Just leave this here to marinate.
I sell my soul - but at the highest rates.
🔗📼 Harlan Ellison 18 years ago #PayTheWriter
Had cause to post this today - again - on a LinkedIN feed.
Just to say thank you to @sod - reminding me that passkeys exist for log in - which historically I have avoided - because all experiences to date have been horrible - on micro.blog - simple - clean worked in about 5 seconds. 💯
Spotted on the web this morning - @dave .. I think ….
It’s not decentralized, it’s uncentralized. Important distinction.
Just Good Music
Reconnecting with my Just Good Music cofounder and introducing you to an awesome video from ‘Ren’. Truly stunning - and if there is a god - he is going to go far.
About This Blog - Part Two
After this, I asked for “the top 5 themes of the entire blog - and how those themes might be categorised.”
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1. Systems vs People
Category: Human-Centric vs Mechanistic Worlds
This is the spine. You’re constantly examining how systems — corporate, political, digital, economic — drift away from the people they’re supposed to serve. The writing teases out the gap between stated purpose and lived reality. When you pull the thread, it usually reveals misaligned incentives, bureaucratic decay, or the slow capture of human agency by structures not built for complexity.
This theme is broad, but it’s recognisably yours: the quiet insistence that the world works better when humans aren’t an afterthought.
⸻
2. Digital Culture & Identity
Category: The Internet as a Social Mirror
You’ve been tracking digital behaviour long enough to see its cycles. Posts float between the technical (protocols, decentralisation, identity plumbing) and the cultural (“what is the internet doing to us?”). You keep returning to the tension between centralised power and distributed potential — especially identity, agency, and data ownership.
There’s a through-line about the internet revealing who we are, not who we pretend to be — and how platforms distort that mirror for profit.
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3. Organisational Drift & Work Dysfunction
Category: Structural Failure in Modern Work
You dissect how organisations lose the plot: misaligned goals, leadership illusions, management fads, the tyranny of systems of record, and the way noise crowds out thinking. It’s not just critique; it’s pattern recognition. You keep orienting back to: • why clarity erodes • why communication collapses • why strategy gets replaced with theatre
This is the foundation of your People-First and Structured Thought work — the blog was the long preamble to those frameworks.
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4. Politics, Power & Narrative
Category: How Stories Shape Systems
Politics shows up not as team sports but as a study of power mechanics: incentives, misinformation, propaganda, social drift, and institutional self-preservation. You’re tracking how political narratives shape behaviour, how media distort signals, and how systems use confusion as a feature, not a bug.
It’s less “left/right” and more “how does power behave when no one’s watching?”
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5. Personal Reflection as Calibration
Category: Lived Experience as Data
Scattered between analysis are personal markers — moments of doubt, frustration, humour, curiosity. These aren’t diary entries; they work like calibration points. They show why you care about the themes above and how your lens shifted over time.
It’s not nostalgia — it’s grounding. The personal posts remind the reader (and you) that all the system-wide reasoning still begins with lived experience.
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How These Themes Organise Themselves
If you zoom out, the five themes collapse into three overarching categories:
A. Systems Analysis
• Systems vs People
• Organisational Drift
• Politics and Power
These posts decode how things really work — beneath the surface narratives.
B. Digital Life and Identity
• Digital Culture
• Decentralisation
• Protocols, platforms, incentives
This is your long-running preoccupation with how the internet reshapes agency.
C. Personal Lens & Human Anchors
• Reflections
• Observations
• Small signals
They keep the whole thing from becoming a cold systems textbook.
About This Blog
What is this blog about? Apparently it serves as a reflective exploration of complexity in various systems, highlighting the disconnect between theoretical frameworks and real-world behavior, while aiming to promote thoughtful navigation through that complexity. Who knew? Click through to read the why, the method and the overview.
Looks like someone’s lost the plot …
🔗 Russian oil has flowed into New Zealand despite sanctions
Then again imagine the price at the pump reduced profits of the gas companies if that hadn’t happened.
Yup - ð The Gaping Void Post www.gapingvoid.com/just-fall…
Yup - 🔗 The Gaping Void Post
A reminder from Seth
The Hotel California (and subscriptions)
The seduction is clear. They’re sending a message: If you want us to bring you eyeballs, move in. Don’t link out.
and …
The best way to read blogs hasn’t changed in twenty years. RSS. It’s free and easy and it just works. It’s the most efficient way to get the information you’re looking for, and it’s under your control.
🔗 Job for 2027: Senior Director of Million-Dollar Regexes – O’Reilly
From $15,000/day to $0.96/day - I do think we’re about to see a lot of companies realize that a thinking model connected to an MCP server is way more expensive than just paying someone to write a bash script. Starting now, you’ll be able to make a career out of un-LLM-ifying applications.
And so we go round?
The freezing over of hell.
Last week I am listening to MTG and wondering why I am agreeing with her - and then this week Musk releases a new feature that seems pretty much ‘like - yeah - right on’.
Techdirt reports “ 🔗 Why Trust & Safety Work Was Never About The ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’
Call It A Public Service
The report reveals a decline in employee trust due to disconnection from leadership and stagnation in career progression, prompting a return to office spaces despite the ongoing buzz about AI disruption.
Loving what @dave is doing with the Feedland Daveland and everything else push .. and the write once publish anywhere story is music to my ears .. which is why I use Micro.Blog where I write and publish once and then Micro.Blog pushes out my words to a handful os services that I have defined and so on and so on …
What I am missing (not a programmer) is what Dave is doing that is different to @manton ❓
Well - thats been a job I have not been doing for. long time - but once again - thank you @Munish for reminding me that other people do on occasions look at ðï¸ my actual site. Styling moved along, search back in place and the start of my documents directory re-enabled. Onward. https://john.philpin.com
Well - thats been a job I have not been doing for. long time - but once again - thank you @Munish for reminding me that other people do on occasions look at 🖇️ my actual site. Styling moved along, search back in place and the start of my documents directory re-enabled. Onward.
I know how he feels. ðï¸ð¬ My Review ð john.philpin.com/2024/12/0…