A flock of starlings decided it was absolutely vital that they all immediately move 100 metres to the west.

This is arguably one of the most “Hveragerði” photos I’ve taken. The river Varmá flowing past Reykjafjall mountain.

The literal translations of those place names are “hot spring town”, “warm river”, and “steamy mountain” respectively.

We are, as a nation, a bit literal-minded when it comes to naming things.

I think this site here in Hveragerði is scheduled to be demolished, cleared, and replaced with high end flats next year. They’ve all been empty for months now and the house has been damaged by recurring leaks in the heating.

This is the second of two parts on media creation. You can find the first part over here: Creating media with an uncooperative mind

Infinite negatives #

In trying to figure out what I should write and talk about, I could spend the rest of my life outlining all the topics I don’t care about. The world is larger than our attention can encompass.

Even if I limited myself to going over the topics you might expect somebody like me – based on the public image I’ve chosen to project online – to reasonably cover but won’t, that’d still require me to write more words on subjects I dislike than on the ones I like.

This blog has always been a practical venue. I had blogs before – I’ve been writing online in one place or another since the mid- to late nineties – but this was the first place I specifically used to position myself for a chosen career.

I’d focused on ebooks for my PhD, given up on them after graduation because they seemed dead in the water in 2006.

Then as soon as I settled into a web dev job, ebooks finally became a thing with the Kindle, iPhone, and competitors all popping into the market from 2007 onwards. So, after waffling about for a couple of years, watching from the outside as the topic I’d studied for my PhD finally took off, I decided to make a venue where I could, effectively, put up a sign saying:

“Are you interested in ebooks and publishing? I know a bunch of stuff about that! Have degrees and everything.”

This website was born. First as a straight website, as I was mostly blogging on Tumblr in those days, but later I turned it into proper blog, with an RSS feed and everything.

As the ebook side of the publishing industry went through its own bubble and bust, with the inevitable fraud, collusion, and antitrust convictions (because this was back when cheating the public occasionally had consequences) I tried to reposition myself more on the crossroads between publishing and web development.

As I became a senior web developer, the gap between the understanding of most managers I’d dealt with and the realities of software development became more and more obvious and acute. I figured I might be able to help bridge that gap by writing specifically to try and explain how uniquely software development interacts with management practices and theory. That way I could target two different audiences with a single topic:

1. Software developers who both needed to explain to their managers how their work, well, worked and needed to better understand what their managers were dealing with.
2. Managers who found themselves managing software projects but didn’t necessarily have visibility into some of the unique problems with software development.

That led to the book Out of the Software Crisis and related blog posts.

The book was both a product designed to help people do their jobs and a tool to help me position myself as a freelance consultant beyond the more narrow publishing and media space where I’d previously planted my software development flag.

It did result in a number of contract leads, but fewer than you’d expect. Next to none of those leads survived the first “weeding”. Most managers who exhibited an interest in the problem of managing software development seemed to be major fans of extremely distasteful people with very poor judgement and warped priorities.

Somebody who keeps praising people like the 37 Signals manager who led their company into repeated crises by prioritising extremist politics over good management is unlikely to be a pleasant person to work with, even if you naively disregard their likely politics.

Once I weeded out the “37 Signals are great managers” sympathisers and related crowd – they seemed thick on the ground in software even after that company’s first “racism is good, actually” implosion – the remaining leads were old contacts from the publishing industry who had gone “oh, this means Baldur is a freelancer now” and got in touch. A significant portion, though not a majority, of these projects turned out to be related to corporate web developer education and training, which I enjoyed.

I did consider trying to turn the “momentum” of the book into other products – a course, mentorship, or the like – but, while I had experience as a lead dev, I’d left all of my ambitions of becoming a manager of some sort behind and I think there’s a limit to what somebody who has never been a manager can teach people with ambitions in that direction.

I didn’t feel I could teach a field that I wasn’t interested in practicing myself, especially since I was still deep in my Long COVID brain fog that had hit me just before I began work on the book.

Then, as the worst of fog began to inch away, the “AI” Bubble happened.

I never intended to write about “AI” #

I’ve had an on and off interest in “AI” and Machine Learning for most of my career so, when Copilot and ChatGPT started to get traction, looking into it was a logical move.

What I discovered appalled me. All of those management principles I’d been trying to teach in my work and writing, all the development practices I’d been trying to promote, weren’t just being disregarded by these tools.

They were, and still are, the antithesis of sound software development and good management.

They are broken by design, all the way from the fractured ground up to the wobbly top.

• The error rates are unacceptable.
• The variability and volatility is unacceptable.
• The copyright ambiguity they create in the generated code is unacceptable.
• The disregard of consent, regarding both the personal data and creative works they derive their models from, is unacceptable.
• The abuses they enable are unacceptable.
• The environmental impact is unacceptable.
• Their political collusion with extremists is unacceptable.
• The sheer scale of destruction they inflict on the knowledge ecosystem and creative industries is unacceptable.

And, fundamentally, they make good management impossible. The way they function is incompatible with organisation, structure, quality, and variation control.

Any form of integration with your work will compromise your work, irrespective of the costs, origin, point of execution, or ethics of creation. The damage may not be apparent at first, but these systems, due to their design, will hurt you in the long run.

I and others have compared it with asbestos – a miracle material with genuinely amazing properties that is so incredibly harmful that it has even been banned in the United States. For the most part. That final attempt to close the gap on an asbestos ban took place in 2024, with the preceding debate coinciding with the initial growth of the “AI” Bubble.

It isn’t a coincidence that the asbestos analogy has been popular among those who criticise “AI”. It was at the top of the mind of pretty much anybody who was concerned about safety and consumer protection while ChatGPT was blowing up.

But I now prefer to compare generative models to leaded petrol:

It poisons everything, increases crime, harms your brain, makes the world genuinely worse in multiple ways, and could have been replaced with safer and more effective solutions at pretty much any point in its history.

The only reason people didn’t – why they chose to knowingly poison their children and their own societies – was to save a little bit of money in amounts that never came even remotely close to outweighing the immense costs to society.

This is a technology that should never ever have been shipped.

I’m genuinely disappointed in every single person who keeps promoting it in their blog posts, videos, or social media.

The Intelligence Illusion, where I wrote about the risks generative models create for businesses, was motivated by how appalled I became as I researched the technology and how it interacted with the theory and practice of management.

This both worked and backfired in ways that I never expected.

No freelance career yet #

I did get a couple of interviews in the early days, as I was one of the first to push out a book on the topic, but once I got quoted out of context in a fairly awful New York Times piece I began to deny interview requests that were specific to “AI”. (There are a couple of outlets I’d decided in advance I’d say yes to if they asked, but they never asked.) I’d recommend people, and I offered to speak on background, helping the reporter understand what they were covering.

Only one took me up on that offer, which was a lot of fun, and the interview requests stopped after a while. Once reporters stop seeing your name in the venues they keep an eye on, they drop you from their list.

There was never any chance of the book leading to freelance opportunities. Every time I’ve received queries from companies on helping them form an “AI” strategy or policy, I replied with a short message saying that my advice is simple:

Avoid the tech until the bubble pops, then reassess. Most of the biggest web companies in the world today got into it or were founded after the dot-com bubble popped. Being late is a strategic advantage. If you want, I could help you outline how that strategy would work in detail – how to prepare for when the bubble pops – but otherwise my advice is simple: Wait.

I always thought this was a nice and neutral reply. Focused on the strategic benefit to the company. No mention of pesky ethics or environmentalism that might scare the punters off or disturb the unholy soulless inner workings of an MBA.

But the communications always ended at that point.

Almost all of my freelance clients continued to come from former publishing industry contacts.

The other problem was that the book itself and the associated blog posts arguably backfired.

Be careful in explaining your adversary’s mistakes; they might learn from it #

The book helped the right people. But it also helped the wrong people.

The best way to explain it is to put it in the context of a different societal and economic transformation: the deindustrialisation of the US with outsourcing.

Companies all over the US were destroying local jobs, closing factories, and deindustrialising their country by shifting work abroad. If you believed that outsourcing weakened society, led to the downfall of the economy, and exposed the companies to hard-to-manage risks, one of the worst things you could do would be to focus on the risks to the companies.

If you were living in that era and had the skills and interest to tackle the issue, you could take the humanities and social sciences approach and outline the effects on the social fabric, local communities, education, and public health. If you were an academic or a journalist, this would be the approach that made the most sense and your position would give you enough standing to make people listen.

Or, you could have put on your policymaker or economist hat and dug into the fractures this created in your economy and the sociopolitical risks to the state. Anybody who had the ear of the lawmakers would have been a fool not to take this tack on the topic.

If your skill sets were management theory, systems-thinking, and the organisation and structure of work, you might have be tempted to cover how outsourcing specifically harmed the companies themselves, their function and ability to operate, in an attempt to talk them out of it.

This would have been a mistake.

These companies were deliberately setting out to weaken the bargaining power of the workforce. They already felt that the risks were worth it. All you could have accomplished by going over the specific risks of outsourcing they themselves were facing – the communications, the longer iterations, the disconnect between teams, etc. – would have been to help them mitigate the impact of those risks and further their goal of destroying labour.

Offshoring – despite being on a macro level one of the more catastrophic strategic errors in US history since the end of the Cold War – happened nonetheless. It made the companies and their owners richer even as it rotted their countries from within.

“AI” is flowing into those same dried riverbeds. It’s the same social, economic, and strategic mistake except at an even larger scale and putting even more at risk.

My book was helpful to many readers. I still occasionally get emails thanking me for getting their defences against LLMs up in the early days of the bubble. Not often, but occasionally.

But to some readers it was helpful in ways that I, the writer, did not enjoy or appreciate.

Many of the glowing recommendations and positive buzz around the first edition of the book came from consultants who then used it as a playbook for furthering “AI” adoption in business by managing the risks deemed important by the business. I even got an email from a Scandinavian VC and “AI entrepreneur” thanking me effusively for the book.

If you ever wondered why I stopped covering specific organisational and work-related issues caused by “AI” – the flaws specific to the tech and how they interacted with work – now you know.

If you wondered why I published a second edition despite the risks being fundamentally unchanged and most of the research continuing to come to the same conclusions, this is why. I wanted to reposition the book to make it untenable to the consultancy crowd.

This worked, I think. At least I don’t get emails from management consultants or VCs any more.

My writing here shifted mostly to three topics:

• Tech scepticism. That is, advocating the idea that you should be careful about trusting the tech industry and its products.
• The personal impact of “AI”.
• Web development.

(Also photography, but that’s just for fun. Nothing practical about it.)

My tech scepticism netted me what you could describe as a “backbencher” position in the online tech scepticism community. Not one of the frontbencher who gets called on for interviews and the like, but I occasionally get to write a polemic that rouses and motivates other backbenchers.

There isn’t much more to it than that at the moment, and that’s fine.

But when I turned back to writing about web development, I discovered that the field was gone. Web dev training, specifically, has been wiped out by “AI”.

Where did everybody go? #

While I was busy pushing the “AI” book I’d failed to notice that all my training and education projects had dropped off one by one. Most of my peers who had been selling courses and training were shutting down their businesses. The demand for web dev ebooks had cratered.

So, my attempt to shift away from the “AI” book back to web dev training was a bit like exiting a bunker with a hot dog cart in tow and try to sell a nice juicy hot dog in a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape full of ash and radiation.

Software developers haven’t all switched to using agents for their coding, but they do seem to have all switched to error-prone, backwards-facing, nondeterministic chatbots for what now passes as web dev “education”.

Every time I thought to myself “maybe it isn’t that bad, those two are still selling their courses and ebooks so there obviously continues to be a market for this” I’d find out a while later that their business had indeed collapsed and that they had been coasting on fumes. Then they would give up as well and quit the industry.

Moreover, the field of web development has regressed overall. React and framework-oriented development is back in full force. Novelty and research now focuses exclusively on some variation of getting a Large Language Model to regurgitate some old thing into the gutted, hollowed-out skinsuit of some other old thing. “Let’s use an agent to port it to Rust! Let’s make a WordPress replacement in JavaScript! Let’s port this project to a more convenient license!”

Dependencies are getting less and less reliable as everybody’s toolchain gets rotted open with insecure coding agents and bad practices are automated into petrification.

Design is nonexistent.

User research is nonexistent.

Product development is nonexistent.

I don’t enjoy my field any more because the field is gone. Assuming that there’s still something there is a mistake. That feeling you have isn’t a frustration with changes to your chosen field. It’s nostalgia for a field that disappeared overnight. What passes as web dev today at large bears no resemblance to the field we built over the years. Everything we learned has been abandoned because companies assume it’s all been encoded into their chosen Large Language Model.

I’m still doing web development work, but navigating the flood of misguided pull requests and nonsense “documentation” is getting harder, not easier. I love the work when I get to do it without dealing with nonsense, but I don’t think finding those opportunities is going to get any easier from now on.

It’s frustrating and depressing and the more I experience the “new world order” of web development the less I want to have to do with any of it.

Employment in tech seems done. All the major employers have revealed their hand and that hand is just one “fire more; hire less” card after another.

You could stay and fight for your survival, but it would be foolish to expect those who remain to have a glorious career. You’re basically in the same position as a non-union factory worker in a post-outsourcing, deindustrialised economy. You might be one of the few who gets to keep your job but what little bargaining power you had against your employers is gone. That never ends well for the worker.

With web dev gone and tech scepticism not being anything that resembles a career path – you’re a Patreon- and book-subsidised commentator at best, not nothing, but still not a long-term career – it’s hard to figure out where I should position myself.

This blog has been a personal journal, a venue for hashing out my thoughts and ideas. It’s also played a big role in developing my career.

Software development and tech have been where I positioned myself, for most of the past decade or so. Everything else has fallen into the “personal” category. Stuff that I cover because I needed a venue for the thoughts, but never represented the brunt of this site.

Outside and downplayed #

A necessary part of surviving having an online presence is artful omission. Parts of your life get to be visible online. Other parts are downplayed. The rest is offline.

The part of my life I’ve constantly downplayed online is my work, education, and experience in media and publishing.

I’ve worked in radio, TV (vision mixer), did a short stint in Iceland’s then brand-new film school, wrote and self-published novellas, and helped a number of people publish their books both digitally and in print. I’ve helped artists put together their art books and assisted with their installations. My first degree was in comparative literature. The rest were at an Art, Media, and Design faculty. For years, I worked just as much in After Effects and Premiere as I did in Director, Flash, or web dev. I taught both at an art, media, and design faculty in Bristol and design and photography students at a junior college level here in Iceland. I published a graphic novel a few months ago.

It’s the part of my career that I’ve enjoyed the most and, for a while, spent the most time on.

But it came with two problems:

1. It generally doesn’t pay. At least not compared to web dev work.
2. I always felt like an outsider in those fields.

As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realise just how much the second issue affected me.

For example, one memory that still sits with me and played a big role in driving me away from fiction writing was as I sat listening to a friend of mine struggle to say something positive about a novella I had written. He settled on “the typography is excellent.”

The typography of an ebook. This, coming from a British publishing professional, if you know what they’re like you know what that means, felt devastating.

I completely gave up on writing fiction shortly afterwards, and I’m only now coming to terms with how much of that came from how rejected I felt by my friends and acquaintances in the publishing and media industries. At the time it felt like the people who I thought would cheer me on unprompted just all fell silent. I always assumed it was because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say.

That I worked at the crossroads between tech and publishing – ebooks, content management systems, reading systems, and the like – also seemed to mark me as an outsider.

Another defining memory from that period was sitting in the Unbound offices (this is before we all found out what was going on there) and chatting with others around the lunch table about our jobs. As you do. When I mentioned something I was working on, one of my coworkers turned to me and said something along the lines of “I’ve never read an ebook and never will” and that was the end of that. In the end, the only topic of conversation that seemed tenable for me to the rank and file of Unbound was to answer questions about Iceland and tourism in Iceland.

On more than one occasion, I had people at publishing conferences immediately turn away and leave the conversation as soon as I mentioned that I was working on the tech side of things.

Seeking approval from people who were never going to approve of you is never healthy.

Some people were great – still are – but those also tended to be treated like outsiders by the rest of the industry.

Over the past decade I’ve actively downplayed the scope of my media and publishing career because I’ve always assumed that your average person in tech would be at least as big a dick as the average publishing person and would be just as dismissive of anybody with a hybrid skill set.

I don’t think I was wrong about that – “we’re major dicks!” seems to be a point of pride for many in tech – but I do think I underestimated the potential of connecting with other outsiders. People with hybrid skill sets, expertise and experience in both print or media and in tech – or even just experience in one and a dream of another – and who feel alienated from both sides of the crossroads they work at.

I think I underestimated how many of us there are and, now that the “AI” Bubble has managed to alienate big swathes of society, I think there are more of us than ever before.

So, more than a topic, I have a feeling I want to capture. A spark of an emotion I want to keep alive:

I don’t want any of us who stand at the crossroads between fields to feel like outsiders any more. With the world heading where it’s heading, us outsiders need to band together.

The actual topics, I think, should be more defined by what this ad hoc group of people – wherever I find them – need solving than anything predefined, but I think there might be a few broad areas I could tackle.

• Creative processes. Specifically coming from one process to another and how you adapt your thinking and approach when transitioning to a new venue or field.
• Getting over the hurdles of doubt and worries about the ugliness of your work.
• Getting things done and productivity are not the same thing. In fact, I’d say they were close to opposites.
• Discovering yourself is a key requirement for sustainable achievements in any creative field.
• Appreciating the ugliness of both creative and tech work.
• Understanding the context of media and how tech affects it.
• How to deal with the way tech affects our work and media.
• Understanding how the grammar and structure of social media affects what you can say and how you can say it.
• Working with the hybrid media landscape we live in.

The topics are endless, but the feeling defines the worldview and angle of approach.

I think I can figure out a way to be useful for this audience.

And the next step is pretty much just to go ahead and try it.

At least, that’s the theory. We’ll have to see how it turns out in practice.

This is the first of two parts on media creation. I’ll update this post with a link when the second one is out.

“The students already come with an understanding of the grammar of visual storytelling, but not of writing or audio.”

This was one of the lecturers on audio and radio production at the university where I was teaching.

Back then, in the early 2000s, I was a postgrad student with teaching duties in the Art, Media, and Design faculty’s Media Practice program and, as always, “kids these days” was a perennial topic among the lecturers.

Not in the way you think. These were, mostly, a bunch of idealists. They believed in the job of teaching and were constantly trying to figure out what they needed to adapt. Times change – they always change – and people who care about teaching try to work with an awareness of the new, a care for younger generations, and subsequently get rewarded with constant burnout and mental health crises.

One observation was that newer students needed more support at the start of the course than they used to, with a higher share than usual really needing to take a foundation course before starting their actual degree studies.

That is, they felt in the early 2000s that the students who did a foundation course before going on to do their Media Practice degree were roughly as capable as the average student – without a foundation course – was a few years earlier.

The other observation was more positive. Although this audio production lecturer’s subject wasn’t the direct beneficiary – back then as today, people didn’t listen to what they were listening to – he noted that many of the students had what looked like a head start when it came to studying the practice of visual storytelling. Video, specifically. They might not know the terminology, but they recognised the practice and structure of it when they saw it.

They could “hit the ground running” in ways they couldn’t with writing, designing, or working with audio.

This was a quarter of a century ago.

When I say that our current era of video dominance has been a long time coming, I mean it.

A mass medium no more #

Fourteen years ago I wrote about comics – how they had gone from being one of the biggest mass media industry in the world, with a presence on every corner of every town in the Western world, to being a niche industry with a limited presence beyond a corner in some book stores and the occasional dingy speciality store, and how the prose book seemed to be following the same path.

Publishing is on a crossroads. It’s not just a question of how the form will develop but also who we want as an audience. As books lose their real-world presence, do we really want to just cater to a minority of voracious expert readers? A casual reader is never going to buy a bespoke reading device, but will buy an iPhone or iPad, where ebooks are competing with games, apps, websites, and comics.

Pretending you aren’t competing with other media on price, accessibility, and value, is a surefire way to kill off long-form reading.

Today, I think we’ve reached the same point comics had in the 2000s, except the speciality stores are cleaner, better decorated, and better lit. The book industry is now largely in a steady-state equilibrium catering to dedicated hobbyists, the kind who would list books and related topics specifically as their interest.

That makes writing for readers a lucrative niche market – the margins are solid when you aren’t getting mugged by “AI” companies and don’t fall into the trap of competing with overproduction – but a niche nonetheless.

The problem that producers of niche media – such as comics or prose books – face when trying to market their work is that they are guests in a bigger world. We are working in an environment built on dynamics and structures very different from our chosen media. We constantly encounter a mismatch between the venues and skills that are effective for promotion and the skills and capabilities we have developed for our work and craft.

Today to promote prose you need to do something that is not prose.

Fifty years ago you could promote a book largely with more writing.

• Written reviews
• Extracts published in magazines and newspapers
• Reactions and analysis
• Interviews

All delivered in print, the medium of the work itself.

Radio and TV were additions.

Print used to be a complete mass media ecosystem unto itself.

I don’t think that’s true today.

To promote writing or comics, you’re going to need to do video and audio. At least in some form.

So, I’ve been continuing my experiments with media. I need to have a handle on audio and video and I need to figure out a way that I can practice regularly and improve.

Some of the experiments have been short and fragmentary enough for me to just post on social media. Many have just been tests I’ve done myself and put away, having learned what I needed to learn. As is the nature of experimentation, much of it is too insubstantial to publish and goes straight into the drawer.

My tendency to go overboard when starting on new things means I sometimes work very slowly to begin with.

The uncooperative mind #

I also have to contend with my own neurology. I’ve always known that I am almost certainly autistic, but there are no realistic pathways to an autism diagnosis for a middle-aged adult in Iceland and our healthcare system offers little in terms of resources or assistance even if I did get diagnosed.

That means “almost certainly” will have to do as I try to adapt my life around a characteristic that Icelandic healthcare finds inconvenient to acknowledge.

I’ve also been discovering that I’m not as high-functioning as I thought previously. I’ve been relying on very energy-intensive coping mechanisms and an over-extended working memory.

Put simply: I’m exhausted and need to change what I’m doing and rely less on high effort coping mechanisms.

This interacts with work I need to do in that I have pretty severe monotropism. Task switching is quite hard and, if I need to juggle different tasks, they need to be integrated into a set routine with predictable boundaries, otherwise none of it will happen. It also means that some tasks work best in batches that let me do one kind of work for a period that I can then parcel out over time.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve never charged by the hour as a freelancer. With a few exceptions that depend on the kind of work and my relationship with the client (you know who you are) you’re buying a day of my time or nothing at all.

All of which affects the media side of my business. When I experiment with media formats – newsletter styles and schedules, blog post structures, podcasts, video, and the like – they don’t just need to fulfil a business goal, they need to be workable for me personally and cooperate with an uncooperative mind.

For example, I’ve made the mistake in the past of just publishing blog posts as they were written, leading to a flurry of activity for a couple of weeks and dead air for another few.

This means that a media format – medium, structure, style, production, platform – needs to fulfil a number of criteria for it to work for me:

• It needs to further my business goals. I already have photography as a hobby, so other kinds of creative media needs to pay its way or be cost-effective. It doesn’t have to have a full-on revenue stream, but a clear and defined role in an overall business strategy would be ideal.
• I need to be able to do it in batches, with as little of what my brain considers task switching.
• It needs to be something I can add to or turn into a routine. Otherwise, I’ll only get it done once in a blue moon.
• Preparation work should either be minimal or low-energy. I’m fine with certain kinds of rote work. They require little in terms of mental energy so can be an enjoyable way to recharge while doing something productive. (This could explain why I find the suggestion that I should replace relaxing and largely deterministic rote work with error-prone and non-deterministic LLM “automation” that requires considerable mental energy to monitor and check to be nonsense. To me, it’s like saying that writing a book underwater is useful and fun. Just weird irrational nonsense that borders on surrealism.)
• It should involve very little in terms of unstructured or random social interaction. Interviews are fine, but anything that involves going out and talking to strangers is just not going to happen.
• It needs to have a repeatable process that can be improved over time.
• Low budget or a concretely positive Return on Investment. I don’t want to spend a ton of money getting started.
• A topic that’s likely to feed into my freelance or media business. I’ll cover the topic problem separately in my next blog post.

(And, yeah, I do realise that this kind of granular, bottom-up, analytical thinking you see in this post is yet another indicator of autism.)

But the vaguest and probably the most important criteria is that it needs to feel right. In what’s probably yet another symptom of my neurology, things have to feel right for them to happen and if they don’t “feel right” my mental energy drains at a rapid clip and burnout happens.

What’s “right” depends on my taste, my values, and how well I understand the thing and its purpose. It doesn’t have to be fun, but it does have to be at least vaguely interesting.

Sorting out all these issues requires trial and error. You don’t know what a task involves until you’ve tried it. Then you need to think about it, assess, and try again.

Video is the first and obvious candidate for these kinds of experiments.

The Video Experiments #

Video has become the core organising principle of our society. It’s how most people get their (mis)information, how we run our meetings, how people learn, and how they express themselves.

Figuring video out seems important.

Last year I experimented with a few different approaches to video.

I tested four different formats or structures before having to move on to other things.

If any of them had worked outright for me – fulfilled all the criteria – they would have become a routine and I would have continued to make them.

1. Walk-and-talk #

The walk-and-talk format that I tried for a couple of videos were interesting productions but didn’t lend themselves to batch work – not without sucking the joy out of the hikes themselves. The topics were also just personal rambling that didn’t fulfil any meaningful objective. Natural lighting was a bit tricky to work with, but the payoff is that the Icelandic environment is more interesting to look at than your average indoor room. Ideally I would need to buy an adapter to put my variable ND filter on the phone camera, but this style is workable even without that investment.

This could work as a method for making shorts – vertical videos for Shorts, TikTok, and other social media. Instead of making one ten-minute video at a time during a hike I could instead make a batch of five two minute shorts. With a more strategic choice of topics this might be an effective approach.

2. Home office video essays #

The obvious video format to experiment with has always been the talking head video essay.

My reasoning is straightforward: this format is extremely popular. It’s the modern equivalent of the blog post except, y’know, with the potential of reaching an actual mass audience.

Match it with a transcript and a podcast version, where each has been edited both for clarity and to adapt it to its medium as well as possible, and you’ve maximised your potential audience.

Process and edit the audio properly, and you’ve got a solid column-style podcast.

Edit the transcript a little bit more aggressively than usual, and you’ve got a solid newsletter.

The audience knows what to expect. You know what to do. You can start simple and improve the quality over time.

Looking back at my earlier experiments, I have a lot of problems with what I was doing:

• I chose the topics poorly. (Poor topic choice is the running theme in these experiments.)
• The structure of each video didn’t work. The whole thing was a muddle.
• My process for making them was too involved.
• Something feels off to me about the visuals: both how I looked and the lighting.

The topics and structure hang together. If you’re making media to further some sort of business, you need to be answering questions or solving problems that matter to people. Those then need to complement the rest of your business in some way.

One approach is the one, I think, coined by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman which has the memorable acronym PDF:

• Pain. You begin by describing the unanswered pain that the reader or viewer might want addressed. They will know immediately upon reading whether this is a pain they need solving or not.
• Dream. Describe the ideal – what it would like to have that pain solved.
• Fix. The solution. The explanation or detail that helps people solve the pain.

This should be followed by a Call to Action. “Subscribe to my newsletter! Like, Share, and Subscribe! Join my Patreon!”

Others have outlined very similar processes. Chris Goor, for example, calls it HIDE, or Hook, Intrigue, Delivery and Exit, which correspond to Amy’s Pain, Dream, Fix, and Call to Action, but Chris is framing it specifically in terms of making captivating videos.

I followed none of that in these early videos. This is something I need to do better.

I did manage to improve how my talking head videos looked in later shorts, but there’s still some ways to go. I’ve continued to experiment in private, delivering an image of my home office without actually changing said home office or buying expensive kit.

3. Home office shorts #

These looked a little bit better. I did them to promote a graphic novel to the Icelandic market and not really to build an audience (that kind of work should have started months prior to publishing).

It hinted at a more repeatable process. Shorts lend themselves to batch creation, obviously.

Reviewing these in hindsight, I still think that videos shot in the Icelandic environment would be more interesting, visually, than these but this approach could be a solid fallback for when the weather is being uncooperative, which is most of the time here in the subarctic.

I need to use props more in these videos. Having something in your hands to show is a simple and effective way to make the video just a little bit more visually interesting.

4. Shorts with narration #

I did these to promote that same graphic novel.

The basic approach is to narrate over a visually interesting sequence of images or videos.

This format works extremely well when you have something very visual to show but, personally, I don’t think it works well with generic images or shots.

Sure, everybody does it on YouTube, but I think it’s a big contributor to the ongoing homogenisation of online video. Everything looks the same and is lit the same. (So many soft-boxes.)

I’m not fond of how stock footage or the ever-present marginally related B-roll that infects most videos online makes everything look the same, but if the topic is visual, and you have visuals to show, then you show the visuals.

It’s more work, usually, but when the topic lends itself to it, you take that win and run with it.

Audio experiments #

The other experiments I’ve been doing involve just audio: no video or graphics.

What surprise me, considering how much I enjoy photography, is that I’ve been enjoying audio-only productions more than I did video. That isn’t a deciding factor by any means – like I wrote above, interesting is more important than fun – but it wasn’t something I expected.

Through I probably should have expected my enjoyment at least a bit. I come from a family of radio people all the way back to my great-granddad. Throw a dart at my family tree and odds are you’d hit somebody who has, at least for some part of their life, worked in radio, myself included. I have opinions on microphones even though I haven’t used one in any serious work-related capacity for over twenty-five years. My “shitty” headphones are the Sony noise-cancelling ones I mostly use with my weighted blanket. (Again, a bit of an autism cliché, that.) I should have seen this coming.

But I’m also very much not an audiophile. The audiophile space is largely populated by con artists and the self-deluded, but the biggest reason is that my hearing is damaged. Even during childhood my hearing range topped out at around 15 000 hertz, so I’ve never heard the sound of a CRT hum (which is above 15 000 hertz) for example. I also have auditory processing issues which may or may not be related to the damage. Today my hearing isn’t great. It’s probably closer to the average for men my age than when I was younger, but that’s largely due to the dudes of my generation treating their ears with little respect, so their hearing has been getting worse faster than mine.

So, while my enjoyment of audio may well be obvious in hindsight I did have plenty of reason to discount it.

Audio has several practical advantages:

• Much easier to self-host and distribute in various ways because of the smaller file sizes.
• Podcasts are still a mass medium.
• You can distribute to video platforms with just a tiny bit of decorative imagery. It might not play well with their algorithms but can still extend your reach and save bandwidth.
• Audio editing is similar to editing text in that they can be seamless. It isn’t a jump cut if you can’t see the jump.
• Working with audio is much easier and less labour-intensive than video.
• You don’t have to worry about lighting or, y’know, your complexion, but you do need to think about acoustics, background noise, and reflections.
• A good microphone is proportionally cheaper than a good camera.
• Microphones are awesome, in general. Just look at them. Amazing devices. So cool.

Atmosphere #

One aspect of getting back into audio recording that I have enjoyed has been practicing a simplistic form of field recording during my photography hikes. Sometimes I just stop, take in the atmosphere of a location and record a bit of sound.

It brings me joy.

For example, just listen to the sound of this bee going from flower to flower and doing a might fine job despite very windy conditions.

Or this recording from my balcony where you can hear my neighbour’s cock crow.

Isn’t that nice?

It isn’t practical in any way but is a nice complement to the photography as a hobby.

Audio journals #

The experiment I highlighted in my last newsletter was more or less just to answer the question could you do a podcast using a similar format and process as a blog post?

And the answer seems to be “yes, yes you can, absolutely” – people don’t seem to be inherently against podcast formats that don’t involve a bunch of people nattering on for hours – but it does come with many of the same downsides as a blog or newsletter.

You can run your blog as a journal and use it as a way to structure your thoughts, generate ideas, and process what is happening in your field or around you.

You can also run your blog to build an audience for your business with writing helps people with their problems or answers their questions.

One blog or newsletter can do both. Documenting your thought process is useful to others. But you need to strike a balance and often that comes at the expense of the journalling side of the blog.

I’ve been finding out that audio journals work in very similar ways. Procedurally and structurally they work quite well. Much as with video, location recording can sound more interesting, but recording at home can work well as a fallback. But unlike video there’s a lot less work involved both in preparation and production.

But they also have many of the downsides built into blogging.

Journaling in general is a good mechanism for generating ideas. It’s not uncommon for me to have to scrap half a blog post because writing it gave me a much better idea that needs more work. The same has been happening with my audio journaling experiments. I’ve had to file away at least one recording because it gave me a much better idea for the future.

Another one went in the bin because I, sensibly as it turns out, had ambiguous feelings about what I had said and decided to digest it a bit.

I was recording a journal where I was processing my own rigid thinking. Cognitive inflexibility is something I know has on some level more to do with my neurodivergence than my actual opinions because it gets worse when I’m tired.

Another way to put it is that people’s actions don’t get more or less ethical just because my own energy levels change, but I do get more or less judgemental.

Part of that journal went into untangling my feelings about a couple of YouTube personalities: Hank Green and Adam Conover.

Namely, my first instinct to them fucking up is “in the bin with them, they fucked up! I’m never watching their garbage again.”

At least in Adam Conover’s case. I’ve never watched a Hank Green video to the end.

Adam Conover, however, I largely enjoyed. Not a huge fan, but if he was covering a topic I found interesting, I’d click and watch. And as far as I could tell when recording my journal, my harsh judgement of him was objectively unfair of me. He’d messed up by taking on a cryptocoin sponsor, but he had apologised and hadn’t seemed to have made another mess since.

I still couldn’t and can’t bring myself to watch any of his videos. The vibes are off, which I chalked up to my tendency towards rigid thinking.

“I should give him a change. But he broke the rules!”

I still couldn’t talk myself out of the notion that I don’t owe these influencer personalities anything, they aren’t my friends, and any of them that starts messing about with “AI” advocacy, Effective Altruism, or cryptocoins can just fuck right off. It may be cognitive inflexibility on my part, but fuck 'em.

This caused me a little bit of anxiety as I worry about which parts of my behaviour are my neurology and which are my genuine personality.

Then he crops up as a contributor to a… flirting conference? One that seems to be run by a bunch of rationalist, evopsych, “AI” Doomer types?

His name has since been removed from the conference page, but my hesitancy looks justified and sometimes a rigid moral framework – “don’t take money from or hang out with those kinds of assholes” – turns out to be rigid and inflexible for reasons that are practical and useful.

(This reminds me: I need to post less on social media in general.)

Taken together this means audio journals, much like blogs, are a bit of a balancing act that need to be in the mix with other forms of writing or storytelling.

Workshopping a podcast idea #

As you might guess, I’ve been planning to launch a podcast, beyond just the audio journal that I’m planning to cross-post to the existing newsletter.

I’ve been workshopping ideas and getting people’s feedback on approaches and topics.

It’s getting to a place where the next logical step is to record a couple of test episodes with my collaborator and see how it works.

One aspect to it that I want to try is to position it specifically as an audio-only podcast.

That is, the participants won’t be on camera or zoom during recording and even though I may post them on YouTube, you won’t be watching any of us talk. The video aspect would be superfluous and entirely decorative.

“Audio-only podcast” used to be a tautology, but increasingly podcasts are expected to be YouTube series. Basically, many podcasts have become low-rent TV talk shows.

I want to specifically not do that even though I personally have no aversion to video (see the section above on video).

A major reason for this is that quite a few people are hesitant to be on camera in this day and age for reasons that are entirely rational.

Requiring a camera presence in that way rules out both interesting collaborators and a number of interview subjects – especially ones that feel more vulnerable.

People, in my experience, also talk very differently when they know they’re on video than when just their voice is being recorded. I’m curious to see if that translates into a podcast style.

Positioning it as “audio-only” also serves as a signal to the audience about the priorities of the podcast, how we might approach both topics and interview subjects, as well as its structure.

The newsletter #

The background to all of this is my newsletter, which has been unusually quiet for the past few months.

Although, if you look through the archives, it isn’t that unusual. Over the quarter decade or so that I’ve been blogging I’ve regularly paused blogs, discontinued them, and launched new ones.

By a conservative count this is at least my ninth blog. Most of the rest are long since offline and honestly didn’t work.

Even this blog has gaps where my priorities shifted and audience-building became less necessary to my career.

Writing on baldurbjarnason.com has been a fixture in my career and I don’t see myself quitting it any time soon. It’s genuinely the foundation for everything I’ve done. Nor do I see myself abandoning prose writing.

I’ve been writing, until a few months ago, two to four essays or posts every month for the past five or so years.

I did this because it worked. People found it helpful and I sold books and services. Sometimes the pace wasn’t working, so I dialled it down to two a month. Sometimes the topic wasn’t working – it was getting read but not translating into leads, sales, or easier launches – so I paused and shifted topics.

Then it largely stopped working. Largely.

• The tech writing freelance leads disappeared, but that was fine at the time because my book on the business risks of generative models was doing okay.
• Then the freelance web developer leads began to dissipate. I work mostly in web dev and my declared aversion to LLM tools probably doesn’t endear me to potential clients.
• Then the dev training market basically disappeared. Most of my peers who were doing training and education – especially in web dev – have seen their business collapse. There are a few survivors, but it seems that even many of the devs who aren’t using LLMs for coding are still using them to “learn”. Corporate training budgets seem to be largely gone.
• Search engine traffic was never much of a factor for my site, but I’ve heard from others that this is basically gone as well.
• The books have still been selling at a semiregular pace, which is great.

I still have an audience, which I’m thankful for, but the economy both I and the audience live in has changed fundamentally. Circumstances, priorities, and values have changed.

All of which is to say that there isn’t anything wrong with the blog or newsletter format and there’s still a lot of value in using it as a venue to detail my thoughts and understanding (like I’m doing here).

I’ve made this argument before, but if I’m going to keep my media and publishing business going, even as a sideline, I’m going to need to think about new topics. Not to replace this newsletter specifically but as a substitute for the decline in freelance and training work. It makes sense to approach those new topics with a broader approach to media and formats in mind.

If I had started down the path of audio and video before the “AI” bubble, much of this would have been simpler. I would have had clear options had wanted to shift away from web development as a topic.

For example, even though I don’t have much familiarity with the Zig programming language, I could have started documenting my learning process on the blog and over time built up to something like a “Zig for web developers” ebook or course. It would have been a lot of work, but work that was by its nature fairly straightforward. The audience would know what they would be getting. Employers still had training budgets. Freelancers were still doing well enough to be able to chalk a book or course down as an expense. I know – or can figure out – how to learn a new programming language, how to write about it, and then how to explain it in the context of something else I know.

Even though the audience for that kind of learning is never going to be zero, it’s now much smaller than it used to be which would make something like it a bigger risk and more work for smaller reward.

Not impossible, but harder overall.

The “AI” bubble has also made me and many others much more sceptical about wanting to be a part of the tech and software industry in the long term, which could make the notion of retraining in another part of the field hard to swallow.

So, even as I’m getting a clearer and clearer picture of how to approach audio, video, and even the newsletter, the topic – the most important part of a media business – remains less clear.

But it still needs to be tackled, I still need to decide, and I have a few ideas, all of which I plan to go over in the second part.

Until next time.

Here are a couple of attempts of mine to take moody photos of the geothermal fields behind the horticultural school, by the Fífilbrekka cottage.

These are from a new path that was made in the reforestation area to the north of the town to a small grove called Ísakslundur that wasn’t really accessible before.

Went on a day trip to Borgarnes this week. The highlight was the café Kaffi Kyrrð. Also went to the Settlement Exhibition in the Settlement Center which was so old the videos were in standard definition. But a nice town and a great trip

Took a slightly less trodden route during a recent hike.

Since I’m guessing many of you have had a somewhat stressful day like I did, here are a few photos of a redwing out and about doing its thing.

I’m getting a little bit more comfortable with saturated colours in my photographs.

This common redshank was very dissatisfied with my presence, which most likely means the nest was nearby

Bonus horsie.

Horse doing horsie things.

So, this is Gríma. She lives next to the spot of grass that serves double duty as the town official football field and the overflow for the local campsite on busy days in the summer.

Don’t know this dog’s name but it seemed to be having a good day.

Big yawn.

This hen was out and about earlier this week.

This blackbird had its beak full of worms and insects. It had to do that thing where you stop in your tracks and shuffle things around a bit so as to not drop your groceries.

So this used to be the power station for a wool mill back before there was even a town here in Hveragerði.

Common redshanks very vocally object to your presence in their territory.

The horses were surrounded by a beautiful landscape and a mass of flies. And a bunch of starlings, young and old, snacking on the flies.

Another one for the “bird on a fence post” files. This time a starling.

So, when the weather is nice my neighbour Grása, this longhaired grey and white cat, likes to nap outside in the overgrown grass by one of the trees in the garden.

My walks and Grása’s have been crossing paths lately.

Goldcrests are the smallest and shiest birds we have here in Iceland. I managed to spot some movement, couldn’t see clearly even when zoomed in, but after cropping in on the extreme zoom, lo and behold, a goldcrest.

This here is here is a bird called “Jaðrakan” in Icelandic or the black-tailed godwit in English. There’s a pair that seems to nest every year somewhere between the golf course and the horticultural school.

Foggy pasture.

The model today is my neighbour Lukka, a very friendly black and white cat.

Despite people’s common superstitions about the creative process, the tortured artist isn’t very productive and even a mild anxiety or burnout can throw much of your process into a tailspin.

But I have been thinking.

I’ve regularly noted that writing and text has lost its primacy as an information medium. The internet extended its life but, as Neil Postman and others noted in the 80s, “text” as a medium has not had a central role in our societies for decades at this point.

It’s for this reason that I’ve been, semi-regularly, brushing up on my very rusty media skills (I actually did a stint at film school and worked in TV and radio in my early twenties) and trying my hand at video.

I’ve finally gotten around to continuing those experiments but the break was useful in one regard:

Time to think gives you time to think.

(It may seem facetious to say something so obvious but sometimes you get so stuck inside your own head that you don’t see the obvious and stumbling on it becomes a genuine insight.)

My basic idea is that, for now, audio on it’s own is a better fit for somebody like me whose work is so heavy on prose.

There’s a reason why we have audiobooks but “videobooks” only exist as movies with multimillion dollar budgets. Audio matches many of the constraints of text as a medium. On its own it’s edited more like text than video. It’s more work than text but much less work on its own than video.

So, as a step towards expanding my media “footprint” I’ve been doing a few audio experiments with an eye towards podcasts.

I haven’t ruled out doing more video at some point, but if I decide to go in that direction then audio is likely to work as a useful foundation.

But I’ve resisted doing podcasts in the past for a very good reason:

I find them incredibly boring and tedious as a listener.

Dudes chatting aimlessly about a topic for a couple of hours, barely bothering to edit it down. It all seems targeted at the same demographic as live talk radio, except with even less charm and structure.

There are great podcasts, but they are usually the result of more work than just gathering a bunch of guys together on Zencastr. Sometimes its interviews. Sometimes it’s just a slightly more interesting group of people. Sometimes it’s more produced.

So, I’m working on a few ideas and on my processes. I’ve got an idea for a conversation/interview podcast but I’m also thinking about a format that tries to take a simple audio column and make it marginally more interesting.

None of this is working well at the moment but what follows is the first experiment that’s showing a bit more of a cohesive shape than my earlier ones.

It still isn’t quite working, but it’s starting to get interesting.

I wanted to test a few things in this experiment:

• Whether a more vivid environment in the audio would help or hinder the message.
• Would an unscripted but heavily edited in post episode result in a cohesive argument and a more “natural” sounding recording?
• Would the basic technology work? (Microphones. Recorder. Wind protection.)
• Would editing work on Linux? (Important for my workflow that I don’t have to boot up into Windows for work.)
• How much work would it be to create accurate transcripts or captions (I may not be doing video but I could still upload audio as video)?

I think the results are mixed. I personally like hearing more of the environment, but the unscripted “stream of consciousness” argument ended up being unwieldy and the end result doesn’t quite work as well as I liked. The technology worked quite well. Editing on Linux was a doddle. Reaper worked quite well. It has a bit of a learning curve, as any media production app does, but after watching a few tutorials I found that it’s clearly designed with an understanding of the work people do with it. The transcripts turned out to be a lot of work, even with the help of one of the less offensive transcription models my pronunciation and accent regularly caused problems.

I’m not going to set up a podcast feed for this yet, not until I’ve got a better handle on the approach and format for this, but I will continue with the experiments until I settle on something.

I think for my next experiment I’ll try for something more scripted or even fully scripted. A fully scripted one would simplify transcription. I might try a different microphone. There are a few other aspects of this that I might change or adjust. But you can listen to the first experiment below and hear for yourself.

It’s only ten minutes or so.

And a transcript follows below that.

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity) #

My name is Baldur Bjarnason. I work at the cross section between tech

and publishing and have been writing about it for over twenty five years. This is a podcast that is a bit of an experiment. As in, it’s unscripted but will be edited before publishing and the idea is that by editing what would be my first draft of something, we get the structure and argument and quality that you get from writing, but hopefully with a little bit of the spontaneity that you get with the first quick recording of an idea.

And I’m recording this outside largely because otherwise I’d be bored. It really isn’t more complicated than that. And if you listen you can hear parts of the town. The cliffs are just literally just over the town so you can probably hear people and hikers and you can hear the the street—the road—that goes by the town. Especially when you get this high. The obstructions that would usually dampen the sound of traffic you kind of go above them, so …

There’s less there’s less dirt between us and the road than there would be—than there is when we’re at ground level.

But what I want to talk about this time is… I’ve been pondering—I’ve been kind of obsessed with the notion of boredom or specifically the boredom that you get with important topics.

This is not a reaction to anybody in specific or anything particular because it’s kind of an observation on my end as well. Where I… I mean, one of the reasons why I don’t tackle “AI” as a topic, for example, that much any more, even though there’s no shortage of nonsense going on in that arena, is because I covered most of the core arguments that I have to make years ago. like, both in the book I wrote and in the in blog posts and newsletters – I even did a few interviews – and social media

And…

I keep following people, or reading people, reacting to yet another news story about “AI” or yet another argument pro or con “AI” and the same thing with politics, with climate change, and it’s… It is repetitive and it is boring! And it legitimately drains your attention. But…

There’s a tendency—there’s a risk there, that…

There’s a tendency to blame…

Well twofold: our attention has declined over the years that we are unable to focus like our our ancestors used to be able to focus. Or that social media is tapping into something primordial in our minds and that is sapping our ability to focus and read and take in information. Or that the younger generations are unable to or don’t know how to read and have have been let down by the education system but and now are basically feral children that are incapable of functioning within an information society or…

These narratives have a history and there’s reason why we… we keep referring back to them. Dating back to the era of Plato where he had a similar complaint about the youth of his time being unable to remember anything because of the innovation of writing, but what we forget is…

Well first of all…

Sometimes the worry is warranted.

But not in the way that you think. It’s not that…

It’s not an observation of a decline in the youth. It is… We are seeing a decline in the structural stability of the systems we work within and we are grasping onto a symptom of that decline, which is how it’s expressed in the youth. And we blame the youth or we blame a new technology. But fundamentally it’s the system. It’s the political class that’s letting us down. Or, you know, the class that the political class is serving. And you can see this evolution happening over the past decades in western society, where our political class has let us down.

They are unfathomably—they are completely uninterested in dealing with climate change. They are… They don’t care about… They don’t really care about the economy. They care about how the economy serves the wealthy. They don’t care about actually improving productivity. They don’t care about making industry robust and they don’t care about making society work and last.

And that…

That lack of care. That servile deference to the wealthy and their needs and how their needs trump that of the society they operate within. That’s the thing that we are observing but we don’t have a vocabulary for it. We don’t have a narrative. The decline of the youth today is a narrative that we are familiar with, it’s something that we can relate to, we can grasp and reach for.

[Editors note: another narrative that people quite often reach for is “moral decay” which is basically a variation of the “declining youth” story but with more scope for blaming immigrants and other minorities as well.]

But nobody asks why is the education system in the state it is today? Why do young people today… why haven’t they had the same opportunities to exercise their reading and their skills and their interest? Why have… Why are they operating within an economy where their current skill levels seemed to be accommodated, where their – inexperience in dealing with the information – the information flow, the knowledge and the understanding that is needed to function as a citizen in a democracy. Why why why has it been so easy for them to bypass that?

And not their fault. It’s a system that we’re all operating in and it’s the priorities of that system where what matters is how the wealthy get wealthier and not, how well does work work for society? How well does the economy support our humanity, our existence, our – the longevity of our society?

None of that matters and so things start to fall apart. And because we don’t have a word for the people who manage our society are corrupt and letting everything fall apart… Well, we do…

I need to correct myself. We do. But that word is ‘revolution’ and nobody wants that. Because there’s a reason why…

Revolutions always lead to dark times afterwards.

It’s much better to try and figure out a democratic way of changing things but, to do that we need to understand that the current system is broken and…

I don’t know if we’re willing to actually try that

Anyway… this is – has been an experiment. Testing out recording outside. I am testing the windshields. I am testing the idea of editing this into coherence and making it work as a piece. And also making an experiment with attention span because I get bored with two hour podcast. So I am going to start walking down the cliffs. It’s not actually – they are cliffs but the path up and down is very walkable

It’s a managed hiking path route that winds up, that is quite easy. But I’m going – gotta head back, because it’s going to be dinner time soon and I’m cooking.

So…

Until next time. Hopefully.

We’ll see.

I’m guessing my name helped prompt those. We all have very traditional Icelandic names in my family.

If the comment caught me at the wrong time, I’d occasionally reply in my usual literal-minded way:

The Vikings were coastal raiders and Iceland is an island in the middle of bloody nowhere. Once Iceland was settled in 930, we were mostly a nation of farmers and substantially Celtic. We were probably the least ‘Viking’ of all the Nordic countries. Besides, we converted to Christianity in the year 1000, so we were only pagan for a few decades at most. The Icelandic Sagas are a bit like cowboy movies in that they’re the events of a few short years spun into a nation-building mythology that’s well out of proportion to their historical impact.

The idea of us being a “Viking nation” has a strong hold on people’s imagination. But we’ve been a Christian culture for a thousand years. Longer if you account for the few settlers like my ancestor Auður Djúpúðga who were Christian a century before the rest of the nation converted.

One of the pitfalls of growing up in a Christian culture, one that sticks with you even when, like me, you’ve been an atheist most of your life, is a tendency towards knee-jerk millenarianist thinking.

“This changes everything!”

No matter the flavour of Christianity, a core idea baked into every aspect of the religion is that singular revelatory events can fundamentally change the world. There’s the “before”. Then the “event”. Then an “after” that has been completely transformed. In Christianity itself this is usually associated with Christ’s chaotic transit schedule – “He is here! He has left! He is about to arrive again! Now he’s leaving again! But he’s also somehow always been here! And not.” – but the mode of thinking is common throughout literature, philosophy, and storytelling in the Christian west.

When we tell our stories and spout our opinions, we are very prone to statements along the lines of “this changes everything!”.

However, when you study comparative literature you quickly discover that cultures dominated by other religions tend not to have this tendency, at least not to the same extent.

This colours academic thinking as well. Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift, for example, on the face of it frames scientific progress as a series of singular revelatory events that each change an entire field of study in almost one go. But if you dig into the text itself, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the process it describes is one where the worldviews of scientists and academics change one by one, where many simply never adopt the new worldview – the one that more cohesively explains what they’ve been observing – and instead stick to preexisting models. Even the most sudden and dramatic paradigm shifts are processes of epistemic diffusion where the old and new models of truth coexist and interact. All of which is to say that Kuhn’s ideas lend themselves to a pluralistic interpretation provided you actually dig into the text itself, and it means that, if you squint, you could make the ideas work with theories of epistemic anarchism such as that of Paul Feyerabend.

Kuhn’s paradigm shift is less a revelation and more a cycle where the new contains elements of the old and the old attains elements of the new.

From an individual perspective, switching your worldview or mental model on a problem or topic can feel revelatory. “This changes everything!” But the world hasn’t changed. All that changed is how you understand it.

I say all this because I don’t want people to fall into the pitfall of expecting revolution. But I do want you to be open to the idea that events can change, transform even, our understanding of how things work.

There have been a few moments in my life where singular events changed my worldview without truly changing any of the facts I knew.

They simply triggered a new thought: “Oh, this explains what’s been happening.”

The simultaneous realisation that the core argument of my PhD thesis was simply incorrect but that it would also pass easily because I knew the people who were likely to judge it – the theory would play to their biases. I had the choice of continuing to work on what was incorrect and get a PhD or to deliver what I believed to be true and almost certainly not finish the PhD. I still don’t know if I made the right choice. I’m certainly not proud of it.

Walking through the ASDA superstore in Bristol and seeing it for the monument to destruction that it is. Civilisation-scale existential decay as aisles and aisles of branded consumer goods.

Sitting in on a talk on autism diagnoses, one of a series of scientific talks, watching an animation they used as a diagnostic aid, hearing everybody around me laugh as if the shapes on the screen made sense, only then truly understanding myself, and feeling more alone than I have ever felt before or since.

Nothing changed in these moments but in personal terms there was a “before”, the moment, followed by the “after” where everything had changed. The world was the same. But to me the world had transformed.

The US technopolistic hegemony #

Reading that Dmitry Sklyarov had been arrested for violating the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act was the moment I first truly understood how the technopoly of the US government and the tech industry worked.

There have been many definitions of Neil Postman’s term technopoly but mine is:

In a technopoly, the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology.

New ideas in education or healthcare, for example, are evaluated through a technological lens and not whether they educate or heal.

The Sklyarov case was notable for a few reasons:

• He and ElcomSoft had been working within the preexisting paradigm where ideas were evaluated based on their quality and how well they stood up to discourse. Adobe had shipped ebook DRM software that was flawed as designed and trivially breakable. Exposing these failures was a legitimate research activity.
• But ideas in a technopoly aren’t evaluated based on how well they work but in terms of how well they support technology as a culture. That the systems were crap didn’t matter: they were sacrosanct.
• A technopoly is both cultural and political because “technology” is both a culture and a self-reinforcing socioeconomic system. Looking at the world through the lens of “technology” leads you to think about the world in terms of technology. Once you accept it as a frame of reference it becomes all-encompassing.
• By defending the technopoly the US government was signalling to its allies that, as a political and cultural paradigm, the technological mode of thought was not optional. They clearly saw this worldview as integral to the future of the US hegemony.

Despite Adobe withdrawing its complaint, the US persisted in pursuing the case because the point it was making was larger than a single company.

That the case ended in acquittal was neither here nor there – although it admittedly mattered to the defendants. What mattered to the rest of us was that it wasn’t enough for the United States that they effectively controlled tech and copyright policy worldwide – most of its allies had followed its example and implemented or were in the process of implementing their own version of the DMCA – they demanded that thought, debate, and meaning conformed as well. The economics and ideology of Technology were – always – intertwined.

Global tech policy and discourse was set and enforced by the US to favour US-based tech companies whether the companies involved wanted it or not.

The global tech economy #

Our current globalised tech industry can only exist because of the protectionism and policy uniformity imposed by the United States on its hegemony. That billions of people across dozens of countries work and interact on unified platforms whose laws and regulations are, for all practical purposes, basically that of the US – the policies of end-user nations tend to have a minimal effect on how any of these platforms are run – is an artifact of US dominance.

It’s not because these companies are so fantastic or that their products are so amazing that countries would face local uprisings if they tried to keep them in check. They are, more often than not, about as popular and respected as tobacco or pharmaceutical companies – some of them and their products are polling in terms of public sentiment in ranges similar to child molesters or authoritarian immigration enforcement entities – and their CEOs are some of the more despised public figures in recent history.

Countries can fine the tech industry, up to a point, as that just establishes the cost of doing business. “This is the price list for inflicting societal suffering. Pick the one that suits your business model.” But attempts to genuinely change the rules – beyond just enforcing bullshit compliance regulations that mostly serve to keep local upstart competitors in check – will be blocked, overtly or covertly, by the United States.

Before, when the US system of free-flowing trade was still in full force, much of the pressure was implicit or covert. US diplomats didn’t need to say anything. All that was needed was a tacit understanding that there were rules, that the US set those rules, and that those who followed the rules would benefit from the trade that came with being a part of the global hegemony.

The rules didn’t need to be enforced directly except in extreme cases. Even legislation such as the EU’s GDPR exists mostly to strengthen the existing system by establishing rules and boundaries that only incumbent – mostly US – tech companies have the resources to fully follow, and the system was packed with enough exceptions and loopholes to ensure that when it came to changing corporate behaviour it was more theatre than action.

Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment.

The game of technology is defined and controlled by the United States of America. Local governments can impose rules that moderate the impact, but genuine limitations on technology are impossible.

Or, they used to be.

The decline #

In parallel with the rise of the technopoly over the past couple of decades the US’s global dominance has been declining. The 2007 crash effectively legalising financial fraud – you only get jail time if you defraud the rich – lead to both a decline in the rule of law in the US and an excessively financialised economy. When stock markets and the like are overrepresented they suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive.

If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth.

The US has coasted on the fact that it’s economy is so big that it could afford all the finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood. At least for a while.

The other force driving the decline is China.

The rise of China and the decline of the rule of law governing finance in the US has added tension to the relationships in the western hegemony. It’s difficult for the EU to negotiate its ongoing “equitable” surrender to US economic policy if that economic policy just amounts to “whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get.”

Somewhat oversimplifying matters, for a while the bargain was that the EU could have protectionist policies for its industries and in exchange they’d mostly acquiesce to US dominance of tech. Escalating abuses, corrupt tech oligarchs, social media manipulation of politics and elections, attempts to directly co-opt education and healthcare industries, and – with “AI” – outright attacks on many of Europe’s biggest industries such as culture and media, have contributed to the fraying of this relationship.

The EU suffers from the double bind of being protectionist of its industries – that’s literally what it’s for – while at the same time explicitly allowing direct attacks on those industries and its single market because the US tech industry – protected by the US and their dominance over the global economy – has broadened the scope of its ambitions to include “everything, everywhere.” If the EU moves to protect their industries they are acting against the technopoly and US hegemony that frames their very understanding of the world. At the same time their very reason for existence is the protection of their local industries and market and allowing their destruction is unthinkable. Neither action is conceivable, hence the double bind. Psychologically, a double bind like this would feel as confusing as being told you have to bite your own arm because the arm misbehaving. Even if it’s correct, even if your arm is indeed misbehaving and biting it is indeed all you can do to stop it, the thought still has the flavour of madness.

Other countries and regions historically allied with the US are in a similar internal conflict.

Voters, labour, and industry increasingly demand checks on the US tech industry. Populist politicians speak out against social media platforms. Tech companies are compared directly to the tobacco industry. Right-wing nationalist calls for “sovereignty” are redefined to include technological autonomy.

But participation in the US-controlled global economy is contingent on putting as few limitations on the excesses of tech as possible, an implicit bargain that has repeatedly been made explicit by their current president.

That same president has, in a way, presented the world with a resolution to the double bind by unceremoniously ending the US hegemony. His trade war partially unravelled the status quo, but it’s his diplomacy or lack thereof that put a period to era of American dominance.

The moment this became obvious was the Iran crisis.

“This changes everything!” as they would say.

The hegemony ends #

The closing of the Hormuz strait is a bigger event than portrayed by most mainstream media.

Not only did the US fail to beat a much smaller nation – one that has been operating under crippling economic sanctions for years and plagued with internal turmoil – into submission, they effectively sabotaged the world market, destroyed all of their alliances in Asia, and destabilised the petrodollar bargain all at once.

It is triggering a monumental economic crisis – this much we’ve been told – but a longer-lasting change is how it has accelerated the unravelling of the old world order.

The impact of removing 20% of the world’s oil and gas supply isn’t distributed equally. It’s primarily, at least to begin with, born by countries in Asia, many of whom are historically some of the US’s strongest allies in the region. This is affecting their industries and agriculture and threatens both starvation and economic collapse.

What’s more, they know who’s to blame:

Nam Aoi, 58, said she can only afford to plant on 19 of her 32 hectares. Until now, she never left farmland barren before.

Some of her neighbors blame the Thai government for not helping enough. Others accuse fertilizer companies of profiteering during an emergency. But standing at her paddy field under the 102-degree heat, sweat beading on her forehead, Nam Aoi said she faults only two men: Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Those two held hands and created war,” Nam Aoi said, her voice rising. “Nothing is normal because of them.”

Iran war is crushing Asia’s farmers, threatening global food supply - The Washington Post

The petrodollar bargain where the world’s biggest oil producers agree to only sell oil for dollars – propping up the dollar and forcing countries to buy the currency in excess of what their direct economic relationship to the US would require – has been falling apart in slow motion over the past few years, but this latest crisis simultaneously takes much of the dollar-priced oil directly off the market and weakens the underlying relationship so that the bargain is less likely to hold whenever the strait opens again.

There’s a risk that US allies in Asia crash-transition to alternative energy sources because of the Hormuz crisis, increasing their reliance on China, decreasing their reliance on Gulf oil, reducing their investment in the US dollar, and begin the process of severing themselves from US in terms of trade and diplomacy.

If the crisis spreads to the EU, coming straight at the heels of the Greenland and tariff crises, the pressure within the EU to disentangle itself from the US increases substantially.

These processes now look pretty inevitable. The question is mostly how long it will take.

The US no longer has the power or influence it once did and that changes everything for US tech companies.

The old is dying #

We’re in a very odd place. We’ve clearly come to an end, of sorts, but it’s an ongoing end – a decline mixed with stepwise collapses – so we don’t get the release that comes with closure or the certainty of knowing your fate.

We’re in a crisis because, as Antonio Gramsci said, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

I have spent much of my career pulling together thoughts on why the software industry behaves the way it behaves. Management is mostly motivated by stock prices, not by delivering valuable software at a profit, but that only explains their drive, not the mechanism they apply to reach for their ambitions.

The mechanism is the application of control. Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries. Why make software for hotels when you can control the hotel industry? Why make software for taxis when you can replace the entire industry with software? Instead of trying to entice customers to upgrade their software by making new versions more valuable to them, push them to a subscription service where you control what they get, when they get it, and what value they’re allowed to unlock from their own businesses. Why sell Word when you can sell an Office 365 Cloud Subscription?

The endpoint of this is to replace every industry that remains with generative models. Cut back on actual development of Photoshop, for example, lower development costs and programmer overhead even as you replace the industries that are your customers with automatic image and video generators.

But writing out a detailed analysis of the how, what, why, and where of the software industry’s grasp for control doesn’t really make that much sense when we don’t know how any of it’s going to pan out.

The software industry is built on the foundation provided by an unchallenged US global hegemony. Without it, without the economic force provided by the US dollar, the US having access to all of our data around the globe and their control over payment systems and networking would be less tenable. Today’s software industry would not exist. Without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did.

Even as the software industry achieves its ne plus ultra – the unprecedented achievement of controlling all language, media, and office work in the west by turning “AI” into the universal intermediary – the foundation they built on is crumbling.

A big chunk of my livelihood over the past few years has been in helping people understand the software industry on both a micro- and macro-level. Why do software companies behave the way they do? Where should you copy them, and where should you chart a different path? What works and doesn’t work in a software development project? What has worked for me? What has worked for those like me?

Even my writing on “AI” has centred on how things work, not on politics, social impact, education, or culture:

• How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise, provided nobody else uses LLMs. The results are catastrophic when everybody is using them.)
• How do LLMs affect the thinking of those that use them? (Quite a bit, mostly for the worse, but the exact causes and effects are tough to assess.)
• Does it work for business or not? (Mostly not. The inherent variability of a generative model means that the benefits will always be mostly hypothetical while the harms are widespread and long-lasting and substantially outweigh the benefits that can be realised.)

But “AI”, even more so than any other tech, is contingent on political clout. It’s what forces through data centres, lets companies infringe on copyright and violate software licences, renders them at least temporarily immune to all kinds of consumer protections and wrongful death suits, and results in the political collaboration where “AI” systems provide authoritarian states with “accountability sinks” and algorithmic cover for institutional racism. It’s this political partnership more than anything inherent in the technology that has let the “AI” bubble get this far and change so much.

It’s also what makes analysis so fraught because the US is over as a global power. Getting beat by a cash-starved, under-resourced, extremist state struggling to quell internal unrest is not something that happens to global superpowers. Remember, this isn’t an instance of asymmetric warfare like the Vietnam War where the very strengths of an empire are turned into weaknesses. Iran has big obvious military targets and an organised military that’s still functioning after an all-out attack by the US. It’s state versus state where even a draw means the big state lost. It’s what happens to shit-heel nations who don’t know their time has come, like when the United Kingdom and France rushed headlong into the Suez Crisis.

But the Hormuz crisis also delivered a second mortal blow to the US-controlled globalised market. You can’t remove 20% of the world’s energy output, not to mention a number of other essential commodities, without disastrous consequences. Two weeks would have been bad enough. Two months are a catastrophe. A whole summer would be unimaginable.

Crises happen. As do strategic miscalculations. Even empires make mistakes. What sets the recent crises – Hormuz, tariffs, and Greenland – apart is how the US has used them as an opportunity to deliberately signal the end of its own empire. They first turned on their trading partners, then their allies in Europe, and then they delivered one of this century’s biggest economic and energy crises to their allies in Asia.

Countries that were firmly embedded in the US-controlled global market are now buying oil with yuan and paying Iran for passage with cryptocurrencies. As electricity and fuel rationing begins, everybody knows that the US is to blame: the voters, the media, the politicians, and the wealthy. When people die, their nearest and dearest will blame Americans.

The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.

It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.

My understanding of how the software industry works is now historical. It does not correspond to our present reality. That history is a legacy that’s useful to understand but only as an antecedent to the present, but if we take it to represent some sort of truth about the new world when it eventually comes into existence we will only be misguided and misled.

The tech industry is shaping up to be one of the most hated industries in our modern era.

It was built on the foundation of empire.

They’ve been taking enormous risks believing they were empires in their own right.

I suspect we’re about to find out whether that’s true or not.

If you enjoy systemic-but-practical takes on software development, you might enjoy my book Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking For Software Projects.

Out of the Software Crisis

€35 EUR for PDF and EPUB.

Software projects keep failing, not because we don’t have the right team or tools but because our software development system is broken. Out of the Software Crisis is a guide to fixing your software projects with systems-thinking making them more resilient to change and less likely to fail.

Systems-Thinking For Software Projects

A blackbird looking a bit scruffy.

Oystercatcher! On a lawn!

This male northern wheatear was hanging out at a construction site this week.

A white wagtail doing its thing.

Blackbird.

The black-tailed godwit has arrived.

It doesn’t seem to matter what process or method you use, whatever benefit there is to your work seems to come out in the wash.

Your job adopts a scrum or agile, buys a fancy SaaS that’s supposed to change everything. It all seems fine for a while, but if you make the mistake of pausing a few months later and reviewing the progress, you usually find that the effect, if any was minimal.

The problems at work are supposed to be fixable. The bargain was supposed to be straightforward:

1. Each issue has a solution.
2. You adopt the solution, a methodology or app used by others (“industry standard”).
3. The issue is supposed to go away.

Instead it just gets soggier.

Your problem is that you’re just tinkering with the system you’re working in. You can’t actually fix the issue directly. You need to fix the system – the organisation you’re working in.

To fix a system that isn’t working isn’t you don’t add more to it, but instead you stop doing the things that make it worse.

Thankfully, this is usually much less work than adopting a fancy new process or onboarding everybody to a new Software-as-a-Service.

My book, Out of the Software Crisis, focus on the many ways organisations and teams compromise their own work by introducing a number of ideas based on management theory and Systems-Thinking.

This Easter, from 31st of March to the 7th of April, you can get all of my books, including Out of the Software Crisis, as a part of a four book bundle, only available during over the Easter period, at a €85 EUR discount off the full combined price.

It includes:

• Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking for Software Projects, an opinionated guide to the systems-thinking perspective on software development.
• The Intelligence Illusion: why generative models are bad for business, an overview of the many risks and pitfalls of using generative models in your business backed by in-depth research.
• I am Uncluttered (Yellow): doom-prepping web dev through disdain, disrespect, and doing the right thing. (Only available for a limited time through this bundle.)
• Bad Writing and Other Essays: Twenty-Five Years of Writing About the Digital Transformation. (Only available for a limited time through this bundle.)

Also included: a preview of my upcoming book #

Included is an 80 page preview of the book currently I’m working on and will hopefully release later this year: The Magic Toy Factory which continues my exploration and explanation of management theories and concepts from a more humanistic process.

Buyers will have the option to join a newsletter where I plan to document my progress with the book.

And when the book is out, anybody who has bought the preview, whether as a part of the bundle or individually, will get the final version for free.

If you don’t want to buy the entire bundle but want the preview and want to follow my progress on the book, you can buy just the 80 page preview, in PDF and EPUB, for €29 EUR.

This was in late 2000. We were having drinks in the Watershed in Bristol.

For those of you not familiar with the Watershed, it’s an art house cinema, media production centre of excellence, conference venue, houses a diverse community of media practitioners, and a bar.

It was the place in Bristol where people in media hung out. Students, writers, artists, academics, film, TV, and radio people of all stripes, writers, and more have tended to hang out there at various times over the years.

I don’t know what it’s like today – I haven’t been to the UK in about a decade – but I’d be surprised if it didn’t still attract that sort of crowd. At least what’s left of it after the past decade of ruin.

When I was studying my Masters in Interactive Media back in 2000, us interactive media students used to hang out there a lot. During one of these hangouts we ran into a small group of people claiming to be just about to launch a dot-com startup.

This was after the dot-com bubble had crashed. Now, there’s an argument to be made for starting a tech or software company as the market bottoms out. Your competition has been cleared out or is suffering. Funding might be hard but recruitment becomes easier. You also tend to have easier access to all sorts of under-priced infrastructure.

This was not that. This was a group of young guys that were specifically starting a VC-funded startup, in the dot-com vein, and making all the same promises you saw in the dot-com bubble:

• “We’re going to change the world.”
• “Anybody who signs up to work with us is going to be rich.”
• “The stock options are going to be worth a fortune.”
• “We have an amazing concept.”
• “No, I’m not going to tell you unless you sign an NDA.”

They sat down at a table full of interactive media students and basically offered us all a job, with stock options and amazing benefits.

I told them to fuck off, although in a not quite so polite language. I’d only been in the UK for a few weeks as an adult by then. I was still speaking with level of bluntness that was even considered a bit much by other Icelanders.

I was the only person at the table who was even just a little bit sceptical. I told the others they’d never hear from these guys again.

“Yes you will,” the startup guys chimed in. They were still at the table.

“If these assholes do contact you, then they’ll ask you to work for free, promising an amazing future.”

“No we won’t.” They were quite all quite drunk.

It was at this point that one of my friends, another Masters student, took me aside and asked me why I was being difficult.

“Because they’re either lying to you, trying to use you, or both.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“Because nothing they’re saying makes sense. None of us will ever hear anything from any of these guys again. Also, weren’t you listening earlier when one of them talked about how he was worried his neighbour was going to plagiarise their idea by listening in on the radio waves generated by the electric wiring in his flat? They don’t sound well.”

“That could be happening! I’m sure I’ve heard about that happening to somebody.”

We never heard from any of them.

People want to believe in magic #

You don’t have to spend much time looking into how faith healers and homeopaths operate to realise that their biggest advantage is people’s unrelenting desire to be fooled. They want to believe in magic.

Even when they know better. Even when the people making the promises of magic sound like they are on the verge of a serious breakdown.

But, often as that does happen, I don’t think this is why I was alone at that table in my scepticism. That was more a question of how each of us saw the industry we were a part of.

You see, this was an evening in the middle of a week, where we had gone out after the lectures of the day ended.

That meant the group was disproportionally full-time students with no family and no day job to pay for their studies.

We were people who had only experienced the web, web development and design, and interactive media as this powerful new thing that held endless possibilities.

And me, the resident grump.

The students who were in the Masters because the dot-com they had been working for fell apart were all at home. The people who were studying because they suddenly had spare time after business for their interactive media studios had dried up were at home with their creepy partner who hit on every twenty-year-old in sight.

If you mostly see the positive in your field, vague promises of a grand future sound more compelling. If you’ve seen the dysfunction firsthand but love the industry despite its flaws, you know that the vagueness hides a lot of horrors and grim disappointment.

The promises made by the makers of various coding tools built with Large Language Models (LLMs) tap into this divide.

Two groups within the field of software development look at the same dynamic, the same behaviours, and the same features, but come to diametrically opposite conclusions.

This might seem perplexing but it makes sense once you realise that software development was already divided:

1. Those who believe software development and the software industry has been going from strength to strength – “software is eating the world” – and this is just making that happen faster.
2. Those who believe we’ve been in an incrementally escalating software crisis since at least 2007.

Our current software crisis – we’ve had a few – has been ramping up since the US gave up on regulation after the 2007 crash. Instead of reforming and regulating finance, the US decided to let the finance industry take over all of its industries, which hasn’t been great overall, but for software it’s meant that “quality” stopped mattering.

• Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.
• Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.
• Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices (“UGC! No, Web 2.0! No, blockchain! No, AI!”).
• Customer lock-in is a standard tactic.

There is little to no downside to poor software quality. The upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies

Some corners of the software industry are less affected. Others, such as web dev, are more affected.

To illustrate the lack of a downside:

The stock price of the company that caused worldwide outages and economic havoc, Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is higher today than its peak before the outage.

Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences.

This has led to a field whose standard practices are a cluster of bad habits and superstition. Web development is now especially notorious for completely disregarding accessibility, user device capabilities, and regulations. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern developers. Misconceptions about test-driven development and pair programming abound. Code review is the norm even though it’s largely useless as practised.

When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.

They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes.

Those who are most vocal today about the dysfunctions of LLM-coding were already warning about the dysfunctions of the software industry well before the “AI” bubble began. The issues that plague the industry predate this particular bubble and many in software have been concerned about them for years.

Equally, most of the people who today are the most vocal about the benefits of LLM-coding were bullish about software development before the bubble. They didn’t see anything wrong with the earlier state of affairs so they don’t see anything wrong with magnifying that dysfunction tenfold.

Hence, a divide in the discourse around LLMs for coding.

Both see Large Language Models as a mechanism for scaling up existing software practices with minimal human observation.

One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe.

There is nothing either group can say to the other to shift their opinion because the disagreement is down to a fundamental difference in worldview.

But if you aren’t in tech and are wondering which to trust, just ask yourself: do you really think the chucklefucks of tech have got coding figured out?

Or are they a bunch of self-serving con artists sitting at a table with inveterate optimists spinning a yarn of a grand future?

Later this month I’m going to be launching a small project.

The idea is very simple:

What if we give people more options for how they can support a newsletter that don’t involve subscription?

Instead of charging people $25-50 USD a year for a subscription, I’m planning on offering a short ebook containing advance copies of the next few flagship essays I plan on publishing on the newsletter, along with a few thousand words of essays and arguments that are unlikely to see the light of day elsewhere.

These essays use my personal experience with software development and interactive media as a lens for me to interrogate the evolution of the software industry and what we can learn from what we’ve lost.

Buying it will give you an opportunity to see the essays well before they are published and show you the argument they’re making as a whole in a single ebook.

If that sound like your thing and you aren’t a follower of my newsletter, you might want to subscribe. If you’re already a subscriber, then you have my thanks.