- Blog
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Competence can fuck off
I learn that Photoshop is thirty. The small revelation that goes with this information is that I’ve been using Photoshop for thirty years. That’s more than half of my life so far. I began using it in my twenties, at the other end of the 1990s, under Margaret Thatcher, under George H.W. Bush, before the…
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Destroy Bitcoin. Smash the mining rigs
I first published this at Medium.com, where it’s become my most popular post. It’s a disaster. There’s no point messing around. Let’s kill it now Bitcoin (and its many mutations and outgrowths) is a planetary-scale mistake, a whiny tech-bro fantasy and an environmental catastrophe that’s already happening. A sane world would pass a UN resolution,…
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Podcasting—the platform battle
UPDATE 2026. When I updated this post in 2022 I concluded I’d got it completely wrong about who would wind up dominating podcasting. Now I’m not so sure. UPDATE 2022. I got this completely wrong – at least the bit where I decided who will win the podcast battle. If podcasting is going to become…
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Podcasting—welcome to the symphonic era
This is not about the 90% of podcasts that are still three people at a table talking about something. Nor is it about all those podcasts that are basically a byproduct of radio production. It’s about the new stuff—the bigger, glossier, narrative formats that are going to change audio and storytelling for good. This is…
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11 essentials for the modern podcast
This is one of a short series of posts about the evolution of podcasting. The first one’s about the new wave of ambitious, highly-produced storytelling formats – I’m calling it ‘the symphonic era‘ and the second is about the epic platform battle that has just begun. So I thought I’d collect some of the basic…
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Who is Trump?
A little Benito Mussolini, some John Gotti and some George Wallace. Plenty of Charles Lindbergh too, of course. But mainly he’s Rufus T. Firefly.
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Seven things I learnt from the British Library’s Magna Carta show
The British Library has a terrific, totally absorbing show about Magna Carta – which is the cornerstone of world democracy or a sort of baronial shopping list weirdly granted in a field by a King who didn’t mean it – depending on your perspective. It includes two original 1215 manuscripts and dozens of other beautiful…
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In praise of friction
Install Privacy Badger. It’s a plug-in from the EFF that blocks the nasty stuff that web site owners silently insert into your browser – tracking code, cookies and code from third-parties. It works in Firefox and Chrome (but only on a computer, not on your mobile). Now enjoy the genuinely freaky experience of wandering the…
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The electro-mechanical sublime
I visited the quite amazing Museum of Pinball in Paris last weekend. It was a revelation. The pinball machine (‘Flipper’ in France) represents some kind of high point in pre-digital coffee bar thrills. The genius of cramming so much potential ecstasy/kinetic joy into a case the size of a kitchen table. A crazy-noisy-beautiful thing. A…
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Uber’s bubble
So it turns out that Uber isn’t just a neoliberal bulldozer, dismantling restrictive practices, labour codes, tax regimes and all that – according to this article at ValleyWag, it’s also a subprime bubble waiting to happen. Uber’s problem: hiring new drivers isn’t fast enough, especially drivers with fancy cars – and that $17B valuation won’t…