1. Hello hello! The Notices, now coming from Substack. Lemme know if anything weird happened, or this went to spam or anything.
2. Quite the week on the Twitters. eh. How tiresome to be reminded again of just how much of our world is at the mercy of the egos of ManChilds. An upside though is how much personal reflection it’s prompted about ‘pre-Hellscape’ social networking. My favourite is DadaDrummer on the thrill of being involved in a scene – garage rock, conceptual art, computing – when ‘nobody knows anything’.
3. (Valeria Maltoni summed up the whole era perfectly by pointing out the shift from ‘social networks’ to ‘social media’.)
4. All of which reminded me about my earliest internet experiences: a distant friend writing their email address in their Christmas card in 1993 (because how else was he gonna spread the news?!). How in my first job that had internet access (1994) I’d look things up for a few minutes at lunchtime but then log off – because I’d seen everything on the internet that was interesting.
5. So, the oldest known sentence written in the earliest-known alphabet turns out to be a bit of product copywriting! An ivory comb, inscribed with the words ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’. Pleasing.
6. Another entry in my long-running series of ‘I’m Sorry We Need A New Metaphor’ – The Atlantic reminds us that the surveillance world we live in isn’t ‘like Nineteen Eighty Four’ at all. In Orwell’s dystopia, Big Brother watched everyone equally. Whereas we experience privacy more like a luxury good – some people are far more watched than others. What’s a more appropriate dystopian touchstone?
7. Precision-of-metaphor related: Morgan Housel on the difference between ‘cumulative vs cyclical knowledge’ (Some things humanity learns once; other things we have to re-learn each generation.) I read this on the same day as James Clear’s thing about the difference between building a body or building a bridge. (in some areas of life the value is in starting, in others finishing.)
8. Not gonna lie, I spent the rest of the day thinking about just how helpful I find these types of ‘clarifying pairs’. Do you have any similar favourites? Hit me up.
9. Does the idea of ‘brand purpose’ make any sense? It’s one thing for a brand to want to do good – but how many brands genuinely exist for the purpose of doing good? And is that Brewdog ‘Qatar World Cup anti-sponsorship’ campaign good or hypocritical? Or good and hypocritical? And if hypocrisy is inevitable, are there any other options? Nick Asbury has been the most rigorous and insightful thinker about brand purpose for a while now. His latest essay – about how we seem to have entered a new phase of purpose nihilism is the perfect summary of the whole convoluted mess. Top stuff.
10. How to say people’s names right. This is an excellent thing by @EttieBK. One of those small-yet-important ‘skills’ everyone should nail. (Also, any excuse to re-watch Uzo Aduba’s ‘if they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michaelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka’ speech.)
11. I totally shoulda mentioned this at Hallowe’en, but Dirt’s ponderings about spookiness (as opposed to full-on scariness) is a joy. Tl;dr: it’s likely about craft. Most often we experience spooky things because someone else deliberately made them that way for us. Nice.
12. I am very late to the Blackbird Spyplane newsletter (‘sletter’) party. Their takedown of the ‘wisdom’ that personal style is ‘all about being yourself’ is glorious: ‘Why does this advice irk me? … while it a valuable kernel of truth, so does the exact opposite advice, which is also way more interesting and, ultimately, way more useful when it comes to developing personal style: BE SOMEONE ELSE!’
13. Hmm. I notice that almost all the links today are to sletters, and not Twitter. Maybe we will all survive after all.
14. That’s all! Bye!.