“The world really has changed” – I obviously thought this needed saying. Who was I trying to convince? Will there ever be a time when this isn’t true?
“I am connected to a very diverse network of people” – I had no idea how much this would grow. Especially when Twitter came along.
“a traditional CV doesn’t give the flavour of real me” – still true. I spent another hour with someone the other day who wanted to understand “what it is that you do?” These days I’m much more light-hearted about it and worry less about being misunderstood.
“a blog is a perfect personal knowledge management tool” – this was marketing, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still true. I wish I used it more.
“It’s OK to turn up late to the party” – I really thought I’d missed the boat. Again, I had no idea what was just around the corner.
It does feel like the same sort of need is here again, for us to take responsibility for making our own media and building our own online relationships, instead of delegating it to the new corporations that have appeared in the last 20 years. I got close to taking August off again this year and we’re off to some woods for a week, but I’ve got some ideas for how I want to take this thing into it’s third decade. Thanks for sticking around x
So, I woke up thinking about practice. Just choosing to do a something, over and over again. Like, this morning, at 7 a.m., the kettle’s boiling, and there I am, setting up my camera, pressing the red record button and talking to myself in the kitchen like any other ordinary person in the 21st Century. But seriously, I like making this stuff and regardless of how it turns out, it’s a bit of practice I didn’t do yesterday.
And then I’m also thinking about acceptance, particularly in the process of making stuff. Like, nothing is ever totally right the first time, which I’ve been banging on about forever, but still find it hard to accept. I don’t want to draft stuff and then polish. Just. Don’t. Want. I want authenticity and I revert to believing it has to mean nailing everything in one go or giving up completely. Often, things just come out in the wrong order. They’re in some sort of right order in my head, but that’s a sub-optimal order for telling a story. Editing and switching stuff around isn’t just okay, it’s essential and I’ve had to cultivate my acceptance of that too. And since the camera never lies, I’ve had to accept that I now look like I’m 100 years old.
But acceptance is something that literally “comes with practice”. I have to keep doing the thing—setting up the camera, pressing record, and then gradually coming to ignore my tummy, or the dumb things I say or the number of times I touch my face. And that’s the part I didn’t fully understand until I talked it all through. I knew that practice was important and that acceptance mattered, but I hadn’t realised that practice is what actually leads to acceptance.
That’s what I wanted to say. But it’s not how it came out the first time. I had to write it down and think it through and turn it around. You see, I’m trying to get back in the habit of shooting video of myself and when I came to seeing if I could edit this morning’s ramble into something intelligible I realised I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been touching my face. So I made the video into just a montage of that instead.
My first public photo on Flickr in 2004. It’s another interpretation of “perfect path”
One of the things I’ve been reflecting on lately is that I’ve been making things on the web for at least 20 years now. It’s been almost 20 years since I started this blog, and that got me thinking about why I called it “Perfect Path.” That’s a question nobody ever actually asks. People always say, “Hmm, yeah, I get it.” I think for a long time, I was waiting for someone to ask, but nobody did. And this goes for a lot of the work I’ve done – I’ve been itching for someone to ask me what it means, but nobody does because they just get it. Or they don’t get it at all and it seems no amount of explanation helps them.
So, the story behind the name: I was in a bit of an odd place in 2004. By the autumn of that year, I was approaching the end of my 30s. I had been sober for less than three years, though it didn’t feel like I was new to it anymore. When you’ve struggled with drinking for most of your adult life, and then you manage to stop for two or three years, it feels incredible. You think you’ve got it under control, and everyone else tells you it’s still early days. But you think (I thought), “Yeah, I know, but not me.”
But it did mean that for the first time, I had some form of spiritual life. I was, I suppose, wrestling with the first three steps of recovery. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I kept going over those first three steps, particularly the third one, about turning your will and life over to the care of a power greater than yourself, or God as you understand it. I came up with a prayer that included the words, “I am willing to follow God’s perfect path for me, wherever it may lead,” which is very much in the spirit of Step Three. And I really liked that image. So, that’s one version of where the words came from.
Another source of inspiration for the name came around the turn of the millennium when I working on improving public services and expanding my organisational thinking, especially as the internet was becoming more prevalent. I was drawn to complexity theory, and in 2000, I took a course on managing complexity. One idea from that stood out: the concept of a creative boundary between stagnation and chaos. It’s a very simplistic model of complexity theory, but I found the idea compelling—that there’s a perfect path between those two extremes, you don’t want to fall either side of it because it’s hard to get out. So that became a more secular interpretation of “Perfect Path.”
Both ideas were very much alive in me at the time, and they fed off each other. And then by the summer of 2004, I had stopped doing an interim management job that had run its course, and I’d already been trying to blog for three or four years but always gave up after a few posts. That summer, I decided I was just going to go for it and see what happened. I knew by then that blogging wasn’t as scary or dangerous as I once thought, and I was already confidently telling people that it was OK to blog. Around the same time, podcasting was starting to emerge, and I knew I needed to do this thing—to write stuff on the internet and see where it led, both in terms of my personal work and my consulting.
I had already called my company Perfect Path Consulting. I think that was actually in 2002, when I left the Audit Commission and needed to start billing people. It became a brand for me, so I used it for my blog too. I used a typeface from Neuland, the facilitation company which had a distinctive way of writing with a chisel-tipped marker. That became my blog’s logo, in a green that felt fertile, and I dove into it all.
This is a kind of preamble to me reminding myself that I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years now. Sometimes I’m tempted to think I still don’t know what I’m doing and that I have no idea “how to do the internet”. But then I look back and realise it’s been two decades. I’ve definitely put in a few “10,000 hours”—probably on multiple aspects of creating social media. And by “social media” I just mean media that is social, not just the microblogging, photo-sharing, social network platforms that people think of now. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, man. If I have to point to something I can’t stop doing, it’s writing silly stories on the internet.
That’s my thing, and this blog is the place for it. For a while, it got a bit lost because the dominant popular format of storytelling shifted, and a lot of my stories don’t fit into those neat little boxes. Which sounds a bit like Norma Desmond but I’ve also come to understand a lot more about how I work particularly how my brain works and what is realistic to expect from it.
Another thought: when I’m feeling exhausted, when I feel like I’ve done too much but it’s only half way through the day, I’m finding more suitable ways of dealing with it.. Yesterday, I found myself cutting up bits of magazines to make letters for titles of an video series I’m planning. And that’s the way to move forward while resting. Mindless art-making. Not even art, really—just mindless action that is also towards a goal. I wrote a lot in my journal yesterday about getting organised and about the tasks I need to complete, but those tasks can sometimes be too stimulating. They don’t replenish my energy in the way mindless activity does. So, I sat there, cutting out letters to use in a collage-y kind of a thing that isn’t totally defined yet. That was exactly what I needed—no decision-making involved, just: are these letters big enough? Yes. I’ll cut them out and use them.
The other option is putting a record on (no, not flicking to spotify, putting a record on a turntable and hearing the hiss of the needle in the groove). Chopin’s Nocturnes are the most magical to me. They transform me. I don’t care why—maybe it’s something deep, but I don’t need to know.
Speaking of something deep, I had an interesting (to me!) dream last night. In the dream, I was with someone I know, although I couldn’t tell you who they were – a kind of amalgam of wise, kind, brave men in my life. We were talking about the inner work I still need to do, and they asked me what else I needed to let go of. I described some of my fears—that boiled down to fear of being out in the world, being seen, being misunderstood (haha – see the opening paragraph of this post!). It’s hard to explain exactly because it’s more of a feeling inside me. If I had to name it, it would be the fear of being out in the world. The person in my dream said, “Well, let’s get rid of that, then.” They had me open my mouth and tip my head back, and then they pulled something out of me—a long, black, gooey thing that looked like a fish skeleton without a head or tail, just a long spine with ribs (is that what fish have?). It was covered in black sludge and had obviously been inside me for a long time, rotten, but strong and coherent. The guy just pulled it all the way out and it was much longer and blacker and more gooey than I’d expected. Very David Lynch.
Now, this morning, I’m wondering: am I free of that fear now? Is it gone? How will I know? How will I know if I’m free of it? Part of me says, “Let’s just trust that it’s done, that the magic worked.” That it’s been removed and I don’t have to live with it anymore. It was prickly and uncomfortable, so it’s good to have it gone. Who cares what it means? It sounds like a good symbol. It feels like a good thing to be rid of. So, let’s be rid of it.
The quiet early hours, from 5 to 7 in the morning, have always been my most fertile time for ideas. However, there’s a catch: when I sit down to type, I lose the flow of thoughts because I’m still processing them while trying to write.
So, this morning, as I sat with my half-drunk coffee and a half-completed Sudoku, my thinking drifted, yet again to the challenge of producing consistent work and/or producing work consistently. In my personal technology-free fantasy world—definitely sometime before I was actually born—I would have a secretary to transcribe my handwritten notes or dictation, an editor to review my drafts, and a publisher ready to turn it all into paper material to be distributed to places where people who might like my work might pick it up and pay some cash for it.
But inspired by Jay Springett’s recent words about his “Menagerie of Models” I’m now playing with tools that can serve as my own digital secretary and editor. They’re still my words, but I’m getting help from the machines when it comes to capturing and organising my ideas so that I can distribute them more effectively. And here we are, writing not only to people who happen to be in a bookshop or newsagent or are lucky enough to be my personal correspondents, but to just about anyone with a computer.
The 1960s are the only decade in my life (so far) which I didn’t use computers. I had a bit of a dip in such activity in the eighties (at college *nobody* thought of using a computer for anything!) But despite that long relationship, I’ve always had a nagging unease about letting machines do all the hard work that I thought I had an obligation to do myself. But if I really believed that, where would I draw the line? Is using a word-processor too lazy? Should I be hand-coding my html pages? I don’t think so, so why am I squeamish about using ChatGPT with due intelligence and discernment?
That’s the question. Where’s the line between what’s authentic and what’s too artificial? I recently saw a personalised video response, for example, which addressed the recipient by name. And it made me uncomfortable in a way that personalised text does not now, but might have done when I first saw it (just to remind you that I’ve been mail-merging since before you were born!) And that leaves me wondering about future generations who are being born into this kind of digital intimacy or weird (to me) interactions. Will they find it perfectly normal? Or will there always be an inherent strangeness that they learn to ignore? It makes me think of my relationship to photographs – 200 years ago people might have wondered about what effect it has on me that I have so many photos of myself, my family and my breakfasts.
Anyway, I’m not (yet) making video mail-merges but if I did, I wonder how long it would take you to realise?
I recently came across these gems among my sixth-form reports:
School reports: a “confidential and private record of the pupil’s progress”
“I should like to see a minimum of 15 hours study per week at home to begin with; then a greater commitment to the detail of his subjects and less reliance on his natural flair. If he exerts himself next year, the reward could be some very good grades.”
“Lloyd has clearly not put enough work in for this element of his course. He must accept that, at this level, innate ability is simply not enough to secure a satisfactory grade in the public examinations.”
“There has been some progress in Latin, but what of the rest? I cannot believe that a boy of his ability and potential is going to let himself down. We recommend at least 15 hours per week of study at home. Is he doing even this minimum?”
This is all forty years ago, but it still hangs in my psyche. I still think that, no matter what I might have achieved, the only truly valuable things are those that are the result of great exertion, that my “natural flair” and “innate ability” are never enough.
And yet, for most of that time, I’ve continued to find that exertion harder to exercise than most, while my flair and ability have gained me attention and love, I’ve seen less of whatever today’s equivalent is of “a satisfactory grade in the public examinations”
Maybe it will always be this way, that I’ll never be satisfied with my own efforts. But my diagnosis with ADHD nearly four years ago also sheds some light on “How do you solve a problem like Lloyd?” By the time I showed up for the Sixth Form, I’d lost a driving interest in my subjects. I got cornered into three language A-levels when my stubbornness came head to head with the titanium-plated wall of the school timetable, so the only variety in my attention was the fairly tame difference between translating Catullus or Camus or Kafka.
Plus, I had the exhaustion of executive function that characterises my experience of ADHD. Relief came from the variety between school and not-school – and “not-school” was a no-contest between home (TV, food, bed) and everything else that catches the fancy of an eighteen year old “boy”. There simply weren’t another fifteen hours.
Since the end of 2022, I’ve been part of this thing called Hard Art, a collective working on cultural responses to all the things we’re facing right now, but particularly various climate-related ugh-nesses.
Over the last year, as a kind of ice-breaker, people have made blind contour line portraits in pairs and then amazing artist/musician Ian Bruce has coloured lots of them in.
Now, as a fundraiser for the collective, 100 of them have been collected in an exhibition, “Drawn Without Looking” which is on in London for the next few days (through to Saturday 1st June) at the Paul Stolper Gallery in Museum Street. Astonishingly, the one of me (by Love Ssega !) is still, as yet, unsold – get your credit cards out, people!
They’ve also been collected into a book which has been released on metalabel – there’s other Hard Art stuff on the metalabel page too, so have a dig around.
Keir Starmer is quoted as saying there’s an “anti-politics mood” at the moment (as we move towards a General Election in the UK).
I don’t believe there’s an anti-politics mood, but I understand why professional politicians see it like that, because they believe that politics is only what politicians and activists do.
Politics is too important to leave to politicians in the same way that your health is too important to leave to doctors, the education of your children is too important to leave to teachers and your relationships are too important to leave to online social networks.
I think that we all need to take responsibility for actively participating in those things that have been professionalised out of our communal experience, not because we’re anti-expert (some of my best friends… etc) but because professionalised expertise only gets us so far and over a (shockingly short) period of time it reduces our ability to care for ourselves and others.
I saw a demo of a new platform called “metalabel” on Monday. I was excited by what I saw.
How do you split the pot ?
I saw a solution to a problem that we’ve chatted about for the last 15 years or so, a problem that’s easy enough to understand at a simple level, but once you get to the levels of complexity that make it interesting enough to pursue, it seems just too hard to bother with. Or at least that was my experience.
The problem, as I would state it is: how can members of a community release a series of collaborative works and share any commercial gains according to pre-arranged splits without either bleeding money away in financial transaction fees, paying lawyers for creating, interpreting and enforcing contracts or creating a managerial class within the community whose only function is to make the whole machine work (and to take a slice for themselves)?
See, when I started writing that sentence, I thought it was going to be much simpler than it turned out. And that’s what happens with these projects too.
The promise of metalabel is that you can create a series of works with (or without) splits that can evolve over time and the platform does all the work for you. Your community (or group of pals or whatever) becomes a “meta label” that can release all sorts of different creative works.
The proof of the meta-pudding will be in the meta-eating of course, and it’s invitation-only for the time being, but that’s what I took away from seeing it shown off by founder, Yancey Strickler. I’ve been fortunate enough to get pulled into the artist collective known as Hard Art. Hard Art is still being a bit mysterious ahead of “The Fete of Britain” event in a couple of weeks at the Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester (a venue takeover that I’ve been likening to 2013’s “Hack The Barbican” except in the service of making a cultural response to Climate Crisis and the rest of the shitshow we’re experiencing these days). But this metalabel “release” gives you some hints and more will be revealed as the event approaches.
The best social art and community building that I’ve made has resulted in bunches of people who get inspired and trust each other enough to undertake projects – what people quickly notice is that these situations “have great potential” – the realisation of that potential though can be patchy – and while some projects find their feet (and their revenue stream!), lots of them fizzle out, often because the people are already busy and because things just get hard very quickly.
Some examples from my glorious past to help me think this through:
Tuttle Club
As well as having fun, learning lots about the social media scene at the time and inspiring a ton of blog posts, vlogs and podcasts, the people who came to Tuttle, especially in the early days, also ended up getting a new job or starting a business or some other project that ended up being their job. We (I) struggled for a long time with how to make it work financially for myself, given that most of those opportunities were being created while I was giving a friendly greeting to a newbie and I didn’t want to take the “easy” route of selling out or being responsible to a funder for (in)consistent results. Many times it was suggested that if people made stuff there that generated revenue, that a percentage could go into a central pot to support group expenses and me. But as I say, things get pretty complex, pretty quickly and it turned out that this was the kind of “why can’t you just” suggestion that I couldn’t implement (especially back in 2008/9). Even when we did Tuttle Consulting the headaches were in the various informal contractual arrangements and the difficulty of paying for non-billable work.
Centre For Creative Collaboration
One of the ways I did manage to turn the Tuttle conundrum round for myself for a while was by working with Brian when he (and his partners) created C4CC for the University of London in 2010. As Social Artist in Residence though, there was enough to do in curating the social space and relationships in the building. I probably clung onto it a bit long as a source of small but stable income. The question of how to fund and run such a space was, in the end, the thing that killed it off. And this wasn’t for want of trying – very talented people with big brains were grasping for a way to balance revenue and costs without relying on a big (and fickle) sponsor – a way that projects could contribute to the financial well-being of the space and the management overhead, when they mostly in start-up mode themselves.
We Will Gather
We had funding for this platform for a year in 2012/13. That paid us some salary/fees but mostly went on developing and hosting the tech – you could initiate up a “good” thing in your neighbourhood with it’s own web page, just by tweeting and using the hashtag #wewillgather. And lots of good things happened, but it didn’t reach a critical mass partly because of the Twitter API fuckery, but also because it needed some income and some curation/promotion/community building work that we just couldn’t maintain for free.
Workshop34 and other empty shops
These projects were shops! They’re actual retail premises where people are used to going in and spending money – what could possibly go wrong?! Dan and I only had 6 months in Workshop34 in Sittingbourne in 2014/15 but we established a way for the local community, especially local artists to show and sell their work and reap the benefits of working with other people, gaining confidence to keep trying other projects after our EU-funding had dried up. And we did deals with everyone that usually amounted to a 10-15% commission on any revenue they took. This would go into a pot for tea, biscuits and other expenses I incurred. But nobody wanted the hassle of earning money there – whether they were people who might risk their means-tested benefits or people who just didn’t want the responsibility of holding cash for a loosely-organised community. And nobody wanted to manage it afterwards – one of the hardest bits of the work for me was finding someone who’d take the £300 that was left in the community pot at the end.
In all of these situations, the primary purpose (and survival) of the group was ultimately undermined by the difficulty of paying for overheads or organising collaborative work once money was involved.
In each case, people (including me) could see that we were creating something of value. That as collaborative communities, the value had the potential to be realised by making creative assets – learnings, souvenirs, joint celebrations etc. and use the network effect of our joint social capital to promote and sell them. But it was always just too hard. We always ran out of juice (physically, emotionally and financially) before we could get it going. And I started to believe that the common denominator in all this was me and that it was my fault that it never worked, so I stopped trying.
I had a flicker of hope for this situation, when Imogen Heap asked me to help facilitate conversations about her Mycelia for Music idea and I got to see that this problem wasn’t just about me, my collaborators and the communities that we worked in – it was also there in the messy way music gets made. And at the time (end of 2015) it looked like crypto was the way to do this – distributed ledger so that nobody can tinker with the splits or metadata and nobody has to run it, the fees are all included in the blockchain etc. etc. You remember 2015? Yeah, good times!
Metalabel brings me renewed hope. I got it as soon as I heard Yancey say that one of the inspirations was the foundation of the Royal Society – people getting together in pubs and coffee shops and then publishing their work and incidentally creating a whole new method for creating and testing and disseminating knowledge? Well I can’t claim the whole new method thing, but it does sound familiar, doesn’t it?
In a nutshell, it’s a bit of infrastructure for individuals or collectives to release work for digital or physical distribution and, if there’s money involved, a way to set up how the money gets distributed between the people who did the work (and a commission for the platform) – so you can publish a book/EP/film/artwork and have a set of splits that operate while the initial costs are recouped and then a new set of splits thereafter or whatever you and your community want to do.
The difficult bit is still pull together a group of people who want to make cool innovative stuff and won’t kill each other in the process of deciding what gets published and who gets paid. But y’know, that seems a lot more fun when you’ve got a platform to do it on.
PS this is based on a privileged (and otherwise uninformed) sneak peek behind the scenes. I might have got the wrong end of the stick on something. If you go to metalabel.com right now, the concept may or may not jump off the page at you, but I believe the first curated releases (it’s invitation-only for the time being) will be available soon and then it will be a lot clearer.
The Chamberlain Memorial and Birmingham Town Hall, from a car park between Chamberlain Square and Gt Charles St, showing the partly demolished buildings believed to be the Mason Science College (later to be the site of the 1970s Central Library)
I spent a little time in Flickr today, and it reminded me of so many good intentions. I could easily (not easily) spend all my time tagging and annotating photographs and putting them somewhere with some commentary on my life and what was going on. Obviously the one above wasn’t taken by me, but I know a few things about the man who did take it. #
I’m irritated by Threads. The only reason I go there is because Instagram and FB have little clickbaity embeds and I sometimes can’t resist the bait. I don’t want to write there. I don’t like the way it’s becoming, for some, the Twitter replacement – I don’t think FB/Meta can be trusted with that any more than any other platform-owners. I don’t like the way they’ve implemented tags. It might have to be the first instance of me proactively deleting a social media account. #
That’s the second time I’ve seen Dave point to Indieblocks – it does look like the sort of thing I ought to at least have an opinion on. #
I like this format because it reminds me of primary school, where the first thing you had to do was write today’s date at the top of the page. #
Today I learned that Stanley Baxter is a) still alive at 97 and b) out of the closet since 2020. #
A reminder that the four horsemen (or Gupta’s Path To Riches, depending on your perspective) are Blockchain, AI, VR/AR and IoT. Just because there’s been lots of focus on one or other of these of late, doesn’t mean the others have gone away. #
Dave asked about how much of a hassle it was to do anchor tags in wordpress. Not much faff, in my experience using the wordpress.com block editor. I have a sidebar menu for the paragraph block I’m typing. Under ‘Advanced’ I add the same Block Name and HTML Anchor for the first paragraph of a new section – for ease, yesterday I just used S1, S2… SX for sections but for readability, if I were doing a longer piece, I think I’d use somethin more descriptive. Then I add a hash symbol at the end of the block which is linked to the anchor tag (just type eg “#S2” in the link creation dialog). This is meant to be a demonstration of the degree of faff involved (ie non-zero), not a polished set of instructions, ymmv. Yes, of course I’d like something automagic and better fitted to my dainty hands but I also like making more work for myself than is needed sometimes. #
The main way in which it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas is that the overall volume of incoming messages has increased – mostly from people trying to clear things off their todo list before the end of next week (or earlier). I am not altogether innocent of doing this myself, either, soz. #
I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.
Perfect Path 