A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
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.
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– 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:
…At a 1962 conference at the Museum of Modern Art, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer denounced Pop Art as “indistinguishable from advertising art” because “Pop Art does not tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization. Its social effect is simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” But perhaps the content of graphic design is exactly that: an evocation of “what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization,” with all its “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” How else can we discuss the content of a typeface or why the typography of a surfing magazine suddenly becomes relevant? Or how a series of made-up or ‘self-initiated’ posters—already a medium of dubious functionality— can end up on the wall of a major design museum? Work must be saying something, which is different than being about something.
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I can't help but think that if we were to start again with governments we wouldn't have what we've got now. I certainly think that our response to the climate crisis would be better if we took a more anarchist approach.
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