James Fairbairn

Capital is busy completing the construction of a no-escape two-tier economy society. And LinkedIn thought leaders think they can get in on that upper tier if they are loud enough in their support of “disruptive change”

Reading Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine” and Kemp’s “Goliath’s Curse” back to back is quite a trip

Recommended, so far :)

Design can help tilt what we do towards who we want to be We should design for moral coherence. If we design for anything, our designs should aim to bring our habits and actions into line with the values we truly hold, or perhaps more accurately, the values we wish we were able to hold. “The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.” – Taylor Guthrie, https://overcast.fm/+AA2tlVFUsQs/45:28

“The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.”
https://exitmusic.world/design-can-help-tilt-what-we-do-towards-who-we-want-to-be

Wait, how do they know what % of their daily code is LLM-generated?

In the meantime (or to see me wrestle with some of the foundational ideas in public)…

bsky.app/profile/jfai...

Life is supposed to be pleasurable Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law is something I keep thinking about. It states: For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to liv...

I’ve started using this place to sketch out my random thoughts - to think in public, but with as small an audience as possible to minimize my self-consciousness. Don’t subscribe unless my public messy thinking is what you want! exitmusic.world/life-is-supp...

Paused, frankly! Mid selling house/relocating, with a 3 week trip back to the UK in the process :)

Will get back to it though. Can’t keep a good idea down, etc

(So in this example that’s 2% extra on $100k)

It’s a progressive tax, so it’s 2 percentage points extra on every dollar of income above the $1m mark.

What does your salary depend on your not understanding?

Executives: if I'm working for you I want you to delegate management & retain leadership. Definitely not the other way around.

Today's NY Times comparison of Elon Musk and Cecil Rhodes really clarifies what Musk's whole deal has always been about: rehabilitating the colonialist tradition around new frontiers on the internet and in outer space, and rebranding this deracinated neo-neo-colonialism as "adventure" and "purpose."

(If you patiently compost computers, you don’t get new computers)

Life is (living systems are) vertically coherent. Things built on top of computers, not so much.

“If this is the game, I wouldn’t try to win it”

Love this! You’re reminding me that devices that don’t seek to disappear (like phones do) support deliberate practice rather than passive, reactive, subconscious practice. “Convivial tools” framing strikes again!

the reasons gadgets are neato is because they are self-contained and limited

gadgetry is a frame, it requires a border

physical camera: gadget, neato

eink weather display: gadget, neato

ipod: gadget, neato

modern iphone: not gadget, not neato

slop generator device: not gadget, not neato

(Obviously I’m not a farmer or a grocer and the problems are real and hard to solve, but curious what it would take for a given locality to make progress here)

Like, if your goal is to get time-rich, mobile consumers in touch with farmers to make them feel good, then fine, farmers markets do the job. But if the goal is to relocalize food networks, increase farmers’ margins and make consumers healthier… there must be a better way

It does occur to me, why are farmers’ markets generally held once a week for a few hours, and why is the produce:people selling ratio so low? Surely a local farm shops/local logistics network type system would be a lot more efficient?

Petition for a hand-wringing emoji

If you don’t, you’re stripping the economic from the social, which is exactly what is convenient for profit-seeking companies.

If you evaluate a technology’s ability to do a job “better than a human”, you have to include all the benefits that the human version of the practice created, in terms of social bonds, regenerative capacity and cultural meaning.

I just realized that my sort of Buddhist model of Stuff rhymes with a lot of that. Would be good to get a more integrated understanding (and to tease out the differences/uniquenesses)

- Anyway I'm cooking a nice dish of tarragon chicken with cream sauce for dinner

- Life is emergent self-sustaining, self-complexifying complexity and self-diversifying diversity, and thus can only evolve in interaction
- Life and entropy are in a dance with each other. No evidence that entropy has to win in the long run, given quantum fluctutations

Slowly realizing I'm going to have to buckle down and get to grips with these guys aren't I. And Whitehead.

Feck.

Thanks for the encouragement Steve! I love your YouTube videos by the way :)

Departure In Place: An outline for a wildly ambitious book I’ve been circling this book for a long time without quite realising it. It’s about collapse—yes—but not as apocalypse, not as spectacle, not even as a single event. Collapse here is understood as a l...

Okay... deep breath. I’m, erm, I'm writing a book. I think. Or at least I'm writing something that sits in my heart as a book now. Who knows where it'll lead. If you'd like to follow along and cheerlead/act as a passive accountability partner, join up here :)
departurein.place/departure-in...