hello there! i’m olu.
this digital garden is for thinking out loud, sketching things out, getting feedback and learning in public/working with the garage door up/showing my work.
i used to do this in a much more “my thoughts grow here, and once mature, are planted in my blog” but i don’t think this works well with how i think! so this notes site is going mostly append only, which means i will probably refer to it more and write at length less! more of a guerilla gardening vibe than a manicured lawn, for sure.
append, march 2026: i don’t know what it would mean to ONLY append, as sometimes i don’t agree with what i wrote and the pages get very long if i only add to them — thinking of my ai page — so I guess what i really mean is I’ll try not to randomly delete or move stuff.
please get in touch if anything strikes a nerve or speaks to you, or you have something to share.
recent thoughts:
I’ve been inspired by nadia asparouhova’s independent research on open source for a while, and her other writing about structuring the work like a PhD and independent research as a public service. This is one of those things that lowkey changed my brain chemistry on reading however many years ago, and I then did nothing. Mostly because I “wasn’t the kind of person” who gets a lucrative sponsorship or research job.
But, as nadia says in the last link:
Life is short. Do whatever you can’t stop thinking about. Documenting your findings in public (regardless of outcomes!) is a worthy contribution to society, full stop.
So I’m not gonna focus on open source, but going deeper on the things that interest me and will expanding here on a lot of stuff I think. I am trying to use google docs less and write here more so we’ll see!
current interests/focuses
i think this is possibly best summed up as “the ecological impacts of the internet”, but in case you want the long version:
- invisibilised or intangiblised technologies (primarily interested in the internet but other seemingly wireless stuff is cool too)
- the impact, on human and non-human bodies and life, of intangibilised/invisibilsed technology
- whether there’s already terminology for “intangibilised/invisibilised” so i can stop writing that phrasing lol
- other phrasing i have is “unembodied” and “empheralised” which are not much better
- “disembodied”? though i wonder if people would prefer to keep embodiment for living things…
- ecosociopolitical impact of invisibilsed or intangiblised technologies on marginalized peoples
- landlocked countries are much less likely to have widespread internet connection even in the year of 2026, and whilst this is gradually improving it’s a fact of the topology of the world that certain countries have less access to the sea, rather than a “chosen” imbalance for once.
- filter bubbles and whether they exist
- physicality and physical infrastructure of the web
previous thoughts (in no particular order)
- subsea cables - i’m reading the undersea network and my hyperfocus on these wires lives to fight another day
- thinking a lot about topography of the web and the digital for a book (a book!) idea so we’ll see if anything comes of it
- reading a bunch about mapping and tech too
- what’s the point of these notes, anyway?
- coding stuff, mostly about malleable software (aka software the end user can manipulate)
- thinking a bit about polarisation online
- Social media, and whether we need it. What will replace it, if anything, what it contributes and whether it’s infrastructure
- What parts of our digital lives currently in the hands of corporate players are actually digital infrastructure, and should form part of a collective, publicly owned commons
- How we bring glory and romance to the acts of maintenance that stop our servers/bridges/building/water treatment works from keeling over before they actually do.
- Luddism, luddites, neo-Luddites, and how the movement has been misunderstood historically. (yes, I am reading blood in the machine)
- So we need a new Spotify/Tidal/etc or is streaming just a bad model (spoiler so far I think yes but really looking forward to mood machine, a book all about Spotify, coming out in the UK)
- Resisting corporate capture. Must we monetise everything?
- Why do we constantly have to talk about what AI could be, instead of what it currently is: increasingly less but still crap at many of its applications, resource hungry in every sense (time, money, water, etc) and, to be honest, boring?
- Pluralism and its importance to creating healthy ecosystems of like, everything. I was originally trying to get at this with build better webs, though that went in a different direction in the end! I think people are right there are serious advantages to there being “one web”, many things built on top, but what have we lost?
- Digital preservation, and how we decide what is worth preserving in a world with more info than storage space.
- Divesting from big tech, and what we do when we have neither the funds, the time nor inclination to build the next Google .
stuff on technopaganism:
wishing you more than well. đź’ź