Was thinking on my feet lots in this podcast inspired by the superb provocations by Alexis and learning from her as I go. Let us know your thoughts on some of the concepts explored in this one via the comments as keen to learn more.
“When a Leader restores civility and fair play, eliminating dysfunction, it is not unusual for the Community Builders to join the good guys as they discover the personal empowerment inherent in authentic belonging. No longer able to manipulate circumstance and sully reputations, Dragons and Shapeshifters willingly leave, are dismissed, or they change their behavior to adjust to the new culture. Figureheads follow, or they are transferred out of leadership roles, opening up a space for the Creatives to get to work.” Surviving Work: A Creative’s Guide to Dysfunctional Cultures | Psychology Today
“The hasty imposition of a deal at the UN climate conference, Cop29, in Azerbaijan, over the objections of poorer nations has fractured global trust and undermined recent progress. This was supposed to be the “finance Cop” when two dozen industrialised countries – including the US, Europe and Canada – promised to pay developing nations for the damage caused by their rise. Instead, developing nations – led by a group including India, Nigeria and Bolivia – say this weekend’s agreement for $300bn a year in 2035 is too little, too late. Worse, rich-world governments will be able to escape their obligations by being able to rely on cash from private companies and international lenders.” The Guardian view on Cop29: poor-world discontent over a failure of rich countries to deliver | Editorial | The Guardian
“On a much grander scale, she and Zhao tell me they hope that Glaze and Nightshade will eventually have the power to overhaul how AI companies use art and how their products produce it. It is eye-wateringly expensive to train AI models, and it’s extremely laborious for engineers to find and purge poisoned samples in a data set of billions of images. Theoretically, if there are enough Nightshaded images on the internet and tech companies see their models breaking as a result, it could push developers to the negotiating table to bargain over licensing and fair compensation.” The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI | MIT Technology Review
“As the physical reality of the nation slips beneath the ocean, the government is building a digital copy of the country, backing up everything from its houses to its beaches to its trees. It hopes this virtual replica will preserve the nation’s beauty and culture – as well as the legal rights of its 11,000 citizens – for generations to come.” Tuvalu: The disappearing island nation recreating itself in the metaverse – BBC Future
“A paper by Tang and colleagues published in Nature Neuroscience in May 2023 gave an example. When one participant listened to the words, “I didn’t know whether to scream, cry, or run away. Instead, I said, ‘Leave me alone!’”, the AI decoded the thought as: “Started to scream and cry, and then she just said, ‘I told you to leave me alone. You can’t hurt me.’” “It’s not perfect, but it’s shockingly good for using fMRI,” Huth said at a February 2024 meeting of the National Institutes of Health’s Neuroethics Working Group, where he discussed his and his team’s work.” We Want to Hear Your Thoughts | Discover Magazine
An extension which works on Chromium browsers to transfer your Twitter followers to your Bluesky account.
What’s New In Unicode 16.0 (or latest emoji’s to drop which includes Face with Bags Under Eyes, Fingerprint, Splatter, Root Vegetable, Leafless Tree, Harp, Shovel, Flag: Sark).
December 6th is the deadline for the Fast Company ‘World Changing Ideas Awards’ which focuses on “products, concepts, companies, and policies that are designed to make the world safer, cleaner, more sustainable, and more equitable.“
Developing the ecosystem of wisdom, community-led governance and the stewardship of care.
A few weeks ago at HATCH 20, the above talk closed out an evening and left the whole audience in wonderful awe.
In a little over twenty minutes, this gentle offering was fierce in revealing the compassionate truth of where humanity finds itself, and invited us all to be buoyed in the potential of embracing the cooperative choice of prioritising community and connection through feeling / sensing.
For me, what was revealed is what we innately know: living is giving, and love is the only path.
After Forrest finished speaking, it felt like the whole room sighed, together.
Through the welcome tears I wrote the following on one of my mundane postcards and gifted it quickly to Forrest later on in proceedings:
“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” Carl Sagan
Click play above for a energetic deconstruction regarding the elements of said talk, a detailed verbal essay which pulls out the storytelling components I was using plus the highlights which mattered to them. All whilst offering further insights and broadening out the lessons learned plus sharing their own experiences as well.
UPDATED WITH VIDS: A little side Cymru-Aotearoa / Wales-New Zealand project.
A few months ago in a catch-up with the superb Robin Moore, the topic of collaborating (again) came up, specifically around activating my network in the media industry from my time in New Zealand and if there was anyway to share insights back into the Welsh ecosystem.
What followed is alignment with Media Cymru and the opportunity for me develop the following three unique learning opportunities (click on the images below to go to the event listings to sign up)—CHECK OUT THE VIDEOS BELOW:
““A factor of 10 is an enormous difference, and this is what happens when you look at a reproduction compared to a real work,” said Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis, on Wednesday. “You become [mentally] richer when you see things, whether you are conscious of it or not, because you make connections in your brain.” Gosselink said she had been convinced of the power of the real before the study but had wanted her hunch to be formally investigated. “We all feel the difference – but is it measurable, is it real?” she said she had asked her colleagues a year ago. “Now, today we can really say that it is true.”” Real art in museums stimulates brain much more than reprints, study finds | Neuroscience | The Guardian
“Let’s be clear: the UK’s mooted copyright scheme would effectively enable companies to nick our data – every post we make, every book we write, every song we create – with impunity. It would require us to sign up to every individual service and tell them that no, we don’t want them to chew up our data and spit out a poor composite image of us. Potentially hundreds of them, from big tech companies to small research labs. Lest we forget, OpenAI – a company now valued at more than $150bn – is planning to forswear its founding non-profit principles to become a for-profit company. It has more than enough money in its coffers to pay for training data, rather than rely on the beneficence of the general public. Companies like that can certainly afford to put their hands in their own pockets, rather than ours. So hands off.” Here’s the deal: AI giants get to grab all your data unless you say they can’t. Fancy that? No, neither do I | Chris Stokel-Walker | The Guardian
““The existing structure of OpenAI is quite convoluted,” said Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College law school. “If they simplify their structure in some way and have a public benefit corporation as the parent company, they can make as much money as they want.” The ChatGPT developer is reportedly heading for a valuation of $150bn under the new fundraising, making it worth nearly as much as Uber. Apple and the chipmaker Nvidia are among the companies cited in reports as potential investors in the funding round.” OpenAI planning to become for-profit company, say reports | OpenAI | The Guardian
“The TikTok owner launched its own web scraper, Bytespider, in April, and it’s now scraping data multiple times faster than bots from other companies, Fortune reported, citing research from Kasada, a bot management company, and Dark Visitors, a monitor of scraper bots. Companies developing AI models, such as Google and Meta, use scraper bots to gather data to train and improve the large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models that power the companies’ AI services.” TikTok owner ByteDance scrapes the web faster than OpenAI
“Kline sat at his keyboard between the lime-green walls of UCLA’s Boelter Hall Room 3420, prepared to connect with Duvall, who was working a computer halfway across the state of California. But Kline didn’t even make it all the way through the word “L-O-G-I-N” before Duvall told him over the phone that his system crashed. Thanks to that error, the first “message” that Kline sent Duvall on that autumn day in 1969 was simply the letters “L-O”.” ‘We were just trying to get it to work’: The failure that started the internet
“This week, Balaji posted an essay on his personal website, in which he argued that OpenAI was breaking copyright law. In the essay, he attempted to show “how much copyrighted information” from an AI system’s training dataset ultimately “makes its way to the outputs of a model.“ Balaji’s conclusion from his analysis was that ChatGPT’s output does not meet the standard for “fair use,” the legal standard that allows the limited use of copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission.” Former OpenAI Staffer Says the Company Is Breaking Copyright Law and Destroying the Internet
WATCH
EXPLORE
The Mudita Kompakt is live on Kickstarter and fun attempt at cutting out the digital distractions of a phone (apart from the e-ink this can be achieved with any phone though but good for kids as a dumb phone).
The WikiProject AI Cleanup aims combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.
Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.
A unique conference where hugs are longer / more sincere.
Situated in the high desert of Bend, Oregon at the superb Juniper Reserve, the four-day-20th-anniversary event of HATCH just rocked my soul.
This was my fifth time attending (see 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2023 write-ups) so I knew what to expect, however, what blossomed for me was the understanding that even though the events of this past year had broken me in many ways, HATCH broke me open…
…open to connect (with self / others / ideas), to listen (really listen), to appreciate music, to dance, to explore, to talk, to sing, to move, to write, to participate, to observe, to learn, to lead, to play, to be tempted, to be.
A cherished time which greatly expanded my already hungry curiosity, accelerated my muted creative belief / potential whilst amplifying the obvious but not-heard-often-enough-truth that we all need other humans to thrive.
Dual badger.
Apparently, I was the first to register this year and was honoured to play a dual role: as an attendee / alum and also leading a reflection activation on the last day / eve, running a pop-up session on speaking with purpose, facilitating an ‘intention session’ plus arrived a day early to help set-up:
Attendees are medley of seekers, doers, artists, creatives, business greats, technologists, environmentalists, investors, next generation’ers—simply, a confluence of talent (what I learned after my first two is not to be awed but instead be playful / grateful in the possibility to learn from impressiveness):
One of the cornerstone pieces of any HATCH is the ‘ask and offer’ whereby the community is invited to create in-situ the reciprocal-ness we all need to flourish. For most, the offer part is easy, it’s the ask which causes challenges as it should be personal, honest and intentional. These are then displayed for the duration, amended and added to via other offers from those in the room who can aid the call:
My ask of the community.
HATCH is the most effective event I know at creating the conditions for people to feel trust, find purpose, see kindness manifest and generate creative value. All stemming from the curative skills of the organisers, the space / place, the talks / sessions offered, emotional positioning by the MC’s, as well as those who answer the call to step into the unknown and embrace the fluid nature of the experience:
Thank you HATCH for again being there when I needed it. For allowing me to be seen. For providing the space and place for others to shine. For giving us the belief that connection, true human connection is the currency of success.
BONUS playlist from some of the artists sharing their talents on stage:
Taken from when we recorded the below audio podcast episode
A new leadership framework coming soon (wink-face-emoji).
What a joy to converse with fellow curious soul Digby Scott on his new fortnightly podcast, Dig Deeper, conversations with depth to change the way you lead:
We talk about mundanity (it’s now a word, sod off!), hobbies, context vs content, audacity, white space, delegate experience design, what’s eternal, hearing, listening, speaking, storytelling, coaching, translation / narration / curation / host leadership™ plus what the world needs more of.
Hope you enjoy and thank you again Digby for the opportunity to spend time with you again!
The original approach to this blog post was a reflective look back from my initial online forays during my first year of University, writing essays on hyper-reality as part of the course I was taking, then participating in the most early social networking platforms, right through to building businesses around the emerging space plus everything up till now.
I scrapped that as was getting bored and my fingers hurt. So started writing 30 things I learned (one for each year) in an attempt to extract some wisdom from being an early adopter.
But that went by the wayside as could only conjure up a dozen or so and they felt a little ‘preachy’, so, I’m just going to mark it with a simple side-eye and a tut.
A physical gesture and audible proclamation which sums up how I feel about the whole tech and interwebs space currently.
So many online platforms and services plus the technology we now use to access this incredible tool for humanity, is designed to purposefully trick and hide the fact that it’s all about extraction…
…extracting attention, the good vibes / kinship / playfulness which fuels our mortal souls, the pioneering spirit enabled through accessibility, plus even vacuuming up the whole web without permission and / or attribution to then build predictive-pattern-regurgitators-wrapped-up-in-AI-branded-interfaces which users can be charged again for.
However, I still believe in the inherent positive power of the internet: how it creates unique opportunities for voice, agency, story, connectiveness, learning, to amplify intentional technology in enhancing the whole human project, through kindness and participation not commodification and engineered engagement.
So here’s to the next 30 years and the evolving nature of the online space, more laws and governance over data sovereignty, transparency of data use, the universal shift back to adding not reducing value, building opportunities for people to link up their creativity, along with and making people think and / or smile.
For creative maximilists looking to encourage dangerously original things!
These offerings was inspired by a real life event (“I don’t do mundane” was my response when someone asked for ‘mundane’ from me). That value destroyed a career path, meant the loss of a healthy dose of money / about a year in time / loads of positive energy, and deeply affected my mental health, because:
“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.”
…so I’m turning that deeply negative experience into a gift of inspiration and designed the following for audacious humans with aligned principles (the posters would be great for offices, workshops, classrooms, meeting rooms, funky shops / cafes, creative and co-working spaces etc. plus the cards to celebrate / encourage someones imaginative approaches):
Eighteen items from three designs, with two variations on each (colour / no colour) across another three product options of greeting cards, matte posters and / or framed posters.
