Russell Davies

Signs for the times

Alex is right about the general standard of signs, but I hadn't thought about how much it sometimes matters. She's right. Sometimes it's more than a petty annoyance.

Maybe we should try this sort of thing.

Essays After Eighty

I'm not sure why but I've started making daily videos on TikTok in the way I used to do daily blogging over here. Some of them are based on books, it's sort of turning into a thing.

I've putting them in other places too, because it feels precarious to rely on a single platform. Here are some of the things about Donald Hall's Essays After Eighty.

Interesting 2026 - RSS first

hello RSS massive

You're the first to know. Interesting 2026 will be on the 20th of May.

The First 100 tickets are £30. After that they'll be £40.

Get tickets here.

This is a good listen

No coffee morning on Wednesday

I think this is just for Jez's info. But, still.

Notes on substack

I have a few friends with Substack newsletters. Mostly writers trying to find a way to make a living as the rest of their various industries collapse. They're mostly not in this little bubble - where substack's Nazi / underpant gnomes problems are well understood. They're mostly just pleased that substack makes newsletters easy and there appears to be a well-paved path to making some money.

Personally, I suspect they're going to end up in trouble. It will inevitably fall apart and they'll have built another house on sand. But this can be a hard case to make, there's nothing as comfy-looking as a port in a storm. And I don't want to lecture anyone, it's very hard to be on the internet without compromise. Maybe we should all have shamerolls below our blogrolls. Mine wouldn't be pretty.

But, in case it's useful, I'm going to keep this post as a place to collect evidence/arguments.

AMC: Substack did not see that coming (Thanks Phil)

AMC: Pushing up Nazis

Colin Nagy: We’ve gone from some high minded Jane Jacobs INTERNET discourse to Nazi notifications in mere weeks!

Anil Dash: Don't call it a substack (Thanks again Phil)

And, the clue is in the URL leavesubstsack (Thanks Tom)

An unusual person's singular perspective

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose" - Dolly Parton

(Washington Post review of a book on Conde Nast)

"Grynbaum pointed out that many of the most popular Substacks — such as the various shopping newsletters and Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, a highly influential roundup of gossip and stories from across tech, media, style and business — are about an unusual person’s singular perspective. There is still a desire for figures who can point us, and our attention spans, to what is worth watching, buying, talking about or pondering."

The 12-hour bus is still tiny

A new episode of 4764

Big totem

I'm convinced by this by Ben Thompson (from here)

"...So, are existing publishers doomed?

Well by-and-large yes, but that’s because they have been doomed for a long time. People using AI instead of Google — or Google using AI to provide answers above links — make the long-term outlook for advertising-based publishers worse, but that’s an acceleration of a demise that has been in motion for a long time.

To that end, the answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: build a direct connection with readers. This, by extension, means business models that maximize revenue per user, which is to say subscriptions (the business model that undergirds this site, and an increasing number of others).

What I think is intriguing, however, is the possibility to go back to the future. Once upon a time publishing made countries; the new opportunity for publishing is to make communities. This is something that AI, particularly as it manifests today, is fundamentally unsuited to: all of that content generated by LLMs is individualized; what you ask, and what the AI answers, is distinct from what I ask, and what answers I receive. This is great for getting things done, but it’s useless for creating common ground.

Stratechery, on the other hand, along with a host of other successful publications, has the potential to be a totem pole around which communities can form. Here is how Wikipedia defines a totem pole:

The word totem derives from the Algonquian word odoodem [oˈtuːtɛm] meaning “(his) kinship group”. The carvings may symbolize or commemorate ancestors, cultural beliefs that recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. The poles may also serve as functional architectural features, welcome signs for village visitors, mortuary vessels for the remains of deceased ancestors, or as a means to publicly ridicule someone. They may embody a historical narrative of significance to the people carving and installing the pole. Given the complexity and symbolic meanings of these various carvings, their placement and importance lies in the observer’s knowledge and connection to the meanings of the figures and the culture in which they are embedded. Contrary to common misconception, they are not worshipped or the subject of spiritual practice.

The digital environment, thanks in part to the economics of targeted advertising, the drive for engagement, and most recently, the mechanisms of token prediction, is customized to the individual; as LLMs consume everything, including advertising-based media — which, by definition, is meant to be mass market — the hunger for something shared is going to increase.

We already have a great example of this sort of shared experience in sports. Sports, for most people, is itself a form of content: I don’t play football or baseball or basketball or drive an F1 car, but I relish the fact that people around me watch the same games and races that I do, and that that shared experience gives me a reason to congregate and commune with others, and is an ongoing topic of discussion.

Indeed, this desire for a communal topic of interest is probably a factor in the inescapable reach of politics, particularly what happens in Washington D.C.: of course policies matter, but there is an aspect of politics’ prominence that I suspect is downstream of politics as entertainment, and a sorting mechanism for community.

In short, there is a need for community, and I think content, whether it be an essay, a podcast, or a video, can be artifacts around which communities can form and sustain themselves, ultimately to the economic benefit of the content creator. There is, admittedly, a lot to figure out in terms of that last piece, but when you remember that content made countries, the potential upside is likely quite large indeed."

 

No coffee morning on Wednesday...

...but there are slots available for Unoffice hours.