Two insights into how agent-assisted work feels in my feeds this week:

Matt Jones writing in the frame of how the new technology is affecting our relationship to time (as new tech always seems to have done). I don’t know whether I’m rationalising this after the fact (probably) but I did feel a little unease while reading this, which I think I put down at the time to envy of anyone who can pull multiple ideas and sources together into a longish piece like this. The Colophon at the end was something of a relief, knowing that perhaps I’d heard a familiar voice mixed in with Matt’s, the voice of Claude. But it’s a weird mixture – not entirely Jones (I’ve been reading him for 20 years or more) but also not entirely chat-bot.

and then Jay Springett on his current process:

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

Both seem to me to be pointing to a way of working that’s like having an indefatigable, bright research assistant who gets your way of thinking and expressing yourself, providing a much better first draft than you might expect. And as with taking on a real-life assistant like that, your work shifts to being able to express your intentions clearly, point the kid in the right directions and then polish up/reduce down what they come back to you with.

We’ve been having coffee (and often cake and biscuits) on the first Friday of every month at Essex Hall under the heading of “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” for just over a year now. It works brilliantly for some people, not so well for others. And, of course, there are people born every day who haven’t even heard of it.

We’re going to keep doing them in person on the first Friday, but I will also open up some space for the conversation online so that we can include people who can’t necessarily make it to London (specifically WC2) for a couple of hours.

The online version will be on Zoom at the same time – 10am till midday on all the other Fridays except the first… maybe. There won’t be a hybrid one on First Fridays – hybrid just doesn’t work for this kind of conversation – but if we find there are people who come every week online, and there’s someone who can hold the space then that can go on at the same time as the in-person one.

The main differentiator between this and all the other bazillion coffee mornings I’ve tried to use as a tool for transforming ourselves and society at large is that we start by reading some questions that Dougald wrote for his online course about Regrowing A Living Culture.

What does it mean to speak about a living culture?

What does doing this say about the ways of living that most of us grew up taking for granted around here lately?

What are the first moves of regrowing? The simple practices that we can start with in the places we find ourselves in now?

What are the daring moves that might be called for?  The places it might just be possible to intervene within the big systems of the world, as we have known it, to help create the conditions of possibility for presently unimaginable futures?

How do we find each other and stay sane and face the depth of the trouble the world is in without letting that just paralyze us?

They’re meant to set the scene, you don’t have to come with specific answers to these pacific questions. There is no homework.

There are announcements at 11am (unless I forget)

So this isn’t exactly the freewheelin’ online Tuttle that we did during lockdown. Or maybe it is and I don’t know shit. I want it to be different though. The in-person mornings have been different. I think they all probably need a bit of you in the mix. Sign up on Luma to get the Zoom details.