’t guarantee that any individual response from a chatbot will be honest or helpful, it’s inarguable that they are much more honest and more helpful today than they were two years ago. It’s also inarguable that hundreds of millions of people are already using them, and that millions are paying to use them.

The truth is that there are no guarantees in tech. Does Google guarantee that its search engine is honest, helpful, and harmless? Does X guarantee that its posts are? Does Facebook guarantee that its network is?

Most people know these systems are flawed, and adjust their expectations and usage accordingly. The “AI is fake and sucks” crowd is hyper-fixated on the things it can’t do — count the number of r’s in strawberry, figure out that the Onion was joking when it told us to eat rocks — and weirdly uninterested in the things it can.

[…]

Ultimately, both the “fake and sucks” and “real and dangerous” crowds agree that AI could go really, really badly. To stop that from happening though, the “fake and sucks” crowd needs to accept that AI is already more capable and more embedded in our systems than they currently admit. And while it’s fine to wish that the scaling laws do break, and give us all more time to adapt to what AI will bring, all of us would do well to spend some time planning for a world where they don’t.

Source: Platformer

This advent series is published anonymously, but Matt Jukes outed himself as the author of this one. It makes sense him doing so, as it’s about working in the open, and how it’s benefited him — but now he feels like it’s time to “shut up.” For what it’s worth, I hope he doesn’t.

I’m sharing it here, though, as there are plenty of people who I know who share as openly as Jukesie, and who might be thinking about different seasons to their careers. I suppose I’m one of them. My wife has never been comfortable about my ‘oversharing’, especially in the early days of Twitter. That’s why I’ve toned down that aspect a bit over the years

There’s something about oversharing that feels like a focus on the self. But, as I was explaining to my daughter in relation to art just yesterday, you have to find the thing that allows you to represent yourself in the world. For me, it’s writing. For others it’s drawing, painting, or singing. Without that, it’s a sad, unexpressed life.

(It’s also well worth looking at the other essays in the series, as there’s some really good writing here.)

People I’ve never met in person are familiar with my ups and downs at work, my health, my travels and my ambitions. My openness has been called brave, inspiring, narcissistic and irritating. It’s provided me with an army of acquaintances around the world, but probably no more close friends than if I’d never popped my head above the parapet and uttered (or written) a word.

I wear my commitment to working in the open as a badge of honour and have spent years advocating for others to follow suit.

The problem though, and the reason I’ve been thinking a lot about it, is that I am tired of it and really feel like it is time to shut up. I don’t know whether those peak Covid years rewired something in my head, or whether it is just a by-product of getting older, but the energy required to maintain quite so public a persona has become unsustainable, and increasingly less enjoyable. The challenge though, is that my professional identity is so entangled in my openness, I fear what would happen if I did quiet down.

This fear is my own fault. My career has become a patchwork of short-term jobs, generated by a short attention span, and held together by a loose theme and a high profile. If the profile declines, will it all tumble down like a house of cards?

Source: I thought about that a lot

I missed this when he published it last year, but this strongly-worded and reasoned stuff from Cory Doctorow still applies. He explains why he’ll only ever be found on actually federated social networks. The word he coined, enshittification, can only applied to a captive user base. It makes me think about what I’m doing on Bluesky — which I’ve already described a ‘pound shop Mastodon’.

Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.

[…]

Being a moral actor lies not merely in making the right choice in the moment, but in anticipating the times when you may choose poorly in future, and taking steps to head that off.

[…]

That’s where Ulysses Pacts come in. […] We make little Ulysses Pacts all the time. If you go on a diet and throw away your Oreos, that’s a Ulysses Pact. You’re not betting that you’ll be strong enough to resist their siren song when your body is craving easily available calories; rather, you are being humble enough to recognize your own weakness, and strong enough to take a step to protect yourself from it.

[…]

I have learned my lesson. I have no plans to ever again put effort or energy into establishing myself on an unfederated service. From now on, I will put more weight on how easy it is to leave a service than on what I get from staying. A bad service that you can easily switch away from is incentivized to improve, and if the incentive fails, you can leave.

Source: Pluralistic

I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but this is more like it! Local models that are not only lighter in terms of environmental impact, but are trained on permissively-licensed data.

Training large language models required copyrighted data until it did not. Today we release Pleias 1.0 models, a family of fully open small language models. Pleias 1.0 models include three base models: 350M, 1.2B, and 3B parameters. They feature two specialized models for knowledge retrieval with unprecedented performance for their size on multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Pleias-Pico (350M parameters) and Pleias-Nano (1.2B parameters).

These represent the first ever models trained exclusively on open data, meaning data that are either non-copyrighted or are published under a permissible license. These are the first fully EU AI Act compliant models. In fact, Pleias sets a new standard for safety and openness.

Our models are:

• multilingual, offering strong support for multiple European languages
• safe, showing the lowest results on the toxicity benchmark
• performant for key tasks, such as knowledge retrieval
• able to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware locally (CPU-only, without quantisation)

[…]

We are moving away from the standard format of web archives. Instead, we use our new dataset composed of uncopyrighted and permissibly licensed data, Common Corpus. To create this dataset, we had to develop an extensive range of tools to collect, to generate, and to process pretraining.

Source: Hugging Face

Image: David Man & Tristan Ferne