‘In civilizations without [browsers], dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.’
Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 1967. Updated

The word skein is a strange one, and sadly underused. It’s got a bunch of meanings; to my mind, and when I came up the idea for this post, it was the trailing wake of something moving through a medium, but that’s actually a very minor (if not entirely subjective) definition. It also refers, specifically, to the V shape of geese flying in formation and an interesting application in knot theory, as well as being a spool of thread

Which, as I thought about it, actually fitted so well with an idea which I’ve been pondering a lot, and which came to a sort of fruition after reading both Bruce Sterling and James Bridle’s pieces on the New Aesthetic (ugh, capitalisation) and then visiting Jesse Darling’s exhibition ‘Stockholm Syndrome and Other System Failures’ exhibition. The new aesthetic and Jesse’s work are both trying to engage with facets of what it means to live in a world with mass produced and inherently digital objects and culture, and instant access to not just information that is of the world, but information that is in it; people, interactions and relationships.

So let’s talk about what I mean by ‘skein’, and why I think it’s a useful idea. The new aesthetic talks about the ways that machines ‘see’ the world; well, a facet of skein is the way the machines see *us*; especially the machines that are trained upon us. The drone is a potent symbol of this, but perhaps something more abstract in my mind; the clumsy way that the online marketing machines actually target us. Digital rights advocates (rightly) fight the acquisition and retention of personal data which goes on to be used mainly for targeting advertising. But given the volume of information collected on even the most cautious of us, the thing that must be acknowledged that these machines do not see well; we have all been chased from site to site by adverts; some intersection of our interests, google searches and browser articles means our attention is constantly being bid for by certain companies (mine are made.com and branch309.com, a converse shoe factory outlet). The ads for their products are familiar parts of the web landscape for me, popping up everywhere from the guardian website. On Amazon I am trailed by the shades of gifts I’ve bought others, or links to amusing reviews I’ve been IM’d. But the small intersection of the advertisers Venn diagrams that you fit into based on your web histories is a long way from being accurate, or, I suspect, really driving a great deal of traffic and conversions.

So I think this is the Stockholm Syndrome Jesse’s work helped me understand; that there is a comfort in, and perhaps an unhealthy forbearance of, online advertising and the impression that you are being tracked. And like stockholm syndrome, it’s the lack of exposure, violation, or even violence that brings us slowly to empathise with the point of view of the advertising drones. We feel a dissonance when we read stories of family photos being used in billboard adverts, or closeted kids being exposed by their facebook sidebar ads, or even the loyalty vouchers that Sainsbury’s had to stop sending as they knew people were trying to become pregnant before their partners and families. That dissonance is a violation of the intentionality we had ascribed to the bots; it’s to for you to watch, but don’t mess with me IRL. How deliciously voyeuristic.

The ad tracking networks are watching us, but what they see are not our footprints, just tiny impressions without narrative or intentionality. They are the malicious version of Berg’s ‘Be As Smart as a Puppy’; slavishly following and demanding attention, but occasionally pissing on the sofa or running around the house with a toilet roll.

I talked about nostalgia before; the wealth of history that you and your friends understand in it’s context, and how that can flow as part of the ‘timeline’, but not in discrete, packaged chunks. What I’m now finding is that that’s speeding up; recollection and familiarity are almost immediate, as we see quotes from articles before we’ve had a chance to rescue them from our instapaper libraries, or see them referenced in other, briefer, blog posts, or chat about them over a coffee with a colleague. Something that’s pushed this into my face is using Stellar, an app which is hard to describe, but addictive. It (as far as I can tell) let’s me follow people whose updates I often ‘like’ (or fave, or star, or whatever), and it shows me *what they liked*. And so it’s this hodgepodge of ‘read later’ starring, personal scrap booking and awesome tweets, videos and photos, with the most interesting updates being items that only one person has faved. This is an important part of what I think of as the social skein of the internet.

In the days of myspace, we had to actively seek the out updates and activity from our friends; the activity stream was in some ways Facebook’s breakthrough. While the stream wasn’t a new concept, Face made it their own, and adapted, tweaked, optimised and redesigned it countless times to keep you coming back, to keep you ‘liking’, and to actually show you relevant content. It works pretty well, in that you’re unlucky to ever miss a friends birth, engagement or birthday announcement, but not so well that you feel that you’ve seen all you need to. The clumsy metric is still the same; if something has more likes, comments or other interactions, I’ll see it. Recently, though, I’m seeing links being shared, and watching the spread of ‘content’ (oh please, let’s not bring up Kony 2012 here). But what content?

If the advertising skein is that of the wake of the boat, then this aspect is more like the geese flying in formation; a more traditional confirmation bias, but externalised. The machines are presenting me with the content they know I will click on, or like, and not even letting me make my own decision as to whether I feel like being challenged today. Except to articles like poor Samantha Brick’s, which are flagged up as controversial, and which was perfectly launched by the Mail’s online team at the monday morning coffee drinkers were blearily checking their twitter.

In fact, let’s talk (briefly) about that Kony video. Why was it so insanely popular, so fast? Because of how it was seeded; by ensuring that it was pushed into lots of different social groups and shared inside these tribes over a period of 48 hours, Invisible Children made sure that the algorithms pushed it to everyone who was checking their feeds. Twitter’s ‘trending’ algorithms frustrate activists because topics that are ongoing and popular don’t appear, and loud volumes between similar users are ignored. What the Kony video did was ensure that there were new groups beginning to talk about the video constantly, tricking the algorithms into seeing freshness. And didn’t it work well.

So the content machines know what they can shovel at us, and the advertising drones think they know what we want to buy, and thankfully mostly this just isn’t working that well. But our skeins are becoming more defined and more codified. We are going to have to become literate about the ways we are seen by the machines; not just in terms of wearing dazzle makeup to avoid facial recognition, but learning to hack the behavioural predictors.

I’ve lived most of my life in london in pretty close proximity to Thomas Bayes’ grave, and made a few visits. Bayes’ statistics help us to understand a simple question; if this thing has happened (or, more precisely, if we now have more information about something), how does that affect the chances of another thing happening (or, again, more precisely, another statement being true). It helps us avoid spam email, but it’s starting to hinder us with poorly targeted advertising and clumsy invitations to bolster the opinions we already hold (or at least look at yet another adorable puppy gif). We need to start to think about what it would mean to have perfectly targeted recommendations for things to buy, eat, see, watch, drink, visit, read, listen too and so on. And we need to ask if it’s a good thing, and if not, how we can stop the machines trying to understand us.

And finally, that spool of thread, doubled, doubled and knotted, that is also a skein. Foucault’s work on 20th century power relationships talks about “a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein”; he’s saying this in the context of his term ‘heterotopia’, described in ‘Of Other Spaces’. Heterotopia is (put as simply as one can with Foucault), the existence between actual social realities and societal utopias. Foucault says the ship is the perfect heterotopia, existing between spaces and time and self contained; I think the browser is the perfect heterotopia of our time; a space we can enter and exist, but wherein we become someone else and engage with more ideal forms of 21st century society. The smartphone generation see this, escaping into a 3.5” rectangle of glass, escaping the difficulty of IRL life for the comforting updates, alerts and codified status updates of virtual friends. We must resist this comforting anonymity and ensure we take the best of online, offline, while fighting the urge to farmville our lives away. Jesse’s work highlights this; the 640×480 framed anonymous cleavage of the reply girl, inviting trolls in an urge to be empowered and even paid through the reclaiming of ‘tits or GTFO’, and the comforting familiarities of Billy bookshelves that you and everyone you know owns; the cultural vehicle to say, ‘sure, I read, but not in a threatening fashion’, as facets of the same urge; to be accepted, we have to immerse ourselves in this culture of exhibition that has sprung up, and endorse the signs and signifiers that go along with whatever persona we have decided represents us best, while still being able to belief we are a unique and delicate snowflake.

To conclude; the idea here is that we need to become aware of, and attempt to control, our skein online. Understand how we are seen by the advert drones, and subvert them to be sure that we each remain the market sector of one we all so desperately believe we are; take comfort in the trail of poorly targeted adverts we see. Resist the comfortable content your networks place in front of you all the time, and seek out people who will seed your timeline with uncomfortable truths and contrary opinions. Understand that your browser is just that, for browsing, and that for real human connection and insight, we must find the best balance of online and offline, and take our place, not as render ghosts, but as residents.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

On remembering

“There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.”
― Dante Alighieri

Last week I signed up for insta-nostalgia service timehop, which promises to keep you updated with your tweets, facebooks posts, instagram picturs and foursquare pictures from 365 days before. I’ve been using superficially similar service twitshift for a while now, and really enjoyed the experience of seeing what @old_felix_cohen was up to. Twitshift is a service that creates a twitter account that tweets your tweets from a year ago; they suggest that you make it private, and only follow it yourself, which I agree entirely with.

But something went awry very quickly for me with timehop’s service; after just two days emails, I unsubscribed, and sent a grumpy tweet about the copywriting on the email, having been chided for not posting in high enough volume. Now, that presents an issue for me; why should I post more than one update a day; the idea that volume is an indicator of how ‘good’ you are at social media is absurd. Some of my favourite twitter accounts are amazingly low traffic, but astoundingly high quality when they do tweet. In fact, I tend to unfollow high volume tweeters (and twitter, it should be noted, is where i tend to see foursquare and instagram activity too) because they swamp the timeline.

Following 50k people is an effective way to build relationships with anyone who’s dim enough to believe you read over 1,000,000 toots a day.

— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) November 2, 2009

But anyway, that feels like a trite observation; it’s a common assumption that volume on social media is equivalent to quality; but come on, snide observations do not great copy make, and as Jonathan Wegener (co-founder at timehop) pointed out in a long twitter conversation with me and Dan Williams (@iamdanw), they’re aware of this issue and are sorting it out. So, tick, problem solved, I hope. It genuinely seems like a misstep, rather than intentional flippancy.

@felix_cohen @iamdanw The quips are something we struggle with. It’s often with *very* emotional content so it can be great or terrible

— Jonathan Wegener (@jwegener) January 13, 2012

@felix_cohen we just had a copywriter go through and write a bunch more of them — we made him make them all uplifting..not insulting.

— Jonathan Wegener (@jwegener) January 13, 2012

However, as I thought more about it, I realised that the cheeky copywriting wasn’t the root issue for me; sure, that’s not for me, but I appreciate why it’s there and maybe who it’s for.

Memento Mori

“Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you’ll die!”

Tertullian, Apologeticus

Hans Holbein the Younger - The_Ambassadors

The memento mori is a rich tradition for those who create; remember that you shall die, and your creations are what may live on. These are the facets of memory and nostalgia; a reminder of what was, what was felt, an opportunity to compare what is to what could have been, and a nudge to strive for better.

Nostalgia can be comforting or scary, it can be unbidden or designed for, but it is a powerful thing that can pounce on any of us.

Nostalgia is a rush, the involuntary memory that rushes over us and bodily transports us to another time. It’s terrifying, and awesome, and difficult to manage.

And that’s why I think we need to be really cautious about how we mine the archives of the real-time web. As we learn to disclose more, and learn about who sees what, the opportunity for our historical unbidden thoughts to catch us unaware is growing, and we are going to have to learn to design for that.

On digests and digesting

But there’s a deeper disconnect between twitshift and timehop, and it’s the digest.

Twitshift is so incredibly emotive because, well, it makes year-ago-me a person, with emotional struggles, successes, grumpy asides and awful puns. I don’t remember most of these tweets, but damn, some of them can be affective. The thing is, I never expect them, but on seeing them, I really am often briefly transported to that moment. Sometimes I remember what I said 20 minutes later, and wait on that, sometimes year-ago-me has travails and difficulties that I know he’ll overcome, and sometimes he has great success that cheers me up and encourages me. What he does best, though, is remind me how much happens in a year, and how trivial concerns can be 12 months later. And that’s glorious. It is a wonderful memento mori, reminding me of the passage of time without pushing memory at me. The perfect involuntary memories, gently pushed into my awareness.

Timehop (and to a lesser extent, TimeCapsule) send you a digest instead. Mostly, that’s because of restrictions in the media they’ve chosen. Facebook probably won’t allow year-ago-me accounts, because where’s the ad revenue in that, and it doesn’t quite fit into their interface as a concept. Flickr, instagram, foursquare all have this problem to some extent, though I think instagram could be the easiest to solve it for, as it shares the stream of twitter views.

Facebook Timeline instead tries to design for nostalgia, and, you know what, it works pretty well. As Matt Ogle pointed out (obliquely, and I hope i don’t misinterpret here);

We’re gonna need architectures for forgetting

— Matthew Ogle (@flaneur) September 22, 2011

If anything, the problem with facebook timeline is it could be too overwhelming. The list of life events, like major illnesses, could just be too emotive to review…nostalgia needs to be summonable, but not invasive.

@felix_cohen @iamdanw and we’ve had the opposite — a guy who had one post about his dog dying and our service made fun of him.

— Jonathan Wegener (@jwegener) January 13, 2012

But the digest itself, as form, is naturally intrusive; it’s a package that says (certainly with it’s roots as mailing list management practice), “you’ve decided not to deal with events in this context as they happen, so here’s a overview of everything from this day/week/month”). And that’s great for a mailing list, where the majority of discussions may not affect you, or to make sure that interruptions are kept to a minimum (the ongoing battle of modern communications).

And therein lies the problem with digests of nostalgia; nostalgia works when unbidden, when it catches you unaware. It can never be intentional, it can never be summoned. You can introduce the opportunity for it, as with twitshift, but to sign up to a service that neatly packages my memories and doles them out for me to wake up to each morning? No thanks, it’s just not for me.

“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer

We all believed that the network would become the city; instead, is the city becoming the network?

I guess, because of the trope of ‘moving to cities was a huge social adaptation, so the internet is no bigger deal’, we might have gorged on the (admittedly useful) comparisons between cities and the network. Our early media about the network was flooded with images of the network as city; in text with Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, on screen in Tron, Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, and Hackers (just watch the birds eye view of cars morphing to ‘electrons’ here):

And the language we use to talk about the network also shows this creep; things like site maps, information architecture and especially the physical manifestations of the network, with server ‘farms’ and the weird and often brutally urban physicality of data hubs.

One of the works that got me into information architecture and user experience was Kevin Lynch’s ‘The Image of The City‘; a chatty and approachable treatise on how we navigate our way around cities, the ways we visualise and understand our position in them and what coping strategies we’ve developed. Lynch talked about the imageability of the city; the ways in which residents and visitors can understand how the city is laid out and what the overall shape was; what he found was people defined their cities by landmarks, key routes between them and districts. Reasonably, this way of looking at navigation and systems understanding made it’s way into how we think about designing websites…while we have moved on from the gauche obviousness of the GeoCities communities, we are still tied to a metaphor of place in information; visiting websites, going back and forward, even the faux inside/outsideness of logging in and out.

But the city and the network have grown together in new and unexpected ways.

“the skating urban anarchist employs the handiwork of the government/urban corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never even dream of: sidewalks for parking,streets for driving, pipes for liquid, sewers for refuse etc., all have been reworked into a new social order” – John Smythe, SkateBoarder magazine

Iain Borden’s ‘Skateboarding and the City’ was the book that disillusioned me with Lynch; this is a great romp through the more situationist and critical theory of the city, but what grabbed me was the unashamed subjectiveness of his city dwellers. Or not so much dwellers as users, because the skateboarders he writes about are engaged viscerally with the city in a way that is not about simply getting from A to B, engaging in commuting, touristing or even the Baudelairean flaneur. This is the city as a place to play, not work. And this engagement is what we are seeing on the network; not a Snow Crash metaverse, but Borges‘ garden of forking paths (there is much more to be said about Borges’ prefiguring of the ways the world would work).

And I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place.

No, these people don’t know what they want, but they’ve grown used to virtual spaces where that can be discovered; where a manifesto is on a wiki, and where consensus building allows populism, complexity and ambiguity to coexist. They are trying to forge these spaces in the city; simply come by the occupation, talk to some people, be Kanye West and stride silently through, be a banker who cannot help but face the perception of bankers, or be a police officer who is genuinely torn about what to do. The Occupy movement forces us to question the city in, weirdly, almost the same way that a facebook redesign manages to cause so much dissatisfaction; it throws a space we take for granted in our face and demands to know if this is what you expected.

I hope that this is the new city; not as Kevin Lynch saw it; a clustering of destinations and strategies for getting there, but as a place where everything happens in the cracks between the canonical. Where skaters, protesters, critical mass-ers, warehouse party goers and everyone else express themselves through their choices of canvas, space and activity. The city is becoming the network, and that’s a great thing.

“OK, a thesis: boomers stole prospects from this generation, bankers stole cash, govt stole chance to succeed. What the fuck do you expect?”

To expand: I’m at the top end of a generation who have watched as, for at least the last 10 years explicitly, a majority of an older generation, especially in a country over the sea, decide they would cling to their privilege, the next generation be damned. The tea partyis the most obvious example of this, but the whole damn neo-con movement and economic protectionism covers this; there is either a vocal minority or, shudder, a majority, who believe it’s ok to incur debt and not pay it back.

The bankers, too, seem to have the most public gall. Rabidly clawing in bailouts because of their bad decisions, and abusing the power ‘the market’ has been given to keep enriching themselves. £14 billion in bonuses. You know what:

£14 billion in bonuses. THIS YEAR.

The pressure of an older generation to support and the bare faced cheek of the banks and markets are supported entirely by a government that really wasn’t ‘elected’ to power. I voted for labour in my first election, lib dem everyone since, and I used to be so angry when people didn’t vote. Now, or at least next time, probably not. It hurts me to say it, but I can’t vote for anyone in this system.

So why are we surprised that a single, small event has catalyised this incredible explosion of frustration across London?

These kids (and they mainly are kids, of both genders, and of all races), united by age and socioeconomics, watch as even people my age seem to be doing, well, OK, and they have no idea how they will have a future, let alone the one we have promised them on TV, in films and in music.

So yes, they are on the streets, frustrated, angry, looking for the trappings of the life they were promised. And it’s so, so, so sad that they are attacking their own communities, and ruining whatever prospects they had. But we must not allow the media or government to demonise them for this; it’s all of our fault, and we knew it was coming, and we did nothing to stop it.

“It is obviously the period immediately preceding a clash with the police, who are guarding a nuclear power plant, a military training camp, the headquarters of a political party, or the win­dows of an embassy. The young people have taken advantage of this dead time to make a circle and take two steps in place, one step forward, lift first one leg and then the other — all to a simple folk melody.

I think I understand them. They feel that the circle they describe on the ground is a magic circle bonding them into a ring. Their hearts are overflowing with an intense feeling of innocence: they are not united by a march, like soldiers or fascist commandos; they are united by a dance, like children. And they can’t wait to spit their innocence in the cops’ faces.

That is the way the photographer saw them too, and he high­lighted his view with eloquent contrasts: on the one side the police in the false (imposed, decreed) unity of their ranks, on the other side the young people in the real (sincere and organic) unity of their circle; on the one side the police in the gloom of their ambush, on the other the young people in the joy of their play.”

Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Over the last 6 months or so this idea has been coming to the fore of my mind; what we are going to witness over the next 10(+) years, and what we’ve seen the bare beginnings of in the student protests and especially UKUncut (more on that later) is an understanding that, well, maybe we won’t get anything done, but at least we’ll have fun trying. It’s a straight up middle finger to a generation of dour union protesters sitting around in the rain, shouting ‘scab’ at passersby. We’re here, and we’re having fun, because that’s what’s being taken away from us.

Ranked against this new playful protest movement are the pinstriped ranks of the banal. The bankers, politicians, ACPO and even some of the old unions, plus our favourite sparring partner, the Conservative party, are contriving to be, well, just so fucking serious about everything.

Maybe it’s because we grew up playing games, or watching the Goonies, but this group of Gen-X/Y/Millenial (oh, and there are a few boomers knocking about, alright), just can’t seem to take the powers that be very seriously. Day X3 was noted for the way that protesters took it on themselves to lead the police on a merry run around the city, but no-one I knew who was there did it because of a belief that was the point of the protest. We wanted to be talked about, and someone was trying to stop us, so how did we react? Not in the serious Marx/Lenin/Trotsky mode of discussing what it meant as workers, nor even as self-consciously as the situationists, but rather as though it was a game. People had Sukey to guide them, and the more they won, the more fun it became.

This is politics from a generation that’s seen a thousand keystone kops clips in our painfully hip mashups. While it’s taken a lead from the situationist tradition, the new protest brings whimsy; the perfect lance for the boil of pomposity on the nose of the powerful.

And this is where I think UKUncut certainly misstepped; the occupation of Fortnum and Mason was a terribly earnest undertaking, and, while it wasn’t about this, it certainly reeked of the politics of the class war and will, I fear, mark the moment that movement started to decline (ably assisted, of course, by the punitive arrests of the occupiers).

Imagine instead, that UKUncut had gone to lend solidarity to the police who had preemptively closed Boots, Vodafone and Topshop. They certainly couldn’t have left with a large group there, but would have had to stand while being earnestly congratulated for doing UKUncuts job for them. It’s awkward and potentially hilarious.

So let’s not disregard the energy this movement has; it can maintain it’s networked roots, supporting and enabling playful protests and occupation that move before the establishment has a chance to respond, befriending grannies in the street and forcing smiles out of the side of police officers faces. New targets need to be established, and a clear narrative of alternatives, not opposition to the cuts allowed to merge. Cameron has made it clear what he thinks of the intelligence of the hoi polloi. He needs to learn the old adage, and find out that he’s only fooled some of the people, some of the time.

Vice-Chancellor,

I write with regard to the impending rise in the rate of tuition fees that appears likely to be passed by parliament, despite the valiant efforts of young adults, academics and other engaged members of civil society. I appreciate that Bath University, as one of the leading universities in the country, will be keen to increase its income through this channel, especially as the Coalition government makes it clear that university funding will be slashed now, and potentially again (and again…) in future.

However, as an alumnus of the university, I ask that you consider students from all backgrounds in your decision of how much to increase the fees that the institution charges; £9000 a year, even when paid back after graduation, is an incredibly prohibitive and punishing amount of debt to saddle future graduates with; my own debts from even £1500 per annum fees and the student loan program are significant, and I cannot understand what good it would do for society for our future scientists, engineers, artists, managers &c. to begin their professional careers crippled by tens of thousands of pounds of debt.

A generation of students and potential students is being radicalised by this decision, and, although I will not be affected, I firmly believe that implementing this policy will damage both the British higher education sectors success and repute, as well as the long term recovery of our economy. As such, I implore you not to raise Bath’s fees above the existing rate, and certainly not above the £6000 threshold, and to use your position as a leading and respected academic and education professional to campaign against the proposed fee increase, as well as supporting your students and academics in their protests against these rises.

Should Bath take the decision to increase fees to the maximum allowed, I regret to say I will no longer feel any compulsion to support the university through the Alumni programme (I appreciate that the Alumni fund is sometimes used to support students from poorer backgrounds, but I assume that the decision to charge such large amounts will render it unnecessary).

Sincerely,

Felix Cohen
2006 Graduate, Psychology BSc

I’m not sure I agree; my single point of data is that I still use my RSS, less ’cause I’m busy right now, but I add and prune my feeds and, looking at my Reader stats: “From your 217 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,644 items, clicked 265 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.”, other than Google’s woeful social functions, I think I’m doing pretty well.

I also think there’s an advanced user/early adopter thing here, at least when you have Dave Winer and Scoble posting about it.

But I also suspect there’s an interesting cognitive trick at play; items in your twitter stream are likely to be things you agree with/aesthetically enjoy or, if not, that are framed by the snide little remark preceding the link. So your bias for all these pieces of content that have been filtered through people like you is pretty high, and it’s this confirmation bias that makes me value social news so much less than my own curated sources. Now, I suffer a little from self-selected selection in my Reader, but there’s a good few provocative links, articles and the like which I probably wouldn’t see on twitter. Add to that the niche bartending, coding and other sites, plus social updates from Flickr and delicious in the reader, and I really don’t value my social news stream that much. Sorry paper.li users.

I want to read news from sources I am used to, I want to follow story arcs and webcomic plots, and I tend to want to do it in a more immersive fashion than twitter affords. RSS Readers hit you right in the Zone of Proximal Development, and that’s why I’m sticking to my well tended OPML file^†.

^† I wish OKCupid would hurry up and let me upload my OPML file for their matching algorithm

First I sold a suit; the suit my mom had bought me for my uni interviews, and which informed a lot of my suit tastes. Oh, the times I had had wearing that suit. What’s more, it’s more than ample fitting proved to me I’d at least managed a little weight loss at some point.

So the suit’s value is in reminding me of a few well learned lessons, and being the hook for some stories that are now a part of the tapestry of my life; I try to avoid being a big anecdotalist, and a pared down set of the stories I told myself seems wise; these things have become tacit. Off the suit went, and a load went from my shoulders. Getting rid of stuff is easy.

As Sam Hughes at Things of Interest puts it:

But it may make you happier. It is not a weight off my soul, but it is a weight off my mindnot to have too much to worry about.

I have very little storage space, so, the less stuff I have, the more room I have for myself.

I can’t stand clutter, so the less stuff I have, the more space there is on the table for works-in-progress, and the easier it is to clear it entirely in preparation for a meal.

Cruft is what comp sci people refer to as when a piece of software slowly builds up distracting and confusing code; stuff for handling edge cases that never occur now, weird dependencies and utility classes filled with cryptic comments and version control artefacts. It’s, arguably, why Apple made such a great decision when they went to OSX, and why Vista failed; way too much cruft to support older applications that the whole OS was too slow. (Here’s the jargon file entry)

But cruft, as a concept, has wider implications. Think of it as ‘accretion’; the slow building up of barnacles on the hull of a ship that, at some point, necessitate dry dock, scraping back to bare metal and some new means to stave off the inevitable biofouling for a few more months.

It’s possible to deal with cruft in an ongoing fashion, sure, but sometimes a good refactoring is what you need, whether it’s your code base, your ships hull, or, indeed, the pile of crap you lug from rented house to rented apartment. Which is what I’m doing.

Unfinished projects; I’ve got ‘em. What to do with the vintage electric thing that could/should/might become a clock, or the scattered few breadboards for proof of concepts. Also, the unfinished books, half sewn things, half hemmed trousers and other debris of someone who is, frankly, better at starting than finishing. These things are the worst; guilt, staring at me from the top shelf of a wardrobe and the stacked bits on the side of my desk. Triage, I suspect, has to be the answer here. Sit down, work out the big rocks and the small pebbles, leave enough stuff to finish something useful and/or awesome, and ditch the rest. Maybe I didn’t need that nixie tube clock anyway.

It feels good to have a clear out. Cathartic, not painful, and potentially lucrative, if I can work out the ebay tides. Storage is cheap, leaving stuff at your parents even more so. Get rid of the big stuff first, keep anything small that makes you smile and rip any media you can.

And of course, some acquisitions are more fun to get rid of than others.

I was dispatched off to great western wines before my shift one night, the local good booze pusher, for supplies, and decided to grab myself a bottle of this. Because I was fresh to this game and thought different might be better than definitely good, I went with the odd bottle the staff were evidently having trouble shifting (and what a lovely bottle it is, too). Which was a lucky guess in this case, as the Sotol is lovely; like tequila, but without any of the roughness and much, much more complex taste. Makes a fine margarita, too.

Get some at Vintage House in Soho:  (and ignore the comments about the staff, they were lovely when I went in)

Drinking a gorgeous margarita with this stuff now; remember, no flavor crap, just straight up (also, not frozen); 2 Tequila, 2 lime, 1 triple sec.

Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman accept that, on the CPS‘s lack of proceeding against the officer, one aspect that causes concern is his alleged chequered history? According to press reports, he left the Met under a cloud, was re-employed as a clerk, successfully applied to Surrey constabulary for a position and then transferred back to the Met. Can the right hon. and learned Gentleman advise us, in his knowledge, whether that aspect of Metropolitan Police Authority recruitment policy is being examined as part of the process in respect of the prosecution, and whether, if there is a lesson for the Home Office on inter-constabulary transfers, that matter will be brought to the attention of the House?

My MP has replied to the letter below:

Thanks for the e mail Mr Cohen. I’ll let the relevant people know how you feel,
Best Wishes, Jim

Dear Jim Fitzpatrick,

It is with great dismay that I read the outcome of the ongoing investigation into the unfortunate death of Ian Tomlinson. My sentiment is that the actions of the CPS and Metropolitan Police in this case demonstrate a clear and unambiguous desire to protect police officers and avoid the application of justice from a jury.  A catalogue of errors and dubious behaviour has taken place, including, but not limited to:

• the appointment of Dr Patel as coroner

• the behaviour, public pronouncements and equivocating of senior police staffers in dealing with both the Tomlinson family and press after the event.

• the withholding of evidence of assault until a day after the statue of limitations for the charge had passed

• the opacity of the police disciplinary procedure

• the institutional behaviour of the TSG in covering identifying badges and wearing masks.

• the unacceptable delays in the CPS’s announcement

It is clear that the IPCC and CPS are riddled with biased and compromised individuals and institutionally incapable of effecting justice in cases such as this.

I ask that you raise this issue and campaign for the establishment of a transparent, public body for the investigation of police criminal behaviour, as well as the abolishment of the Territorial Support Group, who behave more like the Basij of Iran than the police force we expect and deserve in our country. I appreciate that the Houses (rightly) do not have powers over the Police, however, I feel that vocal objections, questions in the house and a change in the way that the forces are regulated is the only way to restore faith in the police in this country and to allow the family of Ian Tomlinson to receive the justice they need.

Yours sincerely,

Felix Cohen