[ recap ] Last week we looked at Keith Haring's questions about who runs the machine and Milieu, a free record-keeping tool. [ thoughts ] Everyone can suddenly make anything, which has a lot of people wondering whether originality is finished too. But originality was never quite what we think. Almost nothing we call original was made from nothing. The proof is the invention that made the modern world: the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg took the screw press that Rhineland farmers used for...
9 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at John Cage's 4'33", Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory, and Graham Wallas' creative process. [ thoughts ] Keith Haring had just turned twenty when he arrived in New York in 1978. He bussed tables at Danceteria at night and studied semiotics by day at the School of Visual Arts, a year or two from the subway drawings. And he kept journals from his teens until he died. Semiotics is the study of how signs come to mean things and who gets to decide what. It was...
16 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at televised essays (Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. John Berger's Ways of Seeing) and Michel de Montaigne's thinking. [ thoughts ] I didn't post much this week. By the logic of the algorithm, it means nothing happened. But the feed only knows what has been published. It cannot see the half-finished sentence sitting in a notebook, the image saved without knowing why, pages returned to three times without words added. So it does the simplest...
23 days ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Las week we looked at Last week we looked at Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, now fully searchable at searchwhole.earth, Brian Eno's "Scenius" and their project, Long Now. [ thoughts ] You know the feeling. You sit down to read something, and before the first paragraph is over your hand has already gone looking for a second screen. You watch an hour of short clips and nothing stays with you, nothing you could repeat to another person the next day. The feed was engineered to be...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, Richard Hamming on Creativity and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. [ thoughts ] Last week ended on the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand's 1968 version of "access to tools," now fully searchable at searchwhole.earth. Stewart Brand is hard to summarise, so I'll borrow the line the directors of his documentary, We Are As Gods used: He is a finder and a founder. He finds tools, people, and ideas, and blends them together. In...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week, we looked at George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form and James Baldwin's The Creative Process. Both arrived at the same place from opposite directions: the creative act begins by drawing a distinction, marking one thing off from another. [ thoughts ] This month Meta decided what "original" means, and started enforcing it. Facebook launched Creator Fast Track, paying creators up to $9,000 over three months to post. Instagram changed its algorithm so accounts that repost...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
[ recap ] Two weeks ago we looked at post-war Italian design (Testa, Munari, Nizzoli, Carboni) and Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay on mechanical reproduction. Benjamin argued that when something can be reproduced easily, it loses its aura. He meant the sense that it exists in one place and one time. In 2026, that loss has scaled. [ thoughts ] Benjamin diagnosed what reproduction takes away. He said less about what makes something exist as a distinct thing in the first place. Thirty-four years...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Saul Bass’ pitch to Bell Systems (1983) and the "Quickborner Team" revolutionising office spaces in post-war Germany: "Bürolandschaft." [ thoughts ] I keep coming back to post-war Italian design and advertisements. I think there’s something beautiful about the aesthetics. I feel like it’s something we’ve lost. Post-war Italy moved through what became known as the "economic miracle", especially between the late 1950s and early 1960s, with rapid industrial...
2 months ago • 2 min read
[ recap ] Last week we looked at Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and John Berger's four-part BBC series, Ways of Seeing, and how we can use these ideas prompting AI. [ thoughts ] I am pulled, lately, by what I believe is an incredibly innovative and creative period that ran from the 1950s into the late 1980s. Today we’re going to look at Saul Bass pitching Bell System in 1969 and the Quickborner Team redesigning the office in 1958. Saul Bass was a graphic designer, born in the Bronx in...
2 months ago • 4 min read