A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.
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The inimitable Sarah Drummond has created BINFAX 100 which, she says is a way of contributing to the Count Binface campaign:
Yesterday, whilst on a break, I built BinFax.
Helping Count Binface put his manifesto of bringing Ceefax back into action.
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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."
…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)
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!
