Time passes. The highlight of this week was at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday, when we drove into London (more on that in a moment) to see Brian Eno and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic perform Eno’s album The Ship along with a handful of other songs.
It was of course brilliant, and incredibly moving. One of the additional songs that they performed was Bone Bomb from 2005’s Another Day on Earth, which is song rooted in the testimonies of two people; a teenage girl Palestinian suicide bomber; and an Israeli doctor who talked about how he had learned to pull fragments of the bones of suicide bombers from the bodies of their victims. It was incredibly affecting: I cried.
Eno is one of the artistic anchor points of my life. I first ran into his work in the early 80’s, when in my teens I bought a second hand copy of Another Green World and instantly knew that I wanted to be able to make art like that. I never quite succeeded in that aim – whatever my writing is, it’s not like Eno’s!. But he’s always been an inspiration in the way that he has had the fearlessness to do what he wanted to do without worrying too much about either immediate ability or the artificial boundaries which people set between the different creative domains.
Once a year, I reread his A Year with Swollen Appendices, which I think should be on the required reading list for any course in any creative field. No matter what you do creatively, you will get something out of it. You might not like Eno more at the end of it, but I think that’s actually to Eno’s credit.
As I mentioned, we drove rather than getting the train. Environmentally of course that is a poor decision. But it’s also literally half the price of travelling when there are two people, even including the parking and ULEZ charge. We drive to Woolwich and get the Elizabeth line from there; the fuel costs about £10, compared to about £80 for two people to get the train. I remember reading that the line to Canterbury is, per mile, the most expensive passenger railway in the world, and I can believe it.
However, this journey turned into a rather more expensive one, because on the way back we blew a tyre on the M2 and had to call recovery to pick us and the car up. Unfortunately our coverage had also run out, which meant that the total cost of recovery was just north of £200. Plus, of course, the tyre needed replacing (another £80). The God of Nature got their revenge.
A couple of weeks I started a Substack. I wanted to create a series of posts which look at how technology is impacting on publishing, and I have started with a focus on how the main sources of traffic for publishers – Google, Facebook – are going to fade in importance over the next few years as they begin to keep more people on their own pages and produce more immediate answers to queries using large language models (LLMs, which I am trying to not call AI – because while they are definitely artificial, they are not intelligent).
I think the audience development community of which I was (am?) a part is, at least publicly, in a bit of denial about this. The reaction to the article on The Verge about SEO’s impact on the web was a good demonstration of this: a lot of SEO people were very defensive about it, which is never a good look (if you’re confident about your work, you don’t get prickly when someone doesn’t understand what you do). I think I’m going to write something about that this week.
Some people have asked about Substack and why I’m using it. The answer is mostly that it’s much easier to get an audience there than it is to create a standalone newsletter. Substack does part of the work of promoting it for you, and it does work. That said, I also understand that some people have an ethical (and practical) objection to using a platform like Substack, so I’m going to create an alternative way of signing up this week somewhere else (probably Buttondown). It means more work for me of course, but that’s fine: and it also gives me a backup for when Substack inevitably starts to enshittify (which will be the moment you’re no longer able to export your subscriber list to move to another service).
Three things that caught my attention this week
- I feel like I end up recommending whatever Cory has written every week, but this week’s article on big tech’s “attention rents” really did knock it out of the park.
- The Guardian’s interview with Naomi Alderman was also brilliant. But that’s because Naomi is brilliant. We have only met once, but I have absolutely admired her ever since. Amongst the many clever and warm-hearted people I know, she’s pretty much top of the list.
- It’s been interesting to see how little reaction there has been to Sam Bankman-Fried’s inevitable guilty verdict from the Silicon Valley rich dude posse, but it makes sense: they want to portray him as simply a fraudster who got caught. The trouble is, he’s one of their creations who got caught.
