@sbr
Came to tech through the late-night glow of a terminal, not the paved road of a classroom. Would rather be trail running than sitting at a desk. Views sit somewhere between anarchism and secular Buddhism. People once mistook me for a hipster, the track bike, the love of good espresso, but both are part of a love of simplicity, of paring things back to their essence. Drawn to how photography changes the way I see, and to the world it brings to light. I aim to keep things small & simple.
A Luddite's Guide to Technology - Phones I've written before about the Luddites, so if you're unfamiliar with the term, or have only heard the pop-culture version: that they were anti-technology. Go read Brian Merchant's book Blood in the Machine. Very short...
What if social media optimized for less time online? The strange thing about social media is that it borrows the language of friendship while measuring something else entirely. Community, connection, sharing, belonging. These are the words on the tin. But the machinery underneath is usually pointed in a different direction: refresh, scroll, react, post, return. The platform succeeds when you stay. It succeeds when you check...
I'm a meat puppet, and I don't know how to drive Awake. Consciousness, coming to grips with a stream of stimuli; light, sounds, touch. Only to find, we're trapped! Encased in a meat puppet. Our puppet grows, eventually we learn to control its limbs, finally...
The Dictator My family is away for a few weeks, visiting friends abroad, which leaves me free to indulge myself by watching documentaries about collapse. It helps ground me, to be reminded that there is a bigger world outside, and that we should all be doing more to help sustain the world we want to live in. The one we want our children to live in. Amongst the usual litany of climate and economic collapse, there is a new...
There is a lot to be said about the need for boredom in our modern attention commoditized age, reducing distractions and spending more time in quiet contemplation, though that’s not the kind of boring I mean today. What I am interested in the visually...
I had long been familiar with the luddite movement, though only in the vaguest sense. It wasn’t until reading Brian Merchant’s excellent book “Blood in the machine” that I fully appreciated both their historical context and relevance to today. They weren’t...
Goodbye Substack, hello Tuhat When I started writing on Substack last November, I told myself it was a pragmatic choice. Self hosted blogs had come and gone over two decades, victims of my own neglect and the slow entropy of running things alone. Substack had...
I had run before; towards things, away from things, in school. But it wasn’t till my mid twenties that I became a runner, when I actually decided to devote my own time to running for longer than five minutes. In no small part, two coincidences turned what may have been a passing fancy into a life long practice. A relationship came to an end around the same time that a friend convinced me to sign up to a marathon with him....
I don’t write about gear, am not interested in comparing brands of tools. Nor in doing advertising for companies that can’t help themselves emblazon their products with logos. That said, there is one brand I want to discuss, in particular my multi-decade...
I’ve been actively online for some time; with my first self hosted website in 2000, back in the heady days of IRC and BBSs. Yet outside of those text based mediums, which were generally about a specific topic, I avoided social media, which was all about you....
It’s been a while since I’ve read either John Berger or Susan Sontag, and don’t recall their precise view on the truthfulness of photography, yet the idea has been developing in my head for a few weeks. The question of truth has framed the photographic art...
I prefer to avoid discussing particular technologies or brands but this is a bit of meta introspection and some concrete terms are unavoidable. This substack was started November last year, making it week six or so. While I have had a slew of self hosted...
I spent most of my working life in what is referred to as “technology”. Computers, programming, IT; pick your favourite term. Yet I ran outside of a mainstream track, eg. I entirely avoided social media. As a result, the perils of doom scrolling were not a...