Welcome

This is a very brief post to mark the launch of this site - the date being the 22nd of April, 2024. One of the purposes for doing so is to collate the large number of posts I have spread around the web and turn the blog on this site into an archive¹ (it will be an “active” archive as I also start to add new posts).

15 years have passed since my very first blog post on the 16th of April, 2009 - it is still available here. I’ve since posted on various sites with a range of collaborators, including teamsportcoaching.com, Sports Relations, Medium, myfastestmile and WayFinders Network.

We are in a time when big tech and their monopolistic platforms are beginning to be flooded with content generated by Large Language Models (LLM’s), signalling that the process of enshittification is well underway. We are about to see a vicious cycle emerge as the output of these models generates data that the very same models are subsequently trained on. This closed loop will see an exponential acceleration of content that is completely devoid of human wisdom and living intelligence. With that in mind, I chose the “.life” top-level domain (TLD) for this site as a nod to centering living systems.

The march of AI and algorithmically-manipulated feeds is triggering two movements. One, people are increasingly looking to their own local community and (re)connecting in “place”. Two, the (re)turn to a cosy and distributed web as people setup their own sites, as I am doing here. This move creates challenges with search and discovery…ironically it may be a challenge where an AI tool can support human curation, but only if such a tool is carefully crafted by wise and ethical humans rather than corporate psychopaths.

Given that, I wonder how you found your way here? In any case, welcome!

Mark

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash