This felt like a busy week, perhaps because it actually was
On Monday I had a call with Peter Bittner, who publishes The Upgrade, a newsletter about generative AI for storytellers which I highly recommend. It was great to chew the fat a little about what I've been writing about on my newsletter, and also to think about a few things we might do together in the future.
The on Thursday I caught up with Phil Clark, who has also recently left his corporate role and is working on a few interesting projects. Plus I spoke to Lucy Colback, who works for the FT, to talk about a project she's working on.
On Friday we headed down to Brighton for the weekend. Kim was doing a workshop on drawing (of course) and I took the opportunity to catch up with a couple of old friends, including my old Derby pal Kevin who I've known for 40 years. Forty bloody years. How does that even happen?
The three things which most caught my attention
- Here's something positive: the story of Manchester Mill, a subscription-based local news email in Manchester that's doing more than breaking even, which remaining independent, creating quality news, and not taking advertising.
- Tilda Swinton is just one of my favourite people. That's all.
- Mozilla wants to create a decentralised social network, based on Mastodon, that's actually easy for people to use.
Things I have been writing
Last week's Substack post looked at Apple's old Knowledge Navigator video and how computing is heading towards a conversational interaction model. This has some big implications for publishers, particularly those who have focused on giving "answers" to queries from Google: when you can effectively send an intelligent agent out to find the things you want via a conversation, web pages as we know them are largely redundant.
I wrote a post about Steven Sinofsky's criticism of regulating AI. I think Sinofsky is coming at this from a pretty naive perspective, but not one which is atypical of the kind of thinking you'll find amongst American tech boosters. It was ever thus: I feel when writing articles like this that it's just revisiting arguments I was having with the Wired crowd in the late 1990s. The era when "the long boom" was an article of faith, the era when George Gilder was being listened to seriously.
And that's not surprising, really. The kind of people who are loudly shouting about the need for corporate freedom to trample over rights (Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel) grow up in that era and swallowed the Californian ideology whole. So did a lot of radicals who should have known better.
Things I have been reading
Having seen Brian Eno perform last week I'm working my way through A Year with Swollen Appendices, which is a sneaky book: the diary part is only a little over half of it, so just when you think you're coming to the end you have a lot of reading left to do. It's a good book though. Picking that up means I have had to put down Hilary Mantel's A Memoir of my Former Self, but that will be next on the list.
