McFilter

The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 2nd 2026 Edition

✷ 02 November 2026

Artist? Convivial Technologist?

✷ 31 October 2026

Yesterday, while checking my RSS reader, my eye caught the long-dormant feed for Ben Bashford. I wondered how he was getting on and clicked through to an old post to see if there were any clues to his recent exploits.

I found he’d reworked his site and there was a new feed at a new URL. RSS reader updated, today I’ve been catching up on some of what I missed.

His post Are You an Artist? chimed with some other things that happened yesterday.

Six rectangular sheets of wood, painted orange, are mounted in a line across a black wall. Each sheet has one sheet of folded aluminium mounted on it, showing a progression of folds that you'd use to turn a rectangular piece of paper into a paper aeroplane

Last night was the private view for INTERMISSION, the third canto of Transmissions, a group show by the artist collective Material Matters.

I’ve been getting to more art lately, and enjoying the rediscovery. Michael Dales prompted a lunchtime trip to RIBA North to see an exhibition about Manplan, an interesting architecture/urbanism journal from the 70s. And I’d made it to the Bridewell a few weeks back to see ANCESTORS, the first canto of Transmissions.

Each time I’d taken a few photos and intended writing it up here, like we used to back in the day; and then not found the time.

INTERMISSION is the canto from my friend Angelo Madonna. It features his Tide Piano, which I’ve provided little bits of technical support for. It’s a piano frame, played by a pair of plectrums driven by stepper motors that move in step with the local tide. Every few minutes a note fills the room as one of the steppers move over a string.

A camera mounted to one of the steppers films a close-up of the strings below it, which is projected against the wall of the gallery.

A view of the Tide Piano: the frame of strings mounted horizontally with a plywood bridge running across, perpendicular to the strings. The bridge is split into two halves: each of which has a stepper motor and leadscrew mounted on top, driving the plectrum across the strings. In the background of the shot we can see the rest of the gallery with the video feed showing the close-up coil of a piano string projected onto the corner wall

As you’d expect at an art opening, one of the common questions when you get chatting to people is “are you an artist?”. Like Ben I tend to demur. To claim that it’s a term other people have used to describe me.

I have had works shown in art galleries, so objectively that would make me an artist. I think my issue with it is that lots of what I do is more readily termed technology; or rooted in organisational or civic or group “design”; none of which feel to me like “art”.

The easy option would be to say that I’m “not just an artist”, but that implies a diminution of artist that isn’t true. I’m not sure that I live up to the standards that I see in my friends who are artists.

The other readily-to-hand term would be polymath. That feels far too arrogant to be claiming. I think I’m a good technologist; and I am a published author; and have made and shown artworks. But… But…

Maybe the right answer is “sometimes”. I am an artist, but I’m not always an artist.

I usually refer to myself as a “technologist”, and oft expand upon it with “creative technologist”.

I have been wondering if I should tweak that to be a convivial technologist. I think that takes the term in a more interesting direction, and opens up discussions about the open and liberatory possibilities of technology, and critiques of the technology mainstream. I think I need a bit more background reading on Tools for Conviviality before I’ll be happy that I’m not mis-using the term and can start using it.

There was also a conversation last night about writing and “being a writer”.

I was being usefully challenged by E about my reticence; and the best I could manage was to talk about how I like having written, but hate writing. Expanding upon it, it’s more that writing is a struggle—my brain will run off along many different threads, and capturing and constructing a coherent narrative from that is difficult.

Plus there’s the discomfort of killing your darlings and excising sentences or paragraphs that get jotted down in the early drafting process but then don’t end up with a place in the final prose because the writing took a different direction as you worked it out. We’ll see if this paragraph and the last are still here when I get back to them in a while. [It did, for once —Ed.]

And some of it is forcing myself to focus for long enough to get the words on the page. “I’ll come back to it later and finish it off” is something of a death-knell for my writing, particularly if it’s still in the collection-of-thoughts draft phase.

So it’s nice to be getting back to having the time or motivation to see the writing through. Nice to be publishing things other than the Interesting Things on the Internet or Dog-eared Pages again. How are we?

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller

✷ 25 October 2026

I’m not sure what I was expecting or wanting to get from Breaking Things at Work. The Luddites were right about why you hate your job by Gavin Mueller, but it didn’t really grab me. Maybe it’s more useful for folk who haven’t thought about these sort of matters as much. Hopefully the title draws in more people who are looking for ways out of the sort of jobs I don’t have (thankfully).

Anyway, here are my dog-eared sections from reading it.

Page 14

Our history is the Luddites’ as well, and their insight—that technology was political, and that it could and, in many cases, should be opposed—has carried down through all manner of militant movements, including those of the present. There is much to learn from this tradition, even among the most technophilic current-day radicals.

Page 15

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, in a reevaluation of the Luddites’ motivations for machine breaking, describes them as “collective bargaining by riot.”

Page 25

According to Perrot, the weavers’ opposition to mechanization was not total opposition to industrialization, as workers often adopted elements of new cotton-spinning technologies to suit their work processes. For example, English weavers complained that bosses refused to implement “racks,” devices that accurately measured productivity, and therefore secured workers’ piece-rate wages. What workers bitterly opposed was “industrial concentration” that demolished their way of life by undermining the autonomy they possessed in small-scale home-based manufacturing, which “paced its activities according to its needs” so that workers controlled the hours and intensity of their work.

Page 33

By breaking apart each work process into carefully scrutinized component tasks, Taylor had cracked the secret of labor’s advantage, thereby giving management complete mastery over the productive process. The modernizing terminology of “science” and “efficiency” masked the prerogatives of discipline and control of workers.

Page 60

On the other end, manual laborers (such as Flippy’s coworkers) see tasks eaten away and their movements reorganized and tightly controlled to make room for more rigid machines. Wages and working conditions deteriorate. But even then, automation stops short of “full”: such systems, as we will see, rely upon a stratum of human labor that is all but ineradicable. This is as true of Flippy as it is of the most powerful AI.

Page 69

Reuther told the auto workers to consider ‘the future’ which would bring them a six-hour day … Meanwhile, there has been no change in the working day since the workers, through their own struggles over decades, won the eight-hour day. This was a classic idealist mistake: “painting the future as it should by instead of speaking of what is.”

Page 73

E.P. Thompson’s description of the autodidactic and creative culture of the pre-factory weavers of northern England immediately comes to mind: “Every weaving district had its weaver-poets, biologists, mathematicians, musicians, geologists, botanists.”

Page 75

Like David Noble, Weir notes that containerization was not driven solely by industry needs for efficiency, but also by military order: “The necessary planning for the automation of longshoring and shipping began in 1952 at the initiative of the Pentagon and maritime employers, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences.” Military contracts to supply the burgeoning invasion force in Vietnam provided commercial shippers with further leverage over intransigent dockworkers during the 1960s. Indeed, without containerization, Levinson argues that “America’s ability to prosecute a large-scale war halfway around the world would have been severely limited.” In fact, the Vietnam War was instrumental to early processes of globalization: after dropping their materiel in Da Nang, container ships stopped off in Japan to fill up with electronics before returning to the West Coast.

Page 107

In addition to launching important software projects, like the operating system Linux, the free software movement was instrumental in establishing nonproprietary coding languages as standard in the industry, which meant that skill development, rather than being controlled exclusively by large corporations, could be done through open community involvement.

Page 112

Yet hacker culture is often suffused with elitism, an unfortunate side effect often found in meritocratic craft cultures. Few everyday users will have the technical understanding to use Tor; fewer still will deign to suffer through RequestPolicy’s upending of the really subsumed web.

There is an urgent need to think about how Luddite technologies could reach and impact more internet users, beyond the most skilled enthusiasts, especially as more and more activity—in particular, work—moves into online spaces subject to the dynamics of surveillance capitalism.

Page 114

Where social workers once tracked individual cases, familiarizing themselves with their charges and gaining valuable context for judging courses of action, automated systems fragment cases into tasks to be handled, bereft of history or context. The result is, as one caseworker puts it, dehumanizing: “If I wanted to work in a factory, I would have worked in a factory.”

Page 128

Letting Walmart or Amazon swallow the globe not only entrenches exploitative models of production and distribution; it channels resources to reactionary billionaires who use their wealth to further undermine the relative position of workers by funding conservative causes like tax cuts, school privatization, and opposition to gay marriage. Letting technology take its course will lead not to egalitarian outcomes, but authoritarian ones

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 5th 2026 Edition

✷ 05 October 2026

  • Cheap agents, alumni shirts, and Elias Thorne. “AI” killing us all isn’t what I’m worried about; “AI” further polluting everything with more junk because they can externalize the costs onto the rest of us and maybe make a few quid here and there is what I’m depressed about.
  • How to stop having ideas I think (maybe I hope) that I spend almost as long caveating any ideas or proposals that I have at DoES Liverpool with “this is just my idea of it” as I do explaining the idea or suggestion; because I’m aware of the power I hold in that community
  • The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

    the cyberlibertarian model required pretending it was unforeseeable. The platforms couldn’t acknowledge that they needed governance because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging responsibility, and acknowledging responsibility would mean acknowledging liability, and acknowledging liability would mean the entire economic model collapses.

  • On artificial intelligence. Matt May saves me writing my own luke-warm take on “AI”.
  • Surveillance considerd harmful. An excellent Mastodon thread covering how you’d need impossible levels of accuracy—both at detecting bad guys and at not falsely misclassifying not-bad guys—for surveillance to work.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 2nd 2026 Edition

✷ 02 September 2026

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 19th 2026 Edition

✷ 19 June 2026

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 16th 2026 Edition

✷ 16 April 2026

These used to get scheduled to be published on the Monday after I started drafting them, and would then include whatever I’d collected over the following week. Since I migrated the blog to Jekyll I’ve lost the scheduled post option. At some point I’ll reinstate that, but for now it’s interrupted the posting of Interesting Things as I keep collecting-but-not-publishing. This is a note (to me mostly, given I doubt anyone else cares when they get published) that I’m going to switch to a more whenever-there-are-a-few sort of posting frequency. Anyway, while this rambling is on the Internet, I’m not sure it counts as interesting. Onwards!

  • I used AI. It worked. I hated it.. It would be great if we could get beyond the “AI is going to solve cancer and become sentient” and into actual discussions like this one about which tools might work and how it might be possible to use them without surrendering our agency and control to tech VCs.
  • If No One Pays for Proof, Everyone Will Pay for the Loss. Another way of looking at the “AI” question; particularly if, as society currently seems set up to do, we take the quick-fix and externalising the costs onto somebody else. “But he also insists that a model does not know whether its answer is correct, and that millions of lines of AI-generated code will never actually be reviewed by humans. Once that is clear, every apparent gain in speed is really a shift of burden downstream. Someone still has to reread, compare, test, contextualize, and sometimes rewrite. And if no one seriously takes on that work, the cost does not disappear. It reappears later in the form of errors, urgent fixes, loss of trust, and eventually litigation. What is presented as a productivity gain is often just an accounting displacement.”
  • On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse
  • Consent (an angry note for fellow anarchists) “The ultimate extent of this freedom is the monarchist freedom: freedom from the law itself. This is the freedom the Epstein class want. This is the freedom of the dictator, of the Russian Oligarch.”
  • Cyberselfish. I’m pretty sure I didn’t read this when it was first published; it’s sadly prescient, given that we could have done things differently over the past three decades if we’d paid more attention. I guess some of us have been trying for a while now, and maybe we’re starting to realise that we need to not surrender our power so easily. (Found via Phil Gyford’s post about Wired Books)

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 23rd 2026 Edition

✷ 23 March 2026

The conversation is the outcome

✷ 28 February 2026

Reading Jo’s notes on her Cards Against Technology idea I was wondering about what situations I’d deploy them, which led me into wider thoughts about group exercises and my natural aversion to them. At least in the ways that I tend to encounter them.

It’s usually with groups of complete (or at least relative) strangers. We’re broken into groups tasked with taking “big” or “important” topics, and then supposed to brainstorm and discuss solutions; which are then presented back to the wider attendance.

To me it all feels obviously superficial. Folk don’t know each other well enough to get beyond dancing around broadly-culturally-acceptable proposals, and there’s never enough time to reflect on, or really dig into, anything substantive.

However, I think it is useful to convene people and find ways to have them interact. Maybe the problem I have is the need that we feel to generate outcomes. For the work to be for something.

Recently we did an exercise much like this in the DoES Liverpool community. We had one of our annual-or-so Future Gazing sessions.

These are gatherings for the whole community (and friends beyond are welcome too) where we try to take a step back and think about DoES in a wider context and/or across a longer time-frame.

Rather than all sit round a table trying to have one discussion, I distributed sheets of paper seeded with questions or topics around the room. That encouraged people to be on their feet; to move around between the “idea sheets” spending as much, or as little, time on each topic as they liked; and to discuss proposals and thoughts with whomever they found themselves alongside.

We did then reconvene after a round of “dot voting” (everyone had up to five ticks they could place next to ideas that particularly resonated) for a bigger group discussion at the end.

I think the group discussion was the least important part of the session, although the dot voting leading into it encouraged us all to revisit each sheet and look over all of the ideas that had been generated.

The real value in the exercise was the conversations and connections that happened as part of it. The finding of common ground, and the surfacing and acknowledging of different perspectives. The getting to know each other better.

The sheets of paper have only captured a fraction of what was discussed, but I don’t think that matters. Anything important will bubble up in further conversations over the coming months.

Maybe everyone else has known this all along. But it’s been useful for me to acknowledge and explicitly state. In the DoES context we can generalise that the monthly community meetings are for generating tasks and getting things done; and the future gazing is to seed discussion, ideas, and conversation.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 2nd 2026 Edition

✷ 02 February 2026

  • The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a thirty-five year mistake. When I first clicked through to this video I was somewhat put off when I spotted it was two-and-a-half hours long. However! Casey Muratori is an entertaining and engaging speaker, and it’s an excellent tour through the history of computing languagesback to the 60s pulling in all manner of source material. Well worth a watch.
  • Why there’s no European Google? Lovely article arguing that Europe’s tech scene is more open and more collaborative, and less extractive, than the US equivalent.
  • Living without America and the follow-up post after that continue in the vein of wondering how much of our tech is entwined with the US.

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