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Aldous Huxley's book turned out to be a gold-mine that I am still mentally processing. Reading it alongside Gall's Systematics brings up more than a few synthetic insights. With regard to our inability to live fully within or without systems;

The idea that we live half in and half out of rational systems of thought and language is getting more relevant as technology creeps into more of human life. Excesses of one sort of existence or the other are getting more problematic, as device addiction and loss of reality horizons. "AI psychosis" is a more obvious symptom, but more generally we're failing to maintain a balance and that seems bound to lead to mental illness, bad decisions and economic ruin.

I love our techno-critical laureate Mr. Doctorow as much as you do, but sometimes he is most infuriating in his ability to talk around a subject in insightful, intricate technical detail without naming the damn keyword, the plain human factor, right at the heart of it all.

No doubt it grates because I do that too, while I'm still working through an idea. looking for the "nub of it" as it were.

On "Enshitification", he said ten thousand words, and he said ten thousand more, and after we were marched up to the top of the hill and back down again, who was any wiser that with enshitification all along we were talking about treachery? Plain simple calculated deceit?

Today, again Cory picks a spot-on topic, one that we've all been thinking and writing about forever… what is the damn obsession with caring about how (technically) something is achieved rather than the end result? It turns into a great comment on Taylorism and the fundamental insecurity and incompetence of "professional management" that Jay Little spoke with me about last week. But I searched Cory's text and nowhere do any of the following words appear: {Neurotic, Control, Freak}

The entire article is about neurotic control freaks. They're neurotic. They want to control everything. And they're just damn freaks!

This event was fun. I heard about it with no time to spare, so just turned up at 10 O'clock of the first day to find about 40 very interesting people including writers, politicians, psychologists, journalists, artists, activists and at least one fellow computer scientist already deep in conference.

The mini-con was a celebration of Adam Curtis' work, and a space to acknowledge his influence on all our thinking. It was a stroke of genius by organisers (Brian Jenner and others) to pick a body of work, not so much the figure of Adam Curtis himself (who did not attend, eschewing the prospect of becoming "a talisman"), as a neutral focal point around which to build a highly political but non-partisan buzz. Indeed the ideas and style of pieces like Hyernormalisation Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Century of the self and so on, were a constantly nourishing buffet that kept conversation flowing.

"Party" was an ambition that did not quite flower. During the one day I attended there was only moment or two of dancing and music, though I got separated from rest at a nearby bar and probably missed some DJs bringing musical entertaiment. The problem with mini-cons is that by the time everyone gets to know each other the event is done.

So, themes I noted and lessons I learned were around how we break out of stuck thinking. Though psychoanalysis did not explicitly surface (except as an implied counter to medicalisation of mental health) the conference held the very challenging idea of how we are addicted to unproductive patterns of thought, sense of forshortened future, groundhog-days, loops, false dichotomies. These appeared as enrest conversation and some lively spats; one between an ex defence minister and a social democrat responsible for social security policy as "Warfare versus Welfare" (What should one do with a limited budget and the choice between feeding a starving population and repelling enemies at the gate?). Another over the fundamental unfalsifiability of anecdotal evidence. Yet another about Art History.

Yet all of these tensions (which remained mostly positive and civilised) pointed toward the bigger issue, the philosophical problem that all present were in the process of recognising and challenging - and one that is central to Curtis' question; It is that our traditional intellectual apparatus for doing politics, for formulating narratives, and for solving problems are inadequate, damaged by too much historical trauma, too stuck and unsophisticated for the complexities we face.

Disappointingly for me, almost no mentions of our technological enemies were made. Concepts like technofascism, software freedom, digital sovereignty were quite absent from the group vocabulary. Tobias Elwood touched on a few, but only through a negative lens as threats. Important technical ideas were conflated with other areas of discourse like energy security or the hate-triangle of "immigration, identity and surveillance", which I found frustrating. Many ideas we've named and formulated as hackers/system-people still seem muddy within a wider arts and humanities political framework.

The mini-con continues today <2026-09-13 Sun> but I was needed at church, which gave me a moment to reflect on the spiritual themes we shared yesterday, especially of forgiveness as a pre-requisite to moving forward.

Mr Jenner opened the proceedings with a keynote on Bournemouth as an historical health resort, a place for healing and recovery. The themes of trauma recovery, addiction and healing of division were ever present in the background;

• how do we forgive ourselves for the extraordinary mistakes we've made with capitalism, colonialism and industrialisation?
• how do we stop blaming each other and become coordinated in the shared interest of recovery and healing?
• how do we repair curtailed futures and put aside apocalyptic visions of the future?

A most enjoyable and inspirational day and I hope there will be another in times to come.