Russell Davies

Endea Owens and The Cookout

Some joyful and tender jazz. Lovely.

Interesting 2022 - what we know so far

UPDATE: 23 August - I moved some speakers around

It’s still tentative but this is the rough plan for Interesting on 3 September.

A few tickets still available

NOTE WELL: We won’t be providing tea or coffee or anything. It’s Central London, there’ll be places nearby.

11am - I'll need a few volunteers to help put seats out and put bunting up. Please email me if you’re willing to do that.

11:30am - Doors open. Feel free to wander in. I think there’ll be a lot of people aiming to catch up with people they’ve not seen for a few years. This is a good opportunity for that. That’s why I’ve also included some decent time for lunch and a break in the afternoon.

Noon: GO! We’ll start with a little light introducing. I’ll tell you where the toilets and emergency exits are and we’re off.

Then

12:10: Flora Joll “The Night Watch”

12:20: Oliver Feldwick “"Get Off My Lawn: Inside the world of Lawn Bowls"

12:30: Nicki Sprinz & Helen Fuchs “Why we need ravers today”

12:40: Janet Hughes “Soil”

12:50: Nick Hand “The printing bike”

13:00: Lunch

13:45: Anne Shewring “Long grief: things I've learned from my sister dying”

13:55: Abigail Gardner “Chartreuse: Tipple, Colour and Clergy'

14:05: Ramzee “The Happy Accident: How Charles Darwin revolutionised storytelling"

14:15: Charlotte Nathan “Absolute Beginner, 33: Why you too should become a ballet dancer”

14:25: Roshnee Desai “An Indian Girl in London”

14:35: David Lowbridge-Ellis “Licence to Queer”

14:45: Break

15:15: Anab Jain "How confronting my worst fear became a metaphor for our flailing world"

15:25: Bogdana Butner “Train Therapy: How taking the train everywhere has helped me deal with adult life”

15:35: Maurice East “Detroit on Thames”

15:45: Natasha Ratanshi-Stein “Crispy onions”

16:00: FIN

Not / the end of the world

Good story 

Electrify understanding

I am fully convinced of the need to electrify everything. One of the things we're going to have to do on the way to that is understand electricity, batteries, grids etc. Intuitively. An, probably, at a societal level. ie where we get to a point where we're not surprised by things.

Some things we're going to have to learn not to be surprised by:

There might be a 10-year ban on building new houses in West London because the grid won't be able to cope - because all the capacity is used up by data centres along the M4.

 

London is running out of electricity capacity because it's all being sucked up by data centres. Things are getting so bad that housebuilders in west London have been told they can't build new homes https://t.co/GVebb1vtaA pic.twitter.com/haBaP5breC

— Matthew Garrahan (@MattGarrahan) July 28, 2022

Last week the UK bought small amounts of electricity from Belgium at 5,000% of the usual rate in order to prevent power cuts in the South East.

Makita make a battery-powered coffee brewer and a battery-powered kettle. They seem slightly pointless. But they illustrate vividly how much energy it takes to boil water. It's probably a side effect of the global battery-moated customer retention businesses that is power tools.

Those Feet

It feels like time to gather. For fun. For solidarity. So we're having a party. At the Jerusalem Bar & Kitchen, which is on Rathbone Place in London. Just north of Oxford Street. 16th of August.

We'll provide some food and music. You'll have to buy your own drinks.

There will be a bit of music from me (probably dabbling with some version of jazzycoffeeshopvibes) but I will be joined on the devices of steel by two excellent selectors: Ben Thompson and Gemma Samways. Both are music journalists and other things and I have no idea what either of them are going to play. But it will be excellent. You might get some clues from Gem's fabulous Tracks of the Day. Or from Ben's extraordinary Resonance show. (Ben's latest show will be of special interest to fans of home-modernising appliances)

Please come. All are welcome. It will be lovely to see you.

 

Rewilding PowerPoint

I finally did the talk I've been going on about. It was at the Do Lectures so it'll probably be on the internet eventually.

They wanted a title a while back so I called it "Rewilding PowerPoint".

No, me neither, no idea.

Here are links to some of the things I ended up talking about.

There were some bits of my book, segueing, mostly into heavy borrowing from Rachel Coldicutt's Let Occupy Technology with Love in its various forms.

Along the way we also touched on powerpointparties and a bit of Polly Wiessner: "Stories told by firelight put listeners on the same emotional wavelength and elicited understanding, trust, and sympathy".

@defensecharts of course.

Broad Band by Claire Evans and the ideas of Cathy Marshall.

The September Issue.

This bit of magic from Phoebe Waller Bridge.

Marie Foulston's Party in a Shared Google Doc, via Rachel.

This tweet (thanks Denise!)

DALL.E mini

And Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany (via Please Like Me)

Big thanks to all the Do-ers. Especially Chris the sound person.

Interesting Now: Nat

I'm trying to find a fresh lot of speakers for Interesting. Different, various voices. They tend to ask me, not unreasonably, what kind of thing it is. I struggle to answer but one way is to point at previous speakers.

To that end I've been interviewing people who've spoken before and asked them 'what's happened since?'

First up is Nat Buckley who spoke in 2016. About knitting. This is a fascinating 10 minutes. Give it a look. And then book yourself a ticket for more of this.

Huge thanks to Mark Boxall for the editing. (Don't blame him for the film making and sound, that was all me)

 

Notes for a talk: Cosmopolitan cover

"a wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art"

Do you really need the picture?

Notes for a talk - Artificial intelligence is creating a new world order

"Over the last few years, an increasing number of scholars have argued that the impact of AI is repeating the patterns of colonial history. European colonialism, they say, was characterized by the violent capture of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people—for example, through slavery—for the economic enrichment of the conquering country. While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the AI industry is repeating this violence today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the poor"

Technology Review

Notes for a talk - legacy creative industries

"The writing team on Barry most likely doesn't really understand algorithmic decision-making or the value of good stories, and they don't have to. But they're counting on the fact that the audience perceives algorithms as arbitrary and ruthlessly deterministic. In legacy creative industries, algorithms are the anti-art, the angry god, the unflinching paper-pusher."

The Content Technologist