Ian Betteridge

First of all, how the hell is it June already? Is it just me? Is time passing at a ludicrously fast pace?

OK, maybe it is just me.

This week was, in work terms, truncated: A bank holiday plus a day off on Thursday made the week feel even shorter than normal. Since Thursday I have been up in Suffolk for a little mini-gathering of the clan, seeing my niece, her husband, and their two lovely children – the children for the first time ever. They all live over in Adelaide, where my brother and his wife settled over thirty years ago. An outpost of the Betteridge’s, established.

Because I’m quite a bit younger than my siblings being a great-uncle has come pretty early. I’m less than 20 years older than my youngest niece, which means we share quite a few cultural references, probably more than my siblings in some ways. And my niece’s lovely husband (who once managed to absolutely charm my mother, which gives him bonus points) is a wonderful, lovely guy, too.

Spending time away from home is good, but I’m less enamoured of living out of a rucksack than perhaps I would have been twenty years ago. I love being away, but the prospect of being at home in my own bed is what makes travelling special. The journey may indeed be the reward, but being able to soak in my own bath for a couple of hours is also part of the journey, in a way.

This week I have been reading Beyond the light horizon by Ken Macleod, the third in a series which I have quite enjoyed. It’s a nice near-future romp which features submarines which are actually spaceships, a mysterious alien intelligence, and a European Union that’s developed into a more communistic union – and which works better. Thank you Ken for painting a picture of a near future that’s not totally wrecked. I enjoyed the first volume a lot, thought the second lagged a little (as second volumes often do) and am enjoying the third one a lot more so far.

This week I also bought a new iPad, the 11in iPad Pro with the spangly new M4 chip in it. As a bit of background, I actually had two iPads: an M1 12.9in, and a recent iPad mini. Since I bought the MacBook Air M2, the 12.9 – which was intended to be my travelling machine – has hardly had much use. The 11in iPad Pro is intended to replace both, and be the device I take on trips and while commuting.

This trip to Suffolk was its first journey, and it’s done really well. The new keyboard is a delight to type on. While I didn’t mind the previous Magic Keyboard, this is a far better feel and more akin to the excellent MacBook Air keyboard. It’s also – of course – a great book reader, and I have spent a lot of time reading on it. The screen is great, but honestly the screen on every iPad I have ever owned has been great. Is it noticeably better than the older iPad Pro? Not to my old eyes, but that’s because the older iPad Pros already had great screens.

More importantly battery life is good, largely (I think) thanks to the shift to OLED and the power-sipping qualities of the M4. Does it need all that power? No. Will there be applications in the future where it’s required? Almost certainly. Roll on WWDC in a few weeks.

It’s been a while since I wrote a proper Weeknote. To be honest, I am struggling with them a bit – I’m working at an actual company four days a week, which means what I can talk about is a bit more limited than when I was just mostly home-working freelance. 

The job is at a small business to business publisher and events company, working in the pharmaceuticals and transport spaces. Although I have touched on working with transport before, pharma is totally new to me. That’s not a big deal though: my role is to work with their content team, who don’t have a lot of experience, and get them working in new and exciting ways. 

Experience is a strange thing. By any solid metric, I have a lot of it. I’ve worked many different roles in editorial, content creation, video, podcasting – if it’s a medium, I’ve probably done it. I’ve worked on print, digital, done audience development, SEO, social, and more. And I’ve run teams that varied in size from a handful of people to close to fifty. 

Yet sometimes I feel like I don’t know what to do with that experience. Or rather: it feels hard to demonstrate to people just how valuable that experience is.

I have skills and knowledge that are timeless, but a lot of companies out there seem to overlook them. I have witnessed the evolution and transformation of many industries and markets over the past thirty years, but – perhaps because I have spent the last few years buried deep inside a big corporation – it’s sometimes hard to have much to show for it. 

I have a wealth of stories and insights to share, and when I share them people value the insight, but getting the opportunity is sometimes more difficult. 

But then I looked at Reddit posts from recent graduates, who all seemed to discover that the assurances of high salaries and good jobs they were given if they just graduated were, in fact, not bearing out. And I realise (again) how easy I had – and have – it.

Nearly 40% of 18-year-olds go to university.  When I went, in 1986, that percentage was much lower – only 15% in 1980. Likewise, on my year only three out of 110 students in the cohort got first class honours – 2%. Now the average is 36%. When that many people are graduating, and that large a number are getting top marks, it’s not difficult to see how being a graduate isn’t the guarantee of a better job that it once was. 

If someone with my experience and advantages doesn’t feel like he’s being heard, what chance do people just starting out have?

BOY that was a week. You might have noticed that I didn’t write a weeknote last weekend… well there’s lots of things going on at the moment that I can’t really talk about too much. I’ll no doubt have more to say about that some time soon, but in the meantime it just means that my time has been a bit fractured.

This week also saw me start a new job, as interim head of content at Russell Publishing. Russell – or RPL as everyone calls it internally – is a business to business publisher going through some change, and I’ve been brought on board to help develop some new content strategies and mentor the content team. I’m going to be with them for nine months, which I think should be enough to get the job done, and I’m only doing four days a week so I can continue to have enough time to work on some fiction and some other small projects.

It was slightly odd being back in a business environment after a few months where my time was basically my own. I’m only in the office two days a week (the company is staunchly hybrid, which is good) but it’s the first time for several months that I’ve been working around people like that.

To make things more fun, after my first day in the office – induction on Monday – I came home feeling really under the weather, shivering and aching, so I had to phone in sick on Tuesday. Great start! Not QUITE how I wanted things to go. But we go again this week, and it was nice to meet my direct reports.

What I’ve been writing this week

You might have noticed that the US Department of Justice is taking Apple to court. I know, it’s very much gone under the radar.

Antitrust cases are just wonderful for journalists. When Microsoft was going through its cases with the DOJ and European Commission, back in the late 90s and early 00s, I spent quite a bit of time writing about it. So it seemed natural to write something which drew on that experience in terms of the expectations of the kind of stuff you’re going to read and the process it will go through.

I also had to write a post which – horror of horrors – disagreed with something Walt Mossberg had written. Walt is one of my technology journalism heroes. He basically defined the best way to write about technology products at a time when national newspapers really didn’t take computers seriously as something that needed reporting on.

What I’ve been reading this week

This has been that rarest of things: a two-book week. They were, though, two volumes of the same work: Dream Makers by Charles Platt. It’s a set of interviews with science fiction writers, originally published in 1980, and updated by Platt with more historical context – basically what happened next to each author.

Apart from some annoying typos and unpleasant formatting (Platt is self publishing the ebook versions) it’s well worth the couple of quid each one will set you back. Everyone is in here, from Asimov and Clarke to members of the New Wave. Even L Ron Hubbard is there.

Last week we went to see Dune. It's a pretty amazing film, the kind that you just let wash over you and experience rather than trying too hard to intellectualise. You definitely need to have seen the first part, though.

I have some news about work which I will be able to share with everyone next week… yes, I am an international man of mystery. But on Wednesday last week I gave a couple of hours training on video content strategy, something that I am surprised to realise I've been doing regularly for about 15 years. One thing I really enjoy about giving training courses is it makes me realise that I actually know quite a lot about something, and also put it all down on paper.

Because there are too many hours in the day, and because a new version of KDE Plasma is out, I spent some time installing it on my ThinkPad. I had a bit of a play with KDE Neon -- the distribution the KDE team created to showcase the most up to date KDE packages -- but then decided to install the pre-release version of the Fedora 40 KDE spin. I've grown pretty comfortable with Fedora as a distro, and it's close enough to release to be stable.

Things I have been writing

I wrote about the future of search-driven affiliate content. The short version is, I don't think there is one, at least not to the degree that many online publishers are relying on now. In particular, I think the impact of conversation-driven search, which incorporates LLMs to create queries from natural language, will make a big difference.

Meanwhile, this week's ten blue links was a "too much Apple edition", thanks to Apple driving off a cliff while shooting itself in the foot.

Things I have been reading

This has been a slow week for reading. Having completed Burn Book I'm doing the thing I often do, which is to bounce around a couple of different books to see what sticks. I've read a little bit of Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software, as well as Plunder of the Commons. Too many books, too little time.

I'm a little bit tired: a two hour journey back from Folkestone this morning (thank you farmers, tractor convoys in a mediaeval walled city are fun) and several pints last night make me want a nap. It was a friend's birthday, and there was pizza. I narrowly avoided dad dancing.

Things I have been writing

I'm not entirely sure why this week's Ten Blue Links was the Folsom City Prison edition – perhaps because I mention hacking prison laptops – but it was, and there's some good stuff in there. I also wrote about who AI might indicate the end of the line for Google. Google is a strange company in many ways (someone once described it to me as "a university research division funded by an adtech company) and I suspect it's at a crossroads. Of course, like IBM, it won't vanish – companies can last a long time on momentum alone – but it feels like without a major change of course it won't be seen as a visionary company again.

Things I have been reading

After 80 days of daily reading I broke my streak, and, it seems, had a bit of a break. But I've started again, picking up Guy Standing's Plunder of the Commons. Standing starts off looking at the historical enclosure of common land, but then swiftly moves into the way that everything which we have banded together to do in common is quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – being taken away from us and given to individuals to profit from. Same shit, different century.

I bought and finished Kara Swisher's Burn Book. It’s fairly obvious some of the shall we say more critical reviews have done quite a bit of selective quoting. Like quoting a sentence and then missing out the all-important one which follows, showing exactly the opposite of what the critic is claiming. Good book, and I would recommend it to everyone.

The good thing about not writing a weeknote for a week is you have plenty of things to write about. The bad thing is that you have plenty of things to write about.

We’ve managed to fit in two movies in the past fortnight: All of us strangers, and The zone of interest. What a pair of absolute crackers. Go and see them in the cinema, don’t wait till you can stream them or whatever. But then I would say that because I love the cinema, something I have only recently rediscovered.

On a trip to that there London, we managed to squeeze in both exhibitions on at the Courtauld – Cute, and Frank Auerbach – as well as a wander around the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery. Cute was a little disappointing: lots of great objects, but the curation didn’t really tell a story that had any narrative to it. It was more “here’s a thing, here’s a thing, oh and another set of things”. Auerbach is a brilliant artists, but not totally my cup of tea – but he is Kim’s, so that’s fine.

The NPG was a place that I was very familiar with. When I worked at Redwood, we were just across the road in a building which is now a hotel, so I often dropped into the NPG at lunch time for a sit and think. The renovation is a huge improvement, not simply for the fabric of the building but also for the way it’s curated. The Victorians, which used to be a gallery of Dead White Men(TM) now actually tells a story of colonialism and empire through almost exactly the same pictures. Also: whoever decided to put Radclyffe Hall in between Churchill and George VI is a genius.

We also headed over to Oxford for an overnight trip, seeing our lovely friends and their lovely children and also William Kentridge doing the fifth of the Slade Lectures Hilary 2024. I wish we had been able to go to the whole series – Kentridge is a brilliant lecturer as well as an artist I greatly admire. Seeing things like that makes me wish I lived in an academic city, instead of in a city which just happens to have two universities bolted on to it. There is a profound difference, and it’s one of the things that I most dislike about Canterbury.

At the Ashmolean, we saw Colour Revolution, which will have closed when you read this. I liked it: in particular I liked the bust of Maharajah Duleep Singh, heir to the Punjab who was forced into exile in England when we stole his land. The bust on display has his actual skin tone. Queen Victoria insisted on a classic, plain white version for herself. If that isn’t a nod to how Indians – even noble ones – were seen by the Victorians, I don’t know what is.

While there, we also caught Monica Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother at Modern Art Oxford. I was not impressed. There is something about the retreat into mysticism which radical politics of the 60s and 70s succumbed to which irritates the heck out of me. It’s particularly true for second-wave feminism: as Michael Moorcock said in The Retreat from Liberty, “being Mother of the Universe cannot offer much consolation while Father is always in evidence somewhere, even if he spends most evenings at the pub.”

Coincidentally, Moorcock was also critical of the Greenham protests, which he saw as faux radical with zero chance of actually changing anything, and with little/no consequences if you got arrested. It’s not popular to say so now, but he was right – Greenham changed nothing, and the energy which went into it would have been far better spent campaigning, say, for the police to take rape seriously (which they very much didn’t at the time).

This week I have been reading…

Having finished the 500+ page Babel I dived into the 500+ page The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock, and finished it. It's the closest thing Moorcock is likely to write to an autobiography, but of course includes huge strands of fiction in it. Weirdly, he includes many real names of people, but disguises others -- perhaps to make it clear that this is a fictional "real" Moorcock too (it's not down to actually needing the disguise people for legal or other reasons -- changing Ballard to Allard isn't going to fool anyone, and with JGB dead there's no issue of libel anyway).

I also finished Zoe Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, which is the story of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. If you haven't been obsessively following it this book is an excellent romp through all that's happened. But if you have, there's probably not a lot in here which will either surprise you or that you won't be aware of.

Musk is, of course, the main character. But until the day when he tells his own story, he's a main character that is almost entirely absent. That allows the reader to paint in whatever their own feelings are about him, but it doesn't really answer the question of why he is like this, why he takes these dreadful decisions. Nor does it really tell us mush about how he manages to get away with it, although having more money than is right for any human being is probably part of the answer.

The Emperor’s New Clothes definitely applies to those around him, and one of the more interesting parts is the accounts of those who attempted to play along with the Musk regime at Twitter, mollifying him and trying to find ways to do what he wanted without destroying their own values in the process. There will no doubt be a few more of those stories come out over the next few years, and I hope there is ultimately a revised version which tells those too.

This week I have been writing…

Last week’s Ten Blue Links was really a collection of bad things that are happening in tech at the moment. It really is quite grim: between Apple deciding it’s more likely to achieve growth through rentier capitalism than making high-quality products that ordinary people can afford, VCs turning out to be utter morons, and Sam Altman being, well, what we all know he is (but aren’t really saying) I don’t think there has been a more depressing landscape in the tech industry.

As I said at the end of that piece, it’s best to sup with a long spoon.

Meanwhile I made some progress on Orford. Not as much as I would have liked, but I solved a knotty problem in the plot by bringing the introduction of a character to much earlier in the work.

Quite a busy week, all told. I finished off a feature for PC Pro magazine, which will be the first freelance bit of tech journalism I’ve done for quite some time (I think it’s a good five years since the last one). I also took a trip into London to see one of my former colleagues, and it was great to hear what they have been up to. That includes a project I had encouraged them to do involving offering more work experience placements for young people wanting to get into automotive journalism, and it sounds like it’s been a success.

I’m excellent at encouraging other people. Encouraging myself is a bit harder. But even that’s been pretty good this week. I’m still arsing around with technology too much, and thinking too much (and too hard) about platforms and systems and all that jazz. But I also feel like I’m getting somewhere – finally – with the personal projects I have wanted to work on.

One thing I have been arsing around with (for professional purposes) is AI image generation, and it’s absolutely hilarious. Can you guess what the prompt was which produced the image at the top?

Things I have been reading

I’ve been reading Babel by R F Huang this week, and I’m entranced. There’s a lot of wonderful writing in it – I will probably have to write a post just about it when I’m finished – but there are two things which hit hard for me: the scene at the start, where Robin is leaving Canton and believes that he will never see it again, and the continual careful subtext of the seduction by empire of its best and brightest subjects. For me – a grandchild of the Empire, whose mother left Imperial India as a small child – there are so many elements where both those points hit hard. It’s a terrific book, and if you haven’t read it, you really should.

Things I have been writing

I wrote something about Apple Vision Pro, in bullet point form. The confounding thing about Apple is that I think they have, to a degree, lost their soul, and in some ways the Vision Pro is emblematic of that. Vision Pro feels like a device that’s not going to encourage people to be more creative – except in the context of creating things for others to view on Vision Pro.

I’ve been meaning to do a regular link blog post for a while, and now I have an idea for it. So every Friday, I’m going to do a ten blue links post with ten things that have found their way into my inbox. I don’t think the format of the first one is quite right because it is too long (and took too long to write), but I’ll see how it develops. I’m pondering how to make this an email too.

Speaking of newsletters, this week’s was about adapting to the new reality of search. Quality content is going to win, ultimately. Includes a passing reference to Roland Barthes. What do you expect from a philosophy graduate?

I’ve also been working on Orford, the piece of fiction which may well be a novel. I have the beginning. Not only that, but I have the end. How I get from one to the other is the tricky bit. I think I need to redo the outline because that bit just isn’t hanging together well. And then I need to write about another 50,000 words. Go me.

This week there were some exciting work-related developments which I can't really talk about yet, but I might be able to in the future. Or I might not. I know, I am such a tease. I've also been talking to some people about doing some training for them, and we shall see where that gets to.

We caught the last day of Mark Leckey's In the Offing at the Turner Contemporary and I didn't think that much of it. I like Leckey's work generally – Fiorucci Made me Hardcore is brilliant – but this was a collection of other people's work, largely musicians, and it didn't hang together for me. I said afterwards that it is always interesting when musicians dive into visual art because they often don't have the chops to step beyond the original concept. That makes the work a bit one dimensional, and that's how I felt about most of the work here. It falls into the "glad I saw it, but didn't really work" bucket.

Other than that, this has been a quiet week, when I've spent far too much time in the house – perhaps unsurprising given that it's been freezing when it's not been raining (and occasionally both freezing and raining).

The three things which most caught my attention

1. Peter Capaldi bemoans the fact that it's much harder for young working class people to get a start in the arts and creative industries. And he's right. I was lucky enough to be part of the tail-end of free education (I paid no fees and had a grant all the way through to postgraduate level) and I am utterly horrified by how education has change. Fuck, as they say, the Tories.
2. Neil Gaiman's memorial lecture for Douglas Adams is a good one. I'm amazed I hadn't seen this until this week.
3. Hilariously, it looks like there is a massive bot problem on Twitter, as shown by the number of failed AI prompts.

Things I have been writing

I have moved my email from Substack to Wordpress, which means you'll need to subscribe to get my posts. I'm still working out how this works -- I suspect subscribers will get early access, but I'll make them open a couple of days later. The first one is up and it's about the continuing challenge of a return to office.

Things I have been reading

Neal Asher is a science fiction writer that I have been reading since his first novel, Gridlinked. He's an interesting blend of SF and horror which, in his earlier work, absolutely hit the spot. I didn't enjoy his last one that much,but Jenny Trapdoor already feels like a bit of a return to form. The proof will be in the finishing…

I was going to write a sort of yearnote last week, summing up 2023. I didn’t, in the end, mainly because I felt too tired of 2023 to want to write it. It was not the greatest of years of my life. In fact, I would put it down as probably the worst, all things considered. Even lockdown, with all its attendent insanity, had good moments. 2023 really doesn’t feel like it had many.

The first week of the year is always an odd when when you’re working for a company. It’s a time when quite a few people are going to be away, taking the chance of an extended break (if you time it well, you can basically get three to four weeks off).

It’s a little different when you’re not working. The danger is there is no “first week back” in the same way there’s no “last week”. The time can all blur into one miasma of semi-productive, semi-unproductive days. Which then turn into weeks.

Similarly the division between weekdays and weekends becomes something you have to actively preserve, rather than simply relying on a lack of work to magically create your weekend.

And it’s fair to say this week saw a slow start. But towards the end of the week, things picked up. I worked through what I wanted my goals to be for this quarter (and in fact this year). I also started testing Motion, which is an interesting task/calendar app which I like the look of.

What Motion does is automatically create blocks of time for your tasks. You prioritise them, put in deadlines and start dates, and an estimate of how long it will take to do the task. For bigger tasks which take longer than an hour, you can define “blocks” – the shortest block of time that you want to work on that task. Motion then goes off and puts the blocks on your calendar, effectively scheduling in all the work that you have to do.

It sounds more complex than it it, but the end result is pretty compelling: a complete schedule which lets you be clear at all times about what’s next. I started working with it at the end of the week and absolutely blasted through a bunch of stuff which had been lingering on my task list for ages.

Motion started off life as a calendar application and it still works well as one. It will connect to Google, iCloud and Microsoft (work and personal) calendars, and arranges your tasks around meetings. If a new meeting drops in, it will reschedule your tasks, and alert you if suddenly a task becomes impossible to do beyond its deadline.

It’s not cheap: $19 a month if you pay annually, or a stupid $34 a month if you go monthly, I probably won’t subscribe at this point, as I need to watch where my money is going, but I would definitely be tempted in the future.

Technically, I should have written this yesterday, but somehow Christmas Eve feels like an even less appropriate time to be writing than Christmas Day.

Christmas coincides with my birthday, something that’s been a bane and a boon over the years. On one hand, it opens the opportunity of a REALLY BIG PRESENT as a joint Christmas and birthday one, and one I can open a few days before everyone else gets theirs. Although as a child, there were always a few aunties and uncles who managed to sneak in the same present they would have bought me for Christmas anyway.

On the other hand, it’s always meant that my birthday was overshadowed by the big day itself. In my teens and early 20s, this didn’t matter: my birthday was just an excuse for friends to start the Christmas week’s drinking early.

But as friends and family got older, my birthday has always tended to get forgotten, or pushed to one side. Happily, that has coincided with getting old enough that each passing year is treated with as much suspicion as optimism. Your best days might be ahead of you, but there is a hell of a lot less of them than you would like.

Getting old also means that the old acquisitive urges lessen, too, making present buying for me difficult and less obvious. Kim chose wisely, of course, because she puts a great deal of thought into it.

Hence, spending my birthday evening somewhere near Stratford, seeing ABBA Voyage.

I’ve always loved Abba. Old enough to remember when their singles were new and much-anticipated, even as a child I loved the melancholy in their songs. Abba have two modes: full on joy (Dancing Queen) or heartbreak (Knowing me, Knowing you). No band in the world has ever managed to hit both modes so well.

I’ve argued in the past that Abba’s greatest hits are better than The Beatles, and I still think that’s true. There’s something to be written about how Abba are queer in a way that The Beatles never could be. But that’s another essay, and one that I am probably not entirely qualified to write.  

Of course, Voyage is holograms: but after about five minutes, you stop thinking about that and just enjoy it. And it’s wonderful: genuinely the best “live” show I’ve seen. It might have made hundreds of millions of pounds, but you can see where the money went to set it up. Even the building was built specially for the show.

I cried. It’s a mark of the breadth of music that I like that the last band I saw live that made me cry was Van Der Graaf Generator, when they reformed in 2005, and I went to their first show.

But perhaps there’s a connection. I cried at VDGG because they were a band I had loved, who I never thought I would have the chance to see. Abba, despite the physical absence of the protagonists, felt in some way the same.

Anyway, if you get a chance, go and see it. It’s good.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I use computers this week. As I have written before (at great length) I still use computers like I was a full-time technology journalist, which means the tech is the point. I’m playing around a lot, but not necessarily getting a lot done.

So this week, I put a bit of thinking time into both the why and the what. Why I do this is pretty simple: I like playing around with tech, and while I was a full-time journalist, it was literally my job to use it and get to know it better. But what I also had to do was write about it, communicating what I found to other people. I don’t have to do that any more, but I would like to do it again.

The what was thinking about what tools I need to do the productive and creative things that I enjoy doing (and that make me some money). And that list turned out to be simple: a browser, a word processor, a few other things. I’m going to write a longer post about this, but actually sitting down and writing some thoughts on paper about it made me feel a lot calmer.

Three things which you might want to read

1. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that corporations have been using the cover of inflation to pad their margins and add to their bottom line. And I was told it was all greedy workers wanting to, you know, be able to buy groceries.
2. No, just because you have paid millions of pounds for a train doesn’t mean you own it. You’ve simply taken on the responsibility of paying inflated fees to the company that made it when it needs servicing. Didn’t you get the memo?
3. I really enjoyed John Scalzi’s post about abandoning Twitter. There are some interesting points about engagement on Bluesky and Mastodon compared there, too, if that’s your kind of thing.

What I’ve been reading

One of my bad habits is book bouncing. I’m like a magpie: I start on one thing and bounce to a new, shiny thing. And as I have a massive backlog of books to read, it’s easy to bounce from one to another.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that this week I have been reading about five books, with no actual substantial reading done. I promise to be good next week.

What I have been writing

Other than this, absolutely nothing. It has not been a productive week.

How did it get to be December already? And how did it get so cold?

The Byte archive

I was a fairly religious reader of Byte magazine from the early 1980s until it finally bit the dust as a print publication in 1998. I always loved that it wasn’t focused on a single platform, but on “small computers” as a whole.

It also had the kind of deep technical content which I loved. If you wanted to know about new processors, the transputer, or something even more esoteric, Byte was a great place to keep informed.

It also had Jerry Pournelle. Science fiction writer, conservative, and holder (in later life) of some dubious views, Jerry was nonetheless one of the most influential early computer journalists. I loved his columns, which stretched out to 5,000 words or so per issue. They were written from the perspective of an ordinary computer user — albeit one that had the kind of knowledge required to run a computer in the days of the S100 bus and CP/M.

Thankfully, the Internet Archive has every issue of Byte, scanned and neatly labelled. Annoyingly though, there isn’t a single collection which has every issue in it, which means it’s not easy to just download everything.

And having local copies is vital for me, as I use DEVONThink for research, and it wants a local set of PDFs. So I have started putting together the definitive collection of every single issue, and once I’ve done it I will put them somewhere online, so people can download the whole set. It’s big – my incomplete version is about 7Gb, and I estimate the full set is about 10Gb – but at least they will be there.

This took quite a while to do this week, and I'm pleased with the results.

Chanel

I went to see the Chanel show at the V&A – I don’t really like Chanel’s clothes that much, but her accessories are amazing and she had a really fantastic eye for patterns.

Seeing the collection emphasised that once she created the classic suit, so much of what she did was just more of the same. Milking a hit isn’t necessarily a bad thing: but the small card which notes she “attempted to extend the suit from day to evening wear” is a bit of a giveaway. She didn’t just make more suits. But she was more than happy to keep churning out endless slight variants in a way which made her a lot of money.

It was a little disappointing that the exhibition basically skips over the nine years when she could not work in France because she was widely believed to have collaborated with the Nazis. She had an affair with a German officer and used his connections to protect a relative. Literally one sign, with no more than 30 words on it, and then skipping merrily on to her return in 1954.

In fact, there is more space devoted to the one document from 1943 which lists her as working with the resistance, although there is no documentation (and no one remembers) exactly what she did with them.

There is, of course, far more documentation listing her as a Nazi agent. She definitely benefitted from the Germans’ Aryanization laws, which let her get control of her perfume business from the Jewish Wertheimer brothers.

There’s no doubt that Chanel collaborated, and that her high-placed contacts (Churchill, Duff Cooper, and many others) protected her after the war. None of this is mentioned, perhaps because once you understand what she did and what she was, it’s much less likely that you will just want to admire the pretty clothes.

I don’t think it’s possible to understand Chanel-the-person without considering that period of her life. And the exhibition doesn’t have the excuse that it’s solely about her influence on fashion (there’s surprisingly little which contextualises her in that sense). It ends when she dies, so it's not about Chanel the brand or even really her legacy.

In that sense, it’s a massive contrast to Diva, which is also on at the V&A and which managed to reduce me to tears when I saw it. Diva is a brilliant bit of curation in ways that Chanel is not.

However, if you do go to the V&A, get yourself a piece of the pear and caramel cake. It’s really rather fine.

Three things you should read this week

1. The End of Elon Musk. In any rational world, Musk’s performance at the Dealbook conference would be the end of his career. It probably won’t be, unfortunately. But, as Magary notes, Musk “appeared both high and made of plywood”. He does not seem like a well man, and I don’t say that either lightly or with any pleasure.
2. Speaking of Musk, the Cybertruck is here¹, and predictably it’s pricier and has less range than he claimed. Oh, and while the sides are bulletproof, as Musk said, the windows are not, which may prove an issue if someone is actually trying to kill you.
3. And sticking with the theme of “people who really should grow up”, Basecamp lost a customer thank to DHH’s nonsense. Why is it that people who crow loudest about “keeping politics out of work” so often bring their politics to work? Of course, what they actually mean is “keep your politics out of work”. It’s the same as Elon “Free Speech” Musk. Free for them, not for you.

This week I have been reading…

The news that greenhouse gas emissions have been soaring rather than reducing ended the week on a sour note for me, but it makes it more obvious than ever that capitalism isn’t going to deliver a future of humanity. So reading Tim Jackson’s Post Growth has been pretty timely. Highly recommended.

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

1. 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.
2. Tilda Swinton is just one of my favourite people. That's all.
3. 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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

An abbreviated weeknote this time, as I've not long got back from Orford Ness.

Orford Ness is a strange and interesting place. Used by the air force as a bombing run and a research centre, it has been partly rewilded, but with the unmistakable detritus of military and industrial use. In some ways, it reminded me of parts of the industrial edges of Derby combined with the brutal flat farm land of southern Derbyshire. But with shingle. Lots and lots of shingle. It's stark and beautiful, and I recommend a visit.

I started scribbling down a story based in part there last night, which I want to outline further. I'm going to crack into writing a short novel in November and see where I get with it: I would like to get a draft completed, although as I don't yet have a plot outline I'm a bit behind already. That will be this week's work.

Also on the agenda for this week is the second weekly post on my Substack, which focuses on the intersection between technology and the publishing business. Last week I posted about the impact of AI-driven changes in search on the ability of publishers to get traffic, the short version of which is “oh bugger”. There's no doubt in my mind that Google and Facebook really are intent on answering more queries without sending traffic to anyone else. That raises some huge problems, but there are ways out.

This week is all about using AI to create content, and the threat that poses to publishers. “Threat,” you're saying, “isn't it an opportunity?” Well, no – and tomorrow I'll explain why.

The three things which most caught my attention

1. How tiny Qatar hosts the leaders of Hamas. In among the entirely correct condemnation of Hamas, what's being ignored is the role of “friendly” countries in “hosting” the Hamas leadership. Qatar, a country which has a track record of human rights abuses as long as your arm, gets rewarded with hosting World Cups and much more while it materially supports terrorism. Why does the West ignore this? In Britain's case, perhaps because of the [£40bn or so “investment” the country makes] – which mostly means buying and inflating property prices, benefiting our Tory masters.
2. Many people jumped on the story that Spotify made higher-than-expected profits, citing the top-line number of around 1bn euro earnings. What they didn't cite was the actual profit: just 32m euro. Bearing in mind that it was after a quarter of crackdowns on password sharing, large increases in subscribers, and increases in prices, it's hard to see how Spotify will ever be a seriously profitable business.
3. All the Whole Earth Catalog is now available online. Nostalgia in a bucket load.

It’s been a while. I have missed the last couple of weeks not because I was too busy to write, but almost the opposite: I have felt like nothing much has happened.

Of course, that isn’t true. It’s never really true that nothing is happening in your life, but when you’re not working, what tends to happen is that the days elide into each other. The rhythm of most people’s life is work, or child-rearing, or the climbing frame of domesticity which they have erected around their time.

I haven’t really yet cultivated that. I have had no work to do other than to make myself get up and write something every day. We have no children to depend on our timekeeping. And keeping house has never been a routine for either of us.

The commemoration this weekend has been that of three months since I last had to get up in the morning, do eight hours of work, and sign off from Teams. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it. Having nothing to do, no one relying on your input to get on with their lives, is something I can recommend to anyone who wants to avoid waking up one day and asking “what the hell happened to me?” It provides that thing we most lack as we dance busily through life: perspective.

So, what new perspective on my life have I found? First, that I have a kind of pastoral radicalism, a communism-not-Marxism which believes in the collective good. That sounds abstract, but I think it’s important. It’s a deep and abiding value, and we live in an age when values are used as a debased common currency, but in actuality are as ephemeral and short-lived as muons, decaying quickly into more stable and entrenched positions.

The second thing I have come to understand is how deeply rooted impostor syndrome is in my life. I have always spent time denying my role in what I have achieved (at one point, one of my managers made “blowing my trumpet” a goal for the year because of my habit of deflecting praise). Because of this, I am not kind to myself in any meaningful way. Being forced to just stop has allowed me to start the process of letting some of this go.

The act of writing can be both an antidote to and a trigger for impostor syndrome. Writers crave the validation of an audience because it’s the one moment when the feelings of fraudulence are pushed into the shadows. But the fear of not living up to expectations, of having no originality, of creating nothing of value, is also right there, all the time.

I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of days. We were away, first in Hastings (Kim was teaching a life drawing class there) and then Eastbourne, seeing the Turner Prize show. If you get, go: Rory Pilgrim’s Rafts made me cry, as did Barbara Walker’s work. It reminded me that art is emotion, and it means that I really do have to tap into my emotions to make mine work. More of that, I suspect, over the coming months.

Meanwhile, at some point I will have to actually get some kind of income or other. I have a few more months when I don’t need to work, but at some point money will once again become a thing of concern, rather than an abstraction which I can deal with later. One learning about money: I need much less of it than I would have thought a few months ago. Debt, it turns out, robs you of your freedom quite effectively because you have to earn more than you need to pay back someone for the time when you couldn’t earn all that you required. I’m free of debt now, and that feels like an unshackling.

Things I have been reading this week

I finished Gary Gibson’s Europa Deep in two gluttonous sittings. It’s a neat, tidy and highly enjoyable hard SF story, and it reminded me how much of the SF genre is currently playing with the tropes of thrillers and crime drama. I need to think a bit more about this because somewhere in the race to make SF adhere to the structures, tropes and pacing of the thriller, something – quite a lot – is lost.

Reading Hilary Mantel’s A memoir of my former self feels like a delightful indulgence. It’s a collection of Mantel’s extensive back-catalogue of non-fiction, created because she developed the habit early in her career of writing for newspapers, periodicals, and magazines as well as books. It wasn’t really for fun: it was a survival mechanism because writing fiction (then as now) was not really enough to live on, at least until you become the kind of celebrated and storied writer Mantel grew to be.

I’m glad she had to do it because she applied her mind to it and the results are spectacular. In the first piece, “On the one hand”, she writes about the difference between fiction and journalism:

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.

It’s great. You should read it.

How the heck is it October already? That's just not possible.

It's been a relatively quiet week. On Tuesday I was going to go to Waterstones in Canterbury to see Mark Stay talk about his latest book, but didn't feel great so I stayed at home. I suspect the reason I didn't feel great was basically that I didn't have enough caffeine: I accidentally made morning coffee with decaf, which is probably some kind of crime against humanity. Coffee-drinking humanity, at least.

On Thursday I went to the Good Bad Books event at the Barbican. We drove in, which is crazy, but even taking into account the charge for ULEZ and petrol costs it's half the price of the train. The prices of train journeys, even bought in advance, off-peak and discounted, are stupid. Once you have more than a single person, it's probably cheaper to drive if you can, even though fuel prices are again on the up. I hate it, but there it is.

The event was the culmination of a series of workshops. I went to the last one on horror writing and the story I wrote got selected to go in the book produced for the event, which was INCREDIBLY EXCITING. I have had my byline in so many magazines I've lost count, and probably had a million words published, but none of them have been fiction and that's incredibly exciting. I didn't even think it was that good a story, although I'm told otherwise -- so I'll take it.

This was also a week of computer maintenance, and I'm not even vaguely finished. The autumn new operating system bonanza -- new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows and even Chrome OS -- meant that a lot of machines suddenly wanted to download multi-gigabyte updates. Which would be fine if our home broadband ran at anything other than glacial speeds.

Cue me carting around various laptops to the University Library, where I can sit and update things at much faster speeds. And of course read some really good books. Having a borrower's ticket, though, is turning out not to be much of a money saver as I have a tendency to want to buy some of the books I find. Thankfully they are mostly second hand, obscure and cheap.

One other small good piece of tech this week: it turns out there is a version of iA Writer for Windows, which makes me very happy indeed. iA Writer is a great Markdown programme which includes some great editing features, such as the ability to highlight all the verbs, nouns, adverbs and so on in different colours. This makes it really easy to spot where you are being repetitive or where the adverbs are taking over the text.

And finally, Saturday saw us pop along to the Gulbenkian to see Acid Brass – acid house, played by a proper brass band. I first saw them 26 years ago, at the Barbican performance of KLF's Fuck the Millennium – a gig which lasted (if I remember) 24 minutes (there was some numerological connection to the number which Jimmy and Bill were obsessed with). There was dancing.

Things things which caught my attention this week

1. This video shows a meeting between the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, who made some of the most beautiful animated films in history, and a bunch of AI dudes keen to show him their generative movement system. It does not go well. I think I agree with what Miyazaki-san says at the end: "We humans are losing faith in ourselves."
2. iFixit dropped the repairability score for the iPhone because of its parts pairing scam. Sigh.
3. When thinking about global warming, it's worth remembering that it really is the fault of the rich. Eat them. All of them.

Things I have been reading

I finished The Entropy Exhibition by Colin Greenland this week, which is an interesting (and out of print) look at the influence and influences of New Worlds magazine and its coterie of writers. They're a fascinating bunch: from the older ones (Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard) to the young punks (Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison) there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.

I have also started re-reading Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, which I first watched in television form (starring Anthony Sher) when I was a teenager. It was one of the things which persuaded me that maybe I should go to polytechnic rather than sign on or work at the railway painting trains like my father. My ambitions, at that age, involved being in a band and owning a transit van to take us to gigs. My life has taken many odd turns since then.

Also reading – I'm going a lot of reading – New Worlds: An anthology edited by Moorcock from 1983. This was a library find, where I have ended up buying a second hand copy. I had this book when it first came out, and lent it to my friend Stanley. Predictably, I never got it back. Wherever you are, Stanley, give me a shout.

Things I have been writing

I've been writing some notes for a potential novel, but I'm not sure it's got legs. We shall see. I don't think of myself as a novelist, at all, but I'm willing to give it a go.