Author: graham

Refreshing my personal manifesto

Posted on by graham

That’s January done with. So it was time to write a new manifesto for myself. It deals with capitalism, change, technology and fear. If it helps inspire others, that’s good too, but a manifesto should, I think, be a personal statement first. I’d rewrite a fresh one every week if I could – turning thoughts into words is an act of orientation.

Don’t know about you, but I always feel swept along by the crashing waves at the start of the year. All the pent-up turmoil of the general Advent season converts into some kind of post-event frenzy of revolutions and hope for the run up to summer.

I’m coming to the tail end of a few projects this month and am staring through the telescope to see what lies ahead. It’s been a while since I visited that space, so it feels like a good time to reassert my own assumptions. Why am I here? Is this what I want to be doing? Am I taking on undue risks? Re-centre. Re-ground. Re-focus.

January is busy. February is when the real reflection begins in earnest.

So a manifesto felt like a good place to start. Short, scattered thoughts distilled into a reference guide for the soul. Near automatic-writing about as close to the raw ideas as you can get, while still making some kind of sense.

Turns out I’m still thinking about "empty technology" alongside greentech. I find it hard to believe we’ll ever become a sustainable society if we’re only focusing on replacing the technology and the materials, without changing our mindset.

A long time ago, I wrote:

"Technelogos [sic] establishes technology as a tool to rebind and reconnect things above all else, in order to rediscover those connections more consciously."

I know this is still important, but the path can be hard sometimes. Or maybe I’m just looking too much.

The manifesto is here.

Unfeeling the net: Are killer apps killing me?

Posted on by graham

So yeah, I disappeared from blogging for a few months.

And, to be kind of honest, I’ve not been "feeling the net" as much since taking a break from it over Christmas time.

I mean, I’ve been here, lurking and present, chatting with a few people here and there and getting on with work. But let’s dig in a bit here – what I mean when I say "feeling the net" is about the engagement with the zeitgeist, the pervading culture around internet usage that everyone seems to undergo, from when they wake up to when they go to sleep. And possibly beyond that too.

I’ve recently been looking ahead a few months again, sussing out possible projects and future routes for the year. Some of that has meant treading back into some of the online/offline networks that I’ve mentally-muted for a while. And while I can see value in these networks (they wouldn’t exist if they didn’t provide social capital of course), I find I’m really … sensitive to the nature of these spaces. Not one particular space – more the overarching patterns of how these spaces operate. Busy, busy, busy. Hyperbusy.

It feels as if we’ve developed a certain social vocabulary around how we expect social media to work, in the same way that we have certain learned patterns for user interfaces, as well as offline behaviour. And it also feels like we – as a collective userbase – have largely sleptwalked into this new substrate of modern life, only noticeable once we take time out from it for a while.

As a userbase, our experience is formed around this need to connect to each other. But that central nugget is then shaped and guided by mass data observation, the need to extract profit from the network, a genuine desire to build communities from networks, and interfaces which are inherently fragmented.

(It’s complicated, of course. I could dig into any of those factors for at least a few pages, but that’s not something for now. This was meant to be a short post to clear the mind.)

Post. Read. Like. Share. Comment. Repeat. Effects on the individual. Effects on the collective. I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time, and keep coming back to it. It doesn’t sit well with me, even after 20+ years.

Because, in short, net culture is killing me a little. ("Killer app", haha.) It’s tiring to jump from one world-changing topic to another within the single flick of a scroll-wheel. It’s exhausting getting pinged by eight different threads inside a minute. It’s not good to be anxious about someone messaging you with a random personal fear at 11pm that they need you to sort out. (The last one hasn’t happened to me, but it’s certainly not an uncommon tale for people.)

It’s hard defending my own energy against all of that.

Right now, my core social tech is relatively basic (ie. without going super-niche). I have email, with some decent (and manual) filtering going on. I have Discord and Signal for a few close contacts, and for some good (read "still distracting, but inspiring") Community chatter. I have WhatsApp for a few local groups because that’s where they organise things (parents, sports club). I have Slack for clients. My RSS reader is currently broken, and needs fixing because I like feeds, but I’m not missing it as much as I thought I would.

OK, that seems like a lot already. But the key thing is they’re all there for a reason – and I know what the reason is. That feels like a world away from what I experience when I go out into places like LinkedIn, Twixxer, Mastodon, news sites, etc.

And secondly, the key difference is about how much I can curate my own experience, from the people involved, to the content itself, to the interface. Anything that decides what I should see and how I see it moves me away from that, distracts me from my own needs. Disempowers me. Divides me.

Anyway, that’s what I’m feeling today. I’m posting this on my blog, for my own brain. Not for the likes, not for the comments, not for boosting company shares. (Oh hey, "Share this" vs "Share value", lol.)

I’d like to form smaller networks around me; pop-up communities that only exist in real-time, tiny mailing lists that last a month, flash chats where everyone is silent, that kind of thing. I should get better at that. Watch this space? Or get in touch.

Featured image is some business cards I made by hand last week. In this age of AI-generated works, algorithmic content feeds and shoulders-upward communication, paper and pen seems like a rebellious act.

Where’ve I been?

Posted on by graham
Seem to have fallen off the blogging train recently – after I (mostly)
finished drpfd, October rolled on the front of the storms, and I was
(am) caught up among client work, personal projects, and a busy home
life. All of which has been good, just not very public, and definitely
with little time to write Words Which Might Matter.

Still, it’s good to check in. Throughout the maelstrom, I’ve been
learning a lot. For instance!

* Modern CSS units for site responsiveness

in an age where scrollbars are ethereal, and the real difference
between “fixed” and “sticky” positioning.
* How to make things in Pulp ,
the 1-bit editor for Playdate games, and how to
keep a devlog in Discord.
* How to use Carbon Fields , a free
alternative to ACF Pro in WordPress.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot happening at Writing Our Legacy
too, and I try to keep some time for
relaxing. I really need to meditate more when my brain is trying to
juggle so many things though.

I also keep coming back to personal principles and the “bigger game”
that is social equality, climate change, and building something better.
Maybe I’m not doing enough here, or maybe now is not the right time to
make changes – this dichotomy is, in itself, an interesting conundrum.
Busy-ness leads to routine. Routine leads to acceptance. Acceptance
leads to busy-ness.

There is never the Right Time to break the cycle, so is now the Right
Time to break the cycle?

From Task Lists to the Art of Enjoyment

Posted on by graham
It must be late summer, as the bindweed in the garden has begun to take over. I spent a few minutes today pulling out some of the runners and untangling the plants it had wrapped around, which gave me some time to think more about why we do things.

As per yesterday, I’m reassessing the general idea of task and to-do lists. A part of me wants to shift to something more enjoyable, and alongside this notion of “joy”, I’ve been mulling over what gives me joy. (Is there a big difference between “joy” and “to enjoy”? Perhaps not semantically, but there’s a lot to be said for thinking about things in terms of verbs – behaviour, temporarily in flow and doomed.to change, rather than the asset- and accumulation-driven realm of nouns.)

What is that feedback loop that makes me enjoy things? Sometimes it’s the simple process of facing a challenge and resolving it in an inventive way. But there still needs to be a reason behind it – I feel like something should be improved as a result, and I think back to the idea that “if you’ve made the world better during your life, you’ve done ok”.

I had this vaguely in mind as I pulled up the strings of weeds with gloved hands. To-do style: “I must clear out the bindweed.” Enjoyment style: “I can improve the garden’s environment.”

But then. I wondered what I was improving. Or rather, who and what it was being improved for. Was I really clearing the weeds so that the small apple tree could grow more vigorously? Or was it to make the garden neater, for me, for the family, for the neighbours? What did the bindweed think about this, or the spiders that scuttled out of the way as I removed the undergrowth around them?

I didn’t have a firm answer. But with that, I kind of realised that there wasn’t necessarily an answer to be found. “Improvement” depended on your point of view – your own values and interests, and your position in the system. In your timescale for awareness, and in your appetite for change.

Plenty of land and cultures have been torn down and apart, based on one idea of “improvement” or another. Entire educational industries try to shoehorn attitudes into learning alongside skillets and opportunities. “Improvement” can be a form of wielding power, an ominous and subjective decision around what is good and bad. Can we ever say that improvement is a net-positive game rather than a zero sum one, that to improve something is always to deny something else?

It is not wrong to want to improve things. It is a natural (and unique) human desire. But it can be wrong to do it without thinking through the power balances involved, and to enforce an aim of improvement where consent, rationale and emotion are bypassed in the process.

Which leads back to a more nuanced perspective about what it means to enjoy something. It can be a delicate thing, if one is aware of the systems involved. Thinking too much about it can severely curtail that getting l hedonistic idea of doing something for the love of it, but perhaps that just means we should tread more carefully, and be proud of the smaller changes that we’re more certain of?

Re-examining my relationship with To-do lists and Life…

Posted on by graham
[Image: Original Groundlake logo sketched out in biro, re-discovered recently while clearing out old notebooks.]

The bank holiday weekend started out well. We packed the car, left in a semi-timely manner, took the scenic route, and ate our favourite local pizza (one napoli, one pepperoni and pineapple) in the evening. I managed to enter one of my favourite – and dangerous – secondhand bookshops the next day, and spent two days meeting a new family member for the first time. We played table tennis, went to the beach, drank beer and enjoyed a fair bit of Vampire Survivors.

Sunday evening I was a bit weary though, and too tired to be sensible and get an early night. And when Monday came around. It was like my body had given up. And, with it my mind had spiralled down into something of a grump-hole. I crashed pretty hard all day, managing to play the mini-golf I’d hoped to get to all weekend, but having to leave the long drive home to my wife while I mostly stared out the window into the distance.

I’ve been thinking more about life and energy since then. Not that it’s a new thing, I guess I often feel pretty exhausted – there’s a cycle of feeling okay, taking on too much, and then getting overwhelmed and wanting it to all go away. I suspect that’s a decent description of a light form of manic-depression. But that’s me. And I feel like I’m unpicking it a bit more this time round.

I am, however, slightly sick of simply trying to change up my “routine”, or find short-hand ways to be more “effective”, “productive”, “GTD”, etc. I’m generally on board with that and have multiple methods to organise things – they usually work, although at times I think it means my threshold is simply higher, so I get more of a rebound effect when I do get to that limit.

So perhaps I’m missing a whole realm of alternative answers here. Ones that don’t just restructure the pieces on the board, but actually change the rules of the game. For instance, I’ve noticed that a more organised to-do list (even if just 2 or 3 items long) can simply turn into a to-fret list, a machine for making you concerned about whether you’ve ticked your own boxes or not. It can remove a lot of the joy and creativity of doing, and I know myself well enough to know that it’s that joy which keeps me going – without it, the overhead of worry either creates or amplifies the down side of the cycle.

I have a festering belief that (my) focus methods should simply set some basic guidelines, such as time spent, and on a particular area/client/topic/etc, and that I should then encourage myself to enjoy improving that space as much as possible.

Sure, task lists are still a good way of organising and breaking down possible work to avoid confusion, but it’s about shifting the starting point for going into that work. It’s about returning to the reasons for why you started doing something in the first place. It’s all about Intent.

I’m going to give this a mindful go, alongside other small tweaks to try to improve my rest cycles (less coffee, more reading, more water, slowing down generally). I don’t want to set out any specific steps for how I’m going to do it though, other than a few minutes of thought time before I begin things – that would seem to defeat the whole point of it. And I don’t want it to be just a work thing, despite this being my work notes blog. I feel like it’s a me thing, across everything I do.

Let’s go.