// Generative Engine Optimisation
John Lewis says the share of shoppers arriving via an AI tool, ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest, has gone from 0.3% of traffic a year ago to 2.5% now. Eightfold in twelve months. Peter Ruis, managing director of John Lewis department stores, calls it exponential. Every age group.
What happens once the reader stops being a person: a content studio on Oxford Street, a YouTube chat show, and a metric nobody can buy their way onto.
Also: the cobra effect’s other cousin, why “third-party” content made in-house isn’t quite, and a managing director who won’t be there to see if any of it worked.
// Information Appliances
Every function a device can perform is something your brain has to hold open as a possibility.
Jef Raskin, the Canon Cat, and why a device that only does one thing asks less of you than one that does everything.
Also: a language with only one variable, a phone that used to do one thing at a time, and the iPod again.
// The Discipline of No
More money was supposed to buy better decisions. Mostly it buys the excuse to skip making one.
Seth Godin, Yahoo’s old homepage, and the case that more resources should mean fewer decisions, not more products.
Also: a search box with nothing else on it, a company that said yes to everything, and the part of the job that doesn’t scale with funding.
// Imagining the Traffic Jam
Technology has no inevitable trajectory.
Last of five, following on from An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence. What we didn’t imagine when we built the attention economy, what the same question means for the intention economy, and why the destructive path is always the easier one.
Also: a toddler who can infer what you meant to do, an installation at the Venice Biennale, and the moment we all lost, one more time.
// An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence
Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product.
Fourth of five, following on from Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas. About what homogenisation does to trust, once every option looks and behaves the same, and why that makes leaving easy and staying meaningless.
Also: the same coffee shop in Berlin, Bucharest and Cape Town, enshittification, and why there’s no hook left for customer intent.
// Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas
Creativity is powered by friction.
Third of five, following on from My Reconditioned iPod. About what happens to creative work when the friction gets designed out of it. Design systems, Figma agents, and the difference between producing output and having something to say.
Also: a frozen risotto, a component library nobody had to think about, and why the operating was never the differentiator.
// My Reconditioned iPod
I go for walks without my phone now. Just me and whatever I loaded before I left the house.
Second of five, following on from The Intention Economy. What a deliberately limited piece of technology teaches you about choosing what you want, and a subway ad that stumbled onto the same idea by accident.
Also: a walk without a phone, a search that makes you remember the name of the thing you’re after, and a Game Boy with a heart drawn on it.
// The Intention Economy
We didn’t lose our attention. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to.
First of five. This started as one post that tried to do too much. This one’s about ADHD, the attention economy, and the intention economy Doc Searls imagined in 2006, then what happened when the people running the attention economy noticed it.
Also: a misdiagnosed disorder, a search engine that built the answer then buried it, and researchers arguing over who gets to use a word.
// Proof of Life
It’s been a while. This is where I’m at.
A long overdue check-in covering sobriety, why I’ve mostly fallen out of love with social media, and why I think the friction we’ve been so busy optimising away is often the best part.
Also: post-optimal objects, constraints, eating frogs, and a clock that tells the time in poetry.
// Dreaming Aloud
My brain started fizzing again. I hadn’t felt that in years.
An old post, brought in from Medium. About noticing the same energy that was around from 2010 to 2014, before the NDAs closed in, and what a Turner Prize-nominated artwork in Eastbourne had to do with getting it back.
Also: a Tumblr notebook, Discordia, and a clock that started all of this.
// Break It Till You Make It
I used to break gear on purpose.
From 2015, brought in from Medium. Pushing music equipment past what it’s meant to do, and a habit I’ve let go slack since.
Also: an Amiga loading image files as audio, and the accidents that turned out brilliant.
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