]]>You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed.
It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice.
For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account.
Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive?
Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work.
Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon?
It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing.
There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media.
Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of the core problems, especially in short textual media.
As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past.
And it turns out there are reasons why the social media experience is so toxic for so many of us.
In the last video I addressed many of the issues that affect TikTok and other short-form video. It gives you the impression of an argument as opposed to letting an argument unfold.
The constraints imposed by the duration, by the screen size, limit the level of detail you can deliver in a video, which affects the argument they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual social media – the ones that are all modelled after Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either.
They have a lock on the journalistic class, the political class, and on quite a bit of academic research. People of influence tend to disproportionately get their information from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long.
They are the first step in for modern information distribution.
An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon.
Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video.
Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops.
These social media networks all have the issue where you can quite easily ruin your entire career – or at least your day – by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets interpreted by somebody else as offensive.
Sometimes these things are offensive, but you’re used to voicing them in a more forgiving environment. So when you switch to social media, you don’t adjust your language and tone. You don’t code-switch. You don’t change your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience.
You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant.
There’s a name for this: context collapse.
It originates with the sociologist and psychologist Erving Goffman, but I personally first encountered it in the papers, essays, and talks, and books by danah boyd who is one of the leading academics on social media – especially the social media use of teenagers.
And the way that she describes context collapse is that, before, you’d have distinct spheres of social interaction – the high school hallway social interaction for students, the classroom interactions, the family interactions – each of these would have a different language, different vocabulary and different approaches. They would have different expectations for what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s healthy, and what’s unhealthy. What makes the other people in a context angry and what doesn’t.
What social media does is collapse all these contexts into one, so you now have to keep track of half a dozen different environments in your head when you’re writing online.
Any one of these contexts could find your discourse offensive.
This is particularly obvious with humour because jokes require an understanding of the audience and its expectations, because playing with expectations is what makes a joke funny. If your audience is completely different from what you expected, the joke is gonna fall flat or even be considered offensive.
But this also effects normal discussions about topics that are important to our media landscape, our culture, and our politics. Like how we talk about reading.
Reading is important, as you can tell from the fact that a text-based social media remains to this day the first line of information distribution over video. So reading is quite important and the media loves to debate declines or changes in literacy.
But when we talk about reading on a social media network, there’s a limit to how much context we can provide. There’s a limit to how much additional text we can include in each post to define which kind of reading we’re talking and what context we’re coming from. The length limits of the text exacerbates the context collapse.
When you try and discuss the various distint features of audiobooks, print books, and ebooks what you have to say immediately gets mired in multiple different contexts.
One context is that there are snobs who try and elevate print over everything else. They are trying to exclude other media, especially the kind that they feel is making books too accessible, such as ebooks or audiobooks.
Conversely, designers and typographers who are trying to deliver the best designed textual reading experience need to be able to discuss the needs of each form without reservation.
When somebody wades into the online discourse and says something like “audiobooks aren’t reading,” both of those contexts – design and elitism – collapse into the same social sphere.
There is no distinguishing between the two. The designer, in saying this, might be making the point that audiobooks require very different considerations and very different engineering sensibilities such as acoustic design. They require things that just don’t exist in print. Print conversely requires a level of design and thought to the binding, paper, and the kind of ink. All of which are considerations that don’t make any sense in the context of an ebook.
The discourse of a designer trying to talk about the distinction between these, is collapsed with the discourse of the snobs who want to alienate entire sectors of society from reading. Everybody gets ganged upon for making an argument that they aren’t actually making. Because the context has collapsed. The designer get shouted at for being a snob. Or they get supported by the snobs because they think the designer is talking about the elevation of print.
But they didn’t actually say any such thing. They just didn’t have the space in three hundred characters to highlight the specific context of the print form.
These contexts are forced to exist within the same space and this makes nuanced discourse impossible.
It makes arguments and conflict inevitable. It degrades our ability to discuss important topics. The all-encompassing nature of social media degrades our ability to surface specialisation and knowledge from academia and experts. Their contributions are cut off right out of the gate, because textual social media is where information starts its journey to disseminate out into the other media.
This context collapse destroys any possible discourse before it starts spreading. We have crippled our ability to talk properly about society, the world around us, and understand the environment that we live in.
There really isn’t a way around this.
As long as these remain the spaces that academia, politicians, and experts are using to convey their ideas and as long as it’s only space that reporters and journalists really pay attention to, we will be held back by this mush that it turns our discourse into.
The only recourse we have as individuals is to be less reliant on these platforms and switch to other forms of discovering information and knowledge. RSS feeds, trusted websites, or anything really that delivers longer texts, audio, and video and, more importantly, is siloed into separate contexts.
We need specialised pages that follow each topic and give it the detail and nuance it needs without worrying about outsiders misunderstanding it, and then attacking it for offending them in a way that was not intended at all.
We need to be careful about our reliance on social media. Not just because of the mental health issues – there’s a lot of emphasis on the anxiety and mental health ramifications of extensive social media use.
One of the bigger problems with the dominance of social media is that it distorts our understanding of the world around us. It changes what we see, what we hear, and what we read in ways that diminishes our understanding of the world. It makes it harder for us to constructively respond to crises.
Try and spend less time on Bluesky or Mastodon, and just leave X entirely. No good comes from X. It’s just going to give you bad ideas.
Find a few good websites or podcasts and follow them on the topics you’re interested in. Read those. Don’t rely on search engines or social media to get the get your information.
Try to let the nuance of specialisation exist without attacking it. Because we need it.
It’s kind of the only way we can go forward from here.
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]]>In this opinion piece – very much my opinion based on my experience and practice, not on academic studies – I explain one reason why short videos, such as what you get on TikTok, are bad for learning and information.
Did I mention that this is my opinion? Well it is. Don’t go all “well, that’s just your opinion, man”. I already told you so. And the same goes for the academics who suddenly find themselves filled with the urge to debate me on how montage or Tarkovsky have been understood in academic writing over the years.
In. My. Opinion.
TikTok and its copycats have come to define how much of our societies consume information. The information that reaches us is bounded by the nature of the media that convey it.
By emphasising dubious theories that misrepresent neuroplasticity and “brain changes” we’ve managed to downplay that these platforms are doing exactly what they’re designed to do. Their form and design direct how we experience “facts” and how we learn.
I like to blame the Russians.
Not the current lot. Older Russians.
Though, if I’m to be fair, they more described the problem than caused it directly.
Specifically, I tend to blame Eisenstein and Tarkovsky.
Eisenstein was one of the early pioneers of cinema and was the first major filmmaker to come out of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet revolution.
His contribution was the concept of the “montage”. As legend would have it – probably untrue and apocryphal, but it’s a good story – early Soviet filmmakers struggled with shortages. That meant that they had a harder time of constructing films using the method that had been the norm in early cinema: a series of long takes spliced together, as you would if you were recording a play. They had to work with scraps of film.
So, as legend has it, they resorted to splicing together short bits of film and discovered that spliced end result worked very differently.
As he described the concept in his book (I think, it’s been twenty years since I read it, so I’m probably both misremembering and paraphrasing it badly):
If you record a long take of a man walking to a dinner table, looking down at the food, and licking his lips, you are very directly telling the viewer that the man is hungry and is about to eat.
But if you edit together a shot of the man entering a room, a close-up of food on the table, and a close-up of his face as he licks his lips, you are giving the viewer the impression of the same without actually showing it. You never actually visually show the man responding to the food one the screen at the same time. And if you change the shot of the food to the shot of another person, you transform the impression into a sexual one. Same core elements and shots, but because you aren’t directly telling the story visually – you’re implying it – you can transform the impression just by changing one shot.
The meaning, the scene, and the whole is constructed in the mind of the viewer without having to go through the effort of doing the thing itself on screen.
This is labour-saving, but it also means you can tell the story without having to show the story in detail.
The counterpoint to this approach came from another Russian – Tarkovsky – who made Solaris and Stalker and quite a few other movies. He believed that the montage was a bit of a deception. (Again, paraphrasing as it’s been almost two decades since I read his book as well.)
He saw the strength of film as being its time-based nature. It could show you time unfold, actions taking place over time, all on a large screen with detail and resolution that gave you the feeling of being there – gave you the sensation of a reality that impressionistic montage couldn’t and wouldn’t give you.
This is the point where, as a teacher, you’ve lost your students. As soon as you say “Russians” in any sort of cultural context, their eyes glaze over.
So, I always preferred to use action movies as examples to explain these two ideas. Back in the day I would contrast the Jason Bourne movies with Jackie Chan’s, but if I were teaching today I would probably instead use Marvel movies versus John Wick.
The Bourne movies are a stronger example, though, of the use of montage to deliver the impression of a fight without actually showing you the fight. They show punches, throws, and grimaces but at the same time they make it hard for you to follow the action in detail. You get the highlights – “he went out the window!” – but the exact scene itself simply isn’t shown. You get an impression of it through short edits. This is logistically quite convenient because it means you don’t have to actually shoot the scene you want to convey. You can conceal the fact that the actors don’t know how to fight, that fewer things are broken than you’d think, that the entire thing was much slower than portrayed, and the space was too constrained for an actual fight to happen.
You are given the impression of an experience that never took place.
Whereas in the Jackie Chan movies – or the John Wick movies if you aren’t familiar with early Jackie Chan – you get a broader view that often shows the full bodies of all the participants. You see the scene unfold as it happened in front of the camera. Every motion and action is shown in full detail.
It’s visual exposition, and it gives you a much stronger sense of being there, of experiencing the action that you’re watching, and it also gives you enough of an experience of the fight scene to be able to describe it to somebody else because you saw it unfold.
Try to describe a fight scene from one of the Bourne movies and, even if you’ve just watched it, you’ll only be able to convey the highlights of the scene because that’s all you were given.
Try to describe a fight scene from a Jackie Chan movie or John Wick, even a decade later, and you can often outline much of what happened because you witnessed it, and it felt real. It’s a richer and more vivid experience, especially when experienced on a large screen.
These two approaches are important because TikTok and YouTube Shorts – and many longer videos – are impressionistic and not expository.
Because they make you “lean forward” as you’re using the apps the expectation of a shorter duration is baked into the design of the software. You interact with streams of video – you don’t browse or forage – and are constantly ready to swipe to the next.
These services may let you upload longer videos, but the design itself enforces brevity.
This means the shorts themselves tend to resort to the economy of montage to deliver their message. Each short – brief already – is often composed of a sequence of even shorter clips. The stream itself sutures the many shorts together to create an algorithmic montage that’s specifically tailored to your tastes, constantly creating unfounded and even outright false impressions of what the stream is pretending to document.
They give you the feeling of having listened to somebody explain something in detail, but you haven’t actually – you just got convinced by an impression. You didn’t hear an argument. You haven’t actually heard through the reasoning of what you’re being told.
It becomes a mechanism of convincing people of political ideas, of news, of sequences of events out in the world that never actually happened, or are severely misrepresented through editing to create an impression.
This is the most effective medium to deliver a condensed message. Montage lets you create a dense message that is concise enough to fit within the duration parameters enforced by TikTok’s design.
These de facto duration limits our ability to use the Tarkovsky or the Jackie Chan approach of unfolding an argument or story over time.
You can’t deliver complex visual action or complex visual arguments as easily on TikTok using edited media as you can using a larger screen with linear time-based media.
One way to counteract this is through simplicity: the talking head video. A person, looking into the camera, outlining their argument verbally, doesn’t require much in terms of visual information and so isn’t constrained by the tiny screen size. Audio isn’t compromised by screen real-estate. It’s effectively just radio with a face on it, and it’s limited to the specific kind of information you could deliver on radio, but it suffers less from the limitations of modern short-form video.
They may not know it themselves, but this is probably the reason why many educators on TikTok tend to use this approach, or a similar approach with minimal editing, to deliver their work.
My own videos would be more convincing if they were two-minute videos full of short clips from various movies giving you the impression of my argument. (Might not pass content-id, but that’s a separate issue.)
This approach would be more convincing over a short duration, but I would not have the same time to explain the argument, and you would have a harder time integrating it and later on explaining it somebody else.
Because that’s the issue with the impressions created through montage – like the Jason Bourne fight scenes. If you’re sitting with a friend in a pub and trying to tell them about some of the scenes in a movie you just saw, you’d have a hard time giving them the details of a specific fight beyond a single highlight from the scene and how it concluded. You couldn’t describe the actual sequence of events because you never witnessed the sequence of events.
You were only given an impression of it.
Whereas the Jackie Chan or John Wick movies exhibited the event visually. That makes it easier for you to describe in your own words.
This tends to be missing from TikTok and the many YouTube videos that often to emphasize editing over explaining, over outlining the argument.
There are exceptions like the TikToker that goes by the handle Oddpride – Astrid Lundberg. She’s excellent at the genre of video you could describe as “sit down in front of a camera and explain a single concise idea directly to the audience”. She uses basically the talking-head approach. She sits down. Explains things in sequence. No cuts. Maybe an image or two is overlaid. Just a single camera; single shot.
It delivers the message.
When you’re trying to teach, or educate, or convince people of an argument the edited approach works, but it’s one of the reasons why misinformation is on the rise.
It’s so easy to deliver a false message that doesn’t have an argument but gives people the impression of an argument that they never actually watched unfold.
They come away with ideas that have no basis in factuality.
That isn’t to say the two approaches don’t have their place.
If you’re keeping with the action movie comparison, John Woo demonstrates how it can work. In his movie Hard Boiled there are action scenes with rapid editing, that build up a visceral impression that keeps the details intentionally unclear, before cutting to a wide and detailed shot that shows you where things ended up after the rapid sequence.
The impressionistic edits are used to strengthen and reinforce the emotions of the wider shot that follows.
In other scenes John Woo switches to extreme long takes – literally the time-based storytelling that Tarkovsky advocated – that show you the entire action sequence with two characters alternating and going through a hospital, fighting their way to their goal. This gives you the feeling of being there – of experiencing it with them. It makes the story feel much more real. He mixed the two approaches together to deliver a really effective action movie.
This is something you can do when you’re creating a longer piece of work, like a documentary, a movie, a series, or a longer YouTube essay.
Especially if you have the luxury of delivering for a larger screen, even if it’s just the larger screen of people’s living room TV.
This mix-and-match approach isn’t something that works on the phone. It doesn’t really scale down nor does it work with the constraints created by TikTok’s app design.
Talking head videos, like the ones I’m trying to make, kind of scale down. Sort of. For the most part. It’s one of the reasons why I’m using this approach to video.
This format is more likely to be able to deliver an argument that people will understand and integrate and then apply their own life.
Because they are more likely to be able to explain what they learned to others.
If I delivered this as a highly edited video, it would be more convincing, but it would rob you as a viewer of the tools you need to convince others.
The second order effect would be gone. The only way you could spread the message would be to share the video. The first order effect of manipulating you – the viewer – would be there, but if we’re trying to truly reach people and reach an audience we need to give you and ourselves the tools of explaining the things we learn ourselves.
That requires more time. Both in the duration and length of the work we make and in the experience that we demand of the reader or viewer.
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]]>Essay version of the video is below. You can also listen to the audio-only podcast version and subscribe to the unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed.
How do you get out of your own way when you’re trying to make media?
It isn’t easy. If you aren’t used to it – if, for example, text is your primary medium – this shit is quite hard.
I don’t know how many takes I’ve tried, or how often I’ve recorded videos only to find them unusable. This isn’t even my first attempt at this particular YouTube channel and starting something here.
Video is not easy. There’s a reason why it often requires an entire crew for it to look good.
There are people who find video to be an easy fit to how they think. They process the world using vlogs and “tic tocs”, much as I process my experience of the world using text.
Text is how I think. I write even when I don’t have to – even when it’s not a part of an overall business or freelancing strategy.
Video is quite unnatural to me, and it’s taken me a while to figure out a process that I don’t completely hate. Even so, I threw away a couple (or a dozen) of videos because they didn’t work out.
The question for this essay is: how do you get a get out of your own way when you’re trying to do something that’s new, that doesn’t fit your normal mode of thinking? When you’re working in a format that doesn’t work with how you usually think?
The best advice I got was a little bit too simple, but works overall.
‘Just let it be messy!’
This actually goes back to when I was teaching twenty years ago.
If you don’t know my background, I have worked at the crossroads between technology, publishing, and media for twenty-five years. So I have this background where I’m aware of the – not just the technical side or the practice, but also the theoretical context.
It doesn’t help!
It doesn’t make this easier. Doesn’t make sitting in front of a camera and, well, avoiding an anxiety attack any easier.
For some reason I don’t mind recording audio as much. I can handle recording and even the sound of my own voice, but as soon as I’m on camera it gets a bit more stressful.
The core problem I’m facing is that as a consumer, as a reader, or watcher of video, I have taste. I have skills as a consumer. It’s one of the reasons why, if you didn’t start writing regularly when you were young, and try to start writing later on when you’re an adult, one of the things that gets in your way, is that you actually have a well-honed assessment of what kind of writing you like.
That gets in your own way because you can tell as soon as you start writing that you aren’t delivering the same quality or the same structure. Your writing isn’t convincing like the writing you prefer as a reader. So this mismatch between your skills as a reader and skills as a writer can cause a sort of mental roadblock. This applies to most creative fields – design, photography, and so on.
If you have got an eye, but you don’t have the hand-to-eye coordination or the skills to create a composition, you’re going to have a hard time starting.
I actually worked for a very brief period of time in TV. And I went through the earliest version of what later became Iceland’s film school. I helped many work on video and I can tell that what I’m making now isn’t as good as I’d like, which might confuse some because they look at it and go:
That’s fine. It’s at least as good as the other nonsense I watch.
This is why I should just get out of my way and let things be messy.
I’m going to try and not obsess about that slight noise disturbance that I keep hearing in the audio setup that makes me paranoid and worried that something in all of this is causing something that I don’t like.
You might not even hear it.
(It was a random RF disturbance in the headphone port of the interface, so not in the recording. And, yes, I did get paranoid and worried about it.)
I’m not going to obsess over the fact that the lighting is basically a jury-rigged set of seven Ikea bulbs, two reflectors, and an improvised diffusion cloth out of some sort of packing material.
I’m just going to let this be imperfect. Because that’s literally the advice, back in a former life when I was teaching, that I used to give students.
It’s better to have imperfect work than no work at all.
Because if you let your standards – your taste – stop you from doing messy, imperfect things, you won’t ever get the practice you need to make the less messy, less imperfect things.
So you need to make stuff. You need to accept the flaws and the weirdness and stop obsessing over details.
Be more forgiving of yourself.
Because – you know – you’re the only one who you can guarantee will be forgiving of yourself. You can’t control other people’s responses, but you can try to control your own.
So, this is an attempt at a first new video in a while.
Letting it be imperfect. Letting it go through.
It’s raining outside. Quite calming. Probably what I need.
There are going to be more of these.
I have got a long list of topics I want to cover, and I am hoping to improve this process over time.
But, in the meantime, please don’t be mean.
Or, if you want to be mean, don’t be mean somewhere I can see.
Leave it until the third video or something.
If you want to be kind.
]]>When you first load an image it’s showing you a blurry low-res preview, but once you hit scan (and wait for ages) you get one of the best software film emulations I’ve seen
Slow as hell, but looks quite good
Here’s a 20-year-old blast from the past. Took this one during Sigurrós’s public concert in Iceland in 2006.
And, finally, a few photos I shot in 2008 that I’m unreasonably fond of. The first is a photo of the shop window for the used book store in Hverfisgata. Second is of the original Kaffistofa in Hverfisgata run by Samhjálp, a free kitchen for the needy. Third is of a mannequin in a shop front.
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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
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:
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’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.
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.
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.
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:
(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”.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
(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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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