I’m only embedding that because …WordPress…

Do I dip into it? No. I never, ever do. I mean, I never was one of those people (weirdos) who log into their Twitter account and look back over the last X hours of postings while they were gone – this just seemed to me to be a weird misuse of the media. IMO, Twitter isn’t an in-box, it’s a transitory BANG in your face and if you miss it, it’s gone. But maybe that was just me.

I haven’t been on Facebook for a gazillion years. I ditched WhatsApp last year. Zuckerbot can fucking do one. Meta. What a cock.

Literally my only vice now is HackerNews, which I love mainly for the incredible variety of posts, discussion and intelligence. About 90% of it is so, so far beyond me that if I wasn’t such an old, self-assured SOB would make me feel tiny in my insignificance. But that remaining 10% is just incredible. I mean this for example (which is responding to Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness article from 1932) is just brilliant. I’ve read and bookmarked and returned to the original article many times before, but the conversation around it here is new, and dynamic, and wonderful.

What’s interesting about HN as a network is that it is very tightly moderated – not “tightly” as in “no opposing views here” but just wonderfully kept on track by the famous Dang – (there’s a good article here about all of that). There is variety of opinion, and difference, but it doesn’t lapse into the kind of bullshit you see on Twitter. There are no silos, just interesting and varied conversation.

Anyway, none of that is what I came here to post. What I did come here to post is that I like writing – and although for the last two years I have been keeping a private journal (of sorts, it’s all about meditation and so is a bit one-sided and minimal…), I realise that I miss putting [public] words down. So – and I know I said this before, haven’t we all – I think I’ll try punting some much shorter posts into this blog, categorised transients – and do it more frequently. A kind of Twitter but without any of that social bullshit that goes with it…

I did make the RANTIMATOR to do this, but I’ll leave that for those ranty moment…

The phenomena is this: whereas before lockdown it was totally ok to talk to a client on the phone, now it’s absolutely expected that we have a video call instead.

I wonder if this is some strange muscle memory (“I spend the days on Zoom, so might as well be Zoom”) or maybe it’s just more convenient, or maybe because it’s free – but either which way, it’s strange. There’s literally no reason for me to see your face, but for some reason that’s now the norm. Whereas before we were totally content to talk on the phone and then maybe jump into a video call when we needed to share something or see each other’s face – now, not so much.

Related to this, check out this rather excellent post: Introducing Jel: the un-Zoom – it’s a really interesting thought piece into why and how we interact in virtual meeting spaces, what 3D means, and so on. Then – if you’re willing to try something that on the face of it seems rather strange, give the actual Jel app a go, too. I had a go last week with a friend and after you get past the fact that you’re not on a video call and are being represented on screen by what looks like a squashed M&M, it’s actually rather good.

With each of these – and yes, I’ve also just listened to the hilarious James O’Brien / Piers Morgan interview (mellow at first and then… hots up…) – you get the old Morgan tropes coming out: “political correctness gone mad” or “groups are being silenced” and so on.

The problem it seems to me is that “free speech” is too often conflated by these people with “being able to say whatever the hell I want, however horrific it is”. These are not the same. Not at all.

A democracy is one in which free speech is championed, but ultimately this freedom is trumped (lolz, sorry!) by the ability of the individual or group to actually talk rationally, accept difference and explain their point of view.

In the face of this, my “liberty” to say “the earth is flat” or “Covid19 doesn’t exist” or “don’t take vaccines” is not “free speech” but lunacy. There is zero rational evidence to support these positions, and I’d be unable in the face of serious scrutiny to make any of them stand up. Just because something goes viral or has a huge community all blindly following it doesn’t mean it can actually be defended in the cold light of day.

Science is a great example of a method which actually works. The whole, entire point of the scientific method is that it is based around being right until it is proved wrong. Every single serious academic ever knows this: they publish a paper with a theory, and in this publishing they are basically asking their community to shoot it down with an alternative theory. Sometimes the theories remain for decades, sometimes they’re found to be wrong immediately, and then a new paper and theory is published which sets out the latest position, there again until it is proved wrong. This is how progress happens, not by shouting the same position over and over again into a room filled with people holding the same set of opinions.

The interesting thing in almost all the examples being pored over right now – Twitter and Trump, Parler, Voat – is that the individuals concerned are actually all involved in an echo chamber which perpetually self-supports. They are completely unable to rationalise, and if you ever try jumping onto any of these streams or platforms and providing an alternative point of view then you’ll see exactly what I mean by this – you’re almost immediately flamed out of the room. The irony here – that these “free speech” platforms are the least able to support any kind of dissenting opinion (yup, “free speech”!) – is intense.

Ultimately, the person claiming the primacy of “free speech” needs to accept that this freedom has a price: they need to be able to defend their position, and accept that others have alternative positions, and accept that even if their position is “true” now, it may not be “true” when further evidence emerges. This is rarely, I would suggest never, the case in the examples provided here.

A bit of a trigger for this post was the story about the lorry deaths in Essex (and can I just say that the graphic on that page showing the positions of the people in the back of the truck is strangely affecting for me, perhaps as much as the pictures of the people involved – so terribly poignant ).

And then of course the endless stories about groups being taken advantage of, whether Uighurs in China or zero-hours Uber drivers.

And at a stratospherically different level altogether, I’m also spending quite a lot of time thinking about the Nazis: populating a client website about the Holocaust on the one hand, and watching Hunters for the first time..

Now before we all get too depressed: at the heart of it all I am basically fairly optimistic about the human condition. I think on balance people are pretty “good”, and even though we’re surrounded by horrors (and these, of course, get all the reporting because who the fuck wants a happy story?) I think, simply, that our net goodness easily outstrips all the evil shit in the world.

But what I’m interested in here is the switch – in other words at what moment does a person (take the guy in charge of the Essex lorry refugee-importing “organisation”) lose perspective about the impact of what they’re doing on other human beings? Or – how does Uber go from being a cool idea that helps people get from A to B to an organisation that is manifestly and obviously shitting on their workers in order to squeeze the most profit for shareholders?

An obvious starting point is to focus on one’s own existence – so to ask whether any of this is me– I mean, I’m not a fucking Nazi but it’s undeniable that my actions have impacts which aren’t necessarily positive. So when I buy a gadget – for example – there is an environmental impact, a probable negative impact on individuals along the supply chain, an impact as I use the gadget and then ultimately have to throw it away when it becomes out-dated, and so on.

Does this make me complicit to suffering, in the same way that I see the Uber CEO or head of the Essex lorry organisation? I guess in some ways, yes. But in other (I’d argue more important ways) I’d say no. I consider myself to be basically a decent human being, not morally redundant in the way I think of these other examples. I also think I’d argue that there is a limit to how reductionist one can be, particularly in this modern world where it’s becoming easier and easier to trace literally everything as having an impact along the supply chain. I mean, I am struggling to think of any action at all that I can take which when viewed through a reductionist lens doesn’t have some adverse impact on the universe. Sitting here right now typing: using electricity, using a Mac – breathing air, ffs – these are all hurting something or someone if you start thinking in this microscopic sort of way. And – for fear of totally losing the plot – I don’t think this is a useful way of thinking about stuff.

The point is: I simply don’t know how you run an organisation (or a life) which is at its heart fundamentally about making money above all else – fuck the little guys, fuck the planet, let’s just maximise shareholder value, boys!

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Lord Acton, 1887

The question for me is when does this happen? I know organisations and people are complicated and grow in organic ways that aren’t necessarily a reflection of where they started from – but did Uber start off as a basically good (as in not just “good” as in “oo, nice idea” but “morally ok”), and then down the line a whole bunch of capitalist motherfuckers climbed on board and the distance between the idea and the very real people at the end of it became so wide that the goodness leeched away? When the head of the Essex lorry thing thought “nice one, I can make £10k a pop from importing people from foreign lands” – was there anything about those people’s wellbeing in his brain? Was he originally a fairly decent guy but his idea got screwed up along the way as more people got involved? Or are all these people evil sociopaths from the start?

Is it power? Was Lord Acton right? And if so, what does this say about our modern corporations? Are all big organisations necessarily evil? Is there a tipping point (maybe as soon as shareholder value gets involved?), or am I being much to mechanistic about the whole thing?

I’ve been a dabbler, an infrequent sitter, for ten years or more. I’ve been a semi regular for two years. It’s been a proper daily thing for what my meditation app tells me is now 233 straight days.

This is all relatively unimportant, especially the whole gamified notion of a “streak” which seems so at odds with the gentle, always-there nature of the practice.

But. I’ve taken a bit of a journey, and the regularity in the last period is, I’ve come to understand, deeply significant.

Firstly, the regularity creates habit. Reading the web, there’s all sorts of stuff out there about how long it takes to create a habit, ranging from 18 days to a year or more – and of course the nature of the habit is important in this. I can say for sure that if I were to not sit for a day now, I’d feel pretty weird about it. This is presumably what would be recognised as a habit. Secondly though, there is a genuine “breaking through” into daily life which happens after a while when the practice has been regular and longer term. They talk about this a lot in meditation books and other places – the choice phrase being something like “you’re not practicing sitting on a mat, you’re practicing life” or something similar. In other words, meditation and a mindful way of thinking is ultimately a thing that changes your life, not just the x minutes each day you’re doing the practice. At the two retreats I’ve been on, the former has been called passive practice and the latter active.

I’ve had two quite striking separate experiences of this “breaking through” in the last 6 months and a longer term, more gentle effect. The two experiences have revolved around a (fairly regular) “black dog” sadness which hangs around me fairly often, and in particular at this time of year (I’m writing this in February – it’s very dark, very rainy and we seem to be in the middle of a non-stop set of storms: this weekend we welcome the not-very-threatening-sounding Storm Dennis). Normally this time of year – November to February, really – is a time fairly often punctuated with mild depression.

These breaking through experiences are easy to articulate – I woke up on both occasions and immediately knew it was “one of those days” where a sense of bleakness was likely to remain in place all day. But on these two occasions I found myself looking at the “I’m in a bleak mood” narrative from another place – somewhere more balanced and able to be objective, and I found myself able to look all around this narrative and examine it. And then the strangest thing – I simply stopped feeling that way. My mood lifted, almost immediately, and I spent the rest of the day in a kind of wonder that I had this ability in myself to change something which I had always assumed was hard wired in me. 

I always feel a slight apology or disclaimer is due here. I’m in no way suggesting that proper, deep, crippling depression can be conquered this way, but it is also true that I (like most people) have a narrative in my head which is about who I am as a person – and I constantly reflect my experience against that narrative. So for example, up until recently I would have said I’m an insomniac or I suffer from bouts of sadness / black dog– both of which are true from one angle. But confirmation bias is a heady, strong beast, so fitting my black mood into the “yeh, well, that’s just me” is incredibly easy.

Challenging the narrative is what’s at play. From a deep point of view, this is Buddhism (everything is change, everything ebbs, nothing is constant, there is no self) – but more trivially, I’ve found a meditative practice to be a powerful way of stepping outside of that narrative, giving me an ability to be more objective about the self. Eventually of course this may become a journey towards understanding the philosophy which suggests a total lack of self. I’m not there yet, but I see a powerful set of arguments to support this view, ranging from the obvious lack of agency we humans really have (see Sam Harris on luck, genetics and free will) to fairly structural discussions around the lack of “us-ness” that happen around our biology, to the “where is the you located” question when considering fascinating cases like “split brain” syndrome. 

(Here I haven’t even started on consciousness or the location of consciousness (see this insanely interesting or possibly just …insane… article about “panpsychism” for example!) – arguably the biggest question of all…)

Above I said “I spent the rest of the day” – in fact, and this is connected to the “breaking through” thing, I’ve changed (or am changing..) on a more regular, gentle basis too. Daily, I find I live my life in the same way I always did – thoughts rushing, work ideas and family thoughts and to-do’s and All The Things – but on a regular basis during the day, I find I am aware. This awareness pops into my head now probably 10’s of times a day. By “awareness” I mean I suppose an ability to stop, to look at me, to be “in myself” without being overrun by thoughts – the very thing us meditators do for the 20 minutes or whatever each day. But – it’s here actually in my day, breaking in without asking – and this is fascinating, and not something I expected in the slightest. Not least of all, it is powerful to realise how much of our lives we’re asleep at the wheel, but I find it also allows the aforementioned objectivity to come through, too. I’m less cross, calmer, more able to settle after a mental upset. I think maybe I’m nicer, too.

There is an apparent banality to “just sitting” which is easy to overlook – either on the one hand to make this a streak-based game of cheesy Calm/Headspace/10%Happier American accented-ness where you simply clock up the time and check the box each day, or on the other to consider a regular practice for what it is – 20 or 30 or more daily minutes simply sitting. I mean, to an outsider, this is insanity – “what, you just sit? Why? Personally I’ve got shit to do”…

The fascinating thing about this particular activity is that on the surface, it is nothing. It is literally, and absolutely – nothing. What’s even more fascinating to me is that doing (apparently) nothing on a regular basis creates such profound, long term changes in one’s outlook and life.

I’m still learning. I’ll be learning for as long as I do this practice, and (this is interesting, too!) I’m fairly certain that I’ve found a thing I’m going to continue to do for the rest of my life. 

The conundrums that seem so opaque at the beginning of this kind of practice do slowly become more untangled as time goes on. I’m discovering for example (as I read Mindfulness in Plain English that some of the experiences I’ve had while practicing are themselves not to be grasped at, however pleasurable. Feelings of bliss (a state that happens reasonably often for me now as I practice) are to be considered alongside feelings of sadness, feelings of nothingness, or feelings of frustration. As a human being, craving is what we do – all the time – so although it’s easy to leave behind a feeling of sadness, it’s no so easy to not seek or crave a blissful experience.

When I started off, this kind of twisted knot (don’t chase the pleasurable) was so at odds with our modern, Western way of thinking that it seemed completely intangible – now it increasingly makes sense with a backdrop of meditative practice behind it. 

Make no mistake, “making sense” doesn’t mean “easy”. As all the books and all the apps say – this apparently simple practice is not simple in the slightest, but it holds a depth to it which is endless and potentially life-changing.

I’m going to break that rule: here comes a rant.

I get that Christmas is an important time. I get that families like to hang out together. I get that an awful lot of people (unlike me) have big families and have always had that “25 round a table on Christmas Day” thing that I have never really been a part of. I envy this bigness, I really do – it’d be lovely to have brothers, sisters, a father, a sprawling family – that’d be ace.

But.

I absolutely, no matter how I try and consider this from these people’s point of view – do not understand either the Government’s position on “relaxing rules over Christmas” or the families that are going to take advantage of this.

I’ve spoken to a bunch of people over recent days who are going to make the most of these rules but also obviously intend to consider them with a fairly considerable sprinkling of “meh”. Friends who are travelling to London for the New Year. Friends who “might be heading to a party of about 25”. Friends who are having their 89 year old gran over.

The UK’s vulnerable are about to receive the vaccine. Some people already have. So why the actual fuck would you or your family want to throw caution to the wind at this time – I mean, at any time, but particularly now when there is a small quantity of light at the end of the tunnel?

Does Covid19 just lie down for those 5 days? “Nah, fuck it, it’s Christmas, I’ll stop infecting everyone. No problem, pull a cracker with me”. Does mixing become any less dangerous for the old and infirm? No. No, it doesn’t.

I am in an immensely lucky position – I’m in Tier 1. I’m not vulnerable. I have countryside and space around me. I’m also in the “lucky” position of having this decision taken away from me: my mum is in a nursing home (so no big gatherings there) and my parents’ in law are in Tier3, vulnerable and happier to hunker down in the North East over the next few weeks.

I understand very deeply (having wrestled with mild depression for many, many years) that family and friends are important and that there is a huge mental health aspect to this.

I get all of that. Some may say I’m in no position to understand. I do, I really do. But, FFS, surely the sensible, obvious thing to do is just stay at home. Join your family by Zoom. Get shitfaced on your own or with your close family, beam in and watch the Queen remotely if you have to, fart without your gran telling you off…

It’s 5 days, and by all accounts it’ll make an absolutely enormous difference.

Happy fucking Christmas x

(* LOL)

There’s always been too much, probably since the moment Sludge1 crawled out of the swamp and couldn’t keep up with all the groovy things that Sludge2 was clearly up to with all his Sludgy mates over on the opposite bank. But of course what’s new now is that it’s all just a finger swipe away – all this stuff just waiting to be consumed, and all these incredibly interesting sounding people doing incredibly interesting sounding things.

I fling misc stuff into my bookmarks app (https://raindrop.io – try it, seriously, it’s amazing) on a regular basis as I’m working, browsing, whatever. It has a category called uncategorised (I know, go figure) into which everything goes, then every few weeks I work my way through and try and tag stuff, file it, read, etc.

The last few weeks have been fairly typical. Glancing in tonight I see there are 68 things in the list, waiting for my attention. They’re all bloody interesting looking, from a review of Alice James’ book on dying to a seriously cool interactive thingy on generative music (look at this one, it’s ace) to some helpful suggestions on working with the “What is this?” koan.

All this stuff is amazing. I want to suck it all in. But each and every one of those 68 things is at least an hour of proper reading and many of them are more like days or even weeks to properly dig in and read all around the subject.

I need Neo’s cortex blower (…although one has to ask, where was the “I know how to act” session…? …ouch!)

But – of course – I don’t have Neo’s implant because no clever fucker has invented it yet, so instead I continue to slap interesting looking stuff into my bookmarks tool and then review, and do some maintenance, and file it and tag it. Do I ever go back? Yes, sometimes, and I’d be tense as hell thinking that I could somehow lose this stuff – but do I really get deep with any of this stuff, really chew into it in the way it deserves to be chewed into? Rarely.

This is ok, because that’s life. I mean, I know some things quite deeply: the piano, or WordPress, or how to run a web project, or getting museum collections on the web, or printmaking, or…no, that’s about it…

But – it’s also unsettling in a way that is quite tangible – a sense of scratching at the surface, of never getting to it all. It’s a sort of FOMO, but an intellectual one rather than one about parties or looking for where the cool kids are drinking and realising that you’re never in the right place at the right time…

I find myself wondering quite often how this affects us. Clearly at some level, making comparisons (a thing which I’m thankfully far too old / confident / staid to give a shit about now) is dangerous, and fuels really bad shit like teenage depression or a deep sense of inadequacy, but there must be something there too about regularly being exposed to the sheer scale of the stuff we’ll never get to read or understand. It’s beautiful and awe-inspiring and incredible that the world is full of this variety, but at some level it feels like it pulls in a completely opposite direction to somehing sane or measured. It’s similar to the kind of manic, unthinking checking of the socialz, or taking of endless photos that you never go back and actually look at: it’s driven by some kind of madness that is hard to define and yet also terribly familiar.

The sense of stillness that can be got from a long meditation session is a fine yardstick against which that sort of manic gathering can be contrasted. It’s in this meditative nothingness that the deepest, most true and profound meanings can be sought – it’s in silence, in stillness, in lack and not in noise, volume and quantity.

As with today’s rancid political landscape, it’s almost definitely better to just ostrich most of everything and simply pretend it isn’t happening. But then I of course keep on bookmarking, keep on skimming, keep on collecting – but at the same time…thinking maybe I should just …stop.

“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.“

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Yes. There it is, a Polymetaal Ething Press HS-35. Get in.

I’ve hankered after some kind of press since I got serious about printing. Although a good baren does the job for a quick print or for knocking out preview prints, the consistency of colour and tone is hard to get right. There are some very cool ball bearing barens (try saying that with a headful of cider) – and in fact the brilliant Merlin Chesterman (with whom I’ve had the privilege of doing several woodcut day courses) uses one for some of her smaller prints. But – there is nothing quite like having a consistent part of the printing process. There are so (so!) many other variables, from paper to colour to – of course – subject, to layering… that having one thing that always works well is a bit of a godsend.

Anyway, Sophie Fordham (another amazing printmaker and my teacher for these last few years) has a Polymetaal (as well as an absolute monster press – one day, one day!) and I’ve always liked it for its simplicity and ease of use. The other nice thing is that I can get back into intaglio – I’ve been dabbling with an Xcut Xpress for a year but it’s really hard to get the pressure right and it’s not nearly tough enough to do anything other than relief printing.

Haven’t had nearly enough time to properly play yet but here’s a couple of intial rough’uns:

I’m experimenting with paper and inks. The ink here is Cranfield Caligo Safe Wash but in those plastic containers you need a gun for, like you get for DIY silicon. The upside is the inks never really get exposed to air, so don’t crust up.

The ink quality is really lovely – it’s oil based ink but easy to wash. How they do that, who knows – but the payoff is normally between depth of colour and ease of washing, whereas these seem to deliver both. I’ve yet to play properly with combining colours, will report back on this!

Paper: real experimentation here that I thought wouldn’t work – but am using 160 gsm cartridge paper. When it arrived I discovered it has a real sheen to it, which I thought wouldn’t work but actually it has a lovely finish.

Anyway – more to come!

…and here’s just one:

I think next step is to simplify one of the blocks, remove the double layering. I like the sea texture and the perspective though, I think it’s going to work out ok.

Inks: Caligo safe wash etching ink, basic primary colours

The hilarity is, I came upstairs in order to go up into the attic and do my daily meditation session but like a twat I popped into the office and here I am, MUST STOP.

But anyway – I thought while I was here wasting time I’d post two things: firstly, I realised that I am now the proud founder^* of THREE businesses (yes, as per homepage, forget about the first one, it was a combination of picture framer / photocopy wrangler / early web designer and really apart from the story where I cut someone’s priceless print into 6 pieces by mistake doesn’t really warrant any further conversation) – but that the latest one is probably of some interest.

It’s The Museum Platform. The elevator pitch is: a platform for (smaller) museums – a web based thing that enables museums to get their collections and web pages online easily and cheaply. It’s a collaboration between me and the excellent Jeremy O and Rob T and I am VERY EXCITED about it all. I will write more in the future about what it feels like launching a product (vs running a consultancy) as I have lots to say, but for now I’ll just leave it at that.

The second thing is just a thing I knocked up for a laff – the RANTIMATOR. It’s basically an anti-social Twitter. I just get to write what I like, not clutter these page up too much and – as my friend Oli says – howl to the moon. No comments, no replies, no likes. There’s an RSS feed which doesn’t seem to quite work yet (that’s my PHP skillz for you), but will soon, but honest to god I can’t see why anyone would want to subscribe to it.

That’s it. Over and out.

( ^* I love the word “founder”. I mean, I don’t because it makes one appear a total wanker – but at the same time there is a bit of me buffing my fingernails and thinking – YES THIS IS IT and thinking that Paul Graham and Cal Newport and all those productive people must be at least slightly proud of me, because I SHIPPED, you know? What a twat. )