While I do still love a good paper book, there are times that digital books are just so much more useful, especially in non-fiction.

The content shows the cover of a book titled Digital Fix by Matthias Schrader and Volker Martens, alongside highlighted notes discussing themes related to virtual reality, monopolies in information technology, mindfulness design, AI manipulation, and behavioral control.

After the social network, the new bloggers are coming…

One of the things that I’m most angry with the social networks about is the way they deprived me of so many interesting voices. How many bloggers whose in-depth thoughts I valued, enjoyed and was challenged by have been sucked into the easy dopamine hit of social networks? How many exchanged depth, value and complexity for soundbite posts and memery?

One of the things I’ve valued over the last couple of years of micro.blog has been finding new voices and thinkers, who have been prepared to put the time and effort into writing things of worth, and to linking to those of others. It’s a new tool to surface an neglected way of thinking and working, and I value it.

Thanks everyone. You are genuinely enriching my life.


Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

(Prince Charming, Prince Charming)


Post-social network community building needed

Warren Ellis

I feel like I want to see some more thought around getting the fuck off social networks but being able to maintain lines of connection between friends, comrades and fellow-travellers in addition to the Republic Of Newsletters and the Isles Of Blogging. Status pages as the signals from the Invisible Monastery, or, possibly, Hobo Code marks on the walls of the web. Planning for the oncoming dark age?

Building distributed community processes is tough, but fun. And less likely to screw up democracy.


Time to kill off follower counts on social networks:

As we increase the time we spend online, we also expose ourselves to the danger of measuring ourselves by the number of likes and follows we get. That sort of behavior is problematic in itself, but it gets worse when you consider the fact that you have little to no real control over those numbers.

Where micro.blog and @manton led the way…


There’s no place like gnome

A garden gnome figurine is perched on a tree branch next to a hanging light bulb in an urban setting.

I was baffled and slightly depressed in what I was seeing in the analytics I was looking at.

And then I realised I was looking at the wrong site’s analytics. 🤦🏼‍♂️


Looks like Instagram’s down for a good chunk of the world.

Average mental health of the population is improving slightly every second this continues…


Just topped up the bird food. Minor avian riot in progress in the back garden.


5 degrees, rainy and grey. British autumn is here at last.

A harbor scene with boats docked along the water, construction equipment in the foreground, and buildings lining the shore under a cloudy sky.