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.
I’m not using it much, but a small step this week was resurrecting my presence on mastodon. I’m here now – @lloyddavis – this blog also has ActivityPub enabled so all posts are full-text published at the seemingly tortologous @perfectpath.co.uk@perfectpath.co.uk – I still don’t fully understand how it works, I’ve just flipped a switch, so I’m not sure why there’s a big gap in the timeline since October last year but, that’s not that important.
The two threads I pulled on a bit yesterday are of course intertwined – the hope has to be that writing in public using your own voice and out in the open (with caveats for personal safety) is the antidote to the kind of horror that’s taken over lots of public discourse.
I don’t have as much writing time today. I’ve still got lots to say, but I’ve got lunch with some old pals from GSA who I love dearly and wouldn’t miss it, but it carves out a chunk of my day and my attention. It takes time for me to get going and then I need more time to actually get these words down and in the right order. Part of rebooting this blog has to be more self-acceptance than I’ve had in the past. I’ve been lucky this week to have had a few days of being able to give almost full attention to thinking and writing – and that has to be tempered with days like this where there’s more thinking than writing, with the thinking not having to be so deep, although it’s always going on. It’s just a log. On the web. And some days the log contains evidence of much movement and others are less detailed. That there’s anything at all is good progress.
Also, Laura just came in with a bit of chocolate brownie from Gail’s that she’d been given in compensation for them not being able to fill an order. She wanted to share the angelic miracle – it felt like there was zero flour, all sugar and butter, but in a really good way. Like any angelic miracle, I suppose, it can’t be described in words, that’s what ineffable means, innit? But now my mind is racing much faster than my fingers can deliver!
I’ll be thinking about this “Rebooting the Blogosphere” idea for a while. Interesting that the provocation for this thinking is FB “exile” – it reminds me of the energy that gets released whenever a platform goes down or otherwise goes awry – the energy of “I’ve got to find an outlet for these impulses in me, and this platform provided that, and now I’m angry/frustrated by the options that are left”. The experience for Typepad users over the last month or so is another of these (compounded with the grief at the loss of all those old thoughts, ideas and experiences once captured and now maybe somewhere in the Wayback Machine… if you’re lucky….)
Some folk take that energy to the so-called “indieweb” – which is fine and works well for those whose temperament it suits. It’s always felt a bit to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater (and then getting a new baby?) – or like “We don’t want to drive a Tesla, so we’re only going back to driving cars without electronics – don’t worry if you don’t have your own starting handle, I can 3D-print one for you…” I know that it’s not as extreme as that, but it’s hard to shake that prejudice, especially at the point where you’re feeling frustrated.
Steph talks about it being (or feeling) “easier” to hang out on The Socials. There must be some known cognitive bias here, like I feel it’s easier because I’m not actually taking into consideration all the things that I’ve lost – is that a hidden cost fallacy, mixed up with some loss aversion or what? Each app feels easier but none of them do all of the things I want to do and even if they did, each one also comes with a different audience or network and a set of very subjectively experienced social norms for how you should communicate with people there. That feels like having five phone providers and you have to choose which provider’s subscribers you want to talk to before you can say anything, or else hack together something that copies your messages to everywhere and disregards local social norms so you look (and feel) like a robot.
On top of all this, we’re living in a culture where we are encouraged to take the blame/responsibility for everything that goes wrong around us. It’s never the system’s fault, it’s ours. It’s not the idea that five people are somehow allowed to own and control the majority of the economy, it’s your own stupid mental health, so do your stupid mental health walk. And if one of our tools doesn’t work for you, well suck it up, everyone else is having a great time using it – do better or go away.
Today I learned that the Ray Noble/Al Bowlly version of this (the one you’ll know from “The Shining” or, I hear “Ready Player One”) was recorded in Abbey Road Studio 2 – just another amazing bit of musical energy in that space.
So about that hypothesis…
I said yesterday that “algorithmic feeds of the For You Page type become, over time, the same as anonymous feeds of the 4chan type.”
What am I trying to get at here? What is it about anonymous feeds that stands out for me? I think it’s the lack of consequences. You can say anything you want and get away with it. If you are called to account, the people doing it are anonymous themselves (at least if they’re on the same platform). And funnily enough, it seems that allowing people to leave their human identity at the door, ends up with people not treating others in that space as human either (let alone the “others” on the outside), but that doesn’t seem to matter, because everyone’s in the same boat. Yes, everything escalates quickly, and things that would be outrageous in a newspaper are commonplace – this is the troll culture that you catch glimpses of IRL from time to time, some of it requires that you get immersed in the culture, some of it is more obvious, but like all cult(ures) the experience of being an insider depends on there being outsiders who don’t understand all the layers of what you’re doing.
And, as an aging guy, doing OK (so far!) under capitalism, and with a socialist heart, I am definitely not an insider (or even a well-educated student) of 4chan, 8chan or whatever anon imageboard site the “cool (not cool) kids” are into right now. But as a once disaffected youth who hated the world, yeah, I can dig the vibe.
There have always been annoying, nihilistic kids like this, but it feels like it’s bled into more mainstream culture of late – the good news about the internet has been that you can find your people, the bad news is that any awful person in the world can also find their own awful people.
Stephanie Booth has written a really useful three-part series on "Rebooting The Blogosphere" (activities | interaction | integration) – check it out.
I identify with a lot of the reflections and ways of thinking about writing in public that Steph's pulled together. I also feel the enormity of it as a project – we've strayed so far from the times when this kind of writing was the norm – the kind of writing that Dave Winer describes as: "the unedited voice of a person" when asked to define blogging.
That perceived enormity doesn't matter though, because although there's lots for each of us to do, we know (with decades of experience) that this isn't so much a thing that any of us needs do alone, the process of rebooting the blogosphere is by definition a communal act. I'm grateful to Dave, Steph and anyone else who is keeping the flame alive.
Something is coming together for me in understanding some of what's happening with memes in the wider culture (like the St George's Flag phenomenon in the UK). It involves Doug Rushkoff's original concept of the media virus, Venkatesh Rao's Internet of Beefs and a hypothesis I'm feeling my way towards that algorithmic feeds of the For You Page type become, over time, the same as anonymous feeds of the 4chan type. These things together mean that we have a situation where bad actors can win no matter which side they choose, that most media we're exposed to contains an element of grift and that it feels like there is a lack of consequences for lying or misleading people. It's a jumble still, but writing it down like this helps a little.
Typepad dies today. I worked out that I only used it to experiment with video at the end of 2005, so I'm not scrabbling to make a proper archive, there's only enough to merit a screenshot :). The lesblogs would have been the second one where we got a lecture in 'civility' from Mena Trott who co-founded Six Apart, the makers of Typepad. Videoegg, referenced in the post at the bottom of this picture, went on to buy Six Apart (keeping Typepad but selling off Movable Type).
I’d done a day’s work before breakfast this morning. Thanks Geena!
I have to apologise for the LinkedIn-esque final remarks, after a lifetime of thought-leadership and lessons-learned reviews, I just can’t help myself.
The fruits of my labour
Investigations continue, I may have to remove this post later subject to legal action by the accused and her lawyer.
I have recurring frustration with the state of the web. I still have a utopian dream and attachment to people using open tools rather than the (semi-)closed platforms to publish their work and knowledge and thinking.
On one level, this is a purely selfish desire. I would rather have one place to go to see and interact with the bits of insta, FB, masto, bluesky, tiktok, youtube, substack, buttondown, patreon et al that I’m in some way “subscribed” to. And I’d like to be able to just put my stuff in one place and know that the people who want to see and interact with it can do so too.
But also, I have a number of communities or groups, of which I’m a member, that I believe could learn and grow together much better if we all had a view into each other’s worlds. This was one of the founding ideas of Tuttle – to see how productive it could get when you regularly brought a bunch of people to the same place in person who were used to creating stuff online together.
And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.
But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.
Ugh, that was all a bit earnest…
My early morning viewing regularly includes the lates from the BBC Archive on YouTube.
This was today. The finished objects themselves are interesting enough, especially to know that they were in such widespread use even in 1974. But the real pull of it for me is these blokes in their workshop in Peckham, talking like South Londoners used to talk. With a craft that they’d gained mastery over throughout their working lives. I know I would go mad if all I had to do all day was make bits of wood, in shapes that I could stick together with glue and fix brass fittings to, but there’s also a romance to the simplicity of these machines and the simplicity of the lives of the men who made them.
First morning with the heating on (min temperatures overnight are around 7 or 8ºC). It feels like magic. I think it's the memory of when we first moved to a house with central heating (on November 5th 1975). It felt like real luxury, not to wake up under blankets in a cold room, having to make the dash downstairs to the fire, but to be able to get out of bed and just walk around in your pyjamas.
I'm running again. C25K W5R2 IYKYK.
Laura and I started a practice 5 years ago this week of telling each other 3 things that we're grateful for when we sit down to dinner – most days it's a good break for both of us from days of striving to achieve. I think it also kind of marks when we started having dinner together more often than not, before that we'd just see to ourselves, but particularly because pandemic, it became easier for me to just cook for both of us. We were in Aberdyfi and it was six months since lockdown had started, our first proper trip away from the South East in that time.
I miss the West of this island. My old school pal James is posting pics of Harlech and Portmeirion and it reminds me that even though we had a few days in Frinton, it's not the same – I want to see the sun setting (not rising) over the sea. It's one of the regrets I have about not driving and not having a car – I have a fantasy that if I did, then I'd find it easier to just jump on the M4 and head over to the land of my fathers.
I believe the Secret Agent project (and Librivox as a whole) was inspired by the AKMA-initiated collaborative reading of Lessig’s Free Culture – which happened in April 2004 just as conversations about podcasting were getting going.
At the time I recorded a chapter, podcasting was in full swing – we even had a conference here! I had achieved what little notoriety I ever would for making podcasts out of me talking to myself while walking around in London. I remember walking up and down the backstreets of Westminster trying to find a suitable location that was close enough to Scotland Yard to feel like it had some local colour. But it was too wet and windy even for my low production standards!
Speaking of production standards, there’s a very samizdat feel to those collaborative recordings that I think we’ve lost touch with in our need to make polished media for each other. Something about the content (yes the actual contents of the work) being more valuable than the presentation.
I spent yesterday back at Conway Hall. I'm trying to think of other things I've done there other than Interesting (which I helped Russell with for the first three years and which I then attended a couple of times?) There was The Story that Matt Locke did. I feel like there must be other things but I can't remember them (or find them in any of my archives). If I've been to or organised something else there with you, do remind me.
Anyway, yesterday was "The Fate of Britain", an Absurd Intelligence/Hard Art production. It was a brave attempt to pull togther people who are up for alternatives to the so-called "Multifaceted Intersecting Shitshow". I think it worked – lots of people met new people and made connections. Some things seem to be clicking into place. I was glad that I had no responsibility to do anything. It let me do my quietly unassuming schtick while getting to chat gently with interesting folk, old and new. It was a chance to get some focus on what's important to me and what sorts of things I can contribute.
Scale-wise, inbetween the everyone-in-the-hall sessions and the corridor conversations I went to something on "Building an Intergenerational Movement" convened by Charles Landry. Interesting parts for me are the need for third spaces to practice this stuff (tempered with the need to work the tensions with homophily and propinquity), but also that there's a lot of bollocks talked (by people of all ages, and not necessarily those in the room) about generational differences and similarities and what to do about it. I also felt the tension between those people who seem to have been rewarded with power in our world despite (or perhaps because of) their tendency to act childishly and those people (towards the lower end of the age range) who feel they're subject to enforced infantilism by economic circumstances that make it impossible to attain some of the markers of maturity like buying a house, or having a coherent career.
I was reminded by something in a conversation with Vanessa Chamberlin at lunchtime about this place being mine and being a place to write like there's nobody reading. Part of that is about me not needing to explain everything in the above couple of paragraphs before I hit the Publish button. It's frustrating, but there are a bazillion things I want to write about and if I try to write in the way that I think is required for publication (writing like somebody really clever and important reading), I end up either with a long list of bullet points or a very long and boring exploration of one thing. I hold onto the hope that writing things and not explaining everything immediately is better than not writing at all (or writing in sekrit places that nobody will ever see).
I'm a bit shit sometimes – in particular when it comes to relying on other people to tell stories about me rather than me telling them for myself (by which I mean that I think I should be better at doing it myself instead of relying on others so much…)
I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.
Perfect Path 