A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
N.B. You should probably know that I wrote my doctoral thesis on digital literacies and I have opinions including that literate practices happen in communities, rather than being a solo intellectual pursuit.
I'm going to dive straight in.
…I'd like to think that something will come of this initial finding against Meta for being in breach of the Digital Services Act.
I'm hopeful, if only because WhatsApp isn't included in this. It's very difficult for legislatures in this day and age to meaningfully find against social infrastructure (which is what WhatsApp has become in Europe) but it's much easier to regulate social media.
…For the past few months I've been following Nīkau, "a global platform, information and operations security consultancy in service to NGOs, impact-driven organisations and grassroots movements". In addition to security auditing, etc. they also run courses, such as Cloudbreak which is an intensive 6-hour session "[walking] participants through the process of building up and tightly securing powerful cloud infrastructure" to provide "alternatives to Google Docs & Drive, Zoom & more."
…As I think I've mentioned previously, in the past few weeks I've had a couple of conversations which were incredibly eye-opening to me. I think it's quite likely that I have what has, since 2013, been referred to as AuDHD. Essentially, it's something different to autism and ADHD when each are present individually, and is instead a complex, ever changing relationship.
…I've just sent off my first-ever zine to the printer for a sample copy!
CW-PUB-001 / FNO-001: Field Notes on Productive Friction
(currently 23/50 copies remaining, there will be no digital version)
Let it be clear to you that the peace of green fields can always be yours, in this, that, or any other spot; and that nothing is any different here from what it would be either up in the hills, or down by the sea, or wherever else you will. You will find the same thought in Plato, where he speaks of living within the city walls ‘as though milking his flocks in a mountain sheepfold’.
…
My fascination with ambiguity goes back beyond even my doctoral thesis, although it was only between 2016 and this year (2026) that I had a dedicated blog on the topic.
Whether or not we choose to admit it, most of life is ambiguous. The main way this comes up for us as social animals is intra- and inter-personal communication: what does that mean. We're constantly second-guessing ourselves and others, searching for ever-better heuristics to help understand the world.
…Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks discusses how, as a technology, AI is used differently depending on predispositions:
The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”
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A bigger announcement soon, but just to say that FIELD STATION, my new venture with Tom Watson, is now officially A Thing as we were incorporated at Companies House yesterday!
