www.jamesdrever.co.uk

Work/life balance

2010-07-04T00:00:00-00:00

In an attempt to retain some work/life balance in my blog, here are some pictures of our allotment at work.

To be able to disappear behind the tall conifer hedge that separates the allotment from our offices at lunch time, and do some lazy weeding and watering, is a luxury that I really appreciate. Its a short walk, but you feel like you’ve put some real distance between the telephone and computer and yourself.

And then there’s the produce…

The Empty Mailbox

2010-07-10T00:00:00-00:00

Twenty years ago I spent a year studying abroad at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Nineteen years old and homesick, I would wander down every day, sometimes a few times a day, to the mailboxes at Taft Hall where I was staying, and open my own little mailbox, a thin little opening amongst the hundreds of others. I was desperate to see the blue & red of an airmail envelope tucked in there. Sometimes there was more than one. Sometimes, often, there was nothing. I would check again, the mailbox could be deceptive, sometimes there was something hidden in there. But if there was nothing, I would feel a stab of disappointment and wander away.

Nowadays, my experience as a homesick student abroad would be radically different. The mechanisms of the internet would give me the possibility of constant communication from friends who would previously been obstructed by geographical distance and international postal systems. I don’t really write letters much any more, or expect to receive them. But every time I click send & receive on my email now, and nothing happens, I feel a fainter virtual version of that older disappointment.

A letter, at least in theory, offered an experience of completeness and structure. In practice, the letters I received were often composed across days, and rambled across subjects, but they usually managed a saluation, date and signoff, and some coherence of theme and subject. They arrived (again at least in theory) at set times – though sometimes the last post was much later than expected and held a fantastic surprise.

Emails, by contrast, can arrive at any time, and the anticipation for their arrival gets fragmented throughout the day (and indeed the night). The content too tends far more towards fragmentation, with the twitter feed fragmenting further. So the disappointment & anticipation & excitement of receiving or not receiving correspondence has become fragmented, virtualised, dispersed – though also intensified, and with the underyling impulse to communicate in no way diminished.

Then there’s the issue of storage: old letters in the attic, or emails and tweets stored in transient digital space, subject to the purges of disinterested administrators? There are some emails I wish I still had, but they’re gone and there is no chance I will happen upon then.

I’m not trying to be an old codger about this, or to assert the superiority of the letter over its successors. I love emails, and I’m gradually getting converted to Twitter. But its interesting to wonder how great letter writers of the past – and I’m thinking about Herman Melville and William Burroughs, whose letters I love – would have adapted themselves to the newer forms of communication.

What is striking about the letters of Melville and Burroughs - and I was re-reading Burroughs letters 1945-1959 last night with slightly too much wine - is the sheer intensity and desperation of the letter writing, and the level of dependence on their letter writing partner. Take Melville’s letter to Hawthorne dated November 17, 1851:

Your letter was handed to me last night on the road going home to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home I would have sat down and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous – catch them while you can. The world goes round and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then – your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours and both in God’s. [...] I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk, and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand – million -billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you.

Or Burroughs’ letters to Allen Ginsberg dated April 7th 1954:

Dear Allen,

I have written and rewritten this for you. So please answer.

Routines like habit. Without routines my life is chronic nightmare, gray horror of midwest suburb. [...]

I have to have receiver for routine. If there is no one there to receive it, routine turns back on me like homeless curse and tears me apart, grows more and more insane [...] and fragmentary like beserk pin-ball machine and I am screaming: “Stop it! Stop it!”

Would these letter writers had reached these heights of intensity if Ginsberg had been a tweet away rather than a thousand miles and out of contact, if Melville and Hawthorne were the sole members of the Divine Magnanimities Facebook group.

Burroughs’ dependence on his correspondence brings me back to the horror of the empty mailbox, and makes me wonder: is our vast communications infrastructure fulfilling or fuelling our need for contact? Burroughs’ letter writing, and some of our own frantic communications, are compulsive, and to quote another great letter writer, Paul Bowles, “compulsiveness is doom. And any wind in contrast smells of God”. (letter to Alec France, March 2, 1975).

Why they should have closed Six Music

2010-07-10T00:00:00-00:00

They should have closed Six Music because young people today have far too easy access to tasteful music. Because of this, they don’t have the enriching experience of being deprived of tasteful music, like we did. We suffered poor music most of the time, and we became strong, better people for it.

Back in the day, when good music was rationed properly, you could listen to Radio One all day and not hear one decent song. During the Golden Hour, Simon Bates would occasionally play great music, but it was in no way pre-meditated – play random songs from a particular year and something shining will turn up. The Golden Hour was a bizarrely important part of my musical education. I think the Golden Hour should be brought back like National Service – and the let those youngsters mollycoddled by the Year Zero Radio One playlist experience the wonder and the horror that the Golden Hour could produce.

After the Golden Hour, Batesy would play generally very bad things for two hours, then Gary Davies would play generally very bad things for two hours, then Christ, Steve Wright, with the geese. I so hated those geese. But the wonder of it was that occasionally, very occasionally, something fantastic would be played. You hung on through the Radio One Road Show from Prestatyn just to hear if something good was played for five seconds on Bits and Pieces. And if something good came on, it sounded effervescent- not just pleasant and decent and tasteful – it sounded explosive.

In the eighties, good music was nocturnal, it hid away in the shadows of the radio timetable. Peel, of course, and those exuberant or despondent nights when Liverpool played in Europe, but also David ‘Kid’ Jensen, and the wonderful Annie Nightingale. Sunday nights, 7-9, was the time my dad took me out in the car, to aimlessly drive across the Shropshire countryside. Turning left at Craven Arms, heading over Wenlock Edge, or the forests and mines on the far side of the Long Mynd. And always, Annie Nightingale on the radio, with the signal coming and going, and erupting in bursts of static. Propaganda, New Order, the Smiths, as we passed through the Shropshire dusk. They were timeless moments. I would tape the show so I could listen when I got back. But when I put the radio on in the morning, normal service would be resumed.

Of course, I like Six Music really. Especially Adam and Joe. Put them on the Radio One breakfast show. But don’t let them play good tasteful music all the time. We need more rubbish music, so we can appreciate its opposite.

Why I love 'The Birth Mark' by Susan Howe

2011-02-21T00:00:00-00:00

I love The Birth Mark because of its fierce combination of intellect and emotion. Most contemporary literary criticism I’ve read, and I’ve more or less given up in recent years to be honest, values the intellect far more highly than emotion. The writers have been taught to be so painfully aware of the position from which they write- in cultural, class, gender terms – that the end results are self-conscious, anaemic, often verging on the dishonest.

Howe savagely reveals these qualities in the writing of F.O. Matthiessen, author of_American Renaissance_. Although Matthiessen was under the strict influence of T.S.Eliot rather than the more recent demi-gods of critical theory, the way in which the careful public face of his work conflicted with his inner wishes has contemporary relevance. “An American educator. A careful citizen. A mind so terribly aware.” (p.17). Now let’s be clear – you definitely don’t want literary criticism which is pure unmediated emotion – and Howe is continuously politically and historically alert and specific. But it's a matter of balance, and here the heart remains intact along with the mind.

In The Birth Mark the separation between critical or theoretical work and creative work gets very blurred. Intense material about different subjects is tightly compressed & juxtaposed. Sometimes, the style is so tightly juxtaposed that I don’t really know what Howe is on about. For example:

Each singular call. As the sound is the sense is. Severed on this side. Who would know there is a covenant. In a new world morphologies are triggered off.

But I don’t think, as I might elsewhere, that these language experiments are pretentious and obfuscating, because there is so much clarity and passion in the book. There are so many wonderful paragraphs in “The Birth Mark”. Here’s one:

I am drawn towards the disciplines of history and literary criticism but in the dawning distance a dark wall of rule supports the structure of every letter, record, transcript: every proof of authority and power. I know records are compiled by winners, and scholarship is in collusion with Civil Government. I know this and go on searching for some trace of love’s unfolding through all the papers in all the libraries I come to. (p.4)

What do I like about this? Her head knows that scholarship, like pretty much everything else, is compromised and contaminated by the workings of power, but her heart keeps drawing her back.

Another great paragraph:

During the 1950s, although I was only a high school student, I was already a library cormorant. I needed out of the way volumes from Widener Library [...] Thoreau said, in an essay called “Walking”, that in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. What is forbidden is wild. The stacks of Widener Library and of all the great libraries in the world are still wild to me. Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately in order to give a true account in his next excursion. I go to libraries because they are the ocean.

This reminds me of studying for my PhD in the Hugh Owen Library at Aberystwyth, wandering from shelf to shelf following leads from one book to another – literary criticism to mythology to psychoanalysis to contemporary science. I was following clues, wandering around in books..

Here is another wonderful paragraph (and a bit), this time from the interview with Edward Foster at the back of the book:

One thing that disturbs me about Olson’s attitude towards Melville was his attitude that Melville’s Christological pull was some kind of feminine weakness. I think the late work is a going towards peace, like Dickinson, and he had to go that way. Maybe it’s just that you build elaborate metaphysical structures when you are young, and when you are older, those structures collapse into something simpler. Fewer words mean more. Ambiguities of history and chronology melt into light in the East. Light, just that.

A subject I would truly love to write on – but I know it’s way too much and I never will – is the feminine in Melville. There has to be a reason why his writing speaks so directly to me. (p.179-180)

Howe is acutely aware of what separates her from Melville,or from Olson – geography, history, gender. As Howe tells Foster, the “difference between say Melville and Dickinson would be (apart from gender) that Melville is from one side of the Connecticut River and she is from the other side. There_is_an amazing difference between the history of upper New York State and the history of Massachusetts.” As she notes, even Melville and Hawthorne, who in Melville’s letters at least achieved an almost supernatural kinship, were separated, geographically, and emotionally, on different sides of the Connecticut River. But despite this knowledge of separation and difference, Howe can find a “feminine” element in both Melville and Olson that is also at the core of her own work: “It has to do with the presence of absence. With articulation of sound forms. The fractured syntax, the gaps, the silences”.. And fantastic that Howe can see this feminine presence in these male writers, that it doesn’t blind her to their faults, but that she understands what they were trying to hide, in a way – Olson certainly, and yet also reveal.

So while she understands the constraints of time and history, there is a transcendental pull in Howe’s writing that indicates a belief in timelessness.

I think that when you write a poem you use sounds and words outside time. You use timeless articulations. I mean the ineluctable mystery of language is something .. it’s just … it’s like earth from the astronauts view – that little blue film, a line floating around space sheltering all of us.

And, she goes on to say, “in those terms, it really doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. We are all both genders.” And she writes to reveal this realm outside history and gender & all that constrains us, though she realises it is nearly impossible.

I really haven’t explained this properly, just quoted enthusiastically and paraphrased occasionally. Best to read it yourself…

On 'Retromania' by Simon Reynolds

2011-07-10T00:00:00-00:00

Simon Reynolds’s “Retromania” has really got to me. Its thesis is that we’ve entered a stage of pop music where nothing new really happens. The period of pop’s primary production is over: we’re just pick and mixing from the vast repository of old music. Now, its an argument that’s been made before, but up until now its force hadn’t really hit me.

I’ve always had a split head & heart approach to pop music. My head is always looking for the spark of the new, and values singularity. My head loved My Bloody Valentine for sounding like nothing on earth prior to it. When I first heard Paid in Full by Eric B and Rakim, or the various Colourbox and MARRs records, I thought: blimey, where did that come from? My heart doesn’t really care about newness & singularity, it is looking for an emotional connection wherever it can find it. Sometimes my head & my heart are in agreement – but I can only actually think of Bjork’s best work (e.g. Pagan Poetry) as examples of music where innovation and emotion get blissfully conjoined.

Reynolds briefly mentions the old Harold Bloom literary criticism thesis: that each generation of poets must triumph in a Freudian battle with their key predecessor in order to find their own distinctive voice, and, unlike the weaker new poets, stop ventriloquising their ancestors. As Reynolds’s excellent book on post-punk points out, that generation could define itself against punk, its key predecessor, and rebel against the old rebellion (by ditching guitars or wearing suits, or adopting complex intellectual positions). Trouble is, with contemporary music makers, there is no key predecessor. The whole of popular music is resting on their shoulders, the vast internet archive of wonderful and terrible and just plain ordinary music. Who do you react against, in this cacophony of music. Like the weak poet of Bloom’s theory, there appears to be little option but to ventriloquise.

Its probably the political implications of retromania that are most disconcerting. Here we are, a generation of passive consumers, kept contented by access to a vast museum of musical memories that used to signify, among other things, rebellion and invention.
I’m now looking at all the music I love at the moment, and trying to detect in it the spark of something new. Joanna Newsome is definitely singular (too singular for me some of the time), and there’s clearly a kind of innovation at work – but there is also a deliberate refusal of modernity, a harking back to an earlier, unsullied version of America. Same with Bill Callahan – singular indeed, but musically he’s consolidating old ground. Metronomy: ah, now they’re interesting. Packed with echoes of past electronic music (from Kraftwerk to Japan to drum n’bass), the Metronomy album still pulls off the trick of sounding like it could only have been recorded in 2011. So maybe there is some faint hope of escaping or transcending the gravity-like pull of the past.

And it may be that Reynolds, like me, is just missing something. We’ve grown up with pop music as something that develops in a linear way. We expect things to keep changing. Probably, we were just lucky to grown up when we did. And we may just be the latest generational incarnation of the old codger: sections of Retromania have the same codgerist tendencies as some of my own posts. We both look back fondly to the appalling musical diet of old-style Radio One as the Second World War generation looked back to rationing.
I guess for the bulk of human history, musical innovation has not been a constant. Technological innovation has always driven popular music on (the electric guitar, the synthesiser, the sampler), as has migration. Seems to me that the implications of the globalisation of music haven’t been fully realised – that process may homogenise the music of the world, or it may produce unexpected hybridisation, or both. Something thrilling will emerge eventually. Perhaps the grand narratives of pop music are over. Maybe the changes will be incremental, almost imperceptible. And maybe I’m getting too old to notice.. Now, do I listen to Tim Buckley, or the Human League? Decisions, decisions…

In Praise of Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith

2017-06-22T00:00:00-00:00

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith (https://adactio.com/). It made me fall back in love with the web and with making things for the web.

It took me back to my first proper job, in 1998, when CSS was still considered a highly questionable technology choice. I remember thinking, as I struggled to make our website HTML standards compliant and fended off colleagues questioning the decision to use CSS, one day you'll probably be able to justify this kind of tinkering about as an actual career.

It also made me remember the first proper website I took over, looking through all the tangled table layout code - see https://resilientwebdesign.com/chapter2/ for a resume of the crazy stuff done to get a layout to work. At that point I didn't really know what all the and tags meant and I remember looking them up to find out.. Jeremy's book also helped me to remember CSS Zen Garden, which was such an inspiration even to a "non-designer" like myself - see http://www.csszengarden.com/

But while Resilient Web Design is in part a lovely nostalgic journey for an old codger like myself, what I'm most interested in are the forward facing aspects of the book. Part of the point of the book is that there really is no grounds for nostalgia about the web in 1998 or 2002 anyway - there was so much horrible hackery required then to do basic things, or to do pretty much anything in Netscape 4. We are in a better place now, or more precisely we are potentially in a better place - HTML5 and the latest CSS developments, including flexbox and the grid model, should finally make the long heralded separation of content and presentation a reality.

The only aspect of long gone times that I miss is the sense that - even with the caveats above about hackery requirements - you could make a web page more easily. I completely agree with the sentiments expressed in Martin Wright's blog post Complexity is Kill the Web - see http://mynameismartin.com/complexity-killing-web/. I too worry that it's become impossible to teach someone how to create a simple page, which could be simply and cheaply hosted.

It's a bit like the state popular music had got itself in by the mid 1970s, where people felt that you couldn't make an album without elaborate guitar solos or long and expensive periods of time spent in studios. We seem to have strayed from our original focus on the creation of content to be shared.

Perhaps we need the equivalent of punk and post-punk for the web to reestablish a do-it-yourself ethos - the sense you can create a webpage without necessarily needing SASS or a content management system or continuous integration or an ORM, or a CSS or Javascript framework... And that there can at least as much craft in that act of simple creation - potentially far more - than in the creation of something more complex.

The solution proposed in Resilient Web Design to this over-whelming complexity is progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement is a concept that has been around for years, but one that has been expressed far less vocally in recent years. I must admit that I've strayed from this righteous path too. But [Resilient Web Design](/umbraco/Resilient%20Web Design "Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith") has got me back on the path.

I love the idea of starting a piece of work by identifying the irreducible core of what you are trying to achieve, finding the simplest way of delivering that core, and then - if and as required -enhancing it. Progressive enhancement doesn't have to be puritanical or backwards facing. Sometimes a complex framework or tool might be entirely appropriate. The point is that is that you have applied awareness to the process of creation: you haven't just fired up a development tool that makes a series of design decisions on your behalf that you then can't easily undo.

I think there's a nice parallel between the wish in agile methodologies to get work in front of clients as quickly as possible - at work, we talk about Brutal Delivery, getting work pared down to its bare essentials so a client can see it - and the aim in progressive enhancement of working on the core of the project first, and as simply as possible. It also helps to emphasise what is most important in a piece of work - which often actually is the simple intention to share some information.

Part of what is regained from this more aware approach to design is the feeling of being back in control. When I use AngularJS for front end work, it solves a number of short-term problems for me - for example, how do I keep a number of screen elements updated in response to changes in my application. What I lose is a clear sense of how my application actually works. I find myself trying to understand Angular's digest loop to understand unexpected behaviour (see https://www.ng-book.com/p/The-Digest-Loop-and-apply/) If I don't fully understand how Angular works under the hood, I'm building up a technical debt and future uncertainties - what happens if the application stops working - do I know enough about Angular to resolve the issue? I'm also taking on dependencies in terms of managing Angular updates. What happens when I want to make further changes. It's a bit like a modern car, where the number of people who fully understand the mechanics and have access to the diagnostic kit required is ever-decreasing.

In the spirit of Resilient Web Design, I've spent some of the Christmas period simplifying my personal site. I've stripped back the CSS, taken out Bootstrap, removed modernizer, said goodnight and thankyou to jQuery. I've made the HTML properly semantic. I've taken out the blogging package I was using and written my own, incredibly simple, alternative. All of the frameworks I've removed absolutely have their value and I am in no way dismissing them - but I didn't actually really need any of them for a simple website.

Now the site still feels far more complex than it strictly needs to be - it's running on a full CMS (Umbraco), when I could use one of the lightweight CMSes like Perch. It's running on an Azure website with no separate SQL database (it's running on SQL Compact Edition which is adequate for a low volume site). It's a very simple piece of work, visually underwhelming, but I feel in total control of it, and it's been a pleasure to work on. And the performance of the site, with all the excess fat burned off, has been transformed.

So here's to a progressively enhancing 2017..

Adventures in Meditation: Using Headspace

2017-10-12T00:00:00-00:00

I started to meditate about three years ago. Starting to meditate was definitely one of my better decisions.

I started by using Headspace (www.headspace.com) Looking back, I think Headspace was a really good place to start. It gave me a basic meditation pattern that I still often use now. I think some of the various packs that Headspace offer are quite interesting - I liked the Appreciation meditation that again I still use now and again. Although I struggled with them initially, I came to quite like the various visualisation techniques I learnt from Headspace, and again continue to use them. Some of the packs were less successful, at least to me, but I do think Headspace are trying to represent meditation as something that starts with a human need, rather than as a good thing to do in itself, and that's not necessarily a bad approach.

Headspace costs money and that is something that rankles with some people - it is explicitly a product in a way that traditional forms of meditation don't seem to be. But if you go to your local meditation group, there will probably be the expectation of a contribution to support that grouping. I'm not sure any form of meditation is happening completely outside of an economic context.

One thing Headspace couldn't really teach me was good posture. I only learnt that by going to my local Buddhist centre and having kind, friendly Buddhists insisting that I improve the way I sat. At the time, I found this a little annoying, but in retrospect they were absolutely right to gently harass me about posture, because without it you can't sit for any length of time, and you spend all your meditation time thinking about how much your back hurts.

You could argue that Headspace doesn't make meditation a challenging process - there's the sense that Headspace is a kind of lifestyle brand, which allows people to find some calmness without the kind of deep questioning that accompanies more traditionally religious forms of meditation. Calmness commodified. I'd partly agree, and I found I needed something bigger and wider than Headspace. But I'd also say that firstly, giving people some moments of calm is a pretty good end in itself, and that secondly, I think the Headspace meditations do subtly encourage a different perspective on life, once less tied to an insistent sense of self.

I'd also say that while meditation practice tied to established religions (e.g. Buddhism) can offer a challenge to our current compulsively consumerist society, those established religions have so many of their own dogmas, barriers and assumptions that I actually rather like and admire Headspace's attempt to change and simplify the language and presentation of meditation.

Like the wider mindfulness movement, what Headspace does is to de-contextualise meditation, pulling it out of the religious and cultural contexts in which it has broadly been situated for thousands of years and pulling it into a twenty first century, customer-led, productised context. Vincent Horn, from Buddhist Geeks, calls this the "great unbundling", (see https://medium.com/@meditateio/making-meditation-modular-567b3e5cd68d), and uses the current Wikipedia definition of unbundling:

Unbundling is a neologism to describe how the ubiquity of mobile devices, Internet connectivity, consumer web technologies, social media and information access in the 21st century is affecting older institutions (education, broadcasting, newspapers, games, shopping, etc.) by “break[ing] up the packages they once offered, providing particular parts of them at a scale and cost unmatchable by the old order.” Unbundling has been called “the great disruptor”.

In that sense, Headspace is the perfect digital piece of product - structured around the needs of users rather than the institutions and culture of traditional meditation: the "old order". If you start using Headscape, you also avoid the often complicated, and occasionally inappropriate and troubling power relationships that can be found in that "old order" of religious groupings.

That approach is, of course, full of dangers: for example, mindfulness becoming a way of calming the anxieties produced by a consumerist/capitalist society without questioning the assumptions that society is based upon. Or really questioning one's own ethics and behaviour, or in any way breaking down the boundaries between the self and the rest of the world, which is kind of the point of the whole process.

One example of these danger is the app's use of statistics. Headspace encourages you to meditate more by feeding you statistics on usage: another very digital approach. One particularly incentivising stat is the number of days you have consecutively meditated. This use of stats really helped me build a solid practice - I wanted to get to 365 consecutive days, which I managed. But there is a negative side to this gammification of meditation - it gets to the point that the statistics can be more important than the practice ("oh I really don't feel like meditating this morning, but I better do something, even if I only go through the motions, because I don't want to lose my current run streak"). This is both an insane and utterly contemporary distortion of the rationale for meditation, and a very effective way to build a robust practice, at least in terms of the numbers. But you need to reach the point where the practice is genuinely what matters.

Nature and Technology

2019-03-22T00:00:00-00:00

It's easy to think about Nature and Technology as opposites.

On a day where I've spent all day starting at the screen, they certainly feel like opposites. The colour and complexity of the natural world feels very distant. My head is full of binary logic. Nature feels a bit like a paradise that has been abandoned in order to spend more time peering at screens.

We are living through an era of ever-increasing digital abundance and ever-decreasing natural resources. While we lose ourselves in the maze of the internet, watching old music videos and comparing the price of washing machines and their average customer ratings, species of animals and plants disappear, the habitats in which they thrived becoming more and more marganlised. With our attentions distracted, we barely notice the losses. The world around us changes at alarming speed, and yet in a strange way, given the hyper-speed of our cultures and economies, everything seems quite still and unchanging.

Generally speaking, when you look at technology, it looks and feels very different to nature. It's often black and sleek and defiantly unnatural in it's appearance. As if it intends to defy nature by being around forever. And of course, technology is, almost always, designed to be inorganic. It probably will be around for a very very long time, still taking up space though probably not still functioning, while the natural world crumbles and reforms around it. Increasingly, I think of the indisposability of technology as one of it's greatest limitations and think ahead to what future generations will make of our brilliant high-tech detritus.

But of course, all our technology is actually all too natural in it's origins. Our smartphones are assemblages of precious metals and rare-earth minerals extracted from the earth. The lithium in our smartphone batteries is taken from salt lakes. Much of the cobalt, also used in smart phone batteries, is mined by hand in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bastnaesite, monazite, and xenotime contain neodymium, a rare-earth element that provides the haptic buzz that signals an incoming email. Look at a smartphone and you are still looking at nature, crudely melded and transformed into sleek blackness.

While I completely understand the appeal, I'm suspicious of the sometimes expressed wish to escape from technology into a prelapsarian world of the purely natural. From a solely practical point of view, it's pretty much impossible now. And it sounds too similar to other types of idealistic wish that have dark shadows - the wish to escape from the intellect by regressing into a prior state of unthinking bliss, the wish to escape from the busy, multicultural city into the rural idyll. We can't escape from technology completely, but we can certainly use it more carefully.

Henry Thoreau, the American transcendentalist, famously "went to the woods" to "live deliberately", away from the trappings of a corrupted civilisation. He had little time for the two technologies - the telegraph and the railroad - that were transforming American society around him. "We do not ride on the railroad;" he wrote, "it rides upon us" - as our technology - the internet, social media, machine learning - at times clearly rides upon us. But towards the end of his most famous book, Walden, he pauses by a bank of bare soil cut out by the railroad which had impinged on the area around his beloved Walden Pond:

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented.

In this brief sequence, as Jedediah Purdy notes in his article A Radical for All Seasons Thoreau sees the "dirt slide and roll, streaming in and out of patterns, and reflects on the ways that the human body, the waterways of the earth, and every plant and animal are just more matter forever changing shape." This image, as Purdy suggests, can be seen as a "a vivid experience of the oneness of all of life—the natural world and the modern, human-made one." That sense of the fundamental non-duality of the natural and the technological, as "just more matter forever changing shape", is where I'm headed.

In recognising a deep and fundamental unity between technology and nature, we don't need to pasively accept uses of technology that cause negative impact. We're stuck, in this current moment, with our forms of technology, like Thoreau was stuck with the railroad, as the latest stage of our incredible, stupid evolution. Technology and its associated industries think and act as though they are above nature, but like human economics, technology is a modest, limited and relatively impermanent subset of nature. Where we need to get to is technology that is more like nature, and that knows it's place within the wider natural picture.

Holochain

2019-05-16T00:00:00-00:00

I'm very interested in the Holochain project.

I'm interested from three different angles:

The fact it starts with People First rather than technology or data or economic value
The extent to which the project is based on Learning from Nature
The way the design of the project has No Single View of Reality

People First

Holochain is structured around people (it is "agent-centric") rather than information ("data-centric).

Blockchain starts with data as its focus, and the challenge to present a consistent view of the reality of that data. It is a distributed ledger, where the transactions are stored across multiple computers to ensure their integrity and to provide a single record of the reality of those transactions. Blockchain evolved out of (partly libertarian) desire to take the question of personal trust out of the equation through use of secure and distributed technology. It has become clear that, at a technical level, the Blockchain model is unsustainable due to the increasingly heavy computation and thereby energy required to maintain a single record of reality across a growing number of transactions.

Holochain by contrast starts with people sharing information between themselves on the basis of certain ground rules. Holochain does not attempt to enforce a single shared state or consensus, and it does not attempt to take personal trust out of the equation.

Learning from Nature

What is most interesting about Holochain is how much thought has gone into its underyling infrastructure, with much of that thought based on learning from the natural world. The X-Road infrastructure, used by the Estonian govenment to securely share information between government departments, seems significant and progressive because it prioritises the protection of the citizen's data and allows the citizen some degree of control of their data. These good intentions are layered on top of a relatively conventional data exchange infrastruture. The difference with Holochain is that the good intentions are built into the design of the infrastructure.

Holochain works within an underyling infrastructure (Ceptr) inspired by the flow of information in the natural world. Holochain self-consciously uses the language of biological systems to explain its component parts. The system for establishing the ground rules for each Holochain app is called DNA. The system by which nodes in a Holochain network monitor for unwelcome activity is called the Immune System.

As Martin Banove notes in his informative series of essays on Holochain, its infrastructure resembles a "rhizome" rather than a conventional tree structure. Now I never really understand what Deleuze and Guattari are on about, but I can just about follow Banove's reference to Deleuze and Guattari's celebration of the rhizome. What Deleuze and Guattari like about the rhizome is it's structural resistance to the "organizational structure of the root-tree system" that charts "causality along chronological lines" and looks" for the original source of 'things'" and heading "towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those 'things'. A rhizome "has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (see also the Wikipedia article on the Rhizome)

No Single View of Reality

Because of this rhizome-like structure, Holochain does not have the concept of a final true or complete view of reality. Like Torrent networks, you don't download information from a single source, you download information from multiple sources. This means that the "whole picture" of what a data transactions looks like is pieced together as required. One of the key building blocks Holochain uses is the distributed hash table (DHT). Nodes in a Holochain share responsibility to maintaining the accuracy of the information stored, but nodes only store parts of the information. A post on the Rhizom blog (Martin Banove again) puts it as follows:

there is no notion of network-wide consensus (which, by definition, doesn’t scale) bottlenecking the system and strictly limiting the kinds of flows that can enter and the ways in which it can be seen and translated between different contextual interpretations as useful information (and from the reference point of a given agent’s view of the network, or in other words, data is understood as relative to the circumstances at hand, not as an absolute, objective category)

Find out more:

Ceptr (the infrastructure on which Holochain is based)

The Holochain website

The Holo project (a cloud-based hosting enterprise based on Holochain)

The First GFN Shrewsbury Event: the Biodiversity Data Hack

2020-01-31T00:00:00-00:00

Good for Nothing Shrewsbury ran its first event, Bringing Shropshire's Biodiversity Data to Life, on Saturday 25th January 2020.

The idea for the event was to bring together Shropshire biodiversity, technology and data experts, to work together on the following brief:

Shropshire has plenty of biodiversity data, but it’s in a multitude of different places/formats. It’s quite hard for the people of Shropshire, or people making decisions about Shropshire, to use the data in helpful ways. How can we make Shropshire’s biodiversity data more accessible?

We spend some time setting the context, talking about the particular challenges of working with biodiversity data in Shropshire. To find out more about Shropshire biodiversity data, look at the Shropshire Ecological Data Network website.

We also explained the intended way of working:

looking for small steps forward in solving a challenge
keeping an eye on the bigger picture, so those small steps move us towards longer term aims

We then split into groups looking at three different streams of work:

1. Can we create a friendlier way of searching for the data?

This group discussed how providing context and intrepretation for data was at least, perhaps more, important than the data itself. The group came up with some initial ideas on how to make biodiversity data relevant to a wider audience.

2. Can we simplify the techie things behind the scene to make it work more simply?

We were very lucky to have Reuben Roberts from the National Biodiversity Network and this group spent their time working out how a Shropshire biodiversity website might use the NBN's API to retrieve data.

3. Do we know where we want to be in the long term with Shropshire biodiversity data

A select group of deep thinkers spent some time working on a theory of change for Shropshire's biodviersity data, focusing on what value biodiversity data might have for the financial and insurance sectors.

What did we learn?

The time spent setting the context was valuable, because of the wide range of different perspectives in the room. Next time we'll try and do more of that context setting ahead of time, and provide a more detailed brief.
The time we had only allowed us to scratch the surface of finding solutions.
But the atmosphere was terrific, the openness & willingness to get involved from all involved was quite moving to watch. It was a terrific starting point for Good for Nothing Shrewsbury.

What next?

The intention from here is to see which of the strands of work above could benefit from some more focussed Good for Nothing involvement.

If you want to be involved in future Good for Nothing events, either on biodiversity or other topics, then follow us on Twitter and sign up at https://www.goodfornothing.com/chapter/shrewsbury

If you know other people who you think might be interested in making Shropshire an even better place and solving some local challenges, encourage them to sign up too.

If you know of any venues who might be willing to host us, or businesses who might be willing to sponsor us, or charities or community groups who might want us to solve their challenges, get in touch via Twitter

With thanks to...

Everyone who joined us on the day - thankyou for being so positive and engaged and making it such a pleasure.
Preston Montford Field Centre for kindly allowing us to use their venue
Severn Partnership for their generous sponsorship, which allowed us to provide some food & drinks to everyone as they worked
Good for Nothing Chester, for their very practical advice and for the sheer inspiration they've provided by the brilliant things they're doing and the amazing way they do it. I can honestly say I wouldn't have started this without that inspiration.

Deep relaxation and yoga nidra

2020-03-22T00:00:00-00:00

In 2005 I had pneumonia, and spent the next five years having about five chest infections each year. Some days I would have to come home from work and have to just lie down for half an hour in order to continue with my day. Sometimes, that half an hour lying down would allow me to feel deeply relaxed. I can't definitively prove this, but I think this experience of deep relaxation is part of what helped me gradually strengthen my immune system and escape from the cycle of chest infections.

I also noticed that when I couldn't sleep at night, gently focusing on my body and slowing my breathing would also put me in a state of deep relaxation. I wasn't able to will myself to sleep, but I was able to gradually put myself in a relaxed state where sleep might become possible.

A couple of years ago, I had the same experience of entering a deeply relaxed state (in a busy youth hostel unable to sleep). I did some research and discovered the yoga nidra technique, which I've been using since as a reliable way to enter a relaxed state.

The relaxed state provided by yoga nidra is an interesting one, because you can retain awareness. Indeed, the clarity of thought is often quite revelatory and it feels helpful spiritually (for want of a better word) as well as in terms of general health.

I'm writing this partly with the current covid-19 crisis in mind. I'm thinking that, if I get the virus, the technique of yoga nidra and the ability to enter a state of deep relaxation might help a little bit, both during and after the infection, and that if I think it will help me, it might be useful to share the technqiue with others in case they find it helpful too. Clearly, it's not sufficient in itself - but it may help a little alongside other actions of personal prevention and the robust systemic responses we are only just beginning to see in the UK.

The yoga nidra meditation I use most at the moment, and which I'd recommend as a starting point, is on the Insight Timer app (which is excellent). You can find it at https://insighttimer.com/jenniferpiercy/guided-meditations/yoga-nidra-for-sleep

I hope it's of some help.

Nature and Technology in Chapter 19 of The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

2020-11-20T00:00:00-00:00

I've been reading and thinking about Nature and Technology for years, and one piece of writing that has really stood out and inspired me is Chapter 19: Online in The Outrun by Amy Liptrot.

The Outrun records Amy Liptrot's return to her childhome home in Orkney at the age of thirty, coming to terms with the deeply addictive nature of her personality while using technology, often her phone, to both remain connected to her wider life and to locate herself more deeply in her current life and location.

Why do I find Chapter 19 so useful? Firstly, there is a tone and fundamental approach that resonates deeply with someone who loves both nature and technology. Amy Liptrot is a digital native, someone for whom the internet has been a form of a home. She makes sure the "broadband was working before the hot water" when she arrives at Rose Cottage on Papa Westray - the tiny island that is the backdrop to Chapter 19. There is therefore none of the deep-seated suspicion or determined lack of awareness of technology that can be found in some nature writing. Equally, there is a strong recognition of the negative impacts of our use of technology: the loneliness and compulsion of our hyper-connectivity, the ways it feeds our addictions:

There's an emptiness. I've lost booze and I am desperately searching for what I need to fill me up. Is it coffee, sex, writing, love, new clothes or online approval? I read about how these beeps and notifications and vibrations affect and alter our brains, giving small jolts of dopamine, a little adrenaline. Searching for that tiny buzz, I am circling around familiar websites, like a migrating bird following rivers or motorways.

In this compulsion, with "too many tabs open in my brain", the external world is barely present, only partially noticed.

We spend too much time online and real life is just another window. What's the point in going out to look at wildlife when I can watch nature documentaries on YouTube, in bed with an electric blanket?

When I boot up my laptop, the login screen will often show a beautiful image from the natural world. Then I type in my password and it disappears and I'm at work, with another image of nature on my desktop that, if I notice it at all, keeps getting obscured by emails and documents. And of course in reality those beautiful natural scenes that haunt our screens are disappearing at pace, and that's probably part of the reason they are there, a reassurance that really ought to be a reproach.

What this chapter of The Outrun gestures towards is a way of using technology to reestablish a more meaningful sense of particpation with the external world and with nature. There is nothing particularly ground-breaking about the activities it describes. Indeed, what is striking at one level is the apparent simplicity of the methods: just a phone, just a few apps:

I begin to use a GPS app on my phone to track my daily walks around Papay, along sheep trails and high-water lines. I'm building a map , within the limits of the island revealing, the lines I am drawn along.

Of course, behind that apparent simplicity are a series of massively complicated, interconnected and ulitmately fragile infrastructures: internet connectivity and mobile networks, GPS satellites. And the phone itself as a highly complicated coming-together of tiny bits of natural materials drawn from the ground and transported across the world.

Yet all that complication is here in the service of something like a spiritual practice: a deeper awareness of and participation in an environment that uses technology in a wider context.

Overlaid on satellite maps, a story emerges. The GPS tracks show how my walks change. At first I stride out, covering good distances along the coastal paths, marking my territory. As the weeks go on, I become slower and more exploratory, covering smaller areas in greater detail: climbing down the stones into a geo, looking rockpools for treasures.

And the wider context that emerges is a profound sense of place and community. I'm obsessed by Orkney, and Westray and Papa Westray in particular. My great grandfather was born on Westray. When we visited Papa Westray last year, on an evening walk in the fog along its coastal paths, we came across the Old Churchyard, where many of the gravestones bore our surname. I had the eerie sense of being at home. Therefore, for me, reading about the area is boundlessly exciting in itself, and just reading the names of places and islands has a magical quality:

The Pow of Keldie looks like a potential spot to swim at low tide. Mad Geo is dark and intense. For me, these places - 'The Sneck', 'Errival' - exist both digitally and underfoot.

Who wouldn't want to visit Mad Geo and the Sneck?

In The Outrun, technology and place, nature and infrastructure, are intertwined: the wifi gets relayed to Papa Westray via "copper phone lines" having been replayed by "microwaves" from "Kirkwall to Shapinsay to Westray then to us". The mobile signal is "affected by the wind": "I'm waiting for the next gale to receive my text messages". Looking for whales from North Hill, a huge ship is spotted instead, and is tracked via a "marine-traffic website" as the "cargo ship Kuzma Minin", enroute to "Kadalaksha in northern Russia". Planets in the night sky (via the SkyMap app), sleep cycles, menstural cycles, migrating birds, orcas - all are tracked via phone or laptop.

Where does this sometimes frenzied, sometimes compulsive observation of multiple strands of reality lead? At times, clearly, it is an attempt to fill a void. When her phone runs out of batteries, Liptrot says she "can almost feel that I don't exist, my walk is no longer being tracked [...] I want to use all this technology for its benefits but keep it under control".

So what does it mean to have technology under control? The internet and its associated technologies give us a near-infinity of information, and our relationship to that information can be compulsive or overwhelming. Equally, it can be liberating: allowing us to see the same thing (for example a very small Scottish island) from hugely different and potentially contradictory perpsectives, allowing for the validity of each perspective to be perceived without seeing any one of them as a final truth. Effective ways of making sense of the world are key to using technology wisely.

To have technology under control is also to understand its purpose within a wider context. That wider context can be a deepening sense of community: when a "sea eagle" are spotted in Orkney, the message is spread quickly via "local birding forums or text message groups" Sightings of the Merry Dancers (or Northern Lights) "circulate on the social networks, and the next day, or the same night, people share their photographs". In a sense here, the precise technologies are beside the point. What is happening is the sharing of knowledge, excitement and wonder among human communities finding its appropriate contemporary expression using the tools that are at hand.

And if it is under control, The Outrun suggests, then technology can open up the deep, intertwined complexities of a place, feeding curiousity, providing new perspectives, allowing a sense of awe that, for all its activity and participation, has a sense of stillness and presence at its core.

A Brief Appreciation of Buddhist Geeks

2022-07-09T00:00:00-00:00

I started listening to the Buddhist Geeks podcast, presented primarily by Vincent Horn, about five years ago.

I just want to briefly acknowledge and appreciate the role of the Buddhist Geeks podcast as not just a great resource in itself but also as a fantastic gateway node to a bunch of other interesting things.

Through the podcast I discovered:

David Chapman, whose online books Meaningness and Vividness have transformed my view of the world
And through Chapman’s writing, l found Charlie Awberry and the Evolving Ground Contemporary Vajrayana community.
Daniel Thorson and the Emerge podcast, which in turn lead me to Rob Burbea and Vinay Gupta among others
Michael Taft, whose podcast and YouTube meditations have hugely shaped my meditation practice. And in turn introduced me to Erik Davis.
Tiago Forte, whose work on productivity and technology has been a big influence.
And then there is Ann Gleig, Daniel Ingram, Kenneth Folk - to name just a few others from what feels like an almost endless list.

Thank you Vince! Never met you but feel like a owe you a lot!

The Living Room: Gavin Clark documentary

2023-02-25T00:00:00-00:00

Back at the end of the nineties, I liked a band called Sunhouse. Their first and only album was called 'Crazy on the Weekend'. I liked the album because it was about a set of experiences that were outside both of my own comfort zone and outside the usual radius of popular music. I had the CD and over the years would occasionally dig it out and remember how raw but strangely beautiful it was.

Last year, for some reason, I decided to see what had happened to Sunhouse. Sadly, I discovered that the songwriter, Gavin Clark, had died in 2015. I also discovered that Shane Meadows had made a documentary about Clark, who was a close friend of his. The documentary is about Clark rediscovering his confidence as a performer by playing solo, initially in his own front room.

I've watched the documentary several times now. I find it really moving. It is less than fifty minutes. If you happen on this page, have a look and see what you think.

On a walk

2025-04-20T00:00:00-00:00

Woodland forget me nots, Myosotis sylvatica

Ransoms, Allium ursinum

Wild strawberry, Fragaria vesca

Cranesbill, Geranium lucidium

Wood anemone, Anemone nemorsa

Garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata