from the dial-up days

“If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.”

— George Orwell

“It takes much longer to get up north, the slow way.”

— Ian Dury

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

— Aaron Swartz

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notes

more notes on bluesky →

writing

  • Soundtrack to this post. As we enter 2026, many of us are making the usual resolutions to spend less time on our screens or eat more healthily. My resolution is different. I am not trying to spend less time on the internet; I am trying to change how I inhabit it. I am moving “Big

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  • The news filtered through this morning not with a bang, but with the quiet finality of a ballot count. Reform UK has won its first contested election in Scotland. David McLennan took a council seat in Whitburn and Blackburn, beating out both Labour and the SNP. It was not a defection this time. It was

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  • I have been doing some renovations. Not on the house, but here on the site. For a long time, this blog lived in a rented room. I used EasyWP from Namecheap. It was functional. It worked. But it felt like living in a hotel. You can sleep there, but you are not allowed to drill

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  • I have a page on this site called library. It is a curated collection of the media that matters most to me. The books I re-read, the films that fundamentally shifted my perspective, and the tracks that sound like home. I decided early on that I wanted ten of each. It seemed like a good,

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  • It is raining in Paisley again. A grey, steady drizzle that seems to have set in for the winter. I checked the time a moment ago. 7:34 pm. I didn’t check it on a screen. I didn’t have to wake a device up, or swipe past a notification about a breaking news story, or see

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  • Most of us wake up and immediately doomscroll. We check the mental weather report against the global one. We see the ice shelves melting, the inequality gap widening, and the sheer inertia of the systems we are trying to dismantle. It is easy to feel small. It is easy to let the “climate grief” dictate

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  • For a few years now I’ve leaned into the idea of using my own site, writing slowly, valuing analog habits, stepping back from the endless scroll. Blogging felt like a quiet resistance to the noise of “platform social media”. So when I say I’m now using Bluesky, it might sound like a contradiction. But for

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  • The email arrived today, right on schedule. It was from the Wikimedia Foundation, kindly reminding me that I had donated £5 last year and asking if I would consider renewing my support.My gut reaction was to hesitate. Do I actually use Wikipedia that much? The answer is no. My habits have changed. Like many people,

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  • I keep circling this idea that the line between human and artificial intelligence might be more cultural than real. When I finish a book I love, my attachment is to the ideas and the feeling it left behind. Would it change anything if the author turned out to be an AI trained on a century

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  • There’s a rule in the UK that forces some migrants to wait ten years before they can apply to stay permanently. Not because they’ve done anything wrong. Just because that’s how the system is set up. The people affected by this aren’t strangers. They’re carers, nurses, parents. People who’ve lived here for years, worked, paid

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