Quote
-
“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
-
“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
-
“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
-
“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
-
All the news the media missed in 2025 fixthenews.com (via Miraz Jordan.)
-
“The right kind of optimism is disciplined. It begins with the premise that action changes outcomes, then organizes institutions, incentives, and narratives to make that premise true.” mongabay.com.
-
The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news writingslowly.com.
💬 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers for ‘content’ or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human.
Read more: What’s the future of creative work without human intent?
#AmWriting #Creativity #Fediblog #MediaTheory
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
Is note-making an “aide memoire” or a replacement for the source? To distill a book into notes on it, is to change our relationship with the original text. Beyond just storing facts we are building a library of our own interpretations. There’s a friction between preservation and occlusion in our digital workflows.
“When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it.”
Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#Zettelkasten #PKM #NoteMaking
💬 “We need to build digital worlds worth protecting.”
— Dr Krista Fisher, on the real manosphere. Womens Agenda
Compare like with like
When critiquing my own work it’s tempting to compare it unfavourably with something good. But almost all early drafts need improvement.
For example, here’s the final version of a well-known voiceover:
Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
Its five year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life
And new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
But here’s an early draft of that famous start to Star trek. tl;dr it sucks too. [Neatorama.com]
The lesson? If your terrible draft lacks sparkle, it might just be because almost everyone’s does, at first. So if you can’t compare like with like, then don’t compare at all.
Unless you really are planning to regulate commerce and so on.
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if this article piqued your interest you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest, where you’ll find yourself in an exclusive club whose privileged members just get a weekly email.
💬 “For good or ill, a new generation, though raised in the lap of AI, will not be speaking or writing anything like the ‘intelligence’ that raised it.” - Notes on the artificial style of writing.
#Zettelkasten #LLM #AIPhilosophy #Writing #Notemaking #AIWriting
Simon Willison says:
💬 “I’m effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email.”
I already do this easily via micro.blog and it’s a lot less convoluted. I guess he has complete control of the output though, provided he’s happy to tinker like this.
💬 The fight against the far-right is much more compelling to voters when it is framed in the practical opposition to corruption than the ideological opposition to populism. — Ian Dunt, Substack.
A lesson from Hungary for the rest of us.
Game of Likes
I was remembering that time when the MrBeast training manual was leaked and people thought it might offer some insights into how to win at YouTube. Well, it certainly gave some insights into MrBeast.
How to succeed in MrBeast Production | simonwillison.net
There was a part of the manual that made a clear argument in favour of ‘virality’:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
This is a great example of how people do things because they think they have agency but actually their environment largely conditions what they do. If you make videos for YouTube, sooner or later you’ll at least contemplate sitting in a bath of ketchup. That’s the logic of the medium controlling both what’s ‘interesting’ (50 hours in ketchup) and what’s ‘rational’ (filming it).
This little theory goes some way towards accounting for what happened to the likes of Russell Brand, the comedian turned influencer turned defendant, who seems to have pursued every attention-grabbing fashion under the sun, like a seagull checking out empty takeaway trays. It might also at least partly explain the creepy and often abusive behaviour of those ‘manosphere’ influencers in Louis Theroux’s documentary on the tendency. One of them said “I’m playing the game of life and I’m playing it very well”.
That – or the game of likes is playing him and it’s playing him very well.
Because it’s not just the medium (YouTube) that determines the message (50 hours in ketchup): there’s also the audience. ‘An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is ingfinitely more interesting…’ …well, interesting to whom exactly? The implication of the MrBeast manual was that this question was so irrelevant as to remain beneath asking. Presumably the algorithm delivered views and the view count went up, up, up. But whose views?
When you sit in a bath of ketchup for 50 hours you’ll attract the people who enjoy this kind of thing - the spectacle, the humiliation, the low-key shock value, (though presumably not especially the ketchup).
But is this the kind of attention or the kind of people you really want to attract? They just want ketchup, not you or anything else about you.
Unless and until you sit in a bath of custard.
Beginner’s mind: Flea turns to the trumpet
Here’s another great example of ‘beginner’s mind’ in action.
Flea, long famous as the amazing bass player in Red Hot Chili Peppers, has pivoted to jazz trumpet. As a kid he played trumpet with his stepfather, but he hadn’t played seriously in decades. That changed when he decided to make an album.
💬 “I decided I’m gonna play trumpet every day for two years, and at the end of the two years, I’m gonna make a record. I don’t know how good I’m gonna be at the end of two years, but I know I’m going on a two-year-long stadium tour with the Chili Peppers and I can play in my hotel room, and that’s what I’m gonna do, and that’s what I did. I practised every day for two years, and went and made my record.”
Did he know he’d be good enough after two years of daily trumpet playing? No, instead he used it as a forcing function. No matter what: put out the record.
💬 “I got insecure that I wasn’t good enough. But it was more being moved to tears by how vulnerable it felt, like I’m baring my soul. I was prepared that it might not work, that it might suck. I was prepared to fail. But I read this thing by Neil Young where he goes, “I’ve made shitty records and I still put them out because failure is important.” When I read that by Neil Young, someone I admire so much, I was like, f– yeah! If I fail, great. It’s beautiful to take a risk. If I fail, I f–ing tried.”
Well, by listening to his album, Honora, you can judge for yourself whether he failed (spoiler: he didn’t).
A review of ‘Honora’ in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Now read:
The greatest experts are serial beginners.
What Herbie Hancock learned from Miles Davis.
What Billy Strings learned from his father.
The fundamental flaw in how we learn about expertise.
—-
Thanks for reading. Did you know you can subscribe to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest?
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available right now.
💬 “You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something.” - Sam Henri-Gold
Find the right teacher
There’s a Japanese saying that I included in my book:
If it takes three years, find the right teacher.
But sometimes, you just need to get started. Simon Sarris has a great story about this. He decided to build a barn by trial and error, with little previous barn-building experience. But because he was doing this near the road in front of his house, it attracted the attention of a regular passer-by who just happened to know, in detail, how to build barns.
“Mike would have never stopped by if I was not working conspicuously in my driveway, every day, under a pop-up tent. But I was, and he became interested in my progress, and it happens that he has been timber framing since the 90’s. Had I waited for such a teacher—for he has now taught me a good deal—I would have never found him. But I chose to start, and he was drawn to my adventure. Only by virtue of starting the work was the intersection of our lives possible.” - Start With Creation - by Simon Sarris
The moral? If it takes three years, find the right teacher. But if you start your learning journey with action, the right teacher might just find you.
So now here’s a question: Who was the right teacher for you, and how did you find them, or alternatively how did they find you?
(And yes, I have a story about a teacher who found me, but that’s a story for another time.)
Photo by Kazuhiro Yoshimura on Unsplash
Meanwhile, my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, is out now. Please check it out.
Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience
I’ve never been much of a bathing person. Perhaps that’s due to unpleasantly lingering memories of luke warm water in freezing cold bathrooms in the UK when I was a child. The bath was fine enough, but getting out would be a real test. Even bathing, as an adult, in natural hot springs on Orcas Island in the US Pacific Northwest didn’t really do it for me. That was a little ‘rustic’, and not in a good way.
True, swimming here in Sydney where I live is fabulous, especially in the Summer, when the cool refreshment of the ocean waves is totally restorative. But bathing? Not so much. Until a few months ago, that is, when I visited Japan.
Every interface is an argument about how you should feel. - Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier
This is my view of writing and note-making apps, but we can change them, to feel how we want, not how someone else wants us to.
The right kind of optimism in 2026
Happy New Year! May the next 12 months bring you peace and joy and blessing.
Here are a handful of hopeful articles to get your 2026 started on a positive note. I especially recommend the first one which I found deeply inspiring.
Shu Ha Ri and the philosophy of interior design
The late interior designer Professor Shigeru Uchida discusses the importance of Shu Ha Ri for design:
💬 “The current education system lacks “Shu.” There’s a total absence of the attitude to observe, study, and learn from others. The term “breaking the mold” is common, but without having learned anything from others, one cannot depart from or break away from anything.”
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now in paperback and ebook.
💬 “The way we organise our online lives bleeds into the way we organise the rest of our social interactions. If it’s just assumed without question that the online space is a fiefdom, then democracy everywhere is undermined.”
Why niche blogs and small rooms still win
#DigitalLife #Blogging #OnlineCommunity #SmallWeb #Fediverse #Decentralization
💬 “By jumping off your roof into a paddling pool with a goat in it you’ve probably enjoyed millions of views. You’ve probably gone totally viral. But the thing is… I don’t want to be a serf on someone else’s plantation.”
💬 Everyone has principles, don’t they, until the moment they see the phrase, “MySQL wasn’t configured properly”?