De profundis clamavi...

A brief note on why I've been so silent on here, and what's coming up...

Since I first registered this thing, and then ending up taking a full year to mull over the tone and approach before writing my first piece, there has been such a rising deluge of content, so much of it infused, informed or delegated to AI tools, that I’ve not felt like writing here at all (that’s why I have turned off paid subscriptions for now).

It’s trite for me to say it, but writing and rewriting for me really is thinking, and while I have experimented with and deployed AI tools for very defined purposes, I don’t want to use it to replace my thinking or writing. (I’ve set myself a constraint of 45 of your human minutes to write and send this as a test…)

I’ve always liked the idea of thinking out loud and working in the open - in the past I’ve done weeknotes, for example - but in the current glut I want to genuinely add value, while being conscious that there is also a lot of extractive behaviour out there. Hard times make for sharp elbows and sharper teeth…

As a freelancer, I prioritise the work I am doing for clients and partners, especially in these BANI times. And this past year, I’ve had the chance to work with a variety of terrific organisations and people on some really meaningful and I hope in some cases a-little-bit-arc-bending initiatives, from . In the coming months is to try to share a bit of the deeper thinking behind those. One’s coming up next week - a report for Demos on how to increase the independence and accountability of the BBC - and there’s other imminent work related to cities and their information environments, and, as you’d expect if you know me at all, journalism funds and other kinds of financing instruments.

But I will keep moving with the more reflective and conceptual posts about ways to look at the information ecosystem more broadly, and I’m almost done with one that I have been gestating for literally years.

Finally, this platform has changed and become much more self-contained since I first joined it (aside from the other widespread concerns about aspects of it that are well-documented elsewhere). The wider ‘epistemic security’ crisis means we all need to be very conscious about where, how, for whom and on whose terms we publish. So down the line the platform may change - you won’t notice the difference, I hope - but the song remains the same… More soon.