Thought Shrapnel

The mistake of believing you are the bigger thing

Sat, 23 May 2026 20:59:04 +0100

The Art of Money Getting

Sat, 23 May 2026 20:47:34 +0100

I didn’t realise that PT Barnum was 60 years old when he co-founded the travelling show that became the Barnum & Bailey Circus. And he was 70 when he turned one of his lectures into a book called The Art of Money Getting.

Core Principles

Don’t Mistake Your Vocation

Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Most people get this backward. They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. The people who succeed have a knack for what they do. Find your knack first.

Avoid Debt Like the Plague

Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo.

Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might

Half-doing is expensive. Barnum watched neighbors spend whole lifetimes poor because they only kind of worked, while somebody else got rich doing the same job thoroughly. The people who go all in pull ahead of the ones who don’t.

Preserve Your Integrity

Nobody buys from someone they don’t trust. You can be the friendliest merchant in town, but if a customer suspects you of cheating, they’ll walk to the next shop. Dishonesty might pay this week. It costs you over a lifetime. Reputation is the actual asset.

Source: Cool Tools

Image: Public Domain Pictures

We are mature in one realm, childish in another

Sat, 23 May 2026 14:16:36 +0100

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

– Anaïs Nin

As per my last email

Sat, 23 May 2026 14:15:15 +0100

Ah, the consultant lifestyle.

Source: Are.na

Always more mountains

Sat, 23 May 2026 14:02:49 +0100

“Beyond the mountains, more mountains.”

– Haitian proverb

The house that eats its foundations

Sat, 23 May 2026 13:58:20 +0100

I really like this diagram, which uses as a touchstone classic pyramid of the capitalist system cartoons. The twist is that it’s not making a point about workers but about the planet as a whole.

Source: LinkedIn

Use it or lose it

Sat, 23 May 2026 13:46:57 +0100

I am very much thinking about this at the moment.

Source: Are.na

Reprogramming the athlete’s visual system to function at peak efficiency

Thu, 21 May 2026 17:18:48 +0100

YouTube Video

I learned about OKKULO at the Thinking Digital conference. I might be biased because the inventor is local and it’s helping my team (Sunderland) but this looks incredible.

New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways that did not have technological pathways before

Thu, 21 May 2026 17:01:21 +0100

Marcus Bösch with a really interesting insight into the aesthetics of TikTok through the use of some weird examples. He uses the work of Steyerl (2023), Meyer (2025), and Toister & Zylinska (2025) to explain it all. Well worth clicking through and reading the whole thing.

Slop strategies have been evolving ever since Jesus sat down on a huge shrimp in 2024. AI content production is now sophisticated enough to invent new affective hooks that did not previously exist.

New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways that did not have technological pathways before.

[…]

Roland Meyer argues that AI-generated images are optimised not against the real world but against other images already in circulation. They are trained on billions of platform images and rewarded for matching what viewers already expect to see. Meyer, building on a term from Jacob Birken, calls this platform realism — a realism that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with image-familiarity.

[…]

Meyer adds one more thing worth keeping. AI-generated images, he points out, are “disposable by design.” Producers generate dozens to find one that engages. Most are never seen.

[…]

Every time you see an AI-generated image — even one you know is fake, even one you mock or scroll past fast — the type it represents becomes a tiny bit more familiar to your imagination. Across thousands of variants seen by millions of viewers, this slowly changes what feels normal, what feels imaginable, what counts as a recognisable shape in the world.

[…]

We are still at the beginning of a transformative technology whose effects we can barely measure — partly because the changes sit just below the threshold of attention. A weird video here, a strange video there, and yet each one is part of a process that is shifting how we consume media and what we treat as something ordinary.

Source: Understanding TikTok

Drug testing on brains hovering between life and death

Thu, 21 May 2026 16:46:09 +0100

I can see this going the same way as the abortion debate. I know what I, personally, think about this (once I’m dead, I’m dead, and no amount of electrical stimulation is going to reanimate my consciousness) but I think there will be significant pushback from people who have perhaps read a little too much Mary Shelley.

Just a day ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its owner died, it sits on a cart draped in tubes that quiver as they pump liters of blood substitute and other fluids through the organ, supplying oxygen and removing waste. With most of its key functions intact but its electrical activity quenched by anesthesia, the brain hovers between life and death. As it metabolizes experimental drugs, sensors record its reactions, capturing hundreds of data points on its cells, proteins, and physiology. Then, after 24 hours in this state, it will be sliced into hundreds of pieces for more detailed study.

The brain is one of more than 700 that the 5-year-old biotech startup Bexorg has nurtured and studied using a set of proprietary brain-sustaining machines it calls BrainEx. The platform grants researchers an intimate look into how potential therapies might work inside brains with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Bexorg can biopsy the brains and discover how long a drug stays in cells, whether it hits its molecular target, and any hints of side effects.

The system promises far more realistic conditions for testing drugs than lab animals or cells in a dish, its developers say. Whole brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and unique genetics that can affect responses to experimental medicines, says physician Zvonimir Vrselja, one of Bexorg’s founders and CEO. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years.”

[…]

The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.

[…]

The company is also developing a machine learning model called NeuroLens that acts as a “virtual brain,” trained on the brain readouts, donors’ medical records, and protein and microscopy data from brain tissue. The model could eventually allow researchers to test new drug molecules before even going into a physical brain. In this virtual form, the pampered brains in Bexorg’s lab will live on even after their life support is withdrawn.

Source: Science

Image: Milad Fakurian

Why do people procrastinate?

Sun, 17 May 2026 08:07:38 +0100

I am not, you will be unsurprised to hear, a procrastinator. But I do procrastinate, and used to do so much more when I was younger.

This podcast episode from 2020, recommended to me this week so that I could better understand where someone was coming from, is absolutely fantastic. I learned so much, and the enthusiasm of both the host and interviewee is infectious.

Source: Ologies with Alie Ward

Field Notes on Productive Friction

Sun, 17 May 2026 08:00:31 +0100

I’m making my first zine, coming Q3 2026. There’s only going to be 50 physical copies, no digital version, and I’ve already sold ~25% of them.

If you want one, please ensure you choose the correct postage option for your location.

A pocket guide to noticing the frictionless tools that remove your agency, containing eight patterns of capture, plus one self-administered audit. Making the case for reflection over convenience in a world of doomscrolling.

Source: Cognitive Wallpaper

Arbitrary structures and accidental hierarchies

Sun, 17 May 2026 07:53:52 +0100

Source: Are.na

Sun, 17 May 2026 07:49:15 +0100

I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.

– Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

Digital legacy

Fri, 15 May 2026 09:50:41 +0100

I went to a MozAlums workshop run by Ian Forrester on Wednesday which discussed ‘digital legacy’. There was some really interesting discussion about how and when we delete our contacts, deal with digital artefacts after the passing of people we know, and automating some of the things that happen after we leave this mortal coil…

Source: Are.na

The impact of volcanoes on the Black Death

Fri, 15 May 2026 09:45:08 +0100

Scratch the surface, and underneath I’m still an enthusiastic History teacher; I’ve just no students to teach. So I find things like this Open Culture article, which helps piece together how the Black Death came to wipe out ~50% of Europe’s population in the 14th century, fascinating.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent war in Iran, with associated global shocks, are legible to us as we live in a global society based on scientific understanding. That wasn’t true ~650 years ago, so understanding how it all came about, and the impact it had, takes painstaking work.

If new findings by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe are to be believed, a volcano’s eruption helped lead to the outbreak and spread of the Black Death across Europe in the fourteenth century. In the video above, British history and environmental science specialist Paul Whitewick explains the evidence on a visit to one of the abandoned medieval villages stricken by that plague.

As Cambridge’s Sarah Collins writes, “the evidence suggests that a volcanic eruption — or cluster of eruptions — around 1345 caused annual temperatures to drop for consecutive years due to the haze from volcanic ash and gases, which in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediterranean region.” Desperate Italian city-states thus fell back on trading with grain producers around the Black Sea. “This climate-driven change in long-distance trade routes helped avoid famine, but in addition to life-saving food, the ships were carrying the deadly bacterium that ultimately caused the Black Death, enabling the first and deadliest wave of the second plague pandemic to gain a foothold in Europe.”

An important clue came in the form of “information contained in tree rings from the Spanish Pyrenees, where consecutive ‘Blue Rings’ point to unusually cold and wet summers in 1345, 1346 and 1347 across much of southern Europe.” Records of lunar eclipses and layers of sulfur locked into ice cores dating to about the same time further heighten the probability of volcanic activity. Key to tying these disparate pieces of evidence together are changes in trade routes: on a map, Whitewick traces “movement increasing along these corridors, grain imports to the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa from north of the Black Sea and beyond, in 1347.” According to written records, the Black Death came to Britain the following year, arriving in “a country already shaped by failed harvests, weakened communities, and rising movement of people and goods.”

Source: Open Culture

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Don't write in the passive voice

Fri, 15 May 2026 09:29:26 +0100

When I was 14 years old, I was told by my English teacher that I shouldn’t write in the ‘passive voice’. That advice has stuck with me ever since, as once you’ve see it, you see it everywhere.

So I found this, by Tom Gauld, both funny and useful in terms of showing other people (including my kids) what I mean about the ways in which things can be written.

As someone pointed out in the comments, Gauld could have added ‘AI voice’. But then, he could have also added ‘LinkedIn voice’ (and so on, ad infinitum…)

Source: LinkedIn

Believe in your own excellence

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:35:47 +0100

Source: Are.na

There are always people who fall outside the bounds of what a service can handle

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:15:51 +0100

I’m grateful to Tom Watson for sending me this link to Richard Pope’s blog, author of the book Platformland. Pope talks about specific examples from UK public services to make the point that starting with very specific use cases is problematic.

First, because expecting them to scale to other use cases is a form of magical thinking; second, because people change over time.

The first problem with use-cases is that, because they limit the chaos, when you scale you often discover that you have scaled a service that only works for those use-cases. You then have to confront the chaos at scale. Many of the hardest delivery problems or riskiest assumptions may go untested until it is too late.

[…]

The second problem with use-cases, is that complexity is not static. The needs of users change because people’s lives change, political priorities shift, technology evolves. Like levees on a river, use-cases create coherence in the landscape by holding back an inherently chaotic system. However, at some point, levees can get overwhelmed.

[…]

Most services with tightly defined use-cases experience this in some shape or form. There are always people who fall outside the bounds of what a service can handle. And if it’s a public service, not serving these users is not an option.

Source: Platformland

Image: Richard Bell

My kidnappers returning me back

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:03:46 +0100

I came across a different version of this meme and was compelled to create my own version 😂

The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in

Sun, 10 May 2026 15:39:00 +0100

I was sure I’d written about this article from 2020 with the evocative title “Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over”. Written during the early days of the pandemic, Sabrina Orah Mark weaves motherhood, professional identity, and fairy tales for a column entitled Happily (which ran until March 2021).

The parts I’ve excerpted contain a lot of questions about a world that has changed, and is, changing rapidly. Mark contrasts the world of fairy tales, where each character is made entirely of their role, like a stick of Blackpool rock, with the lives knowledge workers now live, dragged slowly into the Precariat.

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.

In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.

[…]

The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive.

[…]

I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere.

Source: The Paris Review

Image: Are.na

Oof

Sat, 09 May 2026 20:25:32 +0100

We live in an economy that has systematically destroyed the conditions for trust, and then charges us for the workarounds

Sat, 09 May 2026 20:08:39 +0100

This is from an economics blog, so focuses on money, but I think it’s equally true of the kind of politics we’ve got at the moment. When people don’t trust each other, then they look to so-called “strong men” to save them from a non-existent, manufactured threat.

Think about what a low-trust economy actually looks like in practice. Everything gets expensive. Contracts get thicker. Lawyers get richer. Every transaction requires documentation, verification, third-party guarantees.

The friction is very much structural. It’s a tax on everything, paid in time, money, and cognitive bandwidth.

Last week, I wrote about 2025 as the year the grift economy went mainstream — surveillance pricing, prediction markets, AI slop, fraud at industrial scale. All of that is real. But it’s downstream of something deeper: we live in an economy that has systematically destroyed the conditions for trust, and then charges us for the workarounds.

[…]

[C]onsider the job market. Fake job listings — “ghost jobs“ that companies post with no intention of filling — have become so pervasive that they distort labor market data and waste millions of hours of applicant time.

Why do they exist? Because companies discovered that the appearance of hiring is useful for investor relations, for internal politics, for building a candidate pipeline. The cost is externalized onto the people who spend hours tailoring resumes and sitting through interviews for positions that were never real.

When the system rewards dishonesty, dishonesty is what you get.

[…]

When institutions and corporations behave in predatory ways, individuals start to adopt the same logic. If the system is a grift, then grifting becomes rational. If everyone is trying to extract value from you, why wouldn’t you try to extract value from them?

The explosion of scams, side-hustle culture repackaged as “courses” that teach you to scam others, dropshipping empires built on misleading ads, influencer marketing that can’t be distinguished from real advice.

[…]

The scam economy is what a low-trust system produces. When people lose faith that playing by the rules leads to fair outcomes, the rules start to feel optional. And once that happens, trust erodes further, which makes the rules feel even more optional, which erodes trust further still. It’s a death spiral.

Source: Your Brain on Money

Image: Bernard Hermant

My goal is to encourage people to take action and look at the alternatives that are on the table

Sat, 09 May 2026 15:30:25 +0100

An important part of TechFreedom is not just talking about reducing dependency on Big Tech, but getting on and doing it. Tom posted his ‘stack’ this week, which was an update to his post last year. It shows that, like me he’s moving towards more and more Open Source-based workflows.

The table above and quotation below comes from a post by Tim Rodenbröker, a designer, hacker and content creator, who in December 2025 outlined his switch from Apple and Adobe to Open Source.

Switching all of my workflows to Open Source is an long-term, ongoing project. It all started with a broken laptop in 2019 which I have repaired by installing a Linux Operating System called Ubuntu. Since then, I slowly removed the software and hardware of companies I do not trust. And I have learned that there are incredible open source alternatives.

I think that many people sabotage their own opportunities to enter this space by adopting a purist mindset, an all-or-nothing mentality. This frustrated me quite some time myself, but I have learned to approach this project iteratively and remain aware that there is no definitive end to this journey.

My goal is not to show people how to become hermits; I will never move into the forest and live on grapes and mushrooms (I promise). My goal is to encourage people to take action and look at the alternatives that are on the table.

Source: trcc

The patient as transcription layer

Sat, 09 May 2026 14:56:46 +0100

I had a similar experience last year attempting to get a diagnosis for a different cluster of symptons. While I totally get the ethical issues and potential problems with using AI in medicine, the waste (and patient frustration) is incredible.

Everyone worries about AI replacing doctors. After 24 hours in the hands of the NHS, I think they’re looking in the wrong direction.

GP, A&E, then other parts of the hospital. Every shift, a new doctor. Every new doctor, the same questions. The same story, retold from the top. Every single one of them then took a picture of my rash with their phone.

The first GP I saw actually had an AI assistant. It recorded our conversation and drafted a letter, which he printed on that grey recyclable paper the NHS uses for everything and which absolutely no one in the chain that followed ever read.

Meanwhile, I had Claude in my pocket. It knew my whole story from the first symptom. It could interpret the blood results before the doctor did, and flag a couple of things worth asking about. By the third doctor, I was essentially a transcription layer between Claude and the NHS.

Source: Paolo’s Weblog

Image: Immo Wegmann