A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
Team Belshaw is on holiday for a week. If you're still pretending to work, this is a great time for you to catch up on:
Yo dawg, I herd you like zines, so I put an zine in your zine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iYAMYsWMM8
(I said I might do this...)
I'm really pleased at how this essay by Tom and me for FIELD STATION turned out. It's about decision making in the AI era, using some physics metaphors:
One of the first questions we ask new clients is "how do you make decisions?"
…
Although it kinda sounds like the name of a Californian synthwave band, 'Reality Drift' is a useful name for something that we've already seen happening recently:
Reality Drift describes a modern failure mode in which systems keep working even as they gradually lose alignment with real-world feedback and outcomes.
…
Source: Are.na
The hand-wringing about disinformation in modern times paints an ahistorical view of the past. There has always been disinformation.
Take, for example, this passage from p.589 of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance (which I finished today) giving examples of what the printing press was being used for, even in the early days.
…”Civilisation is a thin film across an ocean of chaos”.
— Werner Herzog
Every Sunday, my Little Robot Friend sends me a report which I call 'News Canary'. It assembles a weekly set of roughly ten "global change signal" stories from the last seven days, with at least one item from each continent It mixes hard developments (laws, policies, conflicts, technical releases) with soft signals (cultural shifts, viral posts) that may influence how systems evolve.
…