Category: writing

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A week is a long time in politics

Also in my life. And the extent to which I am able to hold on to thoughts that are not created in exchange for Great British Pounds (I will also work for other currencies, fyi).

I’ve been busy writing up my thinking, but it’s for sale and not free. It’s not dumped into a text box on a browser-based publishing platform with no real effort going in to what it is I’m writing or even a why I’m writing it. This is a loose cannon (and canon) of words. Mostly it misses.

Yet, it’s almost halfway through the year and on occasion I’ve written every day for a week, even when I was in hospital for two weeks. I could have written this week but I forgot until my laptop was closed down and I thought I’d remind myself the next day to do the same thing. And then forgot again.

This is a bit like morning pages, which I have done before but didn’t stick with because I’m not a morning person and I like to sit with coffee and then walk the dog. Writing would be an unnecessary distraction that would likely lead to caffeine withdrawal and dog poop on my floor. So, I need to find a new way to remind myself, to get into the habit of writing even if what I produce isn’t great. I need the rhythm.

I also need to get back to playing my guitar more often. Back to playing my vinyl records in the day. Back to analogue stuff. Not all the time but regularly enough that it becomes meaningful to me.

Anyway, I’m working on that. Let’s see how it goes.

What I have done this week is kick off the production of the next Unspun Heroes release. Contracts are signed. MCPS licence fees have been paid. Designs have started. Press releases are in the works. Emails chasing confirmation of mastering and lacquer cutting are drafted. In short, shit got real. And my bank balance dropped a few thousand.

I also bought some books. Fiction. All but one of the six are slim volumes. Several are translated. I also have Strategy Is A Verb by Martin Weigel to start reading. I’m ashamed I’ve not managed to get on to that yet as it’s something that appeals to me in the sense that it’s not a ‘how to’ book, but more of an emotional response to thinking strategically. The kind of book that proves useful when you least expect it. A book about a subject you know well that is going to teach you how someone else does the job you do. A learning opportunity.

Any opportunity to learn is one that is worth taking, so I intend on settling down to some educational reading. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow and write it up later. One can hope.

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Trust Me

Trust. A word that’s so overused that it’s lost its meaning. Or at least it’s lost its power. It’s been highjacked by grifters, and politicians (some are both, I know) and so if someone says ‘trust me’ many people will become wary.

So how do you say trust without saying trust?

I think if you give someone confidence or make them ‘famous’ (I mean famous in the sense that the person’s boss sees them as amazing and rewards them) then I think with the right context it’s a better way to say it. It shows you can be trusted even if you’re just saying is because you have to clarify ‘how’.

Clients, though, love the word. Like they love ‘quality’. I’ve got some convincing to do as this project I’m working on starts to move towards finishing (finally!)

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Narrative structures

I’m building out a presentation. The story has to be crystal clear as the audience isn’t really into ‘marketing/brand’ and therefore the things I want them to focus on – the important parts of the strategy – need to be obvious. Not dumbed down, but not clever. Everyday language.

I had three ideas, one of which has been dropped. Thankful for that. It was okay, but there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. One of the other two remaining is fantastic. I could see the smiles on the faces of the internal agency team as I talked it through. The final one is there but the title of it just doesn’t quite cut it. I think I’m trying to do more with it than is possible so I might go back to it with the ‘everyday language’ mantra running through my head.

I’ve been doing all this against the backdrop of someone being in hospital. I don’t know the outcome of their operation. I think they’ll pull through, but it’s a proper life-saving op and, well, until they come out of it I won’t know if their life will be saved. Weirdly, especially given my post yesterday, this isn’t someone I have met. I just know them. We plan to meet up regardless of the news. I’m looking forward to that, but hope there are happy times ahead when we do.

Anyway, it’s been at the back of my mind and yet it’s also allowed me to think freely. I’ve felt unencumbered in many ways. The brain is fascinating although I don’t know that I’d like to learn exactly how it works. The mystery surrounding it is, in many way, what makes it so fascinating.

Still, two great ideas mostly articulated with a decent narrative structure. Now all that’s left is to finish off the brief to the designer. That’s tomorrow’s job. My brain has been free to think but it needs a rest.

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A Step Into The Past

I’ve just come off an hour-long call with some academics where we dicussed a paper they’d written that will now go forward to an online ‘Journal Club’ where people who are not academics, but have studied the subject, get together to critically discuss this paper.

What’s refreshing is that these academics (all women, I should say, which may or may not play a part in their response) are open to learning through reflection. In my career (lol) world the idea of reflecting and being reflexive is almost frowned upon. You’re just on to the next thing.

When I started blogging back in the early 2000s, I used it as a way to get feedback. Later, perhaps between 2009 and 2016, I used it as a way to think out loud. Even later, I used it as a way to reflect, although that was mostly in the early 2020s. Finally, as I learned more about myself and my way of working I used it to do all three, sometimes in the same blog post.

Now, I’m starting to do that again after a fair while of simply thinking out loud, or just shouting for no reason.

Looking back over the two decades or more of blog posts (they’re all available online) I see that the frequency of reflexive and reflecting posts increases around the same time, which is when I started to work for myself and beginning to try and understand what it was that was doing, or attempting to do. Some of those posts are still valid and useful – in some ways more so.

For being seen as a fleeting medaia, the internet offers a quite solid medium in which to express ourselves. And perhaps we should spend time looking back and instead of using older ideas as a method of cancelling, we use it as a way to consider the journey we’ve been on. (I’m not including the obvious racist, misogynistic or outright vile things people say and have said, but just your everyday observations based on what you knew at the time).

I wonder if we don’t throw out questions now which we can only answer later because we’re scared of it coming back to haunt us. That golden age of blogging where people knew they didn’t know but wrote things anyway in order to get more perspectives.

So, yeah. I have been talking about Systems literacy and it’s made me really think about not only what I’m doing when I write into this text field and click ‘publish’ but also what I could be doing with the output. The thing I wanted to do, yet have not quite done: to reflect.

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Week one, done

I doubt very much that I’ll continue to post every day, as not only do I have a lot of things I have to do, or occasions when I’m not well enough to move from my sofa or bed, I also know that attempting to meet a target is a bad thing.

Hit the target, miss the point. As the saying goes.

However, to get my brain fizzing with ideas – including a few longer, proper deep dives into subjects that have come up in conversation or just popped into my head – this initial burst of enthusiasm has been just what I needed to motivate me to write.

So, one week, five posts. What have I learned?

Typing into the interface without filter has its upsides and downsides. I think I’d like to explore this more.
Not having anything planned is more difficult than it might seem and therefore having some ideas or subjects is probably going to make my life easier and my blog posts better.
I also have to remember that I do blog at least once a month over on Unspun Heroes, and I maintain a BlueSky presence for that project, too, so if I miss days here then it’s likely I’m writing and thinking about music over there.
I haven’t tried to use the phone or iPad interface for this blog, but I think that might be a useful trick to separate quick thoughts and longer, more thought-out pieces.
Not writing for an audience – and recognising that – is the best thing ever; literally no one to impress and no reason to try.

So, that’s my week. Now I have to do some life admin and house cleaning stuff before the weekend. I’m off to see a gig on Sunday, so perhaps I’ll write some thoughts about that at some point.

Oh, I thought about writing this as the first weeknotes entry, but I want to keep this as unstructured as possible and needing to post every week just feels like I’m going against my own idea. I may go back over my weeknotes from my MSc, though, as there was a whole load of thoughts that I’d at least like to revisit from a personal perspective before they get deleted (which will probably happen automatically this year).

See you, maybe, on Monday.

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Not interested, thanks

I’ve always liked the phrase ‘zero fucks to give’. It’s final. There’s no opening for discussion and negotiation. This year, I’ve decided to apply this snappy phrase to what other people think. It’s not about growing a thicker skin – critical analysis of one’s self is important, and if someone else can help you with that then that is welcomed. This is about ignoring the haters, those who seek to undermine or turn me away from doing what I want to do, and generally not getting on board with the whole ‘this is how you should be doing things’ brigade that breeds ‘best practice’ blandness and strict routines.

Nowhere is this more important to me than here. What I write here is, for the most part for me. I’m not seeking an audience. If I were I’d start a newsletter. Blogging is – aside from fodder for the AI techbros’ machine learning programs – there for me to think things through, to explore, to get stuff out of my head.

I’m using it like ‘morning pages’ (which comes from Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’) to throw out words and not think too hard about them. Unless… unless they spark something that feels worthwhile to follow up on. I want to break the barriers I’ve put up in the past few years, to free up parts of my brain that I have neglected.

Yesterday, as I mentioned in my previous post, I had a meeting where I had a discussion about my process. Someone I’ve worked with a little bit was telling me how interesting they found my methods for engaging with a situation, the questions I pose, how much I listen before I talk, etc. It reminded me of when I was thinking about the ‘How of Work’ stuff from my Formation London days. They mentioned that I did things in a way they’d not seen before, that it was less rigid and more in tune with whatever was required of the challenge in front of me.

In the past, others have said this is a negative of how I work, that I should have a repeatable process. Now, someone was objectively being positive about not having rigidity. At least to begin with.

And so I am not listening to the commentary. Or reading the comments. I’m just doing what I need to do for myself. I’m giving zero fucks, for the time being at least. Because this isn’t written for other people, it’s a tool to get me somewhere else.

You know what? I already feel more confident in my own abilities. I feel lighter. I feel like I want to start doing some things again. Some of the things that I used to do – the silly things, the how-does-this-work experimental things.

I want to fail more again, or not be swayed by success (or perceived success). I want to find my own path once more in the creative aspects of my life. To not be constrained by a prompting machine, or a client brief, or what other people think.

I’ll be happier for it, I reckon.

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A quick thought

I’ve decided, to make sure I don’t over-think these posts, to type my thoughts straight into the interface and publish when I’m done. This isn’t because I think what I have to say is right or complete, it’s because I want to use this space as a place to think out loud. I actually want to be wrong occasionally, or at least to have be happy to be wrong later on when I’ve had more time to think things through properly.

So, that’s the premise of all these posts. I need to let go the things that are whirling around in my head – and have been for some time, if I’m honest with myself.

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I keep seeing people talking about ai as a way to speed up their thinking. I’m not convinced that’s what it can do, but I’m definitely certain that it shouldn’t be used in that way. Rather than use ai (always lower case) to speed towards making a decision on something, I’m more interested in using ai to enable humans to be able to slow down enough to think critically about what they are doing, will do, and have done.

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Something to look forward to – or not!

So, I’ve got out of the habit of writing for no other reason than to think. I want to get back into getting words down regularly, so this post is about that.

I don’t want to say I’ll post every day, as that sets up an unrealistic and demotivating target to hit; however, I do want to try and at least get a post in each week. Perhaps a weeknotes, but not called that. And then if I come up with something else in between those weekly ‘must-post’ posts then great, it’s a win. And if not I’m not beating myself over the head with a metaphorical stick.

I’ll start on 2 January, as that’s the first Friday of the new year, which feels like a good time to start anything. I already have a cheeky post to get up and some ideas on what else to write, so even if I use these to get into the groove then it’ll have been worth it.

Worth it for me. I cannot say that it’ll be worth it for you. As they say: your milesage may vary.

Back in Jan.

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Reaching back and moving forward in a weird start to 2023

It’s been quite an odd month has January. Usually quiet on the work front as people struggle to pick up projects put down for the festive break and the cold weather and dark mornings see a lot of people put their heads down and try to make it through to pay day. Which is, for many people in knowledge worker roles, this week.

Therefore, it has been discombobulating to find myself in demand. What’s even more unsettling is that I chose to take on some work that I would normally refuse – because the client was nice and the business challenge was meaty. Still, saying yes to an advertising project – albeit being run out of a non-advertising agency – was not what I was expecting.

It gets weirder.
I thought I would be the planner/strategist, since that’s the role I fulfil for most clients. And I was. I’ve never written a proper comms brief, so it was a new territory for me to do that. I’m usually producing business or tech strategies; the closest I’ve come is brand strategies, but there’s no brief to write in the same sense there is for a creative team.

I’ve read a lot of comms briefs in my years and, on the whole, I’ve found them functional at best. I tried to make sure mine didn’t do that. I wanted it to inspire a team to come up with some great ads. I tried, and failed, to not write some copy lines as part of it, though. I guess it’s not easy to drop your old role even after a decade or more of not doing it. I cannot lie, I love words and writing.

The big surprise came when I was told I would be one of the creatives working on the next phase. Yep, answering my own brief. I was teamed up with a senior art director (at my own request) with whom I’d never worked before. Thankfully, this was something I am comfortable with after decades of working freelance or being seen as the senior consultant with all the answers. Luckily, I was given a name I knew, someone I thought was perfect for the task.

Reader, I had the best week of work I’ve had for a long time. We clicked as a creative pairing, came up with some brilliant ideas (and some terrible ones) and managed in five days to produce a set of concepts I think are interesting and really push the brief to its limits.

The slides are ready ahead of schedule (the client moved the presentation date, though) and next Monday we get to see if the month can end with smiles on the client’s and the agency’s faces.

The study track
Alongside this, I’ve been pulling together a 4,000 word assignment about my research project, which has seen me learning how to do proper academic research and reading more words about a subject I already know fairly well and trying to work out how to articulate what I’m doing and why it’s worthy of the academic world’s interest.

This hasn’t been easy with the commuting and long days of using my brain to think about how to solve a problem. It has also been made more difficult by having to commute with a small dog. Oh, and my coffee machine broke.

Previous study has been what I would call standard study, albeit at Master level. You read, you answer a question using what you’ve read as foundational ideas/concepts, and you pull out some recommendations and conclusions. It’s usually based on something you’re doing or have done. This is the data, and it’s enough. With a research project there is no data. You’re finding a way to collect it and analyse it – and you have to justify every single decision you make, which is exhausting. You can’t just make shit up, as Ashley T. Rubin states in her excellent book about rigorous qualitative research.

I’ve also got to get all the background admin done: write interview questions, email invitations to people I’d like to speak to, and produce consent forms, confirm I’ve considered the ethics, health and safety, and other risks of the project. There’s a lot to do, lots of threads to hold on to and keep track of.

All of this is fine when it’s the only thing I need to concern myself with, but doing it alongside work has been tough going. I was going to take February off entirely, to get ahead of things before it all gets moving again in March for the next deadline in April. That’s not now going to happen, because January has been so packed out. The work for the comms brief will move to production, and I will need to be involved.

With luck it will all slow down towards the end of February and I can spend my time wisely on study only, plus a tiny bit of looking at art and wandering around London while I think. Weather permitting on that last one.

Right now, I still have an assignment to finish. Best get on with it.

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With singularity comes responsibility (2015)

Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.

It’s a long-held dystopian idea that robots will take over the world and humans will become slaves to them. It’s an idea that Ray Kurzweil describes in his book, The Singularity is Near.

Some say, the way that humans are in constant eye contact with screens – often our relationship with our smartphone – we have already reached a point where we are slaves to technology. However, this isn’t what Kurzweil was describing; he was talking about technological intelligence.

What if it’s not that?

Back in 2013 I suggested in a piece for Imperica, called I’m not responsible that,

“…computers [won’t] become intelligent and sentient. I contest that it’s simpler than that: we will simply forget how to do the most practical of things and rely, instead, on a dumb machine to do things for us.”

And I wasn’t joking. Since then, much about our way of life is being outsourced. How far could this thought experiment go? What if we embrace the idea that every decision we need to make is based on what a computer tells us to do? While that might sound daft at first glance, consider the train driver who is told to continue on a green light. That’s a computer making that decision. Yet who’s culpable if the train crashes? What if we removed all trace of human error by taking away the responsibility to make that decision. Completely.

Many years ago, I spent time learning the art of making bread. While I never chose to take it up as a career back then, I got to do work experience at a laboratory that was – and probably still is – responsible for creating new products. One of those was Kingsmill bread. Recipes are carefully created, with ingredients measured to 0.01g. Scale that up, often with unskilled workers, and things go wrong.

In one such plant bakery, there were two jobs that required minimal skill. One was really banal: when this light comes on, hit this button. Every 30 minutes the operator was given a break, so mundane was the task that on the night shift people fell asleep and apple pies didn’t get any apple inside them.

We are seeing apps that tell parents when to put sunscreen on their children, the route they should drive, the photos they should take, the people they should meet, or marry, and a huge variety of other decisions that were once determined by humans. Our first instinct in any situation is to search on Google, ask Siri, or rely on a review on a website from someone we don’t know (and who may not actually exist). Bots are, some say, the new apps.

A new framework

How far could this go?

There appears to be no end in sight. User experience design is removing friction to the point that any element of decision making has been killed; why think about whether you want that pizza delivered in a Uber (or drone) and just press this button now so you can get on with whatever you were doing before hunger had the gall to interrupt you.

Maybe we’ll see Soylent-as-a-Service?

On a serious note, it’s not inconceivable that we’ll begin to see a defence in court come down to a decision that a jury can’t determine with reasonable doubt to have been premeditated or, to some extent, to have been made by a machine. How do you sentence a server to life? Can a datacentre be held to account for corporate manslaughter? To that end, jurors might be screened via an algorithm; heck, IBM’s Watson might be called to serve on a jury.

This is not in the realms of science fiction.

It’s clear we don’t have a legal system that’s set up to deal with the kind of technological leaps that we have made in the past 30 years. Yet, we have to collectively decide what to do next, as a global society.

As we begin to turn off low-level activities from our brains and allow a rack in a datacentre to decide things for us, where do we draw the line?

Is this the true singularity?

Decisions, decisions

Let’s just say that we outsource every decision. Every. Single. One.

Get up, breakfast is chosen for you based on nutrient intake so far that week. You’re routed to work via your phone, which could see you change trains five times, or be woken earlier (when there is congestion). Your TV shows you the most popular shows only, based on what your Facebook friends are watching, or talking about. Or how well you did at work.

There will be no way to opt out. This will be life.

And if you break a law by trying to get back to some level of self-determination, even a small one, what happens then? No need for a court system; you’ll have persistent cookies attached to you that prevent access to some email, or the ability to log on to your favourite porn site, or perhaps deciding yourself when the heating comes on because the temperature has dropped. Your door won’t unlock; your groceries are delivered but they only contain what the computer deems is suitable, given your criminal circumstances.

Ever tried to contact Google support? Good luck with proving your innocence. Right?

Hang on…

Oh, silly me. I forgot: culture.

Much has been made of this recently – it’s what makes us human, it separates us from our Neanderthal ancestors and, so the argument goes, certain religious factions. But even that is getting homogenised.

For example, right now I can pick up a guitar and create a song. I can write lyrics. Or stories. I can draw. And yet, much of the culture we see each day is created by a computer, or at the very least determined by one. The future will see each note I sing auto-tuned, the lyrics I write scrutinised for how well they test against hit singles of the past; my stories are shared, remixed and reposted until they are no longer mine, or any individual’s work – then they are translated by a machine and changed again.

The advertising I see – once a mirror for popular culture – is reflecting the decision of a computer as programmatic takes over. Each year, the same idea is regurgitated and shared again as if new. And we all get excited about it.

This is happening today. Right now. Mostly because we have this weird idea that the web contains the best of culture, so we’re glued to it. It’s where your average advertising creative goes for inspiration. We’re seeing memes used to sell confectionery, Instagram-style filters on travel programmes, listicles for game shows.

Add to this the stark fact that, as humans, we’re fairly terrible when it comes to verification – and when we are looking for it, we only care about the first page on a Google search. Or we ask a question via our favoured social network, or maybe on Quora so that the answer we like the most gets upvoted.

Daily Mail comments are a good indicator of that strategy.

It can’t all be bad, can it?

Sure, some good can come of this. Let’s flip it around, then.

If we remove human intervention and outsource not just our responsibility but also the decision-making that comes along with that, what do we get? Everyone has access to the same level of education, for free; there is no need for physical money, or cards (which results in a reduction in low-level crimes); there are no more road traffic accidents. Imagine it: arguments will be settled with the press of a button. You shrug and move on. The list is endless.

Life would be fairly bland and asinine, though. For the majority.

Modifications will be available, to those who can afford them. For example, you don’t want to ever see someone again? Digitally erase them and even if they’re standing next to you they’re invisible. They simply don’t show up on your radar. Access to an archive of human experiences from the early 21st century will keep us entertained. Same as it ever was.

Whichever the outcome is to be based on giving up our responsibility – and therefore the thing that, I would suggest, makes us human – it’s going to happen. As I said before, computers don’t get more intelligent, we as humans just get a little more stupid each passing year.

Welcome to the Singularity.

Now, go share this cat video.