Writing Wisdom
I've had a very rough idea for a story kicking around in my brain for months. A young woman is the hereditary Wisdom Speaker of her tribe. She's inherited her rôle young, because her mother, aunt, grandmother, and great grandmother have all been killed by leading men of the tribe, for giving good advice — speaking wisdom — that they did not want to hear.
Should she accept the rôle? Would it be wise? Why should she care? Are these people worth risking her life to support? And if she does accept the rôle, how should she act, to put her tribe onto a sustainable footing and bring it into peace with its neighbouring tribes?
In the first week of 2026, I've already written the first ten thousand words of this story. None of what I've written yet is very good; it's all sketchy. But I do have a sketch of the whole arc of the story. It's provisionally entitled 'Wisdom,' and it's provisionally subtitled 'a meditation on theology, and right action.'
The Road to Artificial General Intelligence?
Introduction
This essay grows out of a thread I wrote on Mastodon this morning, which in turn grew out of an essay by Tim O'Reilly on the current state of the 'Artificial Intelligence' industry. One sentence from that essay particularly caught my eye:
By product-market fit we don’t just mean that users love the product or that one company has dominant market share but that a company has found a viable economic model, where what people are willing to pay for AI-based services is greater than the cost of delivering them.
Tidings of comfort and joy
Tidings of comfort and joy
Standingstone Farm
Auchencairn
DG7 1RF
Scotland
The Narcissism of Small Differences
The Narcissism of Small Differences
Liberal commentators are very eager to accuse the left of obsessing — and falling out — over things which, in reality, don't seem to the liberals to matter very much. They have a phrase for this: 'the narcissism of small differences.' Well, OK, we on the left do fall out over things which, seen from outside our spectrum, may seem trivial, such as whether communism should be imposed from above or grown from below; whether people should self organise voluntarily or should be led by a self-appointed vanguard party; whether people should be entitled to food and security as a reward for their work, or simply as a consequence of their membership of the society; and so on.
On Communism
This essay is incomplete; I'm publishing it now for criticism and comment, but will return to it. It is part of a train of thought which includes at least Building Lifeboats, Manifesto for a good society, On Money, and The Standingstone Model. In its final form it will probably be rewritten to include parts of all of those.
The image at the head of this essay is taken from the cap badge of the army of the Soviet Union, which is ironic for many reasons. I see the Hammer and Sickle as an important symbol of the alliance between industrial and agricultural workers, which is what it was designed, in Russia after the 1918 revolution, to be. But the Communist Party of the Soviet Union never really supported this alliance, exploiting peasants ruthlessly.