"Like a commonplace book"
Mandy Brown argues that the attention economy is misnamed (HT Sentiers). Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we’ve made of that word. From the earnest effort of a mind reaching for the world to a mindless, exasperated skittering through the slop. The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do…
EMF was great. Everyone has a different EMF, and arguably a very different EMF. This makes it almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn't been. This time there were lasers and LEDs and robotic things, and also embroidery and a plant swap and a planetarium. I didn't go to any scheduled talks or workshops and I took hardly any photos. I chatted to lots of very diverse people, went to and…
First, calendars. This is of interest as I find my way around the communities in my new area . LAUTI has written a generous how-to on running a community calendar — the hard work of keeping a list of what's happening locally. It's all about the people, and talking to people is step 1. You don't have to roll your own software as they did; Mobilizon is a federated solution, or there's Gancio ('a…
This spring, we moved to Greater Liverpool. Cambridge has been a fine place for many years, but it was time for a change - more scenery, more sea, a proper city. Now, exploring new communities, new routines, new rituals. There is a lot going on - even if I feel I've barely started seeing what's out there. More than 400 climate-positive groups and projects in Wirral Environmental Network , for…
Via Sentiers , Nicholas Carr on whether AI is the paperclip . He rereads Bostrom's paperclip maximizer not as a thought experiment but as a fable: Bostrom's story, I would argue, becomes compelling when viewed not as a thought experiment but as a fable. It's not really about AIs making paperclips. It's about people making AIs. Look around. Are we not madly harvesting the world's resources in a…
Doug Belshaw has a thoughtful post about the financial/work advice often being given to young folks today: The financial guidance given to young people today comes from people who experienced an entirely different economic reality. Boomers hold fundamentally different mental models about how wealth accumulation works, learned in a completely different era. For example, my dad bought a house for 1x…
Yes this: https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/115696408257250551 Helen Toner on generative AI and where it might go , which is a rare article on foundational models and the real world. Hard to pick highlights, but here goes: Two things are true about AI, I claim: AI models keep getting better and better AI models keep sucking, and the things they keep sucking at are kind of confusing ... So the…
There's been a lot of AI in the air, and that is reflected in this collection; at least the bits connecting with other worlds (etiquette, nature, craft and Enlightenment values) get a little outside the bubble. Kevin Beaumont describes how outsourcing IT to reduce costs means "we've normalised ransomware": Because organisations are busy trying to automate everything and put IT at the heart of…
Last week was the second Festival of Commoning . It was great last year, and this year we were back in Stroud for a bigger event (albeit one that was a bit less interactive). This year was also dual track, which meant Decisions as to what sessions to go to... What follows are my fairly rough and possibly inaccurate notes of what struck me as most interesting in the sessions I attended. This time…
Those American candy gift shops, that one usually assumes are some sort of money laundering scheme, are in fact multilevel tax dodges . Valerie Aurora writes about how to start an internet resiliency club. There's a nice map of Digital Public Infrastructure at https://dpimap.org/ Thanks to Full Fact for drawing attention to how Google is making web content harder to trust: In a change buried in a…
Taps microphone Is this thing on? Some of these notes are well aged, like a cheese. A whole lot of life, and death, since last notes. MySociety propose reframing civic tech as pro-democracy tech. Ethan Zuckerman has many excellent thoughts on how the Signalgate story is forking reality. Rob Horning doesn't listen to podcasts . Neither do I, mostly. Some interesting thoughts on parasocial…
I love Tom Forth's response to the Aria call [ X thread ] " Request for Opportunities - as a spark of inspiration for new PD candidates, we pulled together a list of "why aren't more people working on this?!" topics that've been floating around the @ARIA_research slack." - he looked at what companies in Britain are already working on these problem statements: and it turns out it works, he finds a…
Earlier in September I was in Stroud, for the first Festival of Commoning . It was a lovely event, full of people working on commons projects in different ways. What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders. (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier…
In August I wrote that I was looking for work . I shared my blog post on a variety of social media, without doing any reminders or reposts. It was surprisingly popular, and the blog post got nearly 7000 views. Thank you to everyone who shared it or shared job ideas with me. It wasn't an easy post to write, possibly because I had to figure out how to explain what I can do, and what I'd like to do,…
I’m looking for work. My experience doesn't neatly fit standard job titles or sectors, and I've got an eclectic set of criteria for what I want to do, so maybe you can help me find a job which brings them together. I've got a broad set of management, tech and sustainability skills. I've experience with products, operations, organisations; with open stuff and non-profit stuff and systems…
The metaphors we use change how we think about things. Benjamin Santos Genta writes for Aeon about this, and in particular how many of our metaphors relate to war. Might an argument be better as a dance than a battle? (I've been trying to demilitarise my work language for a while; it's not always easy. You can, though, feed two birds with one scone, but that works less well with international…
Thanks Luis Villa for this write up of the current Vizio case (GPL enforcement). The head of the National Audit Office, Gareth Davies, gave a thoughtful speech to Parliament on why good governance matters, especially for the UK's public sector, now. Trust and AI was the topic of Bruce Schneier 's September talk at the Harvard Kennedy School: Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are…
The wise Alex Deschamps-Sonsino organised a climate unconference to coincide with COP28. It was a lovely thought-provoking event with a lot of rich conversations, of which more below. What with this, and Barcamp London a couple of weeks ago, it feels like the indie/punk/grassroots approach to convening is reviving, and about time too. There is a lot going on in the world - on so many fronts - and…
It's always satisfying when projects you have been involved with demonstrate great results: https://twitter.com/ResearchEssex/status/1504867213840420870 Cofarm is in our third growing season, and starting to think about how best to grow - we're getting quite a lot of interest from people interested in creating Cofarms locally. The tricky bit as usual is having the time (or money) to properly plan…
Clearing out old tabs... Another amazingly thoughtful and insightful article from Rachel Coldicutt: Conley’s framing seems revelatory because care work is often characterised as a bundle of physical acts and emotional feelings, but in reality it involves predicting eventualities, mitigating the mitigatable, and softening the blows of the unavoidable. Care work is the anticipation of grief is a…
I've spent most of the last two years as CTO at the OPEN . This continued my trend of working with organisations related to 'open,' but confusingly was nothing to do with open at all. OPEN is the Online Progressive Engagement Network, and I think of it as a co-op, although formally it is not. It's a capacity-building and power-building network, funded (in part) by its member organisations, and…
The 2022 edition of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor came out from the New Climate Institute. It sheds light on the differences between well-publicised pledges of 'net zero' from 25 very large companies (which comprise maybe 5% of global emissions). Thanks to Chris Adams for sharing! We found that the headline pledges of 25 of the world’s largest companies in reality only commit to…
(part 2 of this ) On to crypto in various forms. Highlights mine. permalink #60 of 340: Brian Slesinsky (bslesins) Thu 6 Jan 22 10:04 Beyond the environment costs, though, I wonder about the cultural costs of the rise of gambling 2.0, investment edition. It turns out that not only any cryptocurrency but any small stock can be converted into a fun gambling game with a bit of promotion on social…
The thing about the Well's state of the world review in January each year is there's often a lot of good bits, and so sorting out a modest number of key things I want to remember is tricky. At the time I didn't finish writing up my thoughts on the 2021 Well State of the World so here's some of the posts that still seem interesting after a year... Bruce Sterling: But what's significant for MMXXI is…
The highway in BC which was comprehensively destroyed in the dreadful floods in mid November actually re-opened in December, thanks to astonishing engineering work. Meanwhile, Colorado's latest fires suggest the return of the urban firestorm - a very different proposition to the rural fires which are more familiar. (HT Nathan Schneider for the link) Why do education secretaries hate online…