BOX099.1: 15 Years of Blogging

Telling you it’s been too long is obvious and I apologise for too often beginning these missives with an apology. My last post was 12th July and the work time in between has been difficult, sometimes unpleasant, rarely joyful but definitely purposeful. I have had BOX099 in draft since July but it contains nothing of interest and is outdated so this is a version 0.1 of it. This month – coincidentally – marks the 15th year of me blogging.

Here was my very first post; a video about relativity I found. At the time I was towards the end of undergraduate studies. My first two years of undergraduate were spent exactly the right way; barely attending university, being in and around music, staying out all night, imbibing and partaking of everything London had to offer. I was also (I believe) a different person; convinced I was ineffable and invincible and that, as a result, nothing I did could have any consequence on myself or others. The result of this orgy or egotism and self-indulgence (which I deeply enjoyed, btw) was a violent, immature and childish breakup, one of those shattering ones that suddenly cashes all the emotional cheques you’d been frittering away and forces you to examine who the hell you are. And, at the point, that was an ugly introspection that I Did Not Like and certainly did not want to take all in one go, right when education was also turning up the seriousness dial.

So, I developed the lifelong habit that I still turn to in periods of stress or difficulty (a shattered femur for example); I buried myself in work, spending 12 hours a day in the studio just reading the Internet, sketching and doodling. In 2008, there wasn’t much in the way of Notions or Pinterests or Arenas so if you wanted to keep hold of something, you blogged it. We had had a visit from some interactive typographer (I can’t remember who) who showed the class some entries from his blog and I thought; ‘that seems like a thing that makes it look like you’ve been doing work’ and I desperately needed to look like I had been doing work.

We had a brief about ‘time’ and I always had an interest in popular physics so I just started saving things that I thought might be useful to the blog in the hope that some divine spark would appear. And you know what? That thing that looks like work actually started to be work. Not in the sense of an ‘extra thing you now have to do’ but actually developing the way I think and certainly the way I research.

You see, as you know, I talk to myself a lot. I’m convinced everyone does but they are too embarrassed to admit it. There’s probably some study somewhere about it but I simply find it impossible to work through ideas, scenarios, presentations or conversations without having an externalised internal dialogue and I find it unbelievable that others don’t need this too. Well it turns out that blogging is just a textual extension of that. It doesn’t have the rigour or public-facing-ness of academic writing or things I’ve done for magazines but it’s a bit more considered than pacing around the kitchen table chatting to myself because it requires editing and phrasing and consideration of you and how you read it, even if it’s just you and no one else.

Does it lead to a divine spark? No, because that’s not how creativity works at all. But it lays down pathways that become like desire lines or mud tracks; vague notions and connections and thoughts and tendencies that start to concretise over time as you pour more and more into a particular track, furrow or idea. I imagine it a little like building a campsite: At first you don’t know where anything is, there’s loads of things in the way, but gradually behaviours form, paths are worn, things like tools and utensils find their home in the place best suited for them and develop wear in the right places, tacit agreements are made between campers. And the camp can keep being extended once that base is settled in and new paths are worn and trod in.

It’s different to Pinterest or something in that they demand a rigid, inflexible categorisation (at least to some degree); things are in places. When I think about my blog and how it’s informed the structure of my thinking, it’s more like the cosmic microwave background map. Nothing is in a particular place but there are patterns built up over time; it has a gestalt property that only works because I keep building it.

So, 15 years in. Little has really changed. I still monologue into this interface and expect no particular outcome. I resisted the transition to the newsletter trend (though it’s an option for those that prefer that format) because although I sometimes do put in self-promotion or news I don’t want to overburden the world with more reckons or opinions. I also feel like newsletters make a demand of your space and time – erupting into your inbox without warning, adding the work guilt of feeling like you have to keep up to date – while a blog is here if you want it, but really (and sorry) I do this for me, not you.

Recents

Ok, quick life/work updates.

• Recovery was going really well and I was even back to commuting by bike in August. Honestly, a very Good Thing in an otherwise frustrating period of time this summer. But then I did some travelling for work, overdid it and set myself back. I’m back on painkillers and using the stick and have had to go back to the physio. Probably pulled my quads up pretty bad. Very disheartening.
• I was on holiday trying to recover but didn’t really manage to. I used to think ‘time to reflect’ was just something people said rather than something you could actually do but I did grab 20 minutes here and there when not in pain or trying to chase down an infant or entertain an 11 year old to have the internal ‘what am I doing and why’ conversation (not out loud because these moments often occurred while trying to get a baby to sleep.)
• I was in Amsterdam in late September giving a presentation about a really great project we’re working on in Foresight. The project itself is really exciting and interesting but getting it lifted has been very difficult and frustrating. I think the presentation and the project will be public at some point, I’ll share it with you then.
• I had my PhD upgrade this week. This is a big milestone at sort of kind of the ‘halfway point’ (but not really cos it’s more like the three-quarters point). You should be about 60-75% done and need to make the case that what you’re doing is a) good b) original c) achievable. It went well (I passed) and the examiners were very complimentary of it generally but there’s a lot of work to do on thinking about the practice and how it sits with the writing. I’ll talk about this later with you but that is something I get to build that’s mine and that feels nice.
• I joined Lex on the new Comuzi podcast, #NextBillionUsers where we did a terrible job of not talking about design and futures and focussing on AI’s implication for design. They made it a video too.

Short Stuff

• Utrecht University rejected being included in the Times Higher Education rankings. This is a thing that we often toyed with at UAL; that and the QS rankings. There’s a great paper here about how rankings are even more than just the obvious ouroboros of self-flagellation but create the conditions for universities’ own low scores and increasingly implausible future visions.
• Keir Starmer audio deepfake was released on the first day of the Labour party conference. It purports to record him abusing party members.
• Good lord the collaborators on this new Paramore album. Are Paramore one of the most evergreen bands?
• Ramon opened a research lab called -1. Looks very sick.

This was a long one to write but it’s been a while so I felt you deserved it, or that I’d impose myself on you more to make up for my recent lack. I love you. Speak next week.