Commonplace book: reading, abundance, green shoots

Mandy Brown argues that the attention economy is misnamed (HT Sentiers).

Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we’ve made of that word. From the earnest effort of a mind reaching for the world to a mindless, exasperated skittering through the slop. The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin.

Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. 

... Maybe there’s a clue in the way we talk of paying attention, rather than giving it. An older form of that verb also means to appease. We pay attention to the angry gods of capitalism in the hope that they will turn their anger elsewhere.

... It is the skill of reading that hones that curiosity, sharpens our ability to notice what is before us, what is real and what is not, which bargains are fair and which are usurious. Reading is how we attend the world, which is also how we change it.

Doug Belshaw on books as luxury goods:

It explains why the generational divide in media consumption isn't just about preferences, but about inhabiting different cognitive regimes. There are different affordances, vulnerabilities, and luxury goods involved here.

The over-40 crowd (including me) still operates partly within the Gutenberg Parenthesis, where sustained textual engagement is a baseline skill. Meanwhile, the under-40s increasingly operate in a post-parenthetical environment where that same skill is becoming a luxury item.

This has direct implications for digital literacies. If secondary orality is the dominant regime, then I need to update my work to account for its specific demands: things like critical visual literacy, awareness of algorithmic curation, and an understanding of affective contagion in oral-style networks.

The competencies that matter are no longer just about reading, writing, and participating in literate communities. They now also include such things as recognising when a medium that amplifies connection is reversing into surveillance, or when a platform that retrieves community is obsolescing privacy.

Matt Webb argues that "Frozen 2 should be rated R"

I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass existential threat as an incident plot point in the hero’s journey.

... Superman is rated PG-13 in the US, 12A in the UK. There’s off-screen loss of life but on-screen is widespread in movies: death with barely any emotional weight.

(a) I’m sure this lack of emotional weight in existential jeopardy is harmful to us.

https://bsky.app/profile/jameselder.bsky.social/post/3mq5unoo7oabr

Left and right don't seem to be the right frames for a lot of today's political issues. Dan Zimmer notes (back in 2025) the "tension between technologists and environmentalists cuts across traditional political boundaries" and describes an "Up/Down" axis: transhumanists who treat Life as information to expand and escape Earth with, versus posthumanists who treat Life as a complex system to maintain and stay balanced within.  

Somehow I didn't spot this last year - Spencer Lane and Ethan Zuckerman on the 'loyal client':

In the early days of the web, users primarily accessed networked services through programs that protected their interests - loyal clients (Rajendra-Nicolucci et al., Citation2023). With the rise of the smartphone, the app model has become dominant and services are accessed through restrictive dedicated mobile applications - disloyal clients. Even when accessing services on a desktop, many platforms provide a client similar to a mobile app, created in users’ browsers using JavaScript. Modern social media platforms such as Facebook and X/Twitter limit user interactions outside of these restrictive clients with little user control.

Whereas the loyal clients of the early internet were integral to its growth and development, these new disloyal clients override user preferences, discourage innovation, and produce unhealthy platforms. For users whose primary internet experience has been mediated by smartphones and web apps, the concept of a flexible and loyal client might seem alien.

Usenet, email and instant messaging were past examples. Lane and Zuckerman also look ahead:

When we envision a loyal client for social media, it would have a lot in common with an email client. It would be protective, using feed generation algorithms that do not monopolise user attention. It would be customisable, providing options for the user to adjust and ideally allowing its services to be used with different user interfaces. It would be interoperable, pulling data from multiple services using something akin to XMPP bridges. It would be usable, making the user’s goals easier to achieve, not standing in their way.

Building this client poses significant challenges. Gateways require maintenance and sites like Facebook have historically tried to break such software (Merrill & Tobin, Citation2019). Making a client simultaneously interoperable and usable is an difficult interface problem. Pulling data from platforms to send to loyal clients removes some actions that centralised platforms take to be protective, and there are questions about data ownership and privacy. Despite these challenges, we believe it is important to move towards creating such a client.

R. Trebor Scholz & Mark Esposito describe a Solidarity Stack for AI. Lots of interesting projects are mentioned, but it doesn't quite all hang together yet. 

A central obstacle remains regulatory uncertainty, particularly under SEC securities law, which limits the ability of DAOs and cooperative digital organizations to govern assets and scale durable public infrastructure without clear legal safe harbors. 

The authors propose supplementing regulation with public-cooperative partnerships, and investing in federated learning and open models, as a way forward. 

More practically, several encouraging new activities: 

A great many authors propose the Plural Stack. It's a long paper (discussed at a recent RadicalxChange salon) but I'd note this from p15 which captured the essence of it for me:

from the Plural Stack paper, various authors

Dil Green (who wrote here and writes here) privately shared some ideas around 'Digital Commons as Knowledge Provisioning Infrastructures', which revisits the digital commons field through a stricter Ostromian lens. Looking forward to seeing how this develops. 

Gavin Chait is cooking up something interesting too - a social business network, more human than the digital platforms, and aiming to support actual businesses. Go Gavin :) 

ProjectWeave isn't the easiest to parse, but they have also recognised that community trust is something our current internet systems and protocols are lacking. Not the easiest to figure out (try this page) but the idea is personhood credentials, groups, a decentralised trust graph, etc.  The presence of IdentityWoman is encouraging. (I think this may be trying to do something similar to Gavin, but without his focus and meaningful use case.)

Gavin Starks is experimenting with a federated social directory - Constellations. 

Nathan Schneider proposes "An inference cooperative for academic AI" so that universities could pool resources into a co-operatively owned, open-weights AI infrastructure. 

Bruce Schneier on Bernie Sanders' AI sovereign wealth fund plan:

The senator points to a once radical but increasingly popular solution: creating a US sovereign wealth fund by taking 50% stock in AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI. The argument in favor of this is twofold. One: it would establish democratic control over the AI companies, giving the government “the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.” Two: it would return a big chunk of the economic rewards of soaring AI valuations to the public, ensuring “trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us.”

...there are better ways to achieve Sanders’ stated goals.

Public ownership of these companies entangles corporate profit and valuation with the public interest. It would incentivize the government to clear regulations, permit the exploitation of workers and users, suppress competition, encourage AI adoption regardless of the responsibleness of the implementation or appropriateness of the use case, and otherwise act on behalf of corporate interests.

... This is not an effective way to influence corporations to act in the public interest. In fact, it makes corporate influence on the government more likely.

We should be wary of this possibility because we’ve seen it before. ...

As to the goal of reshaping AI in the public interest, we have proposed an AI Public Option. The concept is for governments, be it federal or state, to establish publicly developed and operated AI models run by public institutions under democratic control. The idea is not to eliminate corporate AI or to seize it as a public asset, but rather for government to provide a competitive baseline that private AI offerings must meet or exceed to win business—just like the notion of a healthcare public option.

I really like the "Dimensions of AI Literacies" as a way of thinking about how we understand AI, drawing out cultural, cognitive, constructive, creative, critical and civic elements. 

Cathy Davidson took an idea (from Julie Elie's study of zebra finch communication) and a teacher friend tried it out and got encouraging results (via Nate Angell)

I suggested to her that she try, as an experiment that she carefully observes and studies, a technique where two days a week she and her team of fellow teachers goes all in with the requisite “innovative” AI methods her institution is advocating, and then also have two days a week when the protocol is either “devices in bags” or carefully controlled, managed, studied use of devices (teacher’s choice). Friday would then be used as a recap day where... the students themselves reflect on all they learned and did that week, both using AI and not using AI or some combination of both.

Kai Heron in conversation with Justin McGuirk about the book Radical Abundance. Highlights mine: 

My co-authors and I introduce two ideas – ‘bullshit abundance’ and ‘artificial scarcity’ – to critique capitalism in a way that is intuitive. Bullshit abundance challenges the idea that capitalism creates loads of wonderful things for us, and that it should be maintained because it delivers wealth and abundance for all. In fact, since 1970 this has been happening less and less. But capitalism does create a certain kind of abundance. If you don’t just think about the commodities that capitalism produces, but you think about the broader ecological consequences, you get things like microplastics that course through our bloodstreams, or carbon emissions, or traffic.

... we say that capitalism creates a bullshit abundance of profits for some by imposing scarcity on the many. And we think about that as a scarcity of the things we need to live and flourish, such as free time (the most important thing, I think) affordable energy, water, biodiverse landscapes and environments. 

...We’re trying to push back against a capitalist ideology that says anything other than capitalism will not deliver abundance, it will just deliver you scarcity and misery. People have tried to do this through ideas like ‘fully automated luxury communism’, which I’m much less sympathetic towards, partly because it doesn’t think about ecology properly. The reason to claim it from an environmental perspective is different. While there are real ecological limits that we cannot cross and still maintain the conditions for human flourishing – such as those studied by the Stockholm Resilience Centre – an overemphasis on these can lead to a politics of scarcity, which then repeats a kind of Malthusian logic. Emphasising abundance says that we still live on a planet that can generate not just sufficiency, but opportunities for a kind of excess creativity, play, enjoyment, if we facilitate and enable that collectively.  

... Transition is the problem of our times.... people started having these almost utopian visions of the future. You can rattle the list off: there’s fully automated luxury communism, half-earth socialism, degrowth, the Green New Deal. But what these didn’t do was dwell in the messy realities and practicalities and contradictions of transition. So in that sense, yes, I think we were missing some of the tools needed to think about transition. 

... ‘popular protagonism’. Briefly, it’s the idea that you create institutions, spaces, opportunities where the popular classes – broadly defined – can come together and find a collective shared interest and then act to implement their own freedom and emancipation. And it says that we need institutional forms that can expand our capacity to act collectively. 

...  ‘contested reproduction’. This is the idea that in a moment of transition, socialist or post-capitalist logics – broadly conceived – will intermingle with capital, capitalist divisions of labour and capitalist profit motives. It becomes this very messy and contradictory space, but transition becomes possible by pushing towards a post-capitalist or socialist alternative. And so, we’re looking for examples where popular protagonism and contested reproduction converge. And it turns out that this happens in a lot of places. 

The book explores a bunch of examples.   

In Sentiers 410: 

I tend to assume that a large portion of society has some level of anxiety about the world. Some know, in the sense that the information has made its way to their brain, but ignore it as a self-preservation mechanism. Some just don’t have the processing or attention power left, after dealing with their lives. We often say that most of us—in the global north at least—don’t think about things and take them for granted. For example, a piece of meat in the grocery store does not represent an animal, just an ingredient. Electricity and water are “just there.”

I’m left wondering if instead of “we just don’t think about things” as if it’s because we don’t have the time, it’s instead that we don’t think about them because we don’t understand them anymore. Everything is part of a large system, every system is entangled with others, and many of which are purposefully obfuscated. Beyond that reflection in terms of agency and taking actions in our collective best interests instead of just going along, I’m wondering if this anxiety, this dread, comes from all this obfuscation. That we are not, or not only, ignoring things because we are habituated, but also because they are largely beyond our understanding.

 This is in reference to an article by L.M. Sacasas:

Interestingly enough, the insertion of an ordinary language interface between ourselves and the digitized collective unconscious makes it more obscure and inscrutable to us. The chatbot interface reconfigures our agency in navigating the collective unconscious by, in a manner of speaking, becoming an anti-therapist leading us away from self-knowledge and insight, however disturbing or startling, toward a comfortable and soothing encounter. It offers a false clarity and lulls us into self-satisfaction, guarding us from self-doubt and from lingering too long in an awareness of our ignorance or in a place of troubling uncertainty. It veils the tangled forest of human experience and lights an artificially clear path for us toward the promise of knowledge and wisdom.

which took me onwards to Eric Hoel on consciousness: 

The traditional danger of AI is usually thought to be superintelligence acting as an existential threat. Yet, this may miss the true and more subtle danger: the AI revolution is a mechanism for transferring the processes of our civilization from under the supervision of consciousness to unconsciousness. But as AI removes consciousness from the workings of the world, it renders the world increasingly uninterpretable, ever more strange and unintelligible. So far, the great ensloppification of the commons has supported this as the major risk of the LLM revolution. And as AI systems become more intelligent, especially if they remain (or are likely to remain) non-conscious, then a further significant risk is consciousness receding in cultural importance.

Deb Chachra, writing in Future Observatory Journal (via Sentiers). 

But, while we tend to think of ‘climate change’ or ‘the environment’ as the problem, there are actually two separate issues. The first is the energy problem – where do we get our energy from? The problem of producing clean energy at scale is now technically solved, even if, politically speaking, there is still urgent policy work to be done. But, while our planetary home might have an abundance of energy for our use, the earth is an almost entirely closed system for matter. Every atom that we use for human purposes – that is, every carbon atom that was extracted from a coal seam or drawn from an oil well – is still on earth. What we usually call ‘pollution’ is a shorthand way of saying that specific configurations of atoms are now someplace inconvenient or dangerous, whether it’s carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, microplastics in the ocean, forever chemicals (PFAS) in water supplies or even E. coli in sewage outfalls. This is the matter problem. Because our species gets most of our energy from combustion, the energy and matter problems have been inextricably linked. Access to energy necessarily entails moving carbon atoms from the surface to the atmosphere. Renewables break this linkage, making it possible for our species to get the abundant, inexpensive energy we need without the rearrangement and displacement of atoms that occurs in combustion. We can finally solve the energy problem without worsening the matter problem. 

A worrying example of the 'matter problem' in Wired, "Scientists thought Parkinson's was in our genes. It might be in the water". Turns out we maybe don't hear as much about this because genetics has dominated the conversation and funding landscape so much. 

Tom Harris gave a talk for the Cybernetics Society about climate change; a lot of science beyond just CO2, looking at other planetary warming factors and systems effects. 

David Finnegan on games for systems change, and how to make them actually work:

We are embedded in systems. Climate systems, economic systems, political systems, social systems, ecosystems. Transport networks, food production systems and energy grids provide the backbone of our day-to-day lives. Our minds are shaped by education and cultural systems. All of them influencing and interacting with each other in complex, rapidly changing ways.

These systems are too vast and complex for any single person to understand - and yet we must understand them, because we face shocks and crises at every scale. ...In every sector, people need new ways to make sense of and intervene in the systems they are part of.

... a small subset of games exist with a goal to support or facilitate real world change. We can gather these games under the loose heading of ‘games for systems change’.

Games for systems change are a powerful tool for people working in complex systems.

... In the worlds of international development, finance, policy and healthcare, the use of games as innovative communications tools has escalated.

...Anecdotally, in my own work, I have seen a major uptick in the last decade in the number and variety of organisations exploring games to address their needs. More collaborations between organisations and game designers are undertaken every year.

The problem is that most of these games are failures.

David instead proposes an approach that "focuses on embedding game design capacity within project teams, developing small-scale game interventions for specific contexts, and working iteratively over a longer timescale." 

Richard Pope writes about the history of state and digital tech "On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate". Waiting for bureaucracy, waiting in spaces and queues with other people also waiting. I had forgotten Girobank.   

The post-war digitisation of the UK’s tax and benefits system, the creation of automated institutions like Girobank, and teaching children programming with the BBC Micro (ironically, the conservative Thatcher government did a better job of ‘picking winners’ with the BBC Micro, than the statist Benn had done with ICL) were all bets on the future.

Those kind of bets have been long absent from British politics, but looking to the energy behind digital infrastructure in Estonia and India and it’s hard not to see the similarity.

... Before capability comes community. The health of the civic tech community in the UK...was a big factor to the success of the Government Digital Service. ...

When government creates organisations they are claiming a right to operate somewhere. So, when the UK created Girobank it claimed a right to operate in the financial sector.

The Government Digital Service was many things back then, but it was partly the state choosing to operate in the digital domain. A choice supported by a networked digital community. It said ‘digital is important and we choose to operate here’. Our digital infrastructure is as important as our physical infrastructure.

 That was then. 

... we have lost something along the way.

Firstly, a never ending search for ‘efficiency’ has too often replaced bolder visions for what a digital government could mean for the public experience of the state.

We wait differently now. Rather than saving us from bureaucracy, digital often displaced and atomised it. Paper forms have become web forms and countless web pages explaining how to complete them. We wait for emails, rather than letters. Communal experiences with public services, however mundane, are now millions of individual interactions. Government has been placed at distance, harder to understand and less willing to account for itself through digital interfaces.

Secondly, despite the public sector’s long history in technology, it is still somehow perceived with newness and novelty, talked about in euphemisms and metaphors rarely used by digital practitioners. Combined with the growing power of commercial platforms, the public domain is at constant risk of both an inability to deliver, and disintermediation by private sector operators.

A long rant by Nikhil Suresh about the current state of AI in businesses, where the emporer truly has no clothes and true believer fervour has taken over in many places. 

https://bsky.app/profile/blackhc.bsky.social/post/3mqm7vfupjc2g

Dan Bricklin writes about what it would take to create software that would last 200 years. Unlike other infrastructure, software is built assuming it will be replaced in the near future. 

The world is different now than it was even just a decade or two ago. In more and more cases, there are no paper records. People expect all information to be available at all times and for new uses, just as they expect to drive the latest vehicle over an old bridge, or fill a new high-tech water bottle from an old well's pump. Applications need to have access to all of the records, not just summaries or the most recent. Computers are involved in, or even control, all aspects of the running society, business, and much of our lives. What were once only bricks, pipes, and wires, now include silicon chips, disk drives, and software. The recent acquisition and operating cost and other advantages of computer-controlled systems over the manual, mechanical, or electrical designs of the past century and millennia have caused this switch.

I will call this software that forms a basis on which society and individuals build and run their lives "Societal Infrastructure Software". This is the software that keeps our societal records, controls and monitors our physical infrastructure (from traffic lights to generating plants), and directly provides necessary non-physical aspects of society such as connectivity.

We need to start thinking about software in a way more like how we think about building bridges, dams, and sewers. What we build must last for generations without total rebuilding. This requires new thinking and new ways of organizing development....

There is so much to be built and maintained. The number of applications for software is endless and continue to grow with every advance in hardware for sensors, actuators, communications, storage, and speed. Outages and switchovers are very disruptive. Having every part of society need to be upgraded on a yearly or even tri-yearly basis is not feasible. ... Needing every application to have a self-sustaining company with long-term management is not practical. How many of the software companies of 20 years ago are still around and maintaining their original products?

I am not 100% sure the "must last without total rebuilding" is quite correct, because software can - or could - more easily be rebuilt than a bridge. But the general idea is a good one. Bricklin goes on to describe some of the development practices, the social and economic models, that might be needed.  

I found that article via George Oates who notes:

... about how we have change our whole posture around software as societal infrastructure. I’ve been chewing on a similar idea, where, once the privilege dies down, scale begets obligation.

These corporate giants that now serve millions or billions of people and still have those clauses in their Terms which say they provide NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND and can delete anything for any reason must transform.

Indy Johar writes about the Long Now 

We are living through a moment in which a long now is no longer a cultural aspiration but a structural necessity for continuity, for any meaningful prospect of flourishing, and for avoiding pathways of runaway collapse.

A long now doesn’t mean a vague commitment to the future. It means something practical and demanding: the capacity to hold continuity across multi-generational horizons — to sustain learning, legitimacy, investment, care, coordination, and institutional renewal — even as conditions become more volatile, less predictable, and more tightly coupled. A long now is civilization’s ability to remain future-bearing under stress.

One of the clearest pathways to constructing a long now is rooted in a single strategic focus: the preservation and expansion of civilizational optionality.

Optionality in this context is not “the options currently available.” It is the degrees of freedom available to civilization — the maneuver space we retain to respond not only to uncertainties we can name, but to deep unknowns and cascading failures that compound faster than institutions can adapt.

A civilization with high optionality can absorb disturbance without collapsing into zero-sum dynamics. It can recompose itself without becoming brittle. It can keep multiple viable pathways open long enough to learn. A civilization with low optionality loses this maneuver space. It becomes trapped in narrowing corridors of coercion, scarcity, and conflict, where each shock closes more futures.

Once more, Long Now London helped maintain the Uffington White Horse this year. It was hot. We discussed how much we appreciate the chance to do this, but how not everyone can maintain this particular beautiful horse. What things in your local community are worth caring for, and labouring to maintain? What might be the equivalent of this white horse, in your local area, hundreds of years into the future?

Scouring (weeding) the Uffington White Horse (thanks Pete Landers for the photo!)

This year Chris Daniel wrote about the horse for the RSA Journal and they made this lovely short film, in which I burble barely coherently because it was very, very hot:

 

All The Views, the longest lines of sight around the world (thanks to Long Now group chat!). 

https://mstdn.social/@arnicas/116973903933289086