I went down to Weymouth for a couple of days this week to see my mum. On Tuesday we drove over to Lulworth Cove for a coffee, picnic lunch on the beach and an ice cream.
The first time (maybe) we went there was Easter 1973. It was quieter than Autumn half-term 2025, the parking wasn’t as expensive (or managed via CCTV) there was a little less erosion and there were fewer ice-cream sellers. But we did have a picnic on the beach.
It seems that seventeen years ago today, I was in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Andrea Vascellari got some video of me asking Tim O’Reilly a question about online/offline relationships. In retrospect, there’s a lot of naivety and privilege in the air.
I noted:
the stories we’re telling are still more about technology than about what people are doing with other people.
plus ça change…
We watched Paradise and kinda wished we hadn’t. It’s a less hopeful picture of the near future and how we’d deal with an apocalyptic event than you’d usually expect on mainstream TV. I want my apocalyptic tales to end with a less realistic, but rousing affirmation of the strength of humans to stick together please. I’m holding out for season 2 to deliver, but won’t be surprised if it doesn’t.
I spent a couple of summers in the early eighties selling ice cream, chatting up the odd grockle and looking out over the sea to Portland.
The other stream that I take to when I need to calm down a bit is NASA’s HD Views from the International Space Station
Recent conversations about “the media”, reboots and regrowing cultures have had me looking back to the good old days of 2006 when I disclosed the contents of my “one-person media empire” bag and David Wilcox was starting to talk about “Social Reporting” – (btw the first link in that piece goes to one of David’s typepad sites, but “Thank Brewster!” it was captured by the Wayback Machine.)
In those days it appears it was all about the kit. The first iPhone was just around the corner. And now I carry all of that stuff *and* the software to edit and publish it around in my pocket every day. And so do you, probably. Utopian 2006 me would have imagined only a blossoming of enlightened civil society as a result. Silly Utopian 2006 me.
Something else happened in 2006 that seemed to offer hope for said blossoming and enlightenment. But the way it turned out makes that hope look appallingly naive. Twitter.
In that December I said:
If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.
It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.
Dear reader, that “temporary diversion” ended up lasting another 10, 15, 20? years and one might argue that it actually broke what we were doing altogether. It takes practice and willpower to get back into writing in anything more than 140 character chunks (not solved when the limit got stretched to 280) especially when other parts of the ecosystem are working against you.
Dave Winer was pointing out how stuck we were with this stuff in 2014
Twitter says our posts don’t have titles, and can’t be longer than 140 chars. And Google Reader said our posts had to have titles, and could be unlimited in length.
This is why my world is fractured, and so is yours.
Now, I got a lot of good things done with a combo of Twitter (and Facebook/Instagram) and blogging in the intervening years – it wasn’t all gloomy. And I have friends who make a living now from people who pay them to write e-mails (and have Substack deal with the distribution details and some of the marketing. Oh and the payment processing) or make little films and let YouTube pass on some of their ad revenue.
You don’t have to be a wild conspiracy theorist or some sort of nostalgic Web 2.0 obsessive to recognise that giving that much power over your work to a third party owned by billionaires carries significant risk, especially given the way such billionaires have behaved in the past. But most people, me included, don’t then get farther than “Well, whatcha gonna do?”
I don’t have the whole answer yet, but I’m picking away at it here. I inwardly groan when my morning inbox is full of messages from group mailing lists that belong on a linkblog. Or I have to download an interesting-looking article from a friend on a WhatsApp group because it’s behind a paywall or some other barrier to reading it on the web.
Why is this? Why can’t I just accept that the media ecosystem is fractured and that I have to treat this kind of information in one way and that kind of information in another way, because that’s just the way it is.
You can’t expect the world to just organise itself according to your whims, Lloyd!
Well yes, partly it is my own idiosyncratic ways of organising my work and thinking and how I think about information and knowledge. But it’s also the understanding of why these tools get organised in such a way as to enable the exploitation of our collective labour by people who already have more money and power than they know what to do with.
I’m not making generic recommendations for the whole world. I’m thinking here in particular about some small-ish groups I’m in, that could imho accelerate and improve the thinking and activity and effectiveness of the group, if there weren’t these strangers in the room, intermediating between us as friends, and taking their cut at the same time, the owners and managers of these platforms.
I'm taking part in a reading group for "Hospicing Modernity" with a particular focus on how the messages in that book might apply to churches and spiritual community.
We're gathering once a month and the meetings are confidential (I don't think we've even agreed on using the Chatham House rule) but I'm only going to share some of the things that came up for me, both in my prep (I'm medicated, I can now do prep! I read the chapter before the meeting!) and in the course of the gently- and gracefully-facilitated (by Liz Slade and Al Barrett) session.
I'd already tried reading this book a couple of times and then I also tried listening to the audiobook. I've never got very far before. So I'm grateful to have this group as an excuse to make perseverance more of a priority. It's not just me, it is a difficult and challenging book, in the same way that I found my first reading of "Alcoholics Anonymous" difficult and challenging.
The subtitle is:
"Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism"
Yikes!
and the publisher's bibliographical summary reads:
"A discussion on how we must face the multiple crises of modernity, interrupt and retire damaging modern behavior patterns, and reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis"
It's a lot.
I will need more than one post to cover what went through me yesterday. I had the familiar feeling of having my inner world rearranged both by reading and discussing with others. I dreamed weird dreams afterwards.
The first part (which we've covered in the first couple of sessions, while also gingerly getting to know each other) is about sixty pages and it lays the preparatory foundations for the rest. It begins with a discussion of what, or rather, WHO "modernity" is and then invites you to "to witness and offer palliative care to modernity dying within and around you".
We focused yesterday on the third and final bit of "prep work" which clarified for me that this is about cleaning house (mostly within, but also without!). One of the creative tensions that I expect to return to throughout is between the processes presented here of internal decluttering and composting and the processes that I'm familiar with from my step work in taking inventory, dropping the rock(s) and making amends. I'm fairly sure from what I've seen already that they'll be complementary.
Without knowing the content, just before I sat down to read, I'd followed an urge to tidy my desk (if not the rest of the room around me). And then had to laugh at myself reading in the second paragraph: "Since modernity’s logic is one of accumulation, it conditions us to hoard stuff (both literally and metaphorically), thinking it might one day be relevant."
Oof! Is that what all this is? An unconscious hoarding of stuff? Certainly, if I were able to change my thinking about it's one-day-maybe relevance then I would walk away immediately. I can imagine the lightness of doing so. Immediately crushed by the grief and loss that I imagine would follow. And I'm not the worst at this kind of thing. I've done some work. I've let go of a lot. But there are things that follow me around, that haven't really been touched yet.
A lot of my physical stuff is important to me either because it's about me in the past or because it carries some feeling or meaning about people who aren't here any more. When my dad died, you may remember, I wrote about the need I felt to gather up the things that might otherwise have disappeared with him. Was that just modernity? A trick, to distract myself from what's really going on in the world or the pain of losing someone so close? Maybe also the pain of being me (don't worry, I don't expect that it's any worse than the pain of being you!) and the difficulty of recovering from whatever shit went on in the past that wasn't possible to solve there and then.
I was very grateful, for example, to find my old school reports in my dad's stash, the contents of them really helped me understand and have a bit more compassion for the guy I've always been. When I shared about that at the time, there were people around me who said "Now burn them!" but I wasn't ready to and I'm still not. There's another stage in the process between where I am and "that's all gone" and I think it's something to do with transmuting, or in the language of this book, composting all these things that aren't needed in their current form, but which hold something precious that can support another cycle of life.
I've had an ongoing fantasy project that never gets anywhere. You know, a bit beyond "someday/maybe". A bit more like "when I've really got my shit together and am a much better, more enlightened and free person and don't have to sit around writing stupid e-mails and that". And it's about taking all of the books, tapes, records, pictures, files and shit and creating new things out of the precious emotional parts of them, new things that carry the essence of me and my ancestors for my descendants where it's useful, so that the non-precious physical parts of them can be reused or recycled.
I came away from last night's session with a little more hope that regardless of how unenlightened I feel, I might have permission to do more of that kind of thing now.
I'm glad to see that at least Dave B is reading this nonsense. I didn't get a pingback, though Dave, I saw it because I read your post via RSS. Is that deliberate? I don't remember how these things work. Maybe it's an artefact of the way your microposts are aggregated?
Anyway.
I agree with the thing about reading and writing in the same place – I want it to be my (the writer's) place, not yet another centralising force who one day might be tempted to wall it all off. Having a reader built in to the blogging tool was one of the features that I really liked in Radio Userland, back in the brief period that I used it. I actually used it more for reading than writing due to my well-known shyness about talking in public…
The use cases I'm thinking of at the moment are for groups to blog and learn together. So a collected feed from all the people in the group (although a curated set of feeds from outside would be a useful thing too).
I just tried to find my old Userland blog, but instead, Google just threw up this to distract me. Somehow, in 2010, I was invited to take part in a couple of editions of BBC Radio 5 live's "On The Money" with Declan Curry. My brief was to answer listener's questions on how to use social networking in business. It was fun. I got to sit in the Today studio then at TVC. Many of the questions were basically "how do I use this magic social media thing to do magic and make my business really successful, tomorrow?" and I suspect my answers about there being no magic other than persistence and patience was what led to me not being asked back more than once.
I just sat for five minutes waiting for a call to start that isn't scheduled for another hour. That's the kind of me I've woken up with today! Happity Friday!
Still pondering and burbling about rebooting/regrowing and this thing that to some is a living culture, to some is a media ecosystem, and to others is a learning journal/community. It's the thing that we used to call "the blogosphere" but that name doesn't really cut it with anyone now who wasn't part of it (or an observer) twenty years ago. It's about owning your own alternative to facebook/instagram/substack/X etc without having to be a total nerd. I mean, you don't have to be a total computing nerd, you can still (and should still) be whatever other type of nerd you are. That's the point, this is about enabling all the kinds of nerds to nerd out about their thing, connect to likeminded nerds all over the world and maybe every now and then bump into other nerd gangs… or something (too many nerds! – Ed).
It's for people who have something to say and would like to be able to say it in public, but without being bitterly criticised by strangers on the internet and without worrying that the platform they're building community around is suddenly going to disappear or worse – the "worse" scenarios include what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" but also the platform being captured by fascists, trolls or others who want to shut down open democratic thought and debate. PS enshittification can happen to pretty much any customer relationship you have these days, I don't think anything is a fix-all solution, but reducing reliance on commercial entities is a good way of mitigating the risk.
I also think that an undesirable effect of the way we've done social stuff on the web for the last while, is increased individualism and a decrease in mutuality – maybe it's just me, but I think it reflects the ongoing trend of isolation, which I hope is starting to turn. Citations needed galore, but don't you think we're starting to get together in new (to us, not necessarily totally novel) ways?
I also think it's connected to the downturn in linking. Some platforms make it hard to do, others encourage a feeling that if you send people away, you'll never get them back and the idea that that's a really important thing to avoid.
We are inspired both by the Buckminster Fuller idea that "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" and the principle of plurality, which I heard best articulated by Audrey Tang in Taiwan talking about "demonstrations", a word we associate with activists out on the street, but which she uses to mean "showing people another way in which things can be done".
Our solutions will be open and interoperable. The best and simplest way to make interop work is RSS (yes it's still there, kids!). I can pull together in one place all the things that y'all make that emit an RSS feed. I can't do that if you use something that doesn't.
What does? Yes, traditional blogs of whatever flavour you've got – I use wordpress.com, how quaint! – but ghost is popular, blogger still exists, squarespace blogs are a thing – your public posts on substack too. But also your youtube channel for video, flickr for photos and mastodon & bluesky for microblogging (what we used to call tweeting).
If you've got a group, where everyone is making some kind of media in at least one of those forms, and you pull all of the outputs together, it makes for a strong bonding experince between members. The best bit, is when they start referring to each other and building on ideas together – especially if this is a group that also gets together in real life.
Oh god! the cleaners are here! Hide!
I realised today that there's a lot of overlap between "Rebooting the Blogosphere" and "Regrowing a Living Culture". The Coffee Mornings that I'm doing at the moment have that latter tag line and the question is coming up for me of how to regrow living culture online as well as off. As a very bare minimum, we have a shared google doc that people can put things in that come up in the Announcements slot at 11:00 – it's OK, especially for that group at this stage in it's development but I'm yearning for more.
I've spent today thinking about it in this frame: "If we were going to set up a kind of C4CC again, now, a space that was an intellectual and physical home to a number of groups and small organisations, how would we capture, nurture and nourish the knowledge creation activities of that network of people?"
In 2010, most of us were on Twitter, Facebook was going through an explosive growth spurt and although they were starting to tinker with algorithmic feeds, you pretty much got the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order, Google Reader dominated the news and blogs via RSS ecosystem, Foursquare let you check-in to locations if you wanted to be found IRL. The blogging folk at C4CC had taken a mis-step, but we didn't know it yet – we relied a lot on posterous which allowed creation of posts by e-mail (including attachments). Not only was that useful for those of us who wanted to be able to post from anywhere, but it also made collaborative blogging easier. I made one for people to submit and write about their "most interesting" flickr photos for example. That link of course is to a salvaged version rebuilt on wordpress.com because posterous was bought up by Twitter in 2012 and closed down (with fairly clunky export facilities) the following year.
Now, in 2025, Twitter is unusable for lots of people and there is no single place where that form of microblogging mixed with conversation still goes on. Facebook continued along the feed manipulation path to satisfy its advertisers, Google Reader got snuffed out, flickr remains for now, Foursquare is Swarm, but it feels now like an underground game for people who can't let it go.
With all these changes, we now find ourselves in a place where it's hard to trust any big tech platform with something as precious as your own thinking. But I think if we can get back to "small pieces loosely joined" and take responsibility for the ownership and stewardship of our data, there are opportunities for us to regrow what we had. And the appetite is still there. Often I come across it in people who didn't really get into this fifteen years ago, either because it was the wrong kind of nerdy for them, or because they were only ten years old then.
I made some notes on the things I thought were important for trying to do this in 2025:
Everyone should have a place to publish that feels easy, and doable, and low-stakes. This is about reducing the barriers to publication – a newsletter or a blog (as most people understand it) feels like too much, like there are established formats that you have to stick to. Totally open microblogging either feels at risk from trolls/abuse or pointless because of the overhead of finding your people/having them find you. So I'm thinking of something where you can choose your own policy on openness and commenting. What if the collaboarition platform you're using now (Slack/Basecamp whatever) were open by default, but you could mark some things as private?
An RSS aggregator that does more than aggregate – by adding functionality to search & filter but also repost/link/reply (all subject to individual policies) it becomes a common knowledge store – it needs to not be Facebook! Whatever small pieces you put together, they need to be interoperable and RSS is still a great way to do that (and it isn't owned by anyone). I think that it's possible that the rise of the newsletter format has to do with the familiar functionality of email and that it feels like your own space.
People might just want a linkblog. A place to just share something you've seen somewhere, with minimal commentary – a lot of email groups I'm in end up with most of the traffic being this. As a group activity, it might become like del.icio.us – aggregated across the group with tagging. An extension of this is a reading list (of people/orgs outside the group) or externally facing blogroll.
Rich records of gatherings whether they're in-person or online. This is about bringing the discipline of minute-taking and sharing recordings/transcripts (with permission) to the things we do together. Ideally, decentralised to all members of the group. What's the minimum expectation of someone attending a gathering – what norms do we want to establish about sharing back afterwards?
Some hierarchy is useful. So each group has it's own group blog/aggregator, but aggregation is also possible at a higher/more general level. If I am just on the edge of this network, I don't have to pick through everything else to find the things that are relevant to me, but I can see (and contribute to) the bigger pictures if I want to. This raises questions of autonomy and the principle of subsidiarity.
Writing is not the only fruit. It's important that learning can be shared through audio-visual media by those who find that more accessible.
Lo-fi is OK. This is part of lowering the stakes. If you're walking away from a meeting and making a voice-memo for yourself to remember the things that struck you, or If you've just sent someone a voice message and you realise that what you said might be useful to others (and doesn't breach privacy or confidentiality) then you should be able to post it as a podcast. Audioblogging and Videoblogging are still a thing! And transcription has improved greatly.
The overall purpose is to facilitate the growth of a web of knowledge (and thereby enriching connections between people) both by adding new content and adding links between existing content. Sometimes you'll want to turn your list of links into an essay, sometimes you just want to say ooh, I saw this and it made me also thing of that.
There should be a way of capturing some of the value of all this in commercial products, the income from which should then be shared in an equitable way between the various contributors (including the network as a whole).
This is a bit of a jumble. I know there's a better way, or order, to organise these ideas in, but for today, my brain is tired.
I was just introduced to this use of the word 'palaver' to mean (in Africa) a way of bringing together a local community to creating social links and sometimes for conflict resolution. The notable characteristic of it being a meeting where everyone has a voice but is not obliged to tie their contribution up neatly with references to all of the other speakers. It starts out as the Portuguese for 'words' or 'speaking', gets attached to this, presumably traditional, way of holding town or village meetings, and then, with a classic colonial twist, comes back to Europe with the meaning of pointless talk that goes on without hope of resolution. We look at a process that works and can't see beyond what we would call the inefficiency or lack of sufficient intellectual rigour and so it passes into common usage as a derogatory exclamation – "What a palaver!"
I think the reason it caught my attention is that this reflects my attitude to my own blogging – I'm happy that it's rare for me to write something that is structured as anything more than a note, maybe a bunch of ideas that hold together but not necessarily with any explicit explanation. Every now and then you might see something that looks more like an essay, but regardless, my own internal community nods and accepts that what's been said today is relevant and of value, even if it's not immediately obvious, or if it is actually totally obvious and doesn't need explaining or pulling out in this way over and over again. It's OK, it's a palaver, and that's a good thing.
"If these spaces are important to extremists, shouldn’t they be important to you?" – Dan Slee's long read on what public sector people need to know about Facebook groups. It's a clear and useful read for anyone who's not in the public sector too.
Have I posted a link to Leave Substack lately? I'm still working out how and whether I want to participate in the getting people to pay you to email them business and how to offer that to the people who've signed up to me in Substack on the basis of recommendations from others (nice problem to have!)
Spent the day yesterday talking and thinking about shame, especially in the context of activism. It was a lot. I was grateful for the opportunity to sit quietly and do something with my hands for part of the session instead of being in constant conversation. My headlines were – everyone's carrying an awful lot of stuff, all the time, no wonder there's so much rage and conflict – most of that stuff is the same as everyone else's, but it's hard to feel safe sharing it – and it can be hard to accept that other people really are carrying the same stuff as you, surely my stuff is unique!
We did an exercise where everyone wrote something they were ashamed of on a piece of paper, folded it up in the same way and put it in a box, then we each pulled one out and read it out loud. So there was a small chance that you'd read you're own out, or something very similar, but mostly you'd be reading something from someone else. I found it interesting that many people put more than one shame into the box because we almost went round the circle twice. Anyway it felt good to witness everyone else's feelings and to hear them coming out of your own mouth. It's tempting to think "I don't have that one!" but when you hear it in your voice, perhaps you do, just a little bit less than you thought, maybe.
Just saw an invitation to an Open Space “How do we protect and strengthen democracy in Europe?” My mind went immediately to how to protect democracy from those who will use elected office to make sure that democracy isn’t available any more. It’s not a simple thing. And that’s what makes it a good question for Open Space – these things need talking through, with a load of different people, to get to understand all of it, rather than it just being my point of view. I mean, I know (in this instance) that I’m not wrong, but how we make things safer (here in the UK it’s pretty urgent) with the current state of public discourse isn’t clear.
This is all I managed on the train to Hard Art. Despite what I imagine when I'm walking to the train station, experience shows that I'm not going to do much proper writing in the forty minutes to Waterloo.
Another Coffee Morning today. So much in it. I'd love to write a report, but it's all still whirring around in my head. The first woman to become Archbish of Canterblobs, recurrent references to Bob Dylan, yin and yang and the serenity prayer, substack isn't just problematic because of politics and them hassling you to do stuff but also lots more. I'm hoping others captured more.
The thing about having written at least something every day this week is that I remember that I can do whatever I want, without having to bow to an editor or even any audience, imagined or real. That includes publishing things that are a meandering ramble or just a half-baked idea – if I was treating it like a magazine or even a newsletter, I’d feel like I needed to have some consistent standard that I met – and I think that’s what puts other people off doing it when I suggest blogging to them, they think they’ve got to be good and coherent and the stuff they make has to be defensible by them (as well as thinking it’s going to be attacked). You get things over with people much better by demonstrating rather than explaining, so that’s where I’m going with it at the moment. Writing an unpolished paragraph or two, if that’s all I’ve got today, which is what I do have.
Perfect Path 