A matter of matter battles
I was on a flight from Helsinki to London when the 2026 solar eclipse occurred this week. With uncharacteristic forethought I d ordered, taken delivery of and brought with me eclipse glasses and a little accompanying cardboard filter for my phone camera. I d also researched (and paid a small fee for) a seat on [ ]
My old friend and colleague Matt Webb has started a company this year called “Inanimate” with another old colleague (Daniel Fogg) it’s doing lots of interesting things with ai, physical place and things, and multiplayer-ness. Topics that have long been catnip for him. And me! As they’re building out their company they’re bootstrapping the [ ]
Warning: a collection of half-formed thoughts about time, screens, AI agents, and a surprisingly relevant Japanese arcade genre. This started with a phrase in Azeem Azhar s piece about his AI agent workflow: “wall-clock time.” It s a term of art in programming: the actual elapsed time on the clock on the wall, as opposed to CPU time [ ]
“While something is “tomorrow,” institutions can hold it at arm’s length: debate it, study it, delay it, run pilots, treat it as optional. The moment it becomes “today,” the debate stops being about feasibility and becomes about distribution, governance, and consequence. The bottleneck shifts away from engineering and toward whether we have the institutional capacity [ ]
To be clear, I’ve never read the book, but came to this passage via a circuitous route. Probably my favourite podcast of the last few years is David Runciman’s “Past, Present Future”. It has a series of episodes on great legal trials one of which featured the landmark obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s [ ]
Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at ThingsCon in Amsterdam, invited by Iskander Smit to join a day exploring this year s theme of resize/remix/regen . The conference took place at CRCL Park on the Marineterrein a former naval yard that s spent the last 350 years behind walls, first as the Dutch East India [ ]
I ll be giving the closing keynote at ThingsCon 2025 in Amsterdam on Friday December 12th. Thank you Iskander Smit and crew for inviting me! The working title I gave them: “Back to BASAAP” “BASAAP stands for “Be As Smart As A Puppy” – something I originally wrote on a (physical) post it note back when [ ]
I joined Miro a year ago this week, back in November 2024. In my first few weeks I wrote down and shared with the team a few assumptions / goals / thoughts / biases / priors as a kind of pseudo-manifesto for how I thought we might proceed with AI in Miro, and I thought [ ]
Just watched Sir Norman Foster present at the World Design Congress in London, on cities and urbanism as a defence against climate change. This excellent image visualises household carbon footprints highlighting in coincidental green the extreme efficiency of NYC compared to the surrounding suburban sprawl of the emerging BAMA. 16 years ago this September, [ ]
Just going to leave this here. I’ve worked places like this, I’ve worked like this, I’ve worked with people like this. It’s not for everyone. I seem to need it.