Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.

So after Robb pointed out that Perplexity AI wasn’t using the correct User Agent I had a thought about how else you could prevent your pages from at least being summarised.

Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.

Every year, on the first Monday of May, the people of Hastings parade a man made of leaves through the streets of their town. The leaf-man spins and dances all day, wearing a crown of flowers and followed by his drummers and musicians. The people all wear green. They put garlands of leaves and flowers in their hair. Eventually, the leaf-man is taken to the top of a hill overlooking the sea, where he is slaughtered in front of the townsfolk. This ritual is a piece of hoary old seasonal magic, rooted deep in the green fields of England, and it’s been going on for a very long time. Longer than I’ve been alive, in fact. It dates back all the way to 1983.

This got me thinking that I should document some of the design patterns on my blog, noting how they work and why I have designed things in the way that they are. Herein begins a new series on that topic, starting with blockquotes.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

It’s possible that we as individuals read too much into what we like, that we invest too much of our identity into corporate properties or even art by individuals, and that part of the harm we feel on discovery of harm is associative: that by enjoying something made by someone who did bad things, some of that badness must rub off on us.

begin to remake who we are and how we live

It is true that I am a sucker for goth-flavoured radical left hot takes on pretty much any subject, but I think it works particulary well in Greenaway's book as it is an outlook well-placed to grapple with how utopia necessarily needs to walk hand in hand with the bleakness of our current plight. Because utopian thinking is not about escapism, it is not naive and it is not blind to how bad things actually are. It is the other interlocutor in dialectical opposition to the abyss we're on the precipice of and without it, we'd be lost.

Moreover, the kind of activism that mixes a deep affinity with the landscape with a hardened political edge is more visible than ever. The two things have an obvious symbiotic relationship: the worse environmental destruction gets, the more precious nature seems and the louder people get.

I suspect there’s a high probability that a coffee version of this will appear on James’ blog…

No matter where you are -- treading grounds of knowledge decades old, or breaking new ground -- you are on a journey of learning. What is known to others is new to you. In this feeling, I find delight.

In the indie economy, creators build their own platforms, whether that's a website, an app, or a subscription service. They have complete control over their content, their audience, and their monetization strategies. They are not beholden to anyone else's algorithms or policies, and they have the freedom to experiment and innovate without fear of reprisal.

This archive is an open-source repository of anarchist or anarchy-adjacent science fiction. Featured on the site are books, movies, and other media which are either anarchist in their politics or of interest to anarchists.

TL;DR: You can now use a penguin avatar to navigate my website.

We will be looking for essays on this theme for inclusion in the volume in the near future. We’ll also be hosting an Ethical Gothic Symposium to share ideas and develop papers for the issue. We look forward to finding out more about others whose research might address these concerns (including writers).

Sign up to receive Wyrd Mail in your inbox
Previous Wyrd Mail can be perused

That is why the second avenue of “doing something”, composed of “the rest of us”, is so important. Chaudhary advocates for “leftwing climate realism”, which accepts the science, not because it’s a discipline “beyond impugning” but because it’s quite clear that there are ecological limits on this planet. We need a slower life, he argues; a circular economic system, where firms compete for the same amount of finite profit and the state dominates certain sectors. This will be good for the planet and for people, producing “a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion”.

The parallels between the turbulent epochs preceding the medieval Renaissance and our present age verge on uncanny. Today, intersecting economic, political and environmental crises have incited widespread disorientation and despair reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Below these swirling surface breakdowns, advanced digital technologies are birthing new platforms for human creative participation that could see the dawn of a modern-day Renaissance 2.0.

When deprived of rituals, people are driven to create their own. Family rituals or daily rituals become sources of joy and stability. Even the simple aspects of our daily routine can serve as a kind of ritual—but we also need and deserve larger communal rituals.

Reframing my household as my workshop has helped rid me of the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. That repairing the stove, for example, is an annoying distraction from my “real work.” And, strangely, I was never quite able to articulate what that “real work” was meant to be. It was always just the vague feeling that it was something else, something more important. (Arrogance is a besetting sin of mine.) But if my household is my workshop, then my real work is here, now. My real work includes all of this, from accounting to building raised beds to helping my daughter navigate adult problems.