James Bell Central

Author: James Bell

  • January 2026: Newsletter 101

    January 2026: Newsletter 101

    There’s gonna be a lot of changes round ‘ere.

    January 2026

    Newsletter 101

    This is the 101st edition of my newsletter, and I’m changing everything. I’m changing where it lives. I’m changing how it looks. I’m changing my whole approach to putting my music, and my thoughts, out in the world. And, by golly, it’s actually fun again.

    Okay, to be fair, at the moment it looks pretty much the same as it always did, but it now lives on my website rather than on the Mailchimp email newsletter platform.

    I’ll explain the reasons for the move in a bit, but it’s part of a shift in focus for me that I’m really excited by.

    I’ve rediscovered why personal websites are amazing, and generally undervalued and underappreciated. After years of lock-in on social media platforms, I’m really struck by how much you can do with them.

    Now, I have left this website to collect dust and mildew for a number of years, and despite my frantic updating in the last few days, I’m sure lots of it is still broken – sorry! But I feel like I actually have a vision for how it should work in future.

    In fact, this month I’ve got a bit carried away and maybe done a bit too much on this in too short space of time, so I feel like it might be even more chaotic than usual, but here’s what we have:

    A whole new separate section for the dark political stuff, so it’s a lot easier to avoid for anyone who isn’t feeling it. And also, some light relief I made last year.

    In terms of recommendations, it’s mainly folk or folk-adjacent music – some new, some old. But there’s also a couple of oddball recommendation choices in there too.

    And there’s also a lot about how to do creative projects online. Within a hostile and increasingly toxic walled-garden internet.

    Basically, I think we make our own little spaces of refuge.

    And this is mine.

    Featured

    MICROSONGS

    One fun by-product of overhauling this website is I’ve been trawling through all the stuff I’ve made over the years. This batch of microsongs is actually probably the most recent.

    Some of them are literally just a few seconds long, but each one cuts right to the very quick of the human condition.

    Be prepared to go on a pyscho-philosophical journey.

    Bring snacks.

    Featured

    THE QUIET PART LOUD

    Something I’ve written about before is that there is this tension being an artist in, or even just adjacent to, authoritarianism. Either you make your art about what the regime is doing, in which case they kind of win, or you ignore it, in which case you are tacitly treating it as normal, in which case you are tacitly endorsing it, in which case they win.

    I feel like it’s difficult to have something to say, however small your audience, if you’re not addressing the rampaging elephant in the room. But it can’t be the only thing you have to say. As we say now: joy is resistance.

    So I want to pull all my thoughts on the current state of world politics into a regular, but separate, article which readers can dip into if they’re interested, but which they can just avoid if they want to.

    This is the Quiet Part Loud.

    Read the article

    Recommended

    PANTO HORSE SONG

    Sometimes, it can just be as simple as clicking on a video by a musician you’ve never heard of because the title suggests it’s about a pantomime horse.

    A sweet and (deliberately) silly song. Highly recommended.

    Recommended

    MAVIN GAYE’S CLUELESS ASS

    Screenshot of a Spotify playlist by 'Diego' entitled "Marvin Gaye's clueless ass". The tracklist includes: What's Going On, What's Happening Brother, When Did You Stop Loving Me, Where Are We Going, I Don't Know Why, Why Did I Choose You, etc. It has 18,257 saves.

    This might be the first time that I’ve recommended a meme.

    But I saw this screenshot on Bluesky, and it keeps making me smile. (No disrespect to one of the greats of Motown.)

    It’s odd to suggest that a Spotify playlist could have perfect comic timing, but it does.

    Recommended

    CLAUDE CODE

    I appear to be recommending an AI tool from one of the big AI companies.

    But there has been so much talk about Claude Code that I feel like it’s worth identifying the cultural influence it’s having.

    Software developers are saying that this has already changed the way they make a code forever.

    Although, it’s probably worth adding a cautious caveat that I’ve also heard: making code is now incredibly cheap, but making software is still expensive. Edge cases, server maintenance, bandwidth costs, etc.

    But still, it seems pretty incredible.

    Recommended

    THE MUSIC WE LOST

    I mentioned that I’m trying to parcel off all the more distressing stuff into a separate article.

    This is, in its way, a pretty distressing video, detailing the Irish famine of the 1840s and how it has affected Irish music, culture and life ever since.

    It was recommended on the local folk Discord server, and if you are a folk nerd, I highly recommend checking it out.

    Recommended

    KYNTRA

    Another recommendation from the Bad Tradition Discord server. This time of a folk duo – one of whom I was in The Reverenzas with a million years ago.

    I haven’t seen young Henry Webster in a long time, as he lives in that London now. Although, rumour has it he’s been to local sessions and I’ve just missed him.

    But he was a great fiddle player then and he’s a great fiddle player now. The guitar playing is pretty great too.

    Recommended

    BJÖRK SINGS THE ANCHOR SONG (IN ICELANDIC)

    I still believe that Björk doesn’t get the recognition she deserves, as being perhaps Europe’s singular musical genius of the 1990s.

    Despite her playful genre-hopping, I still associate her with the electronic, synthetic, modernistic.

    But in this video, she just rides up to a local Icelandic church on her bicycle and plays the last song on her first debut album, singing in Icelandic.

    It’s a whole different side to her, and it feels to me like a ray of sun on a heavily overcast day.

    Here are the lyrics:

    I live by the ocean / And during the night / I dive into it / Down to the bottom / Underneath all currents / And drop my anchor / This is where I’m staying / This is my home

    Upcoming Events

    Friday 13th February

    Every second Friday of the month. This one’s for the lovers. (And the scuba divers, because the pub will probably be underwater.)

    Dear Diary…

    A couple of years ago I was so happy that I had finally found the ideal creative channel for making music the way I wanted to make it: YouTube. I would record music, and make music videos, and then document the process of making them and comment on any interesting tangents along the way. The videos were way too long and unfocused, but I don’t regret making them like that. It gave me the room to experiment, and find a new format that I could refine over time.

    Then… yeah. Trump. Again.

    His return sent panic through the jobs market, making it suddenly much more difficult to get the boring safe jobs in University admin that I’ve been relying on for the last couple of decades. But it also gave us Vichy Tech, and the realisation that these unimaginably wealthy and powerful platforms like YouTube would soon be weaponised against us.

    Now, I just shared the video below in the Quiet Part Loud, but I’m sharing it again here to expand on a different point.

    It seemed clear that the internet of the big social platforms, which had become an increasingly toxic place anyway, was about to become actively hostile. Real life community was likely to become increasingly important, but so were smaller, more private online communities. Places where connections and relationships weren’t filtered through political gatekeepers.

    Figuring out how this might work was a challenge for my music projects. But it was maybe a bigger problem for my day job.

    Because I had been getting exasperated with working in university admin – perhaps unsurprising after 20 years, on and off. And I started to explore the idea of freelancing: specifically, using my day job background in communications and marketing to help Oxford researchers promote their research and their careers.

    So I’ve spent the last few months doing just that: talking to researchers about how to communicate in 2026. From my many years working at Oxford I’d developed some pretty firm ideas about what works and what doesn’t. Ideas that tend to differ quite considerably from what the University tends to consider as best practice (and what I tend to consider is at least 10 years out of date).

    As I’ve been pitching my theories, however, about the dangers of dependence on platforms that might be politically weaponised, and about the challenges of posting online regularly when you have hardly any time, and about the challenges of staying in touch with your followers when Zuckerberg wants you to pay for that privilege… I started to realise that I was also talking to myself.

    I started to see the parallels between university researchers and purveyors of super-niche historical music.

    Maybe the monthly email newsletter, which I had really just kept going for fun all these years (10 years this March, incidentally!), was actually the one thing to focus on. Or rather, maybe it was the combination of an email – which goes out to your audience rather than waiting for them to come to you – and a personal website, where you put whatever kind of content you want.

    I suppose I was considering this for a while, but wasn’t really sure whether to commit to it.

    And then one day I was idly thinking about what it was I wanted from making music. I knew – I’d always known – how to build a career as a musician: you move to London, play a lot of gigs, pay attention to the audience and adjust your material until they love it. Then you get a manager and it all builds from there. I knew that, but I didn’t want to do it. That’s the same way to build and grow a YouTube channel, incidentally, but again I didn’t want to do it.

    Why not? Because for me the whole point of these projects was to realise the music in my head, not tailor it for an audience.

    Then I realised: these last few years I’ve been trying to be a semi-professional musician or a YouTuber, but I’ve been doing it wrong because what I want is to be neither of those things. I want to be an artist – that’s the technical term for someone who isn’t interested in ‘market fit’.

    And here’s the thing about being an artist: the whole point is to avoid formulas and quick workflows, and to come up with something totally new and original. That takes time. That takes a ton of time. And it will basically never leave time for marketing, or promotion.

    You just can’t do both.

    But the one thing that artists can do, so long as they’re happy with a small audience, is just make the best art they can, and put it out in the world whenever and however they can, and hope that word of mouth spreads. If it doesn’t, the art probably isn’t good enough yet.

    That was the thing that clicked for me, and made me realise that platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp might be where I host my stuff, but I really need to focus on the email/website combo rather than appeasing an algorithm.

    Oh, and I actually need to make some art!

    I mean… that’s the other big problem. I don’t think I’ve made anything I would consider art in many years. I haven’t had time, because I’ve been foolishly been trying to get the marketing funnel set up first. Maybe that’s why the writer’s block as lasted so long – I just hadn’t been giving myself the opportunity to practice?

    Anyway, I feel like I know what I’m doing now.

    But I have a lot of catching up to do.

    So What Have We Learnt?

    I moved the email newsletter to the website so that I wouldn’t be dependent on any online platform.

    But I also did it because it lets me do this:

    Ask me things

    If you have any questions then seriously, do please leave a comment or drop me a message here. About life. About the universe. It’s never been easier!

    Photo Credits

    • Click on the images to see the originals. (It just means less admin for me this way.)
  • Minneapolis, Davos and Adam Mosseri’s bleak future

    Minneapolis, Davos and Adam Mosseri’s bleak future

    THE QUIET PART LOUD

    So, 2026: new format, new ideas, new regular feature.

    In the days after Trump was elected, I made this video:

    TL:DW is that I can see a fundamental obstacle to being an artist under an authoritarian regime: either you make your art about what the regime is doing, in which case they kind of win, or you ignore it, in which case you are tacitly treating it as normal, in which case you are tacitly endorsing it, in which case they win.

    I feel like it’s difficult to have something to say, however small your audience, if you’re not addressing the rampaging elephant in the room. But it can’t be the only thing you have to say. As we say now: joy is resistance.

    So I want to pull all my thoughts on the current state of world politics into a regular, but separate, article which readers can dip into if they’re interested, but which they can just avoid if they want to.

    This is the Quiet Part Loud.

    Part 1 – Minneapolis: the seeds of the US resistance movement?

    January 2026 feels like a turning point. Although feelings can be deceptive, because thinking back it also feels like every single month for at least a year and a half is some kind of turning point.

    The year began with a dramatic escalation from the Trump administration, and I’m not going to list all the drama. However, out of all of it I think the world’s gaze has turned to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis.

    And just to add this explanation once again: whilst this is a domestic US crisis, the US is still effectively the global bank, police officer, court and media provider, so I believe we should all pay attention.

    I want to start by focusing on a disagreement between two influential American historians. Professor Heather Cox Richardson, who I have recommended in my newsletter, has writes a daily letter explaining the current US crisis in terms of its history, and it is read by over a million followers on Substack.

    In this recent video she urged her followers to put pressure on congressional Republicans, but right now only they have any power.

    Enter rising star Tad Stoermer.

    He is also a scholar of American history, but specifically resistance history: those times when effective resistance movements were built and changed the countries political direction.

    His latest video responds explicitly to Richardson, and other moderates, who are suggesting that Americans just need to appeal to the better nature of an openly fascist government in the middle of an uninterrupted power grab.

    He is utterly scathing.

    The TL:DW of this is that history tells us no attempt to appease or persuade a tyrant has ever worked. Ever.

    And to suggest that only congressional Republicans hold power now is to basically give up on democracy. Power exists beyond congresses and parliaments. Citizens can resist, agitate, push back, put the regime under pressure.

    Stoermer makes the point that finally we’re seeing this in the United States, in Minneapolis.

    But there is such a stark, shocking disconnect between the cowardice and inertia of the Democrat leadership and the energy and activism on the ground.

    About an hour ago, YouTube just fed me a great example of this: an interview with a community organiser.

    Aru Shiney-Ajay describes how they all can feel the fear of living in a military occupation, but the amount of solidarity, compassion, organisation and community is like nothing she’s ever seen in over 10 years of activism.

    Citizen patrols are walking the streets, and when they see ICE operatives they message their Signal chats, and then blow whistles, which summon more citizens, until eventually they outnumber ICE considerably, and the ICE abduction is aborted.

    Now.

    I don’t want to suggest that’s American fascism over with. It’s barely begun. But I find it hard to imagine these citizens will go back to normal after this. Once they are routinely risking their lives for each other, the desire to avoid conflict in case ‘things get bad’ is gone.

    A smart government might try to roll this military occupation back, and try it incrementally at a slower pace when the country isn’t watching.

    This is not a smart government.

    And, although it is still early days, there are some who are saying that Trump has already lost ‘the Battle of Minnesota’.

    Here’s Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times:

    I’ll round up this section by taking a little detour.

    There’s a creator I’ve been following – a trans academic studying the far right whose social media handle is Nope Brigade – whose videos have been getting more and more… well, terrified.

    After the Charlie Kirk assassination, they said they were contemplating fleeing the US. Then they said they had decided it was time.

    And then they stopped posting. For weeks.

    Every now and then I’ve typed ‘Nope Brigade’ into my search, but nothing new came up.

    Then, a few days ago, they posted this:

    I try to remind myself, when I find myself drawn from the safety of my sofa into who is winning the sport of right vs left, that the horror has already begun for so many people.

    We still have time to stop that horror spreading to the UK. But that time will soon run out.

    Part 2 – Even the masters of the universe are spooked

    The World Economic Forum held their annual event at Davos this month. By most accounts, the Trump crowd turned it into an absolute clown show. Here is a highlight reel:

    I found this video from US media’s favourite rich smart-arse professor Scott Galloway:

    I think Galloway is often funny, self-deprecating, insightful… but also a good representation of how the rich are living in a different reality.

    And I think he knows it. Indeed, that video is basically Galloway talking about how none of these ‘masters of the universe’ – politicians, tech gurus, financiers, celebrities, etc. – really know what’s going on.

    He talks about a sense of unease they all have. Like what’s coming next is going to be bad for everyone.

    That surprised me for some reason. I suppose I imagined that it would all be a bunch of ashen-faced minions sitting round a big table while a masked chairman taps his fingers together and says “Goood… everything seems to be going to plan…”

    Once again, it makes me feel like the big story of the moment is not about a bunch of Silicon Valley geniuses overthrowing democracy, or a Republican party full of mannequins being operated by unknown billionaires.

    It’s about a political establishment of what David Graeber called ‘extreme moderates’ who will do anything, will cross any moral or legal line, to appease their opponents. Leaving their opponents victorious… but confused and disorientated. Like naughty children desperate to know where the boundaries are.

    Let’s talk about those Silicon Valley geniuses though. Let’s talk about the modern media landscape.

    Part 3 – They shoot horses, don’t they?

    On New Year’s Eve, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri published a blog post about his predictions for the future of the platform. And everyone’s been talking about it.

    I’ve seen a bunch of creators complement him for his honesty and insight, and discuss how to tweak their content strategies going forward.

    But for those of us who have decided to get off that ship and paddle to our own little open-web island, he… well, he said the quiet part loud.

    Mosseri talks about his concern that AI slop will soon flood Instagram, and it will become impossible to establish what is real.

    He suggests that, now more than ever, the creators who can be real, authentic, transparent and consistent will be the ones who stand out.

    So what’s the problem with that?

    First of all, he is describing a problem that is very much of his own making, as Allison Johnson of The Verge points out.

    But basically, his point is…

    Yes, we have already enshittified our platform so badly that it’s like a bearpit down there. And this new AI technology (which Instagram’s parent company Meta is heavily invested in) will make it much much worse. And despite Meta being one of the 10 wealthiest companies on the planet, we have decided not to invest any money in restricting or labelling AI content or generally making our platform a more pleasant place to be.

    No. That is all on creators now: our dutiful little gig economy workers.

    You just need to work harder, pedal faster, dance more frantically. You just need to study your analytics, outcompete your peers, and never take a day off.

    And you need to be more authentic, more real. You need to put more of your actual life, your actual emotions, your actual soul into our disposable empty calorie snackable content.

    Because even though you personally don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making a sustainable income on this platform, we can at least take all of that personal data from your content and sell it to advertisers, which is how we keep the steamroller rolling.

    It reminds me of the novel / movie They Shoot Horses Don’t They, about a real life Squid Game in 1920s America where contestants had to basically dance to death for a cash prize, and the entertainment of the crowd.

    But the backlash is already brewing.

    Something The Verge has been talking/writing about a lot lately is that the big tech platforms have now all utterly lost the trust of the public. Any sense of the benefit of the doubt is now gone.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this interview I saw recently of comedian Chris Gethard, talking about the ‘Creator Apocalypse’.

    Everyone talks about the creator apocalypse all the time, but he had some excellent points I hadn’t heard before.

    He points out that the big tech platforms are now selling the idea of ‘being a DIY artist’ as a reason to use their platforms.

    And because the frog has been boiling for a while, we haven’t really noticed that any trace of a real DIY artist culture was ground out long ago.

    The platforms have used this as an excuse to pass all of the work and all of the expense onto the creators, who they make fight for tiny bits of attention, which the platforms can dial up and dial down at will with their algorithms.

    Lots of this great discussion resonated with me, but I want to highlight this excellent point:

    The platform algorithms will boost anyone talking about the problem. But they will suppress any talk of the solution.

    Gethard also talks about how the big tech platforms operate like the company store in an Appalachian coal mining town. They pay you in their own currency (‘scrip‘) that isn’t usable anywhere else.

    Conclusion

    So all of that is pretty bleak.

    But yet… here I am. On my own website. Back on the open web, and this time with a convert’s zeal.

    Because, for all the nihilism of the plutocrats right now, we do still have incredibly powerful tools for communicating with each other.

    I’ll end this very long rant (“If I had more time I would have made it shorter…“) with the video that inspired me to jump ship.

    In this talk to South By South West, independent journalist Molly White reminds us that… “You know that websites are still a thing, right?”

  • December 2025: I’m addicted to workahol

    December 2025: I’m addicted to workahol

    I thought I could handle it.

    December 2025

    I’m addicted to workahol

    Urgh. Another year end. They feel like they’re going so fast now. And sorry, I know I’m always whining about them as they end. In my defence, aren’t they just a precision-crafted ritual for worrying about where your life is, and isn’t, going? Unless you had a great year, in which case I’m glad someone is, and I genuinely hope next year is even better for you. But I think for a lot of people this one has been particularly suboptimal.

    And in 2026 I have the joy of turning 50 years old. Something I am treating like PE class way back in school: decidedly un-fun, but there’s not much I can do about it.

    A big part of this feeling is that I have had a pretty stressful 2025 – dominated by the constant threat of losing my job, and, you know, [gestures broadly] – and I feel like that’s made me not much fun to be around.

    Anyway, now that I have a bit more bandwidth I’m trying to be more constructive and to strike the right balance between identifying problems ahead and focusing on joy now.

    Part of that is going to be more of a focus on actually making music again (which I’m still in the very early stages of).

    Part of it is also going to be about spending more time with friends, family and community, and that’s really what I want to focus on in this newsletter.

    First, let’s do some recommending.

    Recommended

    MK.GEE

    Mk.gee was big about a year ago, and as ever I’m late to the party. I feel like he’s writing the most creative and original pop/rock music I’ve heard since Hyperpop.

    I first heard about him through Guitarist YouTube™ where guitar influencers were singing his praises for seemingly trying to make music they would hate!

    It’s like he took a checklist of all the things good guitar tone is supposed to have, and he then deliberately did the opposite. Instead of a classic Fender Stratocaster plugged into a vintage valve vamp and recorded with perfect microphone placement, he plugs directly into a crappy old four track cassette recorder and then slathers on chorus and reverb.

    And it sounds great. His singing is pretty impressive too. He reminds me, oddly, of a sort of neo-soul Steve Vai.

    And I think this video is beautifully hypnotic.

    Recommended

    ANORA

    If I was a bit more disciplined then I’m sure I’d be recommending the new Knives Out movie I mentioned last month (which I haven’t had time to see yet). Instead, I’m recommending an Oscar-winning movie from last year.

    Actually, full disclosure: Anora is a movie I have started but not finished, and I am watching in 15 min chunks, when parenthood allows. (Less easy to do that with a whodunnit.)

    So far, it feels like it’s part screwball comedy, part doomed romance, part Ken Loach drama, and part melancholy coming of age story.

    I eventually realised I had watched a million billion YouTube video essays on how great director Sean Baker is, and I figured I should check out what the fuss is about. Particularly as this, his latest film, won the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or and won Oscars for best director and best lead actress.

    He makes the kinds of films which I would make if I was a director and, you know, had magical powers. He treads that incredibly gossamer-thin line between making (a) realistic stories about people with tough lives (with lots of creative input from those communities) and (b) warm-hearted films that don’t make you want to jump off a building.

    Recommended

    DREW GOODEN TAKES ON THE TECH BROS

    One of the early stars of Vine who migrated to YouTube, Drew Gooden has been doing talking-head comedy monologues since around 2017.

    But this video recently set the Internet all a-chatter.

    Suddenly he’s taking on political economics, and the graphs are coming out. And finance experts on YouTube have been going… “that’s actually quite a good analysis!”

    Why does this matter?

    Well, for all that mainstream news and entertainment is getting flattened and enshittified, I’m seeing more and more beloved quirky creators with huge audiences loudly and meticulously taking on the plutocrats. And this is important, because – being influencers – they influence a lot of people.

    The Wealth Inequality debate seems to be seeping more and more into everyday discourse.

    Recommended

    BLUMINECK

    This is Dave: an archer, pole dancer, medieval weapons fanatic and YouTuber who also goes by the name of Blumineck.

    Just when you thought YouTube was an endless sea of monotonous repetitive podcasts.

    I just think it’s so refreshing to see someone who seems to be a genuinely nice chap and who is not only having a lot of fun but is showing off some serious skills.

    At the beginning of this Q&A video, he throws an apple into the air and then shoots it with a bow and arrow before it hits the ground. And he does it so casually.

    He also talks about how he became a pole dancer, and gives a very thoughtful and considered answer to the question of why he isn’t on Only Fans.

    Oh, and… er… it really does seem like everyone but everyone is talking about Wealth Inequality.

    Recommended

    DR HOPE vs GOOGLE AI

    The aptly-named Ed Hope is a junior doctor who found internet fame with his pandemic dispatches from the trenches. He was appointment viewing for me during that time, although the algorithm has hidden his videos from me of late.

    This video is, unfortunately, another case of how AI is ruining our lives.

    Because he recently discovered that whenever anyone googles his name, the new Google AI overview will confidently tell you that he, Dr Hope, has been struck off for medical malpractice.

    This absolutely isn’t true, and a quick follow-up search will reveal that the AI is confusing him with someone else. But most people don’t click that far.

    Moral of the story: Google Search is terrible now.

    Recommended

    NOELLE PERDUE on 404 MEDIA

    This is a great conversation between the increasingly ubiquitous (in a good way) 404 Media and online pornography historian Noelle Perdue, that covers a lot of ground and goes to all sorts of interesting places.

    They start by bonding over their mutual love of ‘parody porn’. Game of Bones, Bill & Ted’s Sexcellent Adventure, Ten Inch Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Loin King… you get the idea. “There is a real art to it, because you want [the title] to be recognisable, and it has to be as stupid as possible.”

    They move on to how the anti-porn laws are creating a culture of online censorship, deliberately or otherwise.

    Then Perdue has some really surprising things to say about erotic chatbots: she was very early to write about them, and initially she thought they sounded like a great idea. Somewhere for people to explore without the possibility of real world damage. Now she thinks the opposite, and believes the lack of reality is extremely dangerous.

    And that might sound obvious, but it’s worth hearing her explanation of it.

    Recommended

    SANTA GEORGIA by NANCY KERR

    I expected to start a bit of a flame war on the local folk music Discord server when I suggested that Nancy Kerr is the best songwriter in the English folk tradition.

    Slightly disappointed that everyone then went ahead and agreed with me.

    Anyway, this song of hers has been my earworm for the last couple of weeks (well, this and the dastardly Wiggles, obviously). It’s about how she found leaving the narrowboat she had lived on for 12 years and moving to inner city Sheffield.

    It’s catchy as hell, imho.

    “So farewell cold winter, we will all shine out together…”

    Upcoming Events

    Friday 9th January

    Every second Friday of the month. We will all shine out together.

    Dear Diary…

    So the employment situation I’ve been complaining about all year has stabilised a bit. And I’m starting to get a bit of free time back.

    I’m inching back into writing music again, although – as I mentioned in last month’s newsletter – I continue to deal with the problem that my ambition has vastly outrun my abilities, and there is still a lot of catching up to do.

    But something else I’ve been able to focus on, which feels long overdue, is hanging out with friends again.

    The last time I was focusing on this was actually the month before Trump was re-elected. I wrote a newsletter about how you need to ‘find your people’ and maintain those relationships, and then that got swallowed by the doomscroll for the next year and change. But now it’s back in my foreground, at least.

    In fact, it keeps being in my foreground and then being pushed out by world events. I realised my social circle was shrinking dramatically just before the pandemic hit. And at some point I journaled an idea that has haunted me ever since and I think I’ve mentioned here several times before: ‘if you come out of a global pandemic being too busy for your friends them you’ve learned nothing.’

    However, I realise now that I learned this lesson a long time ago. It’s just harder than it seems.

    Of course it’s difficult to spend time with friends when you have two young children, but when I think back to before I was a parent, I found it difficult then too. I even found it difficult back when I was single.

    Or perhaps difficult is not the right word.

    What I used to understand but had forgotten is that having a social life is not about making a decision in the moment. For me at least, it requires long-term planning. If I wait until I am in the mood to see friends and family, it will never happen. And I’ll go into detail why not in a moment. But it’s never something I’m going to spontaneously do.

    If, however, I plan my whole routine and schedule more carefully, and actually mark out regular social time, then I will want to do it when the time comes. Not least because I will be frequently reminded why it’s important.

    To a certain extent, yes, scheduling a social life is more difficult when you’re a parent, because your daily life just has more moving parts. But, again, it’s not like it was ever straightforward for me, and this month I have been reminded that it’s totally normal to have to cancel and postpone from time to time.

    Doing some kind of communal activity like music can really help, though. Way back in the ‘find your people’ month before Trump I was considering starting some sort of band again. Or maybe even a folk club.

    Now, I feel like I would need a bit more employment stability to fully engage with that in this moment, but it does feel more plausible than it has in a while.

    So What Have We Learnt?

    Why am I unlikely spontaneously choose to hang out with friends?

    Well, this relates to the title of this month’s newsletter. (My brother always used to make the joke: “yes, you are addicted to workahol.”)

    For a long time I think I’ve been ambivalent about self-identifying as a workaholic, because in my mind this is somebody who is always pulling all-nighters and hovering around burnout. And I’ve always been pretty careful to make sure I lead a balanced life.

    But I realise that, by a slightly different but equally valid definition, I absolutely am a workaholic.

    Because whenever I get any free time, all I want to do is work.

    Given the choice, this ‘work’ will be composing music, but it could be many things: journaling my thoughts, scheduling my tasks, doing various household chores or even noting down some wild project idea that I know I’ll never get the time to do.

    Perhaps it’s that introvert/extrovert thing: some people get their energy from socialising, but I very much get my energy from focusing on making something in a solitary way.

    And I really don’t think that’s a decision: I think that’s just how my brain is wired.

    But I realised that this is the reason why without a concerted effort my social life withers away.

    But realising this month that my workoholism has always been a kind of social barrier feels like quite a big deal to me. I feel I can now see why it’s a problem I keep bumping up against.

    Ask me things

    If you have any questions then seriously, do please leave a comment or drop me a message here. About life. About the universe. About wealth inequality. You know I won’t shut up about it until you do.

    Photo Credits

    • Click on the images to see the originals. (It just means less admin for me this way.)

  • Is Mark Zuckerberg quietly winning?

    Is Mark Zuckerberg quietly winning?

    Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta

    Once upon a time…

    A couple of years ago, my day job asked me to talk to a group of sixth formers about their social media habits. The results were pretty much what you would expect, with TikTok and YouTube at the top. There was a tiny bit of love for Instagram, but Facebook and Twitter were basically an irrelevance. In fact, my sense was that the old-fashioned Facebook concept of social media was very much out of fashion.

    This was actually part of a social media audit I was asked to do, and when I looked at Meta’s backend analytics, it painted a sorry picture. It was a mess. More than that, it looked like it had been designed to be deliberately misleading. At the end of the process I came to the conclusion that Meta was juicing the numbers, and using bot farms overseas to make it look like there was more engagement than there was.

    Clearly, these seemed to be failing platforms run by a company that had basically given up on them.

    Fast forward two years and it now seems to me like Meta’s social media products collectively make the most powerful media empire on the planet.

    Meta HQ. By InvadingInvader – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

    What changed?

    Well, Donald Trump came back, obviously. And Mark Zuckerberg aligned his company with the Trump administration’s goals. But then again, so did pretty much every American media company, so what did Zuckerberg get right?

    I think the change has actually been pretty recent – perhaps in the last 3 to 6 months. It came about, I think, from Meta recognising a golden opportunity.

    Since the pandemic, their competitors’ platforms have been getting more and more crowded. For their competitors to make money, only the most algorithmically-optimised-for-attention can survive. Which means that TikTok and YouTube have increasingly been incentivising low effort quantity-over-quality packed with brand advertising. Even before Trump came in, it was getting much less fun.

    But since he came back, the best way to get attention is to lean into the doomscroll, and make content about how bad things are getting.

    Let’s take Johnny Harris as an example. He basically invented the YouTube current affairs house style. And this is the kind of video he was making four years ago:

    This Ghost Town was Sealed for 50 Years | Cyprus, Uncharted, Ep. 1

    This is the kind of video he’s making now:

    How billionaires stole America’s elections

    This is probably 90% of my social media at the moment. And it’s very much my own fault, because I keep clicking on this stuff.

    But here is where Meta’s corporate social media strategy suddenly becomes an advantage.

    Welcome to the Happy Place

    For years their algorithms have been based on the assumption that you don’t want to follow your friends or family, or current events: you want celebrities, influencers and nostalgia. Now, clearly that’s not true, but those are the things that Meta can turn into adverts.

    What has changed, I think, is that many people are so traumatised and exhausted by current events that they want an escape from it all. And Meta has realised that if they just add ‘family and friends’ back into the feed then suddenly that is what their users want.

    I first noticed this a few months ago in the rivalry between Bluesky and (Meta’s) Threads – two new Twitter clones trying to hoover up Twitter’s audience. This time last year, Bluesky was the clear winner, because it was engaging with actual reality instead of a fantasy bubble. Now it seems like Threads is winning, precisely because it’s less screamy and more chill than Bluesky. In other words, because the current harsh reality has been something users wanted to escape from.

    Then I noticed that Facebook was making a comeback. I had made a local folk music Discord server because I found Facebook basically unusable. For quite a while this server has been been pretty active. But I’ve noticed that it’s started emptying out, and when I promote my folk events on Facebook there’s just a lot more response. And it’s not just folk music – so many people I used to hang out with from the Oxford indie scene are still there, posting. And I have to say, it’s actually a much better user experience than it was when I made the Discord server. Meta know I’m there for the local music, so that (along with adverts and Gen X nostalgia) is what they give me. They have data on me going back to around 2007, after all.

    Finally, on the Colin & Samir podcast (which is basically ‘How to make it on YouTube’) I heard them discuss how Instagram is now more culturally relevant than both YouTube and TikTok. New shows like Subway Takes and Trackstar are starting on Instagram, and then moving to YouTube when they get really big.

    Instagram has always been Meta’s most popular and influential product. The guy in charge, Adam Mosseri, is sometimes referred to as the only one at Meta with any taste, and he really seems to understand the creator economy. Even so, for the last few years the consensus was that Instagram was desperately copying TikTok and had no ideas of its own. However, TikTok (in the US) is still reeling from not knowing if it will get banned tomorrow, and many creators jumped ship to avoid the uncertainty.

    So now Meta has this golden opportunity to create a mellow vibes bubble, far from the doomscroll. Adam Mosseri is really good at that.

    Which means I think Meta have swept aside their VR headsets and Metaverse programmes and have instead started to pay attention once again to their social media platforms.

    What the Regime does (and doesn’t) need right now

    Arguably Adam Moseri’s style of social media is much more valuable to the Trump administration than Elon Musk’s. They don’t need state media or billionaire-media pumping out hate propaganda anymore, because millions of individual creators can do that much more effectively.

    What the Trump administration needs is for big established media companies to normalise their actions. Make them seem not that big a deal, and happening far away anyway.

    I’ve been hearing people talk about how authoritarianism is different now to how it was mid 20th century. I’ve been hearing the phrase informational autocracy. And it feels to me like Meta is trying to fulfil a very specific role in this new power structure. It is trying to be the portal in your phone that will show you curated content from celebrities, influences and your family and friends. Some might be outrage bait, and some might be nostalgia and fluffy kittens, but it’s all about a world removed from politics.

    As times get harder, people need relief. They need entertainment. And as so much entertainment has become user generated, it’s been hard to escape the trauma of Gaza or Sudan or any number of oppressed peoples.

    But Meta is all about that curation. They can just dial out anyone who’s harshing your mellow. And I’m expecting to see a lot of surveys that show that “everyone is still using Meta products, so you might disapprove of the company but you should probably accept that you need to keep using them, because that’s where everyone else is”.

    How long will this be successful? Who knows. Although if the last few years are anything to go by then never underestimate the ability of a tech billionaire to shoot themselves in the foot.

    The thing is, I absolutely understand why people are looking from an escape from the doomscroll. And they should! We need to find joy if we’re going to find resilience, and ultimately resistance.

    But… I’m pretty sure Zuckerberg is not the man to trust with it.

  • The Strings That Tie To You

    The Strings That Tie To You

    Have you ever stumbled on a song you haven’t heard in years, maybe decades, that used to be central part of your emotional world? Have you ever found yourself listening and thinking: ‘Wait! I know this. God, I remember this song – I forgot this even existed’? And then you’re pulled back into all the images and sensations of that time?

    That happened to me this morning with the song Strings That Tie To You by Jon Brion, from the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

    I wanted some background music I hadn’t heard a million times, and chose that soundtrack – which I often listen to, but clearly not all the way through. Because I probably haven’t heard this song in a decade and a half.

    Listening to it, for some reason, just made me feel incredibly old.

    It’s a film from 20 years ago, so should that be a surprise? Well, not every old piece of art makes me feel old. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the cinema, but that film doesn’t make me feel old. So I started to try to pick a part why Strings That Tie To You particularly did.

    And I realised that, listening to the soundtrack, I could remember this exhilarating feeling at the time the film came out… that this was the future, and it was great.

    Here was an example of the talent that was going to shape movies and music and culture in the future.

    Remembering this film makes me feel old, because that didn’t happen. The talented people behind this film either faded into the cultural background or became rich and successful in a way that eroded their liability and relatability.

    This film just became a blip, not a trend.

    This is one of the harder parts of aging that I experience all the time, I think: seeing talented people with huge potential have just a fleeting moment before it fizzles into nothing.

    And it would be easy to follow this down a nihilistic rabbit hole, and conclude that everything is pointless and doomed to failure. I do not believe that to be the case.

    But I have been thinking today about how to process this in a constructive way.

    And the conclusion that I’ve come to is that it’s on each of us, individually and collectively, to hold onto those fleeting moments of beauty that are created by talented people, or just created by moments in time. It’s up to us to hold onto them, and to use them to inspire us to make more beautiful things.

    We need to keep trying to push new flowers up through the layer of ash and decay.

    It’s ironic that this song that triggered this whole process was a song about dealing with painful memories that itself with soundtrack to a film about painful memories.

    From the wrinkles on my forehead / to the mud upon my shoe / everything’s a memory / with strings that tie to you.

    And particularly:

    And though a change has taken place and I no longer do adore her / Still every godforsaken place is always just around the corner.

    I mean, I realise that I have rewritten this song 100 times myself!

    But maybe that’s not a bad thing.

    We just got to keep pushing the flowers through the ash.

    Photo by Marta S. on Unsplash

  • A twisted love letter to David Lynch (1946-2025)

    A twisted love letter to David Lynch (1946-2025)

    “I’ll send you a love letter… straight from my heart, fucker!!” (Blue Velvet, 1986)

    David Lynch passed away on 15th January.

    I saw his Dune when I was 11 or 12, so I’ve been aware of his work most of my life. I probably first saw Blue Velvet in my teens, and found it weird and intriguing and messed up, but felt it was probably too old for me. When I saw The Elephant Man, I probably didn’t even realise that was a David Lynch film.

    And I remember watching Twin Peaks when it first aired on TV, but again I felt it was a bit old for me. I think it was when I came to watch it many years later that I really fell in love with all things David Lynch, to the point where he was probably my favourite filmmaker. No one else was as weird and imaginative and twisted. And yet, gentle and kind.

    This, more than anything, was what I (and doubtless many others) loved about his world. His villains were truly terrifying, but his heroes had a goodness and a kindness and an empathy that felt not only heartfelt but realistic. And my memory of that moment in movie and TV culture, no one else seemed to be interested in exploring the idea of Goodness.

    Perhaps my favourite film of his is The Straight Story, and this scene perfectly catches the aesthetic I grew to love.

    “The sky is sure full of stars tonight.” (The Straight Story, 1999)

    In fact, it was only after he died that I realised so many of the components of my own artistic aesthetic I ‘borrowed’ wholesale from David Lynch.

    But at some point in the 2010s I started to lose interest in his films. I hated Inland Empire, which I felt was overlong and incoherent, even though it had some great ideas. Had it been a series of 15 minute episodes, I might have loved it, but it wasn’t.

    And also, my attention started to move to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, who seemed to be interested in many of the same things but took them in other directions.

    But there was something else.

    Lynch had a knack for twisted erotica. No mainstream Hollywood director (and he was a mainstream Hollywood director) could do dark and sexy like he could.

    But as the 90s love of pulp fiction met the #MeToo movement, films like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive started to feel exploitative to me. Was he just another male director playing with his beautiful actress sex dolls? There was something faintly Weinstein about the tone of those films.

    Well, it was heartening to learn after he died that both Isabella Rossini and Patricia Arquette were on record talking about how he created a collaborative, supportive and consensual work environment.

    And I would love to leave it there.

    But the recent revelations about Neil Gaiman give me pause.

    I stumbled onto this voice interview of Lynch, talking about his favourite film by one of his favourite directors: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

    Many years ago I might have said “That’s an overreaction, surely. Kubrick is an iconic filmmaker and Lolita is one of his most celebrated films. It’s possible to greatly appreciate the film without condoning the behaviour of its protagonist!” (Which his grooming a minor, let’s be clear.)

    These days, however, I find it’s more useful to trust my instincts. And something about the way he talks about Humbert Humbert just feels… off, in a way I can’t quite articulate.

    I hope he didn’t have any dark secrets. I hope he was more Agent Cooper than Frank.

    I don’t know. I’ve learnt to give up on all my heroes, one by one. But not the beauty they produce. Kindness is kindness and empathy is empathy, even if it’s authors, like the rest of us, aren’t always perfect at maintaining that.

    And he was really good at empathy.

    For me, this is all of his traits wrapped up in one scene. Despite the world finally realising the kind and gentle soul he is, Joseph Merrick decides he will finally sleep “like a normal person”—knowing that, with his condition, this will kill him.

    Going to sleep for the last time. (The Elephant Man, 1980)

    “The sky is sure full of stars tonight.”