Weeknote 04/2026

Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse.

(Karen Barad)

I don't know what it says about me that I often get up earlier at the weekend than I do on weekdays. Is it some kind of moral failing? Does it signal some underlying malaise? Or is just a function of my weekly routine?

This morning did feel a bit ridiculous, though: 04:15 is not a civilised time to rise from slumber. Coming downstairs to do some reading and blogging is better than lying there ruminating, I guess. And the marmalade-on-toast made with seeded sourdough from a local artisanal bakery took the edge off.

So what have I been up to this week?

Writing

Last week, I mentioned that trying to publish a longer blog post here every day was a bit much. Publishing Monday, Wednesday and Friday this week felt a lot more sustainable.

How and why I’ve migrated from from Google to Proton

I’m not suggesting everyone should follow this path, but this is simply the best choice I’ve found that aligns with how I think about digital sovereignty and who I want controlling my data.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Why your worst decision probably came from your best analysis

When we stop trying to choose between our head and our gut, we are more likely to bring our full intelligence to work.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Why Your Organisation Needs Someone “Unemployable”

At some point in your career, you might realise you are less interested in fitting into roles and more interested in reshaping the system that produces those roles in the first place.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

They have no idea what’s happening now.

I was talking with Laura about how full-time jobs are pretty much over as a construct. There aren’t as many as there used to be, particularly for knowledge workers, and there’s plenty of people (like us!) who wouldn’t want one in any case. This time last year I was laughing at the prediction that AI would be able to replace developers. Now I’m vibe coding actually useful software from scratch. AGI is kinda already here.

Thought Shrapnel

SOLVEM PROBLER

Source: @brucesterling

Thought Shrapnel

The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards

This is a must-read from Andrea Pitzer. As she points out, the window of opportunity to do something about what’s happening in the US is closing. I’ve looked at mass civilian detention around the world. I’ve visited the facilities where people were held. I’ve talked to the people involved—those detained and tortured, those who supported camps, and those who stood idly by. It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process.

Thought Shrapnel

Privacy by design means what it says on the tin

This was shared with me by Tom Watson yesterday, and we discussed it briefly as part of our now-regular Friday ‘noodling’ sessions. Now, fair enough, one would not expect that turning off ChatGPT’s data consent option would delete files on your own computer. But then, not having backups is, at the very least, cavalier when your livelihood depends on your outputs. So it’s a reminder not only that LLMs are simultaneously very powerful and ‘stupid’ but also that, just like every other time in the history of digital devices you should have backups.

Thought Shrapnel

It makes a lot more sense

Source: Bluesky

Thought Shrapnel

Are they ever tricked by a voice that is false when they expected it to be a real, live human?​

Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks about these things. Ambiguity is a fundamental part of how we interact with each other and with our devices. And it’s very rarely discussed in general, and certainly not part of the stories we read, watch, or listen to — except as a plot device. These days, when I watch movies with voice interfaces or “AI” assistants in them, I find myself pretty surprised by how many fictional worlds seem to be full of people who never experience any ambiguity about whether they’re talking to a person or to software.

Thought Shrapnel

My Are.na channels are now more organised

I only post a small selection of the things I bookmark here on Thought Shrapnel. As ever when I’m not sure about how to organise things, when I started using Are.na again, I just put everything in a single “Finds” channel. Now that I’ve been using it for a few months, I decided it was high time I was a bit more organised. So I’ve defined some channels and included them with “Finds” for ease of finding.

Thought Shrapnel

Living with your incapacity

The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands… . The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, … this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs.

Thought Shrapnel

What do we mean when we talk about pollution and toxicity in online spaces?

As someone who has done a lot of thinking about community spaces over the years, I like this investigation into what we mean when we use environmental analogies for online communities. It seems like it’s the start of a research project, and there’s a call for people to get in touch with the author. The metaphor of online communities that “have become toxic” or that are “being polluted” in different ways is a common one.

Thought Shrapnel

Weapon of the enemy

Thought Shrapnel

Psychological Defence and Information Influence

This looks interesting. It’s from Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency and their website has lots of interesting stuff on it. In an age defined by rapid information flows and shifting security landscapes, the resilience of societies rests not only on military strength or technological capacity, but equally on the ability of individuals and institutions to withstand psychological influence and manipulation. Psychological defence is therefore not merely a technical field, it is a civic responsibility and a cornerstone of democratic resilience.

Thought Shrapnel

National security assessment on global ecosystems

It’s always worth looking at what governments decide to publish when the public are busy looking the other way. Recently, Trump’s actions around Greenland have been in the news, and so the UK government though it would be a good time to publish this. It’s only 14 pages long and easily scannable, but TL;DR: “Significant disruption to international markets as a result of ecosystem degradation or collapse will put UK food security at risk.

Thought Shrapnel

Reading

I've enjoyed finishing off Bothy by Kat Hill this week. It took a couple of chapters to hit its stride, but once it did the weaving of personal narrative with isolated landscapes transported me to a different place.

Due to issues with my phone and server (see next bit) meant that my feed reader wasn't working this week. So I didn't add or remove anything on that front, but as mentioned in one of the above posts, my Are.na channels are now more organised.

Geeky bit

This week has been one of tech friction. Let's start with the funny-but-instructive story of me accidentally typing in my duress password on my GrapheneOS-powered Pixel Fold and immediately wiping it.

GrapheneOS: the private and secure mobile OS

GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

GrapheneOS

Ironically enough, I was planning to wipe it later that day in any case, as the inner screen developed a crack. I had everything backed up except my Signal chats. My phone is currently being repaired under warranty by Google, and so I'm currently using an old Pixel 5 running LineageOS. As it doesn't re-lock the bootloader, I currently can't access my banking app.

I had problems with my Njalla VPS twice this week. The first time was when I was trying to programatically delete duplicate posts from the WordPress-Ghost migration in MySQL. I had to restore from a backup. Then, while attempting an upgrade of Ghost, migrations corrupted the database. I had to restore everything again. All I can say is thank goodness for Claude Code. The first time around, I had no clue what to do, and it “thought” for fully 18.5 minutes before getting on and fixing it.

Things come in threes, or at least they seem to, so of course the SSD died that I'd recently installed in my Unraid-powered home server as an extra cache. When I was troubleshooting using Perplexity it mildly scolded me for buying such a “low endurance” drive wholly unsuitable for such “write-intensive” workloads. Noted.

Unleash Your Hardware

Unraid is an operating system that brings enterprise-class features for personal and small business applications. Configure your computer systems to maximize performance and capacity using any combination of OS, storage devices, and hardware.

Unraid

All of these problems are self-inflicted. I don't have to have a folding phone with two screens running an operating system I have to remove before sending it for repair. I don't have to maintain my own blogging software. Nor do I have to run my own home server. But we're friction-maxxing in 2026, right?

Working

If you're reading this via email or RSS, you might want to click through and see how I've made the site more accessible.

More on that soon, but it was inspired by work Laura and I have been as we prepare Amnesty International UK's new community platform for the pilot next week.

You can't just go off “vibes” when deciding whether or not to proceed to the next phase of a project. Laura and I had helped Amnesty staff understand that we needed to do structured, scripted platform testing with activists, followed by a basic accessibility review, and have all of the training material in place before we could push the staging site to production.

Happily, that's now happened and we'll be welcoming staff and activists to the platform starting tomorrow. We're expecting to learn lots and for them to act in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways – as actual human beings tend to. Again, we've already defined the quantitative and qualitative metrics that we'll be gathering during the pilot so that we can make a decision at the end of the time period as to whether it's ready to be scaled-up.

The Amnesty work has taken most of my attention this week, but I did also spend some time responding to the Skills Development Scotland ITQ with Nate Otto. Other than some noodling with Tom, it was my first proper collaboration in Proton Docs. It's not on a par with Google Docs, but it's fine.

Create and collaborate with secure online documents | Proton

Collaborate in real-time, share documents safely, work from any device, and keep your data yours with Proton Docs.

Proton

WAO ran a workshop INASP just before Christmas, and they've come back to ask to continue working with us. A couple of people got in touch about potential bits of work which may or may not come off. I've also updated my Dynamic Skillset website this week, so if you know of anyone who has something Doug-shaped they need help with, please point them in my direction!

Personal

As I mentioned last week, I've been trying to spend some time resting and doing no exercise. So, of course, my body has decided now would be a good time to come down with the latest lurgy. I've been dosed up on ibuprofen and paracetamol for the last few days, the upside of which has been not feeling the mysterious discomfort I've had in my upper abdomen for the last months.

My son, Ben, turned 19 on Thursday. My parents took him out for lunch and he opened presents in the afternoon. On Friday, we packed him up to return to university – which is only 15 miles away in Newcastle. That evening, we went to Khai Khai in Newcastle, before dropping him back at his accommodation.

Khai Khai - An Indian Restaurant in Newcastle

Heritage Indian comfort food in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Regional Indian dishes prepared with fire & smoke, paired with cocktails in a warm, stylish setting.

Khai Khai - Heritage Indian comfort food prepared with fire and smoke

The next I heard from him was at 07:30 the next morning, as I was getting up and he, apparently, was just getting in from an all-nighter in celebration of his and a friend's birthdays. I got myself ready and drove my daughter, Grace, down for a Junior Premier League match against Leeds Academy. They lost, but she played well and it was the debut for her friend Jess. It was just us two, as my wife, Hannah, was having some dental work done.

Now that I've got my home server sorted again, I'm very much enjoying Plexamp on my phone and Mac Studio. It's a lovingly-crafted app and makes me very glad I bought a lifetime Plex subscription when it was on sale.

Meet Plexamp

Explore, discover, and have fun with your music using our beautiful, custom-built music player.

Plex

Next week

I'm on the mend, so hopefully I'll return to doing some exercise on Thursday after a two-week break. As mentioned above, the Amnesty Community pilot starts so that will be interesting.

On Wednesday, I'm up in Glasgow with Aaron at a new strategy-focused facilitation offering from Julia Slay. There's always something to learn from other facilitators, so I'm looking forward to it. Then, on Friday, I'll be doing some in-person noodling with Tom around an idea we've got which we'd like to collaborate on together.