Hey, I’m Olu! I am a full stack developer for local government, a writer, and a content creator. I also like to sew, read, apprendre français, and am extremely online.
For the purposes of this post, I’m mostly going to focus on what I’m currently thinking about, more of which can be found on my blog and my digital garden.
But yeah, in no particular order, ten things I’m currently thinking about:
- 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, time nor inclination to build the next Google.