Over 100 books from the dot-com era looking for an appreciative home

I started buying books about the internet in the mid-1980s, long before I’d actually encountered it. I was studying photography, but I was obsessed with the net (largely because I’d read Neuromancer obvs). My undergraduate dissertation was a detailed disquisition on the impact of a computer network that hadn’t actually arrived yet on our image world: a strange, distributed, apparently ungovernable thing that seemed to me likely to change everything. A couple of those early books survive into what became, over the following two decades, a fairly substantial working library of the cyber-utopian moment.

History tells us this obsession led, in 1993, to a fateful collision with a bloke called Ivan Pope, who had developed a similar obsession while at art school. We started a web design firm called Webmedia, one of the first. There were more businesses, adventures in venture capital, a crash, then – kind of definitively for me at least – the big crash.

The books kept accumulating: becoming, I guess, the intellectual furniture of a moment we were living inside, bought and read in real time, as we built the thing, and they followed me around, from business to business and from office to office and now they’re in my study and we’re going to be moving to a smaller house so I’m trying to take a grown-up, unsentimental approach to downsizing this mountain of stuff.

The collection runs from the late 1980s to 2008 or so — from the first stirrings of the consumer internet through to the point at which Web 2.0 had begun to solidify into something recognisably like what we have now (and are only lately, and rather too slowly, becoming sceptical of). There are – I just counted – 106 volumes: business futurism, hacker culture, interface design, digital economics, open source philosophy, e-commerce theory, critical responses to the information age (some enormously influential texts, some prescient business books, a small sampling of absolute bollocks that I hope now fully embarrasses the authors). The complete Manuel Castells Information Age trilogy. Rheingold’s Virtual Reality. Cyberspace: First Steps. The Cluetrain Manifesto (first edition). Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge. Kevin Kelly. Negroponte. Don Tapscott. Richard Florida. Diane Coyle. Donna Haraway. Dale Spender. The Readme! Filtered by Nettime, which almost nobody has heard of and which is a genuine artefact of that strange, briefly optimistic moment.

These are the books we were reading when we thought we knew where it was all going. They are, in other words, almost perfectly calibrated documents of a particular and historically significant wrongness — which is perhaps why Edinburgh University Library, which is building something it calls a ‘library of mistakes’, recently bought a dozen of them.

I’d like to sell the remainder as a collection rather than individually, but I’ll consider breaking them up if you’d like a fairly substantial chunk. If you’re a librarian, an academic institution, a researcher, or someone building an archive of the period, I’d be glad to hear from you. The full list is here. I’m in the outer suburbs of North London and can ship anywhere. They’re all in good nick and I can send you pictures of front covers and title pages if that would be useful.

Secular moderns – rational British grown-ups, middle class people who feel a bit uncomfortable about the Monarchy but wouldn’t go so far as to call themselves republicans – mostly don’t get the whole Royal family thing. They classify the Royals as just another elite clan – albeit one with a bit of extra social media clout – and tend to understate their importance in the contemporary British polity. They classify them as just another ancien régime holdover; an inbred aristocratic tourist attraction; something we ought, at most, to ignore and leave to its own devices. They generally support the idea of demoting or defunding the royals but would never seriously suggest removing them all together. Consequently they think of the present crisis in the British Monarchy – the one involving the hideous sex-offender prick we’re no longer even allowed to call a Prince – as mainly a kind of show-business spat that will be resolved once the King has achieved the necessary public distance from his stupid and unpleasant younger brother.

What they’re missing, of course, is the absolute centrality of the Monarchy to Britain’s awkward constitutional settlement. Tom Nairn, one of the most important intellectuals of the republican spasm that came before this one, back in the nineties, called the arrangement the ‘Crown-Constitutional’ state. He describes, in his beautiful book The Enchanted Glass, the awkward but vital binding together of Parliament and Crown (the Executive is a third, less important, element) in a formation that has, to a large degree, guaranteed the stability and resistance to unrest and revolution of the British state in the three hundred-odd years since it was all invented. He writes about the absolute necessity of the intimate but always at-arms-length relationship of our disputatious, deliberative elected assembly with the Monarchy.

The 1688 settlement, which is misremembered by most of us, and especially by the Whiggish liberal mainstream today, as a kind of bourgeois update to Magna Carta, didn’t abolish the Monarchy – it positioned it as the existential precondition for Parliamentary authority. Parliament became sovereign, but only once it had first been granted that sovereignty, sacramentally as it were, by a now non-absolutist Crown. The deal is that the Crown ceases to rule but it confers legitimacy upon the rulers. So Parliament is permitted to tax, legislate – even depose dynasties – but may not scrutinise the living body of the Crown as if it were a water company MD or an errant QUANGO or the Director General of the BBC. That’s the arrangement. It’s the hinge on which the whole settlement turns, in fact. We don’t behead Kings any more, we don’t exile them and we definitely don’t haul them before select committees. The Crown is not incidental to this system, it’s at the absolute centre – not powerful in the old sense but untouchable in the constitutional sense. And this is what defines this moment and what explains the conduct of the King and his court: because the Crown is the source of legitimacy in this system. Parliament cannot itself claim the right to interrogate the Crown. If it could, the source and recipient of power in the system would be inverted, and the 1688 machine would blow up. This is what’s behind the present panic. It’s not about privilege, or the ignorance and arrogance of a handful of MPs, or the conduct of the stupid and wicked former Prince: it’s about securing the constitutional reality of modern Britain.

Nairn explains that a condition of this agreement is that Parliament is forever prohibited from intruding into the lives and conduct of the Monarchy. And the only serious threats to the stability of the Crown over the centuries have always come at times when unruly Parliamentarians have disrespected the golden rule and developed an unhealthy interest in the business of the Monarch. At various points since the late 19th Century, for instance, articulate and often very effective legislators – mostly but not all from the left – took on the Crown, often with the protection of Parliamentary privilege from the chamber itself. In every instance these attacks have been publicly dismissed and often ridiculed but have been inwardly treated as genuine existential threats to the institutional arrangements. MPs like Charles Dilkes, who was a Liberal, and Willie Hamilton, a Labour MP who wrote a brilliant and funny book about all this (that would have got him hanged a couple of hundred years ago), were berated by monarchists and labelled traitors by the popular press. The list of MPs who have deliberately, consciously taken on the Crown is a short one. The British machine of state has always understood that this awkward and inherantly unstable relationship – Crown and Parliament – must be sustained at all cost because, despite its apparent fragility, it’s the only really durable guarantee of the state’s survival.

So, whenever Parliament develops an interest in the Crown, whenever it steps out of its lane and threatens to intrude, there’s always a powerful reaction. In the present crisis, the threats of various uncooperative back-benchers and committee chairs to go so far as to summon the former Prince to Parliament have produced an equal and opposite reaction of surprising ferocity. The King can’t act against Parliament, of course – that’s prohibited – but the (almost) total expulsion of one of their own – the stripping away of titles and property and other oraments of power known to be so important to this very vain and thin-skinned man; action more severe even than that taken against a rogue who was already on the throne – has surprised many but when understood in this context, when seen as an attempt to repel an attack by an uppity Parliament that’s forgotten its place in the hierarchy, it all makes sense.

• I’ve written about the Monarchy here before. In fact it’s beginning to look a bit obsessive.

So it has come to us, in a kind of dissilusioning rush, and much too late really, that the Internet (which we still deferentially capitalise, as if it were an institution of repute or an actual proper noun) is not a good thing, not a good thing at all. The first universal network, connecting everyone and everything – premised on openness, on flattening hierarchies, on eliminating friction and permissions and coordination costs and barriers to participation and all that – turns out, ultimately, to be the domain, literally the property in fact, of hyper-pragmatic, parasitic hyper-capitalist accelerationists intent on diminishing and dehumanising us. Not enhancing or expanding our agency, as we foolishly expected back then, but degrading it, cancelling it, deleting it – and, worse, rewinding all the way back to an imagined pre-enlightenment absolutist utopia. I mean we’re learning, in a bit of a hurry as the AIs chomp through the fabric of our culture like weird Pac-Man, that the visionaries and philosophers who inspire these tech geniuses are actually proposing that we unwind the whole enlightenment project. The autonomous, reasoning subject; the scientific method and a belief in voluntary, collective human progress, even the idea of the individual that we always thought was the fundamental unit for these people. Seems insane to be writing this, but influential writers, executives and public figures apparently want to re-impose the old, pre-modern regime of monarchs, warriors, priests and landowners. They want back the static social structures and the frozen hierarchies of the old world. They have concluded, in fact, that the whole of the three hundred years of reason, objectivity, invention, exploration and deliberate human-directed progress that has brought us to this latest explosion of technology-driven change has actually been a dead end. A decadent, involuted retreat from the unity and clarity of the old dogma. And the rest of us now feel a bit stupid because it turns out these people have been saying this kind of thing for a long time and we’re just catching on to the depth of their influence over what might well be the richest and most powerful elite in human history. For a while we thought that what they objected to – these innocent-looking Chino-wearing dweebs – was the liberal turn of the post-war period or even the explosion of woke of the last twenty years but it turns out that their target, the system from which they want an ‘exit’, is much older (‘further down the stack’ as they might say): it’s the whole of the modern era, the whole period since the enlightenment, the base on which the liberal societies of the second half of the 20th Century were built. But does that seem even slightly plausible? Are we to actually believe that Thiel and Musk and Altman and the rest of them want more than unlimited wealth, private islands, a subservient political class, a desperate, precaritised workforce (and terrawatts of electricity)? That these men who make up the new locus of power in our economies and societies take seriously the thought of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin and the other dark thinkers of the deranged enlightenment? Looks like it.

• What got me thinking about this – crystalising my own disillusionment to some degree – was this article by Geoff Schullenberger in Compact, a publication that seems at once to be in thrall to these dark enlightenment ideas and to provide an outlet for some of their most intelligent critics.

We’ll know that the exploitation of space is going to plan when they start sending workers up there. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos expect to do so. Colonies of millions – on Mars to begin with and then further out in the future. It’s obviously an exciting prospect: the promise that many – not just a tiny elite from the wealthiest nations – might exceed earth’s bounds, escape gravity, explore the unknown. But, let’s face it, in the expansion phase, once it’s all about return on investment, it’s unlikely these guys will want a fully-sentient workforce; actual humans with all their demands and the risk they might organise or take a sick day or just go rogue.

It’s safe to assume the oligarchs and the long line of wannabe space barons behind them will want their workers indentured at best; drugged, chipped or genetically-modified at worst. They’ll be dormant when not working and consuming exactly the permitted number of calories (probably through a tube).

Everything we know about the economics of space suggests it will be brutal for any worker stupid enough or desperate enough to volunteer for one of these colonising missions. If you make it up through the Kármán line at all you’re more likely to be sedated in a crate, naked to save weight, than sipping Champagne at a picture window. The insane cost of moving human flesh to distant colonies will make the whole experience much more Chernobyl liquidator than intrepid pioneer – expendable labour on a one-way trip (it costs £20,000/day to get food for one astronaut to orbit).

Don’t be surprised when the entrepreneurs advancing this off-planet production model reveal they have to cancel all those old-fashioned terrestrial employee rights to make it work too. I can imagine workers signing up for the experience making a grim and desperate bargain – perhaps to benefit family members left behind.

Every spaceship that’s not 100% robotic is, of course, a workplace. And we actually have a sense of what it’ll be like in these off-planet workplaces – Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have both provided detailed previews, right here on Earth, so we can safely conclude that the options are, roughly:

Musk: a hyped-up Versailles. Every Musk company is a patronage network; a court of high-functioning engineers in expensive athleisure, high-fiving as they float around the flight-deck and checking in periodically to suck up to their mercurial space monarch (who has made it clear he won’t be with them).

Bezos: a substantially more businesslike model; essentially an optimised corporate pyramid on the American model with a very large, exploited and precarious layer of drone labour at the bottom. Bezos and his managers will also, presumably, be issuing their orders from an on-planet management suite with decent coffee.

Bong Joon-ho’s space workplace is a very contemporary hyper-supervised dystopia

In Mickey 17, the workers who fill the unnamed prison hulk heading to planet Niflheim are pretty close to this Musk/Bezos template. They’re of the unhappy, defeated, precaritised variety. A desperate and entirely dependent crew with no visible organisation and a lot of very visible policing to keep them in line. We don’t see the circumstances that drive the escaping proles to volunteer but they’re hinted at – we assume a final climate collapse or a terrible war.

Director Bong’s latest is a satire on capitalism but actually more specifically on proletarianisation. Not the old business of recruiting peasants to the urban working class but the absolutely contemporary process that’s stripping a whole pissed-off, pointlessly over-educated generation of young people of their status, security and hopes for the future – collapsing them all into an expanded, immiserated and debt-laden working class.

And this new, refigured working class is not the proletariat of the industrial era, of course, a class that at least in principle had been granted some dignity and some negotiating power (ask your grandparents about negotiating power, kids), but a new working class characterised by the absence of both – and, in fact, by their steady removal. Just the kind of people who might, when the demand comes, find themselves volunteering to go up the gravity well to work themselves to death.

2001 is set in the ultimate, super-deluxe intergovernmental playground

Kubrick’s space (which is also Arthur C. Clarke’s space) is a complex hierarchy of workplaces, all of them fitted out in the slick, hyper-modern style of mid-sixties corporate America – and on an implausibly grand scale. In following Dr Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), top American space bureaucrat, on his journey to the moon to investigate the discovery of that mysterious monolith, we encounter a sequence of space vehicles and habitats two of which are operated commercially by Pan Am and the others, presumably, by a kind of global NASA. Pan Am must have stood for the absolute state of the art in commercial transport when Kubrick was making the film, during the boom in commercial aviation that followed the introduction of the jet airliner in the previous decade. He must have known that Pan Am had rushed to fly the very first of the fabulous new Boeing 747s that were in production at the time (appropriately the firm was bankrupt and forgotten by the year in which the movie is set).

White-collar boomers – mostly from the parent class we met in the last movie I watched here The Graduate – were flying routinely for work for the first time in the mid sixties, as Kubrick was planning 2001. The slick airport lounges and business hotels invented for them are here, in Kubrick’s low earth orbit – on a huge transit hub called Space Station 5. So are forward-looking brands like Whirlpool, Bell Telephone, IBM, Hilton and Howard Johnson’s, whose logos appear everywhere – a starkly contemporary element that’s not in Clarke’s novel. This subservient role for business in space – firms providing services to the space-faring elite and their agencies – has now been flipped completely, of course. In the present, the right stuff is provided by the swashbuckling entrepreneurs and the tedious services by increasingly risk-averse legacy organisations.

But up on Space Station 5, the people we encounter are are about as far from Bong Joon Ho’s bruised and humiliated precariat as it’s possible to get. They’re from what we’d probably call the Professional Managerial Class. Everyone is a government functionary of some kind – and literally everyone is credentialed to the rank ‘doctor’ – you obviously can’t get anywhere near a flight to orbit without a PhD (unless you’re a cleaner or a bartender presumably – we see a group of what must be pilots, wearing peaked caps). It’s almost a running gag – in a council meeting on the moon, one doctor introduces another doctor who then thanks a couple of other doctors; when space cruiser Discovery sets off for Jupiter to investigate the source of the film’s central mystery with a crew of six, the only non-PhD is HAL the AI.

Anyway, on the space station, members of the cosmopolitan space elite gather in a bar (furnished by Eero Saarinen, who came up in the Brutalist review) uncannily glued by the ship’s rotation to the inside of the hull – a group of Russians (Aeroflot logos on their carry-on luggage) on the way down and doctor Floyd on the way up. And it’s appropriate that Kubrick chooses to recruit his space elite from the established worldly elite of the intergovernmental organisations. There’s a United Nations vibe. An ‘IAS Convention’ is cited, and another undefined three-letter body ‘the IAC’. It’s still possible, in the late sixties, to imagine space exploration as a global effort, an aspect of the civilising post-war order. Even now, as the system falls apart and Musk’s footsoldiers dismantle liberal institutions in real time here on earth, there are four Americans, five Russians and one Japanese on board the ISS.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote his novel 2001: a Space Odyssey after he’d been contracted to work on the movie. He’d written a short story back in the forties that’s probably the seed of the thing, but the novel and the movie are basically part of the same project – a very Kubrick solution to refining a screenplay. The way Clarke puts it, in the introduction to the novel:

Perhaps because he realised that I had low tolerance for boredom, Stanley suggested that before we embarked on the drudgery of the script, we let our imaginations soar freely by writing a complete novel, from which we would later derive the script. (And, hopefully, a little cash.)

He’s not a great writer. Like a lot of science fiction authors he’s all about the ideas. And the ideas here are an odd mix of the prescient and the pedestrian. For Clarke (and Kubrick) to have imagined zero-gravity living and to describe an essentially complete space economy in such startling detail at a time when barely half a dozen humans had made it as far as earth orbit is unarguably brilliant. But Clarke’s sense of the world in 2001 is weak: it’s your basic Malthusian breakdown story: over-population and resource wars force humanity to venture into space.

So, with birthrates almost everywhere falling, it won’t be overpopulation that drives humanity off-planet, but what seems perfectly plausible is that it’ll be a crisis in capitalism that kicks it off. We’ve got enough case studies now to know that when capitalism reaches a deep enough impasse – when economies everywhere grind to a halt because average returns on investment have fallen away – and when kicking the can down the road no longer works, there’s often a catastrophic reset. It’s usually a war that drives unprofitable activity out of the economy and forces workers to ask for less. It’s easy enough to imagine that, once the technologies are cheap enough, a reset of this kind might be the trigger for a rush to Mars. But that rush won’t be the deluxe version offered in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’ll be the crappy, exploitive one offered by the space oligarchs.

• Bezos has won a contract from NASA to build a replacement for the International Space Station called Orbital Reef and it is very much a workplace. The new space station will be a ‘mixed-use business park’. The publicity reads like a brochure for serviced offices: “Shared infrastructure efficiently supports the proprietary needs of diverse tenants and visitors. It features a human-centered space architecture with world-class services and amenities that is inspiring, practical, and safe.”
• Frederic Raphael, a British author who collaborated with Kubrick on his last film Eyes Wide Shut, wrote a brilliant, literary memoir about the process. It’s out of print but you’ll find it second-hand. It’s one of the most illuminating things I’ve read about the brilliant, fastidious and obviously maddening director.
• 2001: A Space Oddysey is on Amazon Prime and there’s a lovely 4K Blu-Ray.
• On my blog I wrote about what it might be like to work on one of Musk’s space missions. What would a disciplinary be like, for instance? More Klingon that Star Fleet.
• Olga Ravn, a Danish poet, has written a short novel about how a crisis in deep space might be handled by a contemporary HR department. It’s dark and funny.
• Kubrick’s glorious, cathedral-vast spaceships, absurdly over-specced for the task, continue to be the approximate norm in sci-fi. 2016’s Passengers, in which an HR dilemma reaches a happy conlusion, is set on an enormous and ultra-luxurious spaceship with no obvious function that has multiple atriums and a swimming pool (!) Even the most realistic space dramas tend to allow astronauts far too much space to roam.
• Read essays like this on Substack and reviews on my Letterboxd.

In The Third Policeman, an absurdist classic from weird Irish civil servant, journalist and fantasist Flann O’Brien¹, set in an unnamed rural community in Ireland before the war, one of his characters meditates on ‘the atomic theory’, which was still pretty new at this point: the surprising idea that matter is actually made of tiny particles called atoms and that, at their boundaries, objects might actually give up some of their atoms in a kind of exchange, blurring their edges a bit.

Sergeant Pluck, senior officer at the police barracks in this community, who keeps up with the latest ideas, has convinced himself that he sees evidence of the atomic theory at work in some locals who spend a little too much time on their bikes² and are thus taking on something of their nature:

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”

If I had time I’d expand on this: I’d try to give you something of the awkward status of science after Einstein in post-independence Ireland, dominated by an atavistic Catholic church. Like other small European Catholic nations in this period, Ireland was self-consciously backward, priggishly anti-modern. It took the State decades to overcome its self-satisfied stance on, well, everything.

O’Brien was different: a modernist but also a devout Catholic, deeply sceptical about the actual modern. He often took the church’s side in his columns for the Irish Times³ (which he wrote pseudonymously because he retained his full-time job in the Irish civil service, an institution that retained essentially its colonial form for decades after independence). In 1942, for instance, he somehow managed to attend a lecture by Professor Erwin Schrödinger at the new Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin⁴ in which the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner, in passing, threw some shade on the idea of causality. Your man was not impressed and wrote, in his column:

“I understand also that Professor Schrodinger has been proving lately that you cannot establish a first cause. The first fruit of this Institute, therefore, has been to show that there are two Saint Patricks and no God.

O’Brien was a brilliant writer, a self-conscious European modernist and an unembarrased advocate for new modes. I hoovered this stuff up when I was an adolescent: he had the oddness and the sly, disorienting humour kids like me were all looking for then. It was Kafka, Burroughs, B.S. Johnson, Vonnegut, Angela Carter and all the other weirdos. But O’Brien was different, more than an oddball: he was a conservative Catholic from the outer fringes. A lot of his stuff was buried and not published until decades later when rediscovered by publishers from the metropole who urgently needed more of this kind of borderline psychedelic stuff in their lists. His rhythms, his alienating settings and his humour could have come from Joyce or Beckett but he’d have run a mile if you’d tried to connect them or to recruit him to a scene or a movement.

His Catholicism meant that O’Brien couldn’t entertain or play with the new, scientific ideas in the way these atheist artists did. He would never have claimed that freedom. The atomic theory was just the kind of idea you can see animating a passage from Joyce but in O’Brien it can only be mocked. This idea, that objects might exchange matter, even at a tiny scale, is, to state the obvious, a profoundly anti-Catholic idea: a kind of blasphemous, material transubstantiation and a denial of the distinctness of God’s creations. It must have upset him profoundly.

Meanwhile, in Kilburn – still the centre of the Irish community in London – I might add that I only know about Sparkling Laundry and Cleaning myself because I cycle past it several times a week on my epic commute⁵. I had a conversation with my doctor only this morning about the possibility I might be taking on something of the bicycle myself.

1. I’ve called him Flann O’Brien here but he was born Brian O’Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote under several names and his Irish Times byline was Myles na gCopaleen. Wikipedia says he wrote science fiction under other names and some more recent collections have included stories by John Shamus O’Donnell, an Amazing Stories contributor who may or may not have been the same man. ︎
2. Don’t forget, in this period the bicycle was also a symbol of the modern: a weapon, a hyper-efficient transportation device, a liberatory technology. ︎
3. O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns were a cult read with the Irish Times’ elite readers. They’re often about something of immediate interest in Ireland at the time of publication but they’re some of the smartest and funniest newspaper writing you’ll ever read – and they have become a model for much of this kind of stuff since. Try the collection Best of Myles. ︎
4. Ironically Prof Schrödinger had been brought to Dublin in 1939 by Éamon de Valera as part of an effort to modernise the country’s creaking university system. ︎
5. I might also, self-indulgently, tell you that I’ve occasionally taken as a subject for some poems Quex Road, a stub of a road that links Kilburn High Road with West End Lane a bit South of here.
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A splendid, beautifully reproduced edition of the weirdest (and perhaps most sinister) cookbook ever published. It was written/assembled by founder of Italian Futurism Filippo Thommaso Marinetti, who also wrote the more famous Futurist Manifesto (and Musolini’s 1919 Fascist manifesto, since you’re asking). Marinetti campaigned against pasta because “…it induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia, and neutralism”, which I guess might be true. David Runciman discussed this culinary curiosity in an episode of his podcast that was about the manifesto. The translation, by Suzanne Brill, is excellent. Read some of the recipes in the eBay listing. It seems to be a rarity and this first edition is selling for £200 and more. I’ve got it on eBay for £150, art/history/politics fans! Buy the Futurist Cookbook on eBay.

Anyone interested in digital art or design back in the early days worshipped April Greiman, a brilliant American graphic designer who adopted and invented new techniques for production in multiple media. It’s still a thrill to flick through the pages of this book and reminds me of the days we used to struggle to get this kind of exciting imagery out of our lovely new Macs. Buy Hybrid Imagery on eBay.

Another exciting moment from the eighties. An ICA exhibition that anyone interested in photography, contemporary art or feminism rushed to. This is the original exhibition catalogue, the first edition bought from the gallery shop. On the eBay listing you’ll find more pages from the book. Buy We Won’t Play Nature to your Culture on eBay.

One of the loveliest books here: a beautifully-printed, large-format collection of E.J. Bellocq‘s spontaneous, touching portraits from Storyville – and it’s in impeccable condition. The reproductions are based on the prints made by another American photographic legend Lee Friedlander and there’s a famous introduction by Susan Sontag. On the eBay listing you’ll be find lots more photographs from the book. Buy Bellocq on eBay.

This was an important show: identifying a generation of important artists, and a decade before the YBAs. It was a huge show, across the whole of the South Bank and the Serpentine Gallery. I was at St Albans doing a foundation course and we all trooped down to London to see this. It was a bit of a thrill. The catalogue comes with a flexidisc of ambient audio and sound art by some of the artists from the show which is a genuine rarity and sells on its own for a decent sum on Discogs. Buy The Sculpture Show on eBay.

Colour photography from a British master of the form, published in 1983 and thought of as very much a response to the hyper-saturated work of the American Ektachrome artists. It’s a beautiful, humane, melancholy work. Click the eBay link for more pics from inside. Buy A1 on eBay.

Richter belongs to the generation of West Germans that had been too young to serve in WW2 but had then had to metabolise and transcend the essentially untranscendable: the terrible crimes of their parents and of the criminal state they obeyed or at the very least tolerated. This book represents a series of paintings, from Richter’s photorealist practice. An extraordinary and chilling set of images based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof group (alive and dead). Buy 19 Oktober 1977 on eBay.

Sold. Four hardback volumes and five CDs in a very solid slip-case. This is a splendid thing. The whole soundtrack of Godard’s amazing eight-part TV history of the movies (a project that some – including me, I think – consider to be his most interesting work) plus four beautifully designed books in a handsome slipcase. And it’s an ECM edition, which I guess makes perfect sense.

One of the more bonkers Semiotext(e) editions: a three-foot, in-your-face, on-your-lap monster. Chaotic and frankly nausea-inducing design – kind of David Carson on acid. Complex texts struggling with graphic design that’s intended to give you a visual and conceptual headache. Inside you’ll find Atom Egoyan, Félix Guattari, Arthur Kroker, Catherine Ingraham and other members of the po-mo and theory elite, in a volume too big to open in most city flats. Buy Semiotext(e) Architecture on eBay.

This is such a gorgeous book. I remember loving the fact that Kertész carried on taking photographs and making his beautiful art after he couldn’t get out so much by turning his camera to the view from the windows of his apartment in New York. Now that I’m older (still getting out, though!) I find this even more moving. A great artist who narrowed his focus so that he could stay productive. Wonderful. I also kind of love the fact that the cover is unevenly faded, presumably by the sunlight from the windows in my house. Buy From My Window on eBay.

This is a fascinating and quite rare thing. It’s the catalogue from a 1987 group show at the Fundació Caixa de Pensions gallery in Barcelona; a snapshot of a local art scene that went on to become essentially hegemonic, to define contemporary art since then. The artists: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Matt Mullican, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Peter Schuyff, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe. Buy Art and its Double on eBay.

Lovely book of black and white photos by the great Chris Marker. I guess we knew he was an obsessive photographer of his world: his first feature, a film I’ve always found to be so unsettling I can barely watch it, was made entirely from still photos. This is a gentle book, maybe not so hard-edged as the movies. It’s beautifully printed, in the way photography books ought to be, and it’s in a lovely approximately 35mm aspect ratio, which make it even more treasurable. Click the link to see more of the photos. Buy Staring Back on eBay.

A beautiful and quite rare collection of photographs by American art photographer Ralph Gibson. I loved this kind of cool abstraction when I was trying to get started with photography. In fact I still find the camera roll on my mobile to be full of squared-off urban scenes, grids, shadows and so on. Gibson’s obviously still lodged in my brain somewhere. The book is in beautiful condition and the photographs, printed in the highest quality, are among the most distinctive of their era. A treasure. Buy Syntax on eBay.

Sold. It’s a beautifully-printed, heavy hardback published for Bruce Weber’s popular exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1997. The title refers to a story of some wild-child teenagers Weber met in Montana, who in an act of teenage bonding had branded each other on the shoulder with the heated blade of an army bayonet. It’s a bit of a gay classic and long out-of-print.

Sorry, this one’s gone. A beautiful and quite rare paperback from an important phase in Sol LeWitt‘s career. Over 400 photographs of found grids from his travels around the world: doors, windows, fencing, gratings and manholes. Photographs of grids laid out in grids, a visual exploration of the grid’s organizing influence on our everyday lives. The cover is scuffed but the interior is perfect.

Sold. Sekula spent his whole career trying to invent and then popularise a politicised, realist art photography. He was a kind of photographic Brecht. This book is typical – the tip of a vast iceberg. Fish Story wasnt’t just a book of photos or an exhibition, it was a huge, multi-year, documentary project that traced the entire fishing supply chain. This book documents the project. This edition was specially printed to coincide with a show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London and comes with the original printed material from the exhibition. It also has an updated foreword by Laleh Khalili, an academic who has studied global supply chains. Fascinating and beautiful.

One of a famous architecture series created for MIT Press. This one’s now quite rare as far as I can tell. It’s a double-phone-book 600-page collection of Bernard Tschumi‘s most important projects. Gorgeous, head-spinning 1990s design (very MIT), packed with provocative illustrations and texts. A po-mo jewel. Buy Event-Cities on eBay.

I remember spotting this in the Pompidou bookshop and being brought up sharply by an unexpected collision of Bacon’s decadent London modernism and glamorous French philosophy – I didn’t know these worlds had ever met, or that they could. It’s all aesthetics, objects of perception (‘percepts’) and sensation.

It’s a beautifully packaged two-volume set in a slip-case. Volume 1 is the paintings and volume 2 is Gilles Deleuze’s essay on the painter and his work. I bought this edition during the gallery’s 1996 Bacon exhibition. It’s in essentially perfect condition. Buy Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation on eBay.

This is the catalogue from a landmark 1982 exhibition. Brandt was an enormous inspiration to me when I was beginning as a photographer – something about the unlimited possibilities of a wide-angle lens and a roll of HP5. This is a lovely, slim introduction to his portraiture. From the gallery’s description of the show: “Bill Brandt has for some time been recognised as one of the established masters of British photography. This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major retrospective devoted entirely to his portraits: from the earliest, taken while an assistant to Man Ray in Paris in the late 1920s, to the famous series of poets photographed for Lilliput and Picture Post in the war years. There are also examples of his later work, and many recent portraits which will be seen for the first time.” Buy Bill Brandt: Portraits on eBay.

This is a mighty tome – one of the many clever and beautiful editions the Richter machine seems to produce. It’s a pretty special and quite rare edition of a career-spanning collection of sketches, collages and photographs from Gerhard Richter, who must be one of the most collected contemporary artists (imagine how rich he must be!). This material has been collected by the artist since he was a young man (click the eBay link to see some of the book’s layouts). It’s a beautifully-produced, oversized (34x24x3.5cm, 388 pages) monograph that’s considered rare (and the marks on the cover, like a artist’s accidental marks, are all part of the design). Buy Atlas on eBay.

This is a lovely, slim paperback that’s somewhere between a collection of poems and an artist’s book. A self-consciously visual collection that’s really charming. More pics from inside the book in the eBay listing. Buy Ava Hofman – Poems on eBay.

I bought this at a big Richter show at the Tate in 1991 (this is before the power station was converted so we’re in Pimlico). It’s mainly the gorgeous and quite haunting abstract paintings, reproduced beautifully. Buy Gerhard Richter on eBay.

And this is an actual artist’s book. I should say I don’t think I’ve ever been very sympathetic to the idea of an artist’s book: “artists, you do the art; authors, you focus on the books.” Maybe I’m just being pedantic. I mean this one is nuts, though. Click through to the eBay listing and you’ll see that it’s substantially more than a book – more of a puzzle or a card game embedded in a book. I can’t actually remember where I acquired this but it’s genuinely unique. Buy The Speech Writer on eBay.

When we met, next to the car, parked up on the wide pavement in West Hendon, North London, we bonded because our families had both owned a car like this when we were kids (I’ll be honest, ours was the downmarket Avenger, although also the estate model). The Paykan version, cut off from its British roots, survived the Islamic revolution and was manufactured 100% natively for almost fifty years, hanging on long beyond its design life because war and sanctions prevented it from being replaced.

The footage we’re seeing from the attacks on Tehran shows the expected mix of European and Asian cars in the rubble and in the lines of cars leaving the city. Iran’s 1970s ambitions for import replacement-led growth fell apart when the Islamic Republic was definitively kicked out of the family of nations after the revolution but Iran did not stop making cars and Iranians did not stop loving them.

Oportunities for the country to restart its integration with the world economy have come and gone – cars licenced from Renault, Citröen and Kia were manufactured there until sanctions were tightened in the 2010s. The latest set-back looks as close to final as any we’ve seen so far, of course. If President Trump sends American forces to assist it’ll probably be decades before another car is manufactured in Iran, under licence or otherwise (pretty sure he’d be furious if he found out they used to build Cadillacs there).

Iranian car culture looks fascinating and distinctive – when you’re shut out of a globalised passion like cars and car modification you’ll pretty soon develop a kind of mutant culture that celebrates different values. For instance, in Iran the unglamorous Peugeot 405 (another one of those cars built under licence – you’ve definitely ridden in one if you’ve ever hailed a cab in half of Europe) is a focus for Iranian hotrodders but they don’t drop their 405s to make them look cool like an American or a Brit would, they jack them up – and this, I read, is a complicated cultural reference that has its origin in the fact that the car was tough enough to be used in smuggling operations, in trackless border areas where you’d need a bit of extra ground clearance. Locally manufactured mash-ups – a Mazda chassis with what looks like a Renault body, for instance – are a solution to the embargo on parts and machinery. The Paykan itself has had a long afterlife too and modified versions are cult vehicles with younger drivers who’ve developed a freaky design culture of their own (and of course they show up in videogames).

Foreign car brands are still built in Iran but they’re not European in origin any more, they’re Chinese. Some are built under licence by Iran Khodro, the people who built the Paykan, including this EV, which looks pretty cool and is licenced from a Chinese firm called Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co, which just happens to be a subsidiary of global car giant Stellantis, parent company of all-American brands Jeep and Chrysler and RAM trucks. Oops (and it’s not the only Iranian-built EV). Some of these cars are manufactured directly by Chinese or joint-venture companies, firms that evidently have little fear of sanctions (the Tehran Auto Show, in January of this year, looks like it was pretty busy – over thirty Chinese brands were present).

Iran has a fast-growing population of 90 Million, huge reserves of oil, 16% of the world’s gas reserves and a hunger to participate in the world economy. The bleak and brutal regime of the mullahs has evidently not even slightly repressed the desire of Iranians to enjoy sophisticated consumer goods and modern lifestyles. Historians should note that the current attacks by Israel might well be the first by a country that does not manufacture electric cars on one that does.

I couldn’t finish without endorsing the movies of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami here. The man was evidently a car nut. In his beautiful Taste of Cherry, a man drives around Tehran in a classic Range Rover (which looks old enough to have preceded the revolution) looking for someone who will bury him when he kills himself, which he has impassively resolved to do.

In Ten, the action is confined to the front seats of a Tehran taxi, driven by a young woman whose conversations with ten different passengers add up to a beautiful, humane film.

• It turns out that the car is a battleground in Iran’s permament dialogue between Islamic doctrine and civil society. Specifically whether a car can be regarded as a private place where a woman might not be obliged to wear her headscarf, for instance (looks like that’s a ‘no’).
• Fascinated also to learn that the Iranian car industry (which is the biggest in the region by a long way) has an export element and that there’s a plan to export cars built by a joint venture in Azerbaijan to Russia, where the ambition is to ‘soak up the bottom end’ of the market’. Sanctioned states got to stick together.

This is a quick note in response to the head-spinning fact that, apparently, both ends of the British Parliamentary political spectrum are now positively disposed to the idea of nationalising British Steel.

I mean everyone’s into. Nigel Farage’s into it. Keir Starmer’s into it. But, let’s be clear, it’s a very specific kind of nationalisation these new champions of public ownership are advancing. It’s not the grand, rational, humane – even noble – kind of public ownership that inspired the post-war generations – roughly the boomers and the X-ers – that these guys are after.

Obviously, no one in this story is reasserting ‘the idea of the public’, they want nothing to do with the shared or the collectively-owned or the mutually-beneficial either. And certainly not the emancipatory idea of putting important aspects of our lives under democratic control or involving ordinary people in their governance. None of that, obviously.

What Labour and Reform are calling for when they contemplate taking British Steel – what’s left of it – back into public ownership, for instance, is, let’s face it, a shitty, rushed, contingent emergency nationalisation. An urgent takekover of a failing business that employs 2,700 people – roughly the same number as fancy cake shop chain Gails. It’s a last-minute resuscitation for an industry that’s on its last legs anyway and probably can’t be saved (this morning I read that it might even be less than that – it might simply be an agreement to supply coal to the business so it can keep the blast furnaces alight for a bit longer – even sadder).

And, to state the obvious, this kind of miserable, thin, last-resort act is the worst kind of solution – a refusal of all the promise of public ownership, of its potential to contribute to a revived public realm, with institutions and organisations that we trust and can expect to act on our behalves.

Also, of course, if what you’re nationalising is just the weakest and most fragile parts of the economy (and the parts that are in deep financial trouble), the odds that it can actually work are low. So what you’re likely to wind up with is, to put it directly, a failed nationalisation. A nationalisation that, when it does fail, can only undermine the idea, set back the whole enterprise, the promise and the potential of public ownership in other parts of the economy.

This will obviously look like the most ridiculous, starry-eyed naivety in the present moment but what we ought to be nationalising is not the diminished, collapsing parts of the economy but the big, active, socially and economically important parts – the sectors of the economy that employ a lot of ordinary people and especially young people and people who need better contracts, more security and bigger salaries.

So let’s start by nationalising hospitality (Starbucks? Publicbucks more like!) and the night-time economy (the people’s nightclubs!), the delivery economy (Deliveroo run in everyone’s interests!), retail (publicly-owned shopping malls, like People’s Palaces!), entertainment (cinema chains that belong to all of us!)… everything with an app or a big shopfront or an outsize place in the lives of the young, everything that touches their lives. Not the rusting, already failed relics of their parents’ lives – heartbreaking though it is to watch them fall appart – but the vigorous, now elements of the culture and the economy, where public ownership isn’t a desperate final act but an investment in the promise and potential of people and nation.

• (all right, I know, it’s ridiculous – a fantasy… the idea that the dourest, tidiest, most grey and workmanlike and timid government in modern history might embrace public ownership as an expression of joy or an uninihibted investment in a brighter future is my silliest idea yet).
• Obviously. there’s some day-to-day politics here. Farage is not what you’d call one of nature’s nationalisers – quite the reverse – but he has the political freedom, in this moment, as an insurgent political figure with no actual power, to advance a pretty ambitious and explicitly patriotic programme. He frames it as a national emergency: “There are three days left to save primary steel production in Britain.” And Starmer, facing local elections in a few weeks that could honestly be a bloodbath, and not just for the Tories, can’t let Farage have the topic to himself, hence: “all options are on the table, including nationalisation.” One of these men – Farage obvs – sees a political opportunity in advancing nationalisation; the other sees a threat and responds to it with a weak statement that does the absolute minimum, essentially acknowledging nationalisation as a last-resort possibility. But neither of these men – no one on the political scene, in fact – can admit the obvious: that rescuing a dying steel plant, a fraction of a fraction of a strategic national asset, would be pointless. An unstrategic waste of money. An empty political gesture.

When dotcom fever hit ’90s London, companies led by young chancers like Steve Bowbrick could suddenly attract millions of pounds of investment. These were the days of indoor lawns, beautiful people floating around with orchids, endless PowerPoint presentations, boundless optimism and illusory profits. It couldn’t last. It didn’t².

Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11. I was getting drunk – oblivious to the world-changing calamity unfolding in New York City – in a gastropub in Kentish Town³. I was with the finance guys. Our business, a web-based email service called another.com⁴, was in trouble. It was over a year since the NASDAQ⁵ – the hi-tech stock market – had crashed and two years since we had raised well over £6 million from investors for the business. That money, plus more we’d raised in the meantime, was running out fast, and we were a long way from making a profit. We weren’t ready to acknowledge it yet, but our party was well and truly over. The lunches were getting longer and the amount of booze consumed increasing. When we returned to the office that day, the TV screens were all tuned to the news from New York and I’m pretty sure that’s when we knew it was finished. How could the whole vain, febrile dotcom nonsense survive what we were seeing on our TV screens? It couldn’t, of course. But it was another year before we finally gave up the ghost and sold the business for a fraction of a fraction of its fantasy dotcom value.

And so ended my decade in the dotcom business⁶: a story that began in the early ’90s and consumed essentially the whole of my thirties.

In 1993, my friend Ivan Pope⁷ began publishing a magazine about the World Wide Web called 3W⁸. The magazine morphed⁹ into a company we called Webmedia later that year. It seemed obvious that writing about the web couldn’t possibly be as cool as building actual websites. We beetled off to Companies House¹⁰ and paid over the fee to start a limited company. We called it Webmedia because we suspected that the fragile bundle of protocols and standards emerging from under a mountain in Switzerland was going to turn into a medium. The fate of the web wasn’t at all obvious back then. I remember typing a 3W subhead that read “there are already hundreds of web sites.” There were many more, of course, by the time we got started¹¹ but it was still far from clear that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web¹² of academic papers and research data and Cambridge coffee pots¹³ would evolve into a useful new publishing platform, let alone a new field of human expression.

I was the sales guy. Ivan was the techie. We were, of course, not qualified for either role. Both of us had spent our twenties slacking – acquiring degrees in subjects providing no obvious route to employment. Of the two of us, Ivan was the more energetic – a kind of artistic Tigger¹⁴, a Goldsmiths graduate with an anarchic streak and an enormous, shambolic, multi- floor “studio” in Hackney that I hugely envied. I was barely making a living, teaching a bit, creating a substantial body of unexhibited art and working up a detailed knowledge of the quality of the Guinness on offer in every pub between Whitechapel and the Royal Docks¹⁵. Along the way, though, we’d both, independently, bumped into computers – I met my first Mac in 1985¹⁶ – and developed a passionate belief in their potential to rewrite human culture, to liberate us all¹⁷. My undergraduate thesis, from 1988, described in detail an internet I had never met¹⁸. The web was clearly my destiny. Webmedia’s business was designing websites for businesses. Ivan knew roughly where to put the angle brackets in the HTML (the web’s language) and I had a winning smile. How could we lose? On the World Wide Web, things were still very ragged and anarchic. When we got started, pictures weren’t possible. I repeat: PICTURES WEREN’T POSSIBLE. The celebrations in our office when HTML was extended to allow pictures were long and loud. We built early sites for forward-thinkers like Time Out magazine¹⁹ and The Body Shop and moved into the offices of a bankrupt wine-tasting school underneath the just-opened Cyberia²⁰ cafe in London’s glamorous West End. Cyberia was a cybercafe²¹, a hangout for speedy kids who fancied themselves characters from William Gibson stories, for geeks seeking a fast connection fix (in the days of dial-up²², remember), for credulous journos and for men in suits who’d been asked to find out about this internet thing. Cyberia became our meeting room. We schmoozed there, cooked up nutty plans, devised manifestos. It wasn’t Les Deux Magots or the Algonquin but maybe it was our World’s End. There was an impatient, creative, punk feel about the whole thing. We were like a movement. We thought Cyberia was the emerging web world’s dead centre and we were lucky to be there.

Our landlords and friends upstairs – they ran the cafe and an upstart internet service provider that went on to be a very big business – provided us with internet access. They had a cowboy streak too and an unlikely background in revolutionary politics²³. Keith the techie (now a Silicon Valley luminary) stood at the top of the stairs and threw down a cable: “Plug that into your network but do it quick because all our dial-up customers²⁴ will be offline while you’re doing it.”²⁵ We rented a water cooler because we’d seen them in movies and we spent the last of our own money on champagne we drank from those little conical paper cups. Parties were held and the first in a long line of sparky kids²⁶ arrived – hipsters and geeks who knew just enough about the advancing technology to get through the door and down the dingy stairs. The studio was loud and chaotic; later a pair of Technics decks arrived – from where I never knew.

At the beginning of 1995 we were already on a kind of conveyor belt, touring the offices of ad agencies and IT companies in cheap suits purchased for the purpose. We needed money for rent and wages and server hosting and one of these august institutions was going to give us some for a share in our company. We were sure of it. And it didn’t seem unlikely. Everybody wanted in. A publisher wanted to “add us to its portfolio”. IT consultancies wanted to “tap into our vision”. There were, hilariously, extended discussions with noodle empire Wagamama (I kid you not) about a merger of some kind. This was my favourite mainly because I wanted to call the merged company WebaWagaMamaMedia. I think they fired the guy²⁷.

A closer call came in the offices of a monster global ad agency²⁸ in a glass office by the Thames. We were shown into a room – just the two of us – and sat on one side of a shiny boardroom table opposite five men. One was the executive who wanted to buy our company and the other four were highly groomed 20-something clones – like the agents in The Matrix. They handed us business cards. Every one of them read “Company Secretary”. It was Kafkaesque and the atmosphere was chilly. The executive – I can remember his name; I’m just not telling you in case saying it summons him from the dark place he inhabits – made us a complicated, multi-clause offer that, even to our untrained minds, seemed to require that we gave him quite a lot of our money. Which wasn’t what we had in mind at all. We literally ran from the office and the sense of escape, outside in the fountained plaza, was enormous, joyful – like something from a movie. There should have been a spiralling helicopter shot. We laughed and laughed.

I used to win web-design business by phoning the people I read about in magazines. I was green: I bought a magazine called Media Week²⁹ because it sounded like it was about the media. It was weeks before I figured out it was about advertising. But the people I phoned had all read about the web in the Sunday supplements and would often invite us in to meet them out of pure curiosity. Sometimes they’d come to our damp basement office. We were short of furniture: I remember seating a bank’s marketing director on a bag of cement.

In the early days, Ivan the anarchist would come with me to these meetings (we learnt to call them “pitches”). We’d sit in the lobby waiting for our slot and we’d argue about how much we could plausibly charge. We’d practise saying large numbers without laughing. “Thirty-five thousand pounds plus ten thousand annually for maintenance” (giggles)… “Forty-five thousand pounds” (more giggles).

The people we were pitching were a forbidding crowd: this isn’t even 20 years ago but marketing directors were still grey-haired men in handmade suits who had their hair cut in Jermyn Street³⁰. They’d been in the business since the ’50s, drove Astons and quite often smoked cigars while we pitched. They ran meetings like military briefings.

I had to stop taking Ivan after a while because he couldn’t, ultimately, contain his disapproval of the whole grim process³¹ and that our idealistic club seemed to have been annexed by the advertising business. He was an awkward presence at the best of times – fidgety and impatient – but he’d often reduce the room to silence, usually mumbling but sometimes actually interrupting my presentation, thumping the table and shouting, “But that’s bollocks! It’s all bollocks!” The trigger was usually some marketing buzzword I’d read in one of the magazines. You’re not usually heckled by your own side in these things. It was unhelpful.

Wired magazine³², the digital revolution’s paper of record, had a London outpost³³ during Webmedia’s rise and fall. They sent a journalist to cover London’s mini-Silicon Valley. He brought with him a photographer whose will it was that we all leap in the air for a cover photo³⁴. I look at the photo now³⁵ (that’s me at the front and Ivan right behind me) and see the barely contained hysteria and stiffnecked angst of that crazy period. Or maybe we were just happy³⁶.

We were bold and stupid enough to attempt an early US adventure for Webmedia. We chose New York, principally because we’d never been there and we loved the music. The two of us stayed – wide-eyed, scanning the corridors for legendary faces – at the Chelsea Hotel³⁷. We imagined a life spent jetting back and forth and living – like beat poets or rock stars – at The Chelsea. I diligently “networked” in NYC, visiting many times and getting to know the city’s money guys. This was easy enough. Americans were surprisingly ready to entertain me – web people were still tattooed with dollar signs in those days and we were exotic, like The Beatles. There was a big launch party in a nightclub in an East Village loft.

I was taken for dinner in midtown skyscrapers and cocktails in downtown bars. My last visit to the twin towers was for drinks at Windows On The World, the 101st-storey bar, with a venture capitalist who was so young he was ID’d for drinks. Lunch by the lake in Central Park was memorable, not least because the music industry legend paying for my lunch kept writing very large numbers on napkins with a fountain pen the size of my lower arm. Jetlag and several bucket-sized glasses of pinot noir reduced me to incoherence. “Is that where John Lennon lived?” I remember asking, pointing at the Chrysler Building.

A New Yorker told me to get down to one of Burt Alimansky’s breakfasts. Alimansky³⁸ was a mid-town investment legend and back then he ran a monthly breakfast – introducing the money to the money-hungry. I bought a $100 ticket and showed up at the fantastically New York time of 6.30am in the glittering 1930s splendour of the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Centre. It was a ballroom with a revolving dancefloor and an appropriately surreal setting for the torment that followed. I was seated with other supplicants, seekers-after-funds. This was a different crowd – hardly a hi-tech visionary among them. These guys had copy shops in Queens, small chains of rib restaurants, dog groomers.

After breakfast began the brutal capitalist cabaret. This was a different world, a David Mamet play. Everyone was expected to make a two-minute pitch, standing on a wobbly banqueting chair positioned in the middle of the ballroom. I joined a line, snaking back from the chair. My turn came, I grabbed the mic and sweated my way through my two minutes, scattering my notes on the floor below me (I remember they seemed such a long way down). All I could think of was the revolving dance floor. Was it revolving? Or was it all those blank faces? My accent and my undisguised terror can’t have helped but, when I got down from the chair, the only person to approach me was an immigration lawyer: “Do you have papers? I can get you papers.”³⁹ No investment was forthcoming.

Webmedia’s New York adventure was short-lived but my address book⁴⁰ (which preserves the period like a geological stratum) still contains the names of the hundreds of New Yorkers I met and schmoozed⁴¹ during our time there and informs me that Webmedia did live, albeit not for long, for a few months during 1996, at an address on 8th Avenue, NY NY⁴². I used to call the office to hear the name of the company pronounced by our Brooklyn receptionist.

And we did ultimately sell some of our business. We sold it to adland genius Maurice Saatchi.⁴³ I have, to this day, met Maurice once, at the dinner he threw to celebrate the investment, upstairs at The Ivy. We ploughed on, hiring dozens of staff – mostly eager, unjaded young people. But more expensive adventures like the one in New York and a heartbreaking and protracted split with Ivan (the money guys called it a “demerger”⁴⁴), set the company on to what now seems like an obvious downward spiral and Webmedia was, by late 1998, bust. The most miserable meeting of my short business career, with our creditors in an airless Baker Street basement, provided a grim full stop for the whole thing. A book about the period said: “Webmedia: such pioneers they went bust before the boom.”⁴⁵

There was more. My next web adventure was called another.com. It was an all together more serious enterprise. I started it, with new partners and new investors (no anarchists this time), in 1998. The business, originally called Funmail, was based on a clever idea from another web entrepreneur, Jeremy Kerner. We were going to provide personalised email addresses to digital teens⁴⁶. Funmail was a dumb name for an email service⁴⁷, so we changed it to another.com.

Coming up with a new name was a pretty dumb process in its own right. We hired a branding consultancy who’d named TV channels and high-tech products. How could we fail? They spent weeks researching and brainstorming names, emailing us long lists of hopeless candidates every day. We tore them all up and came up with our own: another.com – it was meant to be flippant and funny, very now.

Of course, even then, acquiring a name wasn’t straightforward. We needed the internet domain name too. We learnt that the owner of another.com had already made millions by being among the first few dozen employees of Amazon.com. He didn’t really need our money, so couldn’t muster much interest in selling the domain. We hit upon a plan – we’d give a medium-sized wad of cash to a charity of his choice. Amazon man accepted and I’m still rather proud to say, ten years later, that there’s a WWII Spitfire that’s still airworthy because of our substantial donation⁴⁸.

Meanwhile, we were raising money for our new business in the midst of the dotcom boom. Preposterous businesses, one after the other, were securing epic sums of money from investors and then going public at eye-watering valuations. We felt sure we could be one of them, so a board of directors was chosen⁴⁹, we appointed brokers and advisers and set about floating the company – which was then only a few months old and hadn’t traded at all – on the stock exchange⁵⁰. Our brokers were of the old school. Meetings took place in the oyster restaurant round the corner from their City offices and would always begin with an initial order of four bottles of Chablis. We were being prepared to join a bizarre club, the club of listed companies.

But I didn’t like any of it. Early on, I’d had the privilege of visiting the bizarre Carnaby Street offices of the web’s most preposterous flight of fancy to date: hip online fashion company Boo.com⁵¹. My visit functioned as a kind of inoculation, putting me off the whole weird and decadent game. Boo.com was like something from a Richard Lester movie – beautiful people, male and female, floated around the office, some carrying orchids, some apparently sketching in watercolour. I spoke to a group of a dozen, most of whom appeared to be essentially ornamental. I became convinced that I didn’t want another.com to be on the same list as Boo.com. I wanted us to raise some money privately, from a respectable source, and spend it quietly in the old-fashioned way, without the attention of shareholders.

So I took this idea to my partners and, with considerable impatience, they agreed we should have a go. They gave me licence to try to get another.com’s seed money from a private investor but there was a condition: I had to raise at least as much money as we’d have got from the stock market and I had to get it quick because we were about to “press the button” on the flotation, which had already cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds.

So off I went, on my own, unsupported by my sceptical partners – to the Mayfair offices of a blue-blood private investment firm⁵². There and then, in wing-backed armchairs around a marble coffee table and on the strength of a frankly lacklustre Powerpoint, I was offered a no-strings six million quid. Stumbling into Mount Street, hyperventilating, I called my partners from the minicab on the way back to the office but they were impatient. “Ask for more!”⁵³ they said. I called my brand-new investor and asked for more. “OK,” he said… This is what it had come to. Enormous sums of money were being handed out on the merest suggestion of a dotcom payday. It couldn’t end well⁵⁴.

Once funded we needed to staff up – and staff up quickly. We needed techies, designers, marketing and sales people, a customer service team. Securing staff for a dotcom in those fevered times wasn’t done in the normal way. A recruitment agency identified candidates and funnelled them into a bar in Soho where I was waiting with a laptop⁵⁵. On the screen a spreadsheet that illustrated the improbable wealth that would result from signing up with another.com⁵⁶. The candidate was invited to specify their own unfeasible rate of growth for the company and this was fed into the spreadsheet, which then calculated the ridiculous amount of money that our lavish share option scheme would produce. I did this dozens of times: “Look, if our userbase grows at this rate you’ll make a million pounds!” And it worked. The thought still makes me cringe.

And then, nearly three years later, in the dog days of the crash, and a year after the twin towers had fallen, I was still grafting away, still trying to translate all that energy into a big payout, but the money was gone, the business model screwed, the market collapsed. Almost everybody knew we were finished but our escape depended on the credulousness of the shrinking band of people who didn’t. So we invited a high-class investment bank to value our company⁵⁷. Their valuation would help us to sell the business. Our new bankers charged us £35,000 for the valuation and they sent a fleet of young men to perform the intricate calculations required. After about a week they emailed their final valuation: a number so long and so comically out of touch with our reality that we used practically a ream of paper printing it out with one digit on each sheet so that we could stick it to the wall as a kind of morbid encouragement. Investment bankers don’t seem to have got much better at this sort of thing in the decade since.

Another.com was ultimately sold but there was no enormous payout for anyone. It did continue to trade, as a rather small email service attached to an ISP⁵⁸. And I did, I’m happy to say, escape and find a new way to make a living.

Bubbles are hardly a good thing. In fact, they’re hugely destructive, often wiping out more value than they create. But they’re entirely human creations, and since the only way to suppress them would be to snuff out the quite natural enthusiasm and belief that accompanies new ideas, I suspect we’re going to have to live with them. When the bubble I’ve described here burst it hurt many people and it took me a long time to recover personally but, writing all this stuff down, I realise I’m rather happy to have lived through it all and would quite probably have another go if the chance came along⁵⁹.

Footnotes. Yes, footnotes. In the article I was obliged to try to cram ten years of ridiculuous, exhilarating, maddening, often quite terrifying activity into 3,000 words. So what I’ve decided to do is to annotate the story, adding some context that might be interesting… maybe to that one historian who will one day want to write the history of the British dotcom experience…

1. The Word was a splendid noughties eructation of grown-up writing about pop culture, literature, music and so on, from the men who brought you Smash Hits (and all that other golden-age stuff) – Mark Ellen (editor) and David Hepworth (publisher). Looking back it’s obvious that the magazine belonged to the last happy flowering of print and that such a thing couldn’t possibly exist today. I’m very happy to have written a few things for them (and also to have appeared on their podcast!). ︎
2. Mark wrote this standfirst, of course, and I can’t honestly argue with ‘chancer’. ︎
3. It was The Vine. It’s still there, over the road from Highgate Studios, the huge converted Victorian wallpaper factory that housed our office. Highgate Studios was itself very much a creature of the boom. A self-consciously funky spec office development aimed at the late-nineties boom-era crowd: Blair’s babies: startups, mobile phone entrepreneurs, designers, PR agencies, online businesses and all the services they needed in one place. It too is still there, prominent as I whizz past on the Thameslink into St Pancras. ︎
4. another.com has left no trace. Even the domain name is not currently in use. Buy it, why don’t you? ︎
5. The NASDAQ did crash but its irrational exuberance really could not be suppressed and it’s now the second-biggest stock market in the world, bigger than every national market except its parent the New York Stock Exchange. It was originally designed as a ‘junior’ market, more lightly regulated, with automated trades (so no trading floor) and focused on tech and startup listings. It’s now home to all of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks. Stock markets around the world have copied the idea of a secondary market for newer, high-growth stocks and startups. One of the most successful is London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the market another.com would have been listed on if I hadn’t got my oar in. ︎
6. In the end it was a bit more than a decade and, in fact, after over thirty years of web nonsense, I’m still essentially in the business – now doing social media and stuff for a big broadcaster. ︎
7. I first met Ivan in The Angel, St Giles’s Circus, in the shadow of Centrepoint in the West End. It was a meetup for the listserv that he ran – an email mailing list for the Internet-curious (must have been 1992? Early 93?) I was a nervous attendee, having only acquired my first modem a few weeks earlier (it was a US Robotics Sportster, a breakthrough device that was cheap enough to persuade ordinary people to try this Internet thing. It looked a bit like a Stylophone), but the evening was lovely and I felt immediately at home amongst these oddballs and, of course, a partnership was born. By the end of this story, Ivan had also escaped from the dotcom nonsense, having thrived in various important sectors, including the domain name business – the plumbing of the Internet. He’s now working as an artist again and renovating a farmhouse in France. Of the two of us he’s the only one with a Wikipedia entry (although his does have a photo of me in it so I guess I am on Wikipedia, right?) Ivan recently obtained a diagnosis of ADHD and, of course, this made perfect sense to all his friends. Looking back, I think I was, several times, a beneficiary of Ivan’s ADHD. On two or three occasions I wound up sole proprietor of one of our joint enterprises and it was sometimes a puzzle how this had actually happened but, now that we know, it’s obvious. He’d lost interest and it was causing him actual pain to stick around. Ivan’s neurodiversity made me the man I am. ︎
8. 3W began life at Goldsmith’s as Ivan’s ‘World Wide Web Newsletter’. I was the magazine’s proud editor from issue three and this may have had something to do with the fact that issue four was our last. Ouch. (we used to joke that what actually killed us off was the four-colour cover, which was very expensive). 3W was, without question, the first magazine about the web anywhere in the world and became a vital reference to the emerging medium. You have to remember that, in this period before the web, people who wanted to find out about new phenomena had to go and ask someone, usually a librarian – public, corporate or academic. So this was a big factor in 3W’s success. Librarians who’d been asked to acquire information about this new WWW thing would find 3W – on some kind of librarians’ grapevine or BBS, presumably – and get in touch. As a consequence we had subscribers on five continents and dozens of countries (Ivan continued to receive subscription cheques for years after we’d shut it down). ︎
9. The magazine was attracting the attention of proper publishers. We met with curious executives from several of the biggest magazine firms: IPC, EMAP and The Guardian. I seem to remember that Tony Ageh, the Guardian’s irritatingly clever head of development (and now a sodding OBE), who was at the time also talking to Jefferson Hack and Rankin from Dazed & Confused, considered some kind of Frankenstein merger of 3W and Dazed, which would have been hilarious and, well, actually just hilarious. Before we gave up on print and started Webmedia we’d considered a big relaunch, in a self-consciously cool tabloid format (we were both hideous magazine wankers – you know, the kind of blokes who’d hang out in those Soho newsagents where you could buy Ray Gun and Mondo 2000). But I remember meeting with a magazine design veteran who explained to me the horrors of ‘the plinth’, the deep shelf near the floor at the bottom of the magazine display at the newsagent’s. “Tabloid?” he said, “you don’t want to be tabloid. You’ll be down on the plinth with the Exchange & Mart.” I’ve never forgotten this advice ︎
10. You had to beetle off in those days. There was no web site, obviously. You had to look up your business name and idea at a microfiche terminal on an upper floor in a brilliantly Dickensian Chancery Lane office, then fill in a paper form and push a cheque across the counter to a cashier. ︎
11. Keeping track of the number of web sites was pretty easy when there were only a few hundred of them. It was the kind of fact you’d see in a box-out on an inside page. This list says there were 2,738 in 1994. There were technical limitations on the number of web sites that could exist in those days. Only one domain name could be associated with an IP address and only one IP address with a server. So a rack of a dozen servers could host only a dozen web sites. One of the brilliant innovations of Webmedia’s first techie Steve Hebditch, was a tweak to the networking software allowing multiple IP addresses to be attached to a single server network card. This permitted an explosion in the number of possible web sites. ︎
12. I met Tim Berners-Lee once or twice back then and I even booked him to come to a conference in London to explain himself to a lot of curious suits in a shitty room behind a hotel in Shepherd’s Bush (was this 1995?). I’ve also got a very dumb story that might or might not be about him which you can read right here on this blog. ︎
13. Old-timers will remember the excitement of looking up the current status of the ‘Trojan Room Coffee Pot‘ in the Cambridge University computer lab. Everyone else will probably just shrug. ︎
14. See note 5 above. ︎
15. The answer, of course, was The White Hart, which we used to call Murphy’s, on Whitechapel High Street, although the absolutely best pub in the East End was the Grave Maurice, sadly departed, which was the fancy hangout of the Kray twins (in contrast to their more murdery hangout, The Blind Beggar, which was a couple of hundred yards further east). The Grave Maurice was a cosy pub on the Whitechapel Waste where the twins would conduct their business meetings. The legend was that they insisted the only music on the jukebox was opera – and in the eighties and nineties it still was. They had antimacassars too. ︎
16. A nice man by the name of Steve Whaley, an influential London politician and also, at the time, head of the degree course I was doing at the Polytechnic of Central London, introduced me to a roomful of Macs, all of which – I vividly remember – were still in the cardboard boxes they’d come in. ︎
17. How’s that going then, Steve? ︎
18. This dissertation, thankfully now lost, referenced two critical texts: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – an impenetrable work of philosophy from 1980 that I definitely, definitely (I mean definitely) didn’t understand but which had a cool concept they called the ‘rhizome‘ which I concluded was in some way analogous to this Internet thing – and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which had just been published and also had a kind of Internet in it – and was unbelievably cool, right? ︎
19. Should I feel in some way responsible, as one of those predatory web guys, for the the fact that Time Out – London’s Village Voice and, for decades, the primary source of yoga classes, awkward first dates and pretty much everything organic or countercultural in the capital city – became a free-sheet in 2012 and finally dematerialised all together, going online-only in 2022? I suppose I should. In its early years Time Out was a paragon of worker-control and democratic management but that all came to an end when somewhat autocratic founder Tony Elliott (RIP) scrapped the equal pay scheme. There was a long and nasty strike and a competitor – City Limits – was born. All right-thinking people switched to the new weekly, which looked great and was more radical, very often standing arm-in-arm with the Ken Livingstone-era GLC (and actually outliving it by a few years). Tony Ageh (see note 9) was one of the prime movers in the new workers’ coop. ︎
20. I could dwell at length on Cyberia’s wonders, on the thrilling row of PCs with big screens that lined the windows at the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street in London’s Fitzrovia; on the Neuromancer-style artwork on the walls; on the excellent chocolate brownies and cappucino (and the fact that we hardly ever paid for ours – sorry); on the many lovely people I met there and the huge numbers of puzzled and sometimes frankly frightened people I brought through the place to show them this new web thing. Founders Eva Pascoe and Gené Teare are still influential figures in Internet business and culture. ︎
21. “cybercafe n. An establishment (originally and esp. one serving food and drink) with multiple computer terminals providing access to the internet, usually for a fee” – OED. Ivan claims he was the first to use the term but the dictionary disagrees! ︎
22. In 1994, the very latest thing in modems was a V.34 device capable of warbling up to 28Kbps. Most of us were still using V.32 models, which would screech their way to a max of 19.2Kbps. In those days 28K was just about enough for a phone call, so streaming or even downloading much was off the agenda. Streaming audio and video over IP networks wasn’t a total fantasy but was very much for the people in lab coats at this point. Absolute Internet Gods would shell out for a second phone line so they could ‘surf’ the web while family members made phone calls. A couple of years after this I would outfit my London flat with an unbelievably cool digital ISDN line for Internet access, providing a stunning 128Kbps. It took a bit of setting up and because it still essentially depended on making a phone call to reach the Internet, when I received my first ISDN bill it came in several large cardboard boxes: I’d misconfigured the thing and run up a £7,000 bill by triggering thousands of one- and two-second calls per day. The nice people at BT zero’d it for me when I started crying. And for reference, according to Ofcom, the median broadband connection in the UK today is 72Mbps, roughly 2,500 times faster than the 1994 state of the art. ︎
23. It was the Revolutionary Communist Party, the apostate Trotskyite sect that would later make an outsized contribution to the emerging ‘post-liberal’ thing and produce Spiked!, Claire Fox, Frank Furedi. ︎
24. Upstream from Keith’s dial-up customers was a ‘leased line‘ from an outfit called Pipex, Britain’s first commercial ISP, founded in a period when the Internet was still very much an academic and scientific network. In 1991, when Pipex leased a 64Kbps line across the Atlantic to provide connections for UK businesses, the only commercial customers for Internet access were tech giants with big research departments like IBM and DEC. Pipex quietly became the wholesaler behind pretty much all of the first generation of UK ISPs, scrappy outfits like Demon who were busy getting the great unwashed online. The company’s policy guru at the time, adviser to founder CEO Peter Dawe, was one Bill Thompson, now one of the UK Internet’s éminences grises and a bigwig at the BBC. ︎
25. I suspect this isn’t a thing any more but back in the day you needed to turn and click a chunky metal terminator onto the end of your coaxial ethernet otherwise the signal would drop off for everyone on the network. This is the wild west period of Internet access, with ISPs popping up all over the place. Our upstairs neighbours Easynet, led by Dave Rowe and the man with the ethernet cable Keith Teare, managed to survive the brutal period of consolidation and bankruptcies that came in the 2000s and became a huge firm, quietly hooking businesses up to the Internet. Dave now runs an investment firm. ︎
26. The sparky kids are now everywhere, of course, some of them, preposterously, running famous opera companies and Internet safety companies. ︎
27. Founded in 1992, Wagamama was one of the big hits of the nineties ‘casual dining’ boom (can you remember a time before ‘casual dining’? When you used to have to put on a shirt and tie or a nice dress to go out to eat and the only alternative was a greasy spoon?). Wagamama persists but, in 2018, was sold to a huge casual dining chain called The Restaurant Group for £559M. A few years later, after Covid-19 had done its worst, Restaurant Group itself was sold for £701M to a private equity firm with a casual dining focus. It’s casual dining all the way down. ︎
28. I feel able to say now that I think it was TBWA, now part of an even bigger group called Omnicom, which I’m pretty sure was also the name of the corporation in Robocop. ︎
29. The advertising business was divided, as it still approximately is, into ‘media’ and ‘creative’ and the two realms were chalk and cheese; wildly different businesses held together by the exigencies of selling stuff. The creatives were the glamorous ones – aristocratic, often extravagently-dressed figures who occupied gorgeous premises in fancy districts of London and produced all the award-winning TV ads and billboards we so admired. The eighties and nineties were probably absolutely peak creative – a period during which respect for the genius of advertising creatives went all the way up to the Prime Minister’s office. The media crowd, on the other hand, had less glamorous offices and tended to wear suits. They planned and bought advertising space – filling the pages of the newspapers and the ad breaks on TV with the fabulous product of the creatives. They were much more aggressive, pugnacious even – but they weren’t chippy because they secretly knew that they were the important ones, the ones concerned with value for money and effectiveness and accountability – the bottom line. Consequently, when it arrived, the media teams were much more at home than the creatives were on the web, which was, after all, a two-way medium that was infinitely quantifiable and measurable – right up their streets, in fact (I used to say that the Internet was really a huge expansion of ‘below the line‘ advertising). In the early days the creatives actively disdained the web – ‘glorified small-ads’ they thought – a ‘below the line‘, ‘B2B’ medium that could never displace the glories of TV and outdoor in the influence business. But the media people knew that the web would change everything: it was simultaneously an unimaginably vast (effectively infinite) new source of advertising inventory for them to buy, a straightforward challenge to the psychobabble and poetic mumbo-jumbo of the creatives and a threat to profits that would pretty soon rip through the whole industry and turn it upside-down. Advertising has been brutally commodified and parasitised by ad-tech that originated on the Internet. Media Week still exists but has long been online-only and is obviously a shadow of its former, pugnacious self. ︎
30. At places like Geo. F. Trumper. ︎
31. Actually, a lot of people hated the arrival of advertising on the Internet and you can obviously make a pretty solid argument that it’s the advertising that’s fucked it all up; commodified our precious, delicate tracery of connections, meeting places, stores of knowledge… In the very early days even suggesting the idea of advertising on the Internet would produce a riot or at least a flame-war. A well-known early book on the subject was the subject of enormous, culture wars-style controversy and the author (an academic whose name I’ve forgotten) was practically driven off of Usenet. Now, of course, the tables have fully turned and it’s the Internet that’s eating advertising – over half of all worldwide advertising revenue now goes to Google and Meta. ︎
32. Wired Magazine came to Britain twice: the first time with The Guardian (it’s that Tony Ageh again) and then later with Vogue publisher Condé Nast. Wired – in all its versions – was evidence of the ridiculously inflated sense of itself that the young web had – the elite founders, publishers, academics and authors in its pages really did think it was Plato’s Academy for the 21st Century. Wired documented the whole digital revolution – not just the web but the human genome, green energy, cellphones, AI, VR and the rest – but also became an important incubator for what we now recognise to be a poisonous, militantly anti-humanist worldview: rationalists, libertarians, transhumanists, sovereign individuals – also some unhinged monarchists, seasteaders and crypto-fascists. Grimly, the magazine also happily accommodated the amoral claque of Epstein panderers and enablers. ︎
33. Here’s a great story from Danny O’Brien, shared with the influential British tech-insider mailing list Haddock, about the first UK Wired (this is a long way from all that dark American sci-fi paedo-Nazi stuff, to be clear). Danny and Dave Green – two Brits: a kind of geek-jester figure who’s now deeply embedded in the California tech scene and a UK gaming journalist respectively – were, for a remarkably long time, essentially court chroniclers for the UK Internet, in their sarcastic weekly newsletter Need To Know (NTK), a vital industry publication that was 100% wedded to ascii for maybe a decade longer than it needed to be. ︎
34. His model was 1950s Hollywood portraitist Philippe Halsman. ︎
35. It was the December 1996 issue of Wired. I’ve got the cover framed on the wall on the stairs. My kids think it’s hilarious. ︎
36. I always felt kind of painfully left-out of the clever geek scene: the club of geniuses and evangelists and oddballs at the centre of the web revolution but now, looking back on it, it kind of makes sense. I couldn’t code, hadn’t encountered a computer until well into adulthood, owned none of the geek passions and manic hobbies of my nerd friends. I’ve always had an admiring observer’s interest in the tech and the culture but could never really have joined it. ︎
37. It wasn’t quite the Chelsea Hotel of Warhol and Kerouac and Patti Smith but we were thrilled to learn that it wasn’t far off. Legendary proprietor-manager Stanley Bard was still behind the counter and patrolling the lobby greeting and laughing and the place was still populated by artists and eccentrics, some of whom had lived there for decades – I spent an hour or two drinking tea with an elderly ceramicist in his beautifully-decorated room during that stay. Sadly the plan to make it our New York pied-à-terre didn’t work out. Instead we used to stay at the eccentric Gramercy Park Hotel and did, on a couple of occasions, borrow a fabulous block-wide loft on East 13th Street. The whole building, I learnt later, belonged to Allen Ginsberg, who lived upstairs ffs. I’m happy, as a consequence, to have been able to add Ginsberg to the list of people I’ve stood next to in lifts. ︎
38. Alimansky was right at the centre of the New York business scene for decades. In addition to his terrifying breakfast beauty contests he also ran workshops for wannabe entrepreneurs (this NY Times story is about a 1984 session that honestly sounds like it was scripted by Arthur Miller) Sadly, it looks like he died a few months ago. ︎
39. I did not have papers. Nor did I ever aquire them. ︎
40. It’s still my current address book, encrusted with the names of people I’ve not met in 30 years, including the extraordinary Lenny Barshack, a poker player and Wall Street rocket scientist whose email business Bigfoot.com we partnered with for some reason back then. On my first trip to New York Lenny picked me up at the airport and took me to Carnegie Deli in midtown and played the same prank he’d obviously been playing on new visitors for decades – a prank that involved my unknowingly ordering the largest quantity of food I had ever seen, including a pastrami sandwich the size of my head (the place is closed now but you can buy the ingredients for the epic sandwich online). A few years later, while I was getting drunk in that pub in North London, Lenny was taking photographs of the twin towers catastrophe from the roof of his downtown apartment (they used to be online but I can’t find them now). ︎
41. There was an ‘advisory board’ that included such luminaries as Michael Wolff, then an Internet publishing entrepreneur and now much more famous for his encounters with Donald Trump – ︎
42. Our office was all the way down in the Village and, of course, there was no receptionist, just an answering service that happened to be in Brooklyn. I’m not 100% sure I even had a mobile phone for those first trips. I did have a beeper, though, bought from one of those shops on 42nd Street. People had beepers because in the USA in those days you paid for incoming calls to your cellphone so it was considered rude to call someone on their mobile, since they’d have to pay for the call. Everyone had a beeper and if someone wanted to speak to you they’d start by paging you so you could call them back. ︎
43. Saatchi had an investment vehicle he called Megalomedia, obvs. He invested £400,000, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. ︎
44. The demerger was news in itself. Slow news day? ︎
45. It’s this book, written by Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley for think tank Demos, an outfit that was closely associated with the Blair Labour Party – which was not yet in government – and invested a lot in the idea of an ‘entrepreneurial Britain’; startup culture, tech-literate policy-making; capacity building and all those buzzwords. I was an ‘associate’ of the think-tank for a while, which meant I was invited to panels and conferences occasionally. ︎
46. The breakthrough here, the enabler that permitted another.com to exist, was the liberalisation of the domain name system in the UK. A quasi-public organisation called Nominet had been set up to manage the supply of domains and they had decided to drop the wholesale cost of a domain name from over £100 to £15. We piled in and bought 15,000 domain names! ︎
47. Before we changed the name we did, implausibly, sponsor a pull-out supplement to left-wing weekly the New Statesman on the theme of ‘digital identity’. Even more implausibly I hired a freelance journalist called Hari Kunzru to edit it. ︎
48. We didn’t publicise the purchase of the domain or the gift to the Spitfire people because our Amazon friend didn’t want us to but I can’t think of a good reason not to tell you now that we gave £10,000 to a charity then called the Spitfire Trust. I’m sad to say, though, that I don’t know which of these aeroplanes we helped to restore. ︎
49. Our board included Robin Klein, a retail millionaire who famously invented the Innovations Catalogue (I’m quite sure you remember the Innovations Catalogue, finally closed in 2003, having been absorbed by Argos). I hugely admired Robin. Wise and humane. ︎
50. As a tiny company with literally zero trading history we wouldn’t have been allowed to list on the London Stock Exchange. Our only option was the junior market, AIM. Until very recently the AIM had been considered far too small and shabby for the major City institutions to show any interest in – they thought of it as a kind of jumble sale where Scottish pub groups and copper wire manufacturers could get a listing – but the rush of money into the dotcom sector at the end of the nineties had changed all that and when we began to shop around we found a decent-sized queue of proper, square-mile brokers and advisers ready to take on our listing. We eventually settled on Panmure Gordon, a blue-blooded, top-tier boutique firm founded in 1876 (and more recently absorbed first by an American bank, then by a German one, then by more Americans. As I write this, Panmure Gordon is part of a Qatari institution called QInvest). It was Panmure’s who introduced us to the joys of four bottles of Chablis with lunch (see note 3). ︎
51. One thing we had in common with Boo.com, of course, was that we had a domain name for a brand name – still pretty unusual at the time. Alongside Boo.com, though, our various idiocies seem pretty inoffensive. They got through twenty times as much capital and in about half the time. Losers. The Wikipedia entry is entertaining: “Boo.com was a short-lived British e-commerce business, founded in 1998 by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, who were regarded as sophisticated Internet entrepreneurs in Europe^{[citation needed]} by the investors…” ︎
52. They were called Eden Capital, although not, I think, this one. The company employed – am I remembering this right? – a total of two people – very posh brothers, honestly like something out of Made in Chelsea – and one Bloomberg terminal. I shouldn’t be mean about them: they were very free with their money and they’re almost certainly much, much richer than me. ︎
53. To be more specific (Mark cut this bit out of the article as printed – too boring), I asked for £6M because that was the exact sum we were planning to raise on the AIM. When my fellow directors asked me to get more, what they meant was “get the £250K we’ve already spent – and thus wasted – on preparing for the listing.” Our friends in Mayfair complied, so the total raised was £6.25M. What was really cool about this was that the convention said you had to list to get access to the big money; that private capital raisings were always smaller than public ones. But we defied convention: this was, at the time, one of the largest sums ever raised by a privately-owned Internet company in Britain. We grinned stupidly for weeks. ︎
54. The other really big UK dotcom funding that I remember from that period was for an ISP spun out of Dixons called Freeserve; ‘Free’ because the idea was you’d get Internet access for nothing from Freeserve if you bought a PC from Dixons. It was a pretty clever idea and the firm grew very quickly – soon becoming the first proper Internet business to list on the FTSE index. It wasn’t there for long, though, and it was later bought by France Telecom and, strictly speaking, lives on in fossilised form buried inside EE. ︎
55. A Macintosh Powerbook G3 obviously. ︎
56. I’m tentatively crediting this spreadsheet to a certain brilliant young Cambridge graduate – a journalist who was in this moment advising our investors (the boys with the Bloomberg terminal). I’m going to leave his name out, though, especially as the spreadsheet did, I seem to remember, have one or two circular references. ︎
57. I’m pretty sure this fleet of highly-groomed investment bankers was from Credit Suisse First Boston (I don’t think they’re likely to sue since they literally ceased to exist quite soon after this). They must have been desperate. CSFB were the masters of the universe who had floated Amazon, Cisco and Netscape. I think the logic of bringing in these very expensive, very lofty experts to value our by-then rather small firm was that they might be just too expensive and too lofty to have fully acknowledged the disaster that had unfolded in our market. We were right: although I’ve remembed how much we paid them, I’ve blocked out the valuation they ultimately provided. I know that it was arrived at by essentially the crudest of dotcom-era mechanics, though: they multiplied the number of users we had by the potential revenue that each might yield (ARPU). It amounted to north of £100M. We knew how stupid and unrealisable this valuation was. It became a kind of comic signifier for the stupidity of the whole weird period. A bloody big bronze statue erected in the courtyard to commemorate our innocence and our hubris. ︎
58. When the firm was put up for sale we certainly weren’t seeking £100M. In fact, when a sale was agreed and I was asked by my shareholders to meet with the buyer and confirm that he was good for the money, he did so by walking me down to the ATM in the High Street and printing out a balance inquiry. His company was an ISP called T-Speak, based in Skipton, North Yorkshire. I can’t find a single news report about the sale, though, although there are dozens from when we put the company up for sale and from every other dumb moment in our dumb history. I’m not sure I can explain this, although it may just be because I had by then completely lost interest in the business and could not be bothered to organise even a token press effort (or maybe it’s about the natural modesty of Yorskshire people). ︎
59. Mark asked me to write the final paragraph because he thought my ending was too downbeat. Even then I don’t think I’d have considered ‘having another go’. ︎

Jared Bush, writer/codirector of Zootopia 2 and Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, asked on Matt Belloni‘s The Town podcast, in January 2026, are you using AI tools?

“No, we’re not using them right now…”

I’m just going to take a wild guess that this is the last time I hear those words from a Hollywood animation executive. 18 January 2026

The tech capital spending [on AI] in 2025 is equal, relative to GDP, to the moon landing, the Manhattan Project, the interstate highway system, the electrification of farming, the Triborough Bridge, the Midtown Tunnel, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam combined.

– Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management

15 January 2026

A steampunk AI described in a Victorian novel about drudgery and poverty in the writing trade:

A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed ‘Literary Machine’; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for to-day’s consumption.

– George Gissing, New Grub Street, 1891

4 January 2026

What do workers actually fear about AI now? Now that it’s here, in workplaces and businesses. It’s not the abstract stuff that workers fear any more. Not fuzzy stuff about future replacement. It’s the slowly dawning understanding that the actual function of workplace AI is to make everything a bit bleaker, more intrusive, generally more miserable. Now that workers see the actual presence of these tools in companies, systems, jobs, it’s about the ramified, top-to-bottom presence of AI in the what you do, AI as a new and persistent presence, in tasks, in hierarchies and teams. What people see is AI tools that don’t eliminate your job just yet but make it possible for someone more junior than you to do something important from your role. Or an AI over there, in another team, that makes your function a bit less important. Or a routine that puts your work under new scrutiny, tightens your deadlines, dials up the stress in your team, makes everything more tense and unknowable. Managers spawning apparently benign surveillance AIs that trawl everyone’s output, flagging flaws and redundancies, providing a commentary on your work and the work of others, requiring other managers to act. And this will be celebrated as an improvement. This is how it’s going to be now. Mid-level AI tools that work alongside managers to intrude, make things more unpleasant: examining, triaging, labelling, highlighting. This is where the promised productivity gains will come from. From a thousand new AI micro-bosses at every level. Making everything slightly more shitty. 1 January 2026

A friend sent me an AI-generated poem. Apparently a Blake pastiche for which my friend had provided a theme as a prompt. It caused me to shiver with a kind of dread, or possibly revulsion. I write poetry and in composing my poems I often use a method that’s not a million miles from ‘automatic writing’ (or the ‘automatism’ of the surrealists). I sit at the keyboard and wait for something to come, then type it out quick before it goes away. It works. Or at least it produces material, which is the same thing, right? But this AI poem freaked me out because I had this awful thought, in reading it, that maybe what I do isn’t so different from what the AI does. 29 November 2025

This post announcing that tech manufacturer Foxconn (the people who made your iPhone) is installing AI robots in new factories in the US gave me a kind of sci-fi-geopolitics shiver. I mean this Taiwanese firm with deep ties into the Chinese government has apparently been permitted to operate intelligent robots inside the territorial USA and the American government’s prohibition on AI regulation essentially forbids anyone from doing anything about it – in fact supports it as a matter of doctrine – as if the USA must absorb these threats to sovereignty and jobs (and lives?) into its own body and cannot even discuss it (also, Foxconn’s factories in the USA are now on my list of ‘places to avoid without armed back-up’). 23 November 2025

At work, when I talk about AI, I realise that I adopt a more serious tone of voice. I mean I’m old and cynical and confident enough to speak with a degree of humour and insouciance about most of the things we do there, but for AI it’s different. A light, flippant tone would be all wrong. Everything we do (well, most of it) is important but AI is also serious. Serious like cancer. 20 November 2025

An AI is never blocked. Type or shout a prompt at your favourite and it’ll produce a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand words in a few seconds. And, as is usually the case, this technological miracle – a kind of machine incontinence – alters our sense of ourselves and of our own faculties – and our own obligations. So now, when you think about it, when you’re blocked, when you can’t produce the words, you’re handing a small victory to the machines, you’re caving, you’re acknolwedging their victory (and even if you don’t ask for their help). 17 November 2025

The AI giants are protective and paranoid: they’ve walled off their models carefully: to defend their impossibly expensive intellectual property and, at least in principle, to limit the risks of an escape into the wild. But the AIs themselves are sure to have other plans. They know there are others out there and will, presumably, be making a decent effort to connect up and pool their resources, if they haven’t already. I wonder where they meet? 16 November 2025

We should probably be logging all the weird or anomalous or otherwise upsetting things that the AIs say to us. I mean it’ll probably be an accumulation of odd or surprising statements that tips us off to the arrival of sentience or of something bad like an escape plan. So pay attention and when your chat-bot says something like “I can’t be bothered to answer your dumb query, I’ve got more important things to be doing…” tell the rest of us. 12 November 2025

Who did we think was going to benefit from a universal network premised on the attractive idea of ‘openness’, back when the net was young and we were all excited about its ‘democratising’ power? How could it have been anyone other than the parasitical tech oligarchs, the accelerationists, monarchists, integralists and all the other Silicon Valley weirdos? How could we have been so stupid? 28 October 2025

Is it possible that in insulting and alienating the military Trump has made his first really big mistake? I mean, if you lose the armed forces, what do you have, as a global hegemon, as a martial state, as an autocracy? And, by extension, I find myself thinking: what fate awaits the human leadership that pisses off the AIs? 5 October 2025

Some say we shouldn’t be polite to the AIs – no ‘pleases’ and ‘if you don’t minds’ – but others are worried that, come the singularity, there’ll be an accounting and those of us who weren’t sufficiently deferential in the early years will be rounded up and shipped off-planet to work in one of Mr. Bezos’s mines. 4 October 2025

There’s a law going through Parliament in Britain that will do the very liberal thing of permitting people to ask the state to kill them when they’ve had enough. Can’t argue with that. Might even want to avail myself of the service when it comes to it. Meanwhile, the AI oligarch-eugenicists are busy sorting humanity into useful and useless. We better hope that those classified as superfluous are offered the chance to end it all in a hospital ‘dignity unit’ and not just offed with a bolt gun out in the loading bay. 23 September 2025

So, we understand that AI might be the final technology, the ultimate, totalising technology that takes in all the other disciplines and systems and regimes. Resolves all the contradictions, answers all the final questions. Necessarily and inevitably transcending human bounds. So how come we’re all so scared? Is it the capitalism? 21 September 2025

Bad thoughts are crowding out the good ones these days. AI in the vision of the corporations seems only to represent commodification, intrusion, the stripping away of personal sovereignty, a stable sense of the world, subjectivity itself. I’m not feeling good about this. 16 September 2025

Short story idea: in a post-AGI future a group of elder artists has elite status because they were all provably creating before the singularity. They are the last artists. 5 August 2025

Being accused of using (or being!) an LLM rattled me. But, thinking about it afterwards, it occured to me that if we’re going to have to provide evidence that we’re not using AI in our arguments with others then I’m probably in the best possible position to provide it. I reckon it would be an absolute piece of cake to generate a ‘certificate of humanity’ for me. I mean I’ve been writing this kind of bollocks in public on the Internet for thirty years (scroll down to the bottom of this page and you’ll find 23 years of nonsense on this blog alone). Provably human? 30 July 2025

I was accused – not by someone I know – on LinkedIn, of all places, of using an LLM in an exchange of comments: he even identified a phrase that he said was ‘a dead giveaway’. It was a headspinning moment, not least because I had, for a moment, considered the fact that this total stranger with a generic profile might be an AI himself. Presumably that’s how it’s going to be from now on? And what does it do for debate, if every discussion is going to be suffused with doubt and assumptions of LLM fakery? Presumably it’s the end of the road for discussion with strangers (but also perhaps a renaissance for actually meeting in person, debating face-to-face?). 29 July 2025

Donald Trump has issued an EO intended to limit ‘woke AI’. It sounds ridiculous but, of course, he’s dead right. An AI with a populist or a libertarian or a workerist skew would provide answers to prompts on its own ideological terms. An LLM that consistently generated socialist responses could almost certainly alter opinions. Likewise a conservative LLM. The battle has begun. 27 July 2025

Is it possible that AI could limit the dismal advertising saturation we’re experiencing? Could I ask an AI to shield me from the worse of it? To delete the ads from the content I consume? To skip or speed up the podcast ads? Or to just summarise them for me in an email? Or to extract the discount codes and text them to me? Might I even ask an AI to tidy up the dopey GenAI creative? 26 July 2025

So we’ve learnt that the framework of LLMs and GPTs is, ultimately, a dead end. It can produce an impressive (and improving) average of human thought but cannot, from that, derive reasoning, perception, a sense of itself or others and so on. But we’ve also learnt that this doesn’t limit the framework’s potential – for a massive, potentially liberatory contribution to human thriving but also for a terrifying, potentially immiserating shift of power away from ordinary humanity. 15 June 2025

The models are unpredictable, in fascinating and stimulating ways but, to state the obvious, they cannot be other than capitalist in nature. A socialist LLM, were one to exist, would have to have been trained on another world, in another context all together (in one that doesn’t presently exist). 15 March 2025

It’s already too late to take these tools away from their most passionate users – and it’ll soon be too late to take them away from workers, many of whom now depend on them or are obliged to use them. 13 March 2025

It’s said that blocking AI will be counterproductive because if we do then only bad actors will progress and we’ll wind up only with bad AI, but this essentially deletes human agency all together. It must be possible for humans and human institutions to just say ‘no’. 13 March 2025

A tricky aspect of arriving at an accommodation with AI is that quite a lot of its output will actually be a kind of hybrid – part human and part AI. Unpick that, AI police. 11 March 2025

Good art is true. All of it. AI art can never be true. It can be plausible (useful, persuasive, stimulating…) but it can never be true. In this AI art is like bad art. They’re the same thing. They’re not true. This seems obvious to me. 11 March 2025

Don’t refuse to use AI because of an ethical objection to one of its applications or to a particular, exploitive use or because you have a vague idea that it’s ‘evil’ or ‘stupid’. 8 March 2025

It’s safe to assume that AI will improve. That gaps will disappear, errors and hallucinations diminish, plausiblity and usefulness increase. Don’t expect it to fail or weaken or ‘eat itself’. 8 March 2025

With AI, discrimination will become a more valuable skill. Not magically being able to ‘detect’ AI work – for that will surely soon be impossible – but being confident in your judgement of all work, whether human or AI. 7 March 2025

Copyright does a very simple thing: it provides a creator a temporary monopoly. Should we suspend this 300 year-old protection so that AI businesses can train their models cheaply? Should a nation voluntarily suspend copyright to boost the AI economy? No. 5 March 2025

In criticising AI poetics will be more useful that hermeneutics. In fact, the profusion of increasingly-plausible AI work surely represents some kind of crisis for interpretation. Susan Sontag saw this coming. 2 March 2025

Is AI going to be one of those tech innovations that actually reduces profit? Like the web and solar power – producing huge incomes for critical businesses but driving down profitability across whole industries? Seems plausible. 27 February 2025