Substrate

Civilisation is a thin film across an ocean of chaos.

— Werner Herzog

I ended up quote-posting the same thread on both Mastodon and Bluesky this morning in response to different, but related stimuli.

Given that my posts are auto-deleted after a certain period of time on Mastodon, I thought I'd save what I said here so I can come back to it in future.

I'm on holiday and so reading more, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as actually watching films (I subscribed to Mubi).

I've just finished reading A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion by Frédéric Gros. I really enjoyed other books by him, and so was looking forward to getting into this one after receiving it as a member of the Verso Book Club.

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:

• Notes in this Substrate digital garden since I started it a few months ago
• What Tom and I have been up to with FIELD STATION
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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?"

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Source: Are.na

Earlier today, I received a message from Ivan Minutillo, one of the core team behind Bonfire. He knows that I've got at least one client interested in Bonfire, but also we used to work together on MoodleNet, so he keeps me up-to-date with anything I might have missed.

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.