A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
[S]overeignty is the name for a confused, reactive, often not-quite-thought view that there ought to be a solution to the pressure of adapting to “other people” and to other nations’ force of existence, intention, action, entitlement, and desire. Sovereignty is thus a fantasy of jurisdiction. It is a defense of entitlement, reference, and agency.
…
I use Signal every day and recommend it to others. But, as this post reminds us, for all its state of the art encryption, at the end of the day it's a US-owned, centralised service. What we need is choice built on standards. (In this case, the author suggests, XMPP.)
…The burnout of our age, Han writes, doesn’t come from external repression but from internal overproduction. We are not crushed by the lash; we are fried by the light, the constant buzz of notifications, the tyranny of being reachable, and the invisible expectation to always be on.
…
– Miski Omar, The Guardian
I was having a chat with someone the other day where I casually mentioned that my wife and I used to use a shared task management tool called Astrid. Although we tried a couple of forks after it was open-sourced following the Yahoo! acquisition and closure in 2013, nothing stuck.
…Exciting! The final version of my first ever zine has arrived.
It's looking great and the tweaks that I've made after the test print have turned out perfectly.
I'm anticipating getting these into people's hands in early September. There'll only ever be 50 physical copies (no digital version) and there are currently 12* remaining.
…We've published another essay over at FIELD STATION entitled Governance Is Not a Dashboard. This post is a TL;DR of it, explaining how applying the Viable System Model (VSM) is even more achievable in a world of AI agents.
…“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
— Oscar Wilde
Substack is a shitty place to publish blog posts, but (for me, at least) Substack Notes has a pretty high signal/noise ratio. Because it's very much a writer-focused place, you get wonderful things like this happening:
…