This morning the light looks like big slabs of American cheese slapped across the brick fronts of the buildings. It’s a kind of sickly, thick yellow with the veins of wires and pipes and cement running underneath.

Last week felt hit or miss. Like it could have gone either way. There were a bunch of deadlines and things in the air which I was totally prepared for coming down wrong or not landing at all but, miraculously, it all seems to have worked out which gave me a nice high into this morning. I suppose it all restarts today, back to the confusion of inputs and outputs to be arranged in just the right order. It’s a short one this week, all those balls in the air last week kept me distracted.

I saw this article on How DIY Tools are Democratzing Science and the title just stung me a bit. There’s not really any radically new ideas there, it’s all 3D printing, desktop labs etc. The stuff that’s been around for a while; it’s more this notion of democratisation. ‘Democratisation of x’ sits in an uneasy relationship with ‘disruption of x.’ They both imply a change in a culture or industry. While disruption is usually attached to some vaunted genius with a startup idea, the insight to see what others could not and all the trappings that brings, democratisation is usually about open-source tools and accessibility. Now, I definitely prefer one of those forms of technological change to the other. And particularly when it comes to science and the value of openly sharing data, results and theories to ensure integrity. We all know what happens when startups wonder into science with over-hyped promises locked in black boxes.

But ‘democratisation’ feels as misleading and overblown as ‘disruption.’ It’s a played-out argument but ‘disruption’ usually just means leveraging capital to do what was already there slightly cheaper: Eg, Uber didn’t disrupt transport, they just aggressively undercut the competitors by sticking to the grey areas of legislation, sometimes flat out breaking the law and undermining norms. DIY and open-source science tools will doubtless engage more people in research but it’s not ‘democratisation’ of science unless you’re providing free education to train new people in using those tools. All you’re doing is making science a bit cheaper for those who already know what they’re doing and have the privilege and access. I saw another one this week on the ‘democratisation of design’ which is a pretty common refrain. Is it appropriate to democratise design? Is design’s problem that it’s not democratic enough? The first step, again, in democratising design would be to find ways to provide free design education, to those who want it rather than forcing everyone – whether they care or not – to now have an opinion on and engage in design.

And what even is democratisation anyway? It has ugly overtones of regime change and of the mission to ‘bring democracy’ to Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and all the other places Western armies are deployed. These ‘democratisation’ projects fuel military economies. Was the 15% bump in military spending by the UK government this week a part of ‘democratisation?’ What’s wrong with just saying ‘changing’ or ‘making more affordable’ or ‘opening up.’ I know, I know let’s not lambast media outlets for using overblown words, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what ‘democratisation’ means.

Short Stuff

• Here’s Werner Herzog slapping down Elon Musk. It’s a pleasant novelty but not anything particularly insightful, other than the scorn in Herzog’s voice being very apparent.
• I met Oliver Holms last week and he suggested Devonthink as a solution to Evernote’s progressive decline and unsuitability as a PDF library. Let me know if you have any other thoughts.
• One of the things I’ve started to ‘get’ more in the last few years has been really good performance. Obviously, at the moment, that’s harder to come by. The initial spurts of generosity that flooded the Internet back at the beginning of Covid meant a lot of good ones got put out though. Like Celui qui tombe from Yoann Bourgeois in which the performers cling to a moving platform while Frank Sinatra croons ‘My Way’. Or The Statement by Crystal Pite which was out earlier this year.

• Jack Stilgoe pulled together this panel about AI and hype – Fake It Til You Make It which will probably round off a bit of stuff I’m writing at the moment pretty nicely.
• We have a vacancy in the programme for a lecturer in MA Data Visualisation. You can check out the ad here. If it’s of interest or you know someone who might be interested, let me know.

Anyway, relatively brief as I said. You could have probably not read the thing about democratisation, got to the videos and wrapped this one up in 30 seconds, but it’s too late now. As ever, I bloody love you, I do, speak to you next week.