This week's best things
Digital failure, smoky twirls, AI’s energy diet, alt-phones for t(w)eens, rotating sandwiches, Pocket says goodbye, Airbnb wants to be everything, leadership in 2025, the Who Cares era. I’m back from Aarhus, and I’d love your thoughts on the report.
I'm now back at home in Göteborg, I really enjoyed our trip to Aarhus last weekend - a very chilled out and charming city. With an absolutely brilliant library.
Here are some good things...
Art Vibes
A playful AI-powered experiment from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC that allows you to browse their collection by choosing an adjective, noun, and verb to form a search query.
As Martín Franzini (Chief of Digital Product and Experience) said "When you have over 160,000 works in your collection with just 2% on view, how do you make the other 98% discoverable to people when they would otherwise sit in storage?"
Here's an example for 'moody smoky twirl'.
Interview: National Gallery of Art (DC)'s Chief Information Officer, Rob Stein
And while we're on NGA things, there's a good interview with Rob Stein in Georgina Brooke's latest edition of the Cultural Content newsletter.
Contains some useful bits on leadership, AI, and futurecasting.
"I think we’re heading into a transformation on the scale of the Industrial Revolution—with both upsides and downsides.
One upside could be a shift in leisure time, which historically boosted the arts and culture sector. Another will be changes in education. Self-paced learning is highly effective, and AI supports it well. People will need to learn continuously as AI takes over routine digital tasks.
But we also face risks. AI may amplify misinformation. It’s going to be increasingly important to teach critical thinking: how to distinguish fact from fiction, how to evaluate sources. Humanities and cultural organizations have a critical role to play there."
Georgina Brooke
Beyond the Promise
After months of work (and talking about it quite a lot) the Beyond the Promise report on digital failure in the cultural sector was released this week.
The full report explores recurring project challenges, systemic barriers, and the deeper organisational dynamics that influence the success of digital work.
It’s grounded in real-world stories and aims to be practical, clear, and helpful.
I'm really proud of this work. I hope it's useful, I'd love to know what you think.
Ash Mann
The Reenchanted World
Fancy an essay from famed Norwegian miserablist Karl Ove Knausgård? It's Friday, of course you do.
It's a good rumination on imagination, memory, how we build our understanding of the world, and his life's experiences with technology.
I'm being a bit unfair with my miserablist description, his writing is often full of a real attention to the detail of beauty, and this essay is no exception.
This passage about his experience of ABBA Voyage, for example, is pretty great.
"One winter, my family and I went to the new ABBA show in London, where I sat in the singing and cheering audience, fighting back tears, shaken to my core. The four members of ABBA had been re-created as holograms; they consisted of light, but they looked so alive, rising from a platform beneath the stage as if from the underworld while they sang. They were young again, moving onstage like the slightly awkward Scandinavians they’d once been: Björn, Benny, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid. Their bodies and voices were from the Seventies, but they were moving and singing in our time, alongside a live band that sat in the shadows and played. It felt as if time were being pulled out from under me like a rug, because if I existed in the same time as what I was watching, then I was eight years old and fifty-four all at once, a child and a middle-aged man. Wave after wave of nostalgia and longing swept through me, but also fear, because it was death I was seeing—it was death we clapped and sang along to, there in the concert hall. We were Doctor Faustus as Marlowe described him when the beautiful Helen of Troy was conjured up before his eyes. We were Odysseus as Homer described him when he conjured up his dead mother from Hades and grasped at the empty air three times as he tried to embrace her."
The piece is very long and very poetic, it contains a number of observations that I think say useful things about our relationships with technology and how that affects things like agency, enthusiasm, and adoption.
It's one of my favourite things that I've read recently.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
‘I thought it was a speech by Kurt Vonnegut’: Baz Luhrmann on making Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
For some reason a cover of Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen) came on this week, which in turn lead me to this Guardian article about the creation of the song.
"We submitted it to the local radio station, trying to get Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) heard, but they said it was too long. I thought: ‘Well, they’ll let me on the late-night arts show.’ So I said: ‘I’ll talk about whatever you want as long as you play it.’ Two minutes into the track, the guy in the booth was tapping on the glass pointing because, literally like a movie, the lights on the switchboard were going crazy. The next day, it was the biggest record in Australia."
Kyle MacNeill
We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
A lot of people's concerns about AI focus on its (potentially astronomical) energy footprint.
This piece in Harvard Business Review is a methodical analysis of what's actually going on.
It contains some alarming findings, such as "according to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households" and it also makes some sobering observations about the type of energy data centres typically use, "data centers can’t rely on intermittent technologies like wind and solar power, and on average, they tend to use dirtier electricity."
It highlights that as AI tools become more sophisticated, and as they are used to generate ever more high-quality and complex outputs (hi-res video being a clear recent example) the energy demands are going to skyrocket even further. But the actual picture of that energy consumption is murky, because (surprise surprise) the technology companies aren't exactly forthcoming in sharing data in this area.
File this under 'important information that you should be taking into account when drawing up policies on this stuff".
James O’Donnell
Digital leadership has never been more important
I was asked to write something for Arts Professional on digital leadership i.e. leadership around digital things, and why it's important.
"Leadership in 2025 is already a balancing act. Digital can help ease that pressure. When approached with the right mindset, it can support clarity, connection and delivery."
Ash Mann Associate at The Space
How to make sense of any mess
I came across this website from Abby Covert when doing some reading for the Beyond the Promise webinars.
This is a site (ironically it's slightly messy and difficult-to-use) that contains a lot of useful information about the value of Information Architecture.
"Some things are simple. Some things are complicated. Every single thing in the universe is complex.
Complexity is part of the equation. We don’t get to choose our way out of it.
Here are three complexities you may encounter:
- A common complexity is lacking a clear direction or agreeing on how to approach something you are working on with others.
- It can be complex to create, change, access, and maintain useful connections between people and systems, but these connections make it possible for us to communicate.
- People perceive what’s going on around them in different ways. Differing interpretations can make a mess complex to work through."
Abby Covert
The Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge
I think I've shared something about this initiative before, but it's heartening to see this piece in the New Yorker about the efforts being made by people in America to salvage public digital infrastructure and content amidst DOGE-driven clampdowns.
Blessed are the librarians.
"More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a “digital book burning,” and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice. Racing to comply with executive orders banning “D.E.I.” and “gender ideology extremism,” agencies have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects people of African descent. But they have also axed records having little to do with the Administration’s ideological priorities, seemingly assisted by A.I. tools that flag forbidden words without regard to context. A recently leaked list of pages marked for deletion on military websites includes references to the Enola Gay—not, as it turns out, a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community but, rather, the B-29 bomber that nuked Hiroshima."
Julian Lucas
Pocket is saying goodbye
Pocket has long been one of the avenues through which I go looking for interesting things on the internet. So it's sad to hear that as of July this year, it will be shutting down.
Reading between the lines, it seems that the Mozilla Foundation (which owns Pocket, and also develops the Firefox internet browser) has already started folding much of Pocket's discovery functionality into the native Firefox experience. But still, sad to see it go.
Airbnb Is in Midlife Crisis Mode
Quite why every middle-aged (male) tech billionaire feels the need to pursue the 'everything app' ambition is beyond me (the reason is, of course, money).
We now have Airbnb's Brian Chesky having a crisis about it too, ostensibly it seems he's spending a whole load of time and money to relaunch something that Airbnb already tried and failed with.
This article in Wired is either fawning, or written with an eyebrow permanently raised and trying to suppress a chuckle, I couldn't quite work it out.
"Now Chesky was emboldened to lay out his vision. Home rentals are simply a service, so why stop there? Airbnb could be the platform for booking all sorts of services. While other apps cover specific sectors—food delivery, home maintenance, car rides—Chesky figured that Airbnb’s experience in attractively displaying homes, vetting hosts, and responding to crises could make it more trustworthy than competitors and therefore the go-to option for virtually anything.
In a frantic typing spree at the dining room table, on the couch, the bed, and at times in his office, Chesky specced out how he would redesign the Airbnb app. Its users—now at 2 billion—would open up the app not only at vacation time but whenever they needed to find a portrait photographer, a personal trainer, or someone to cook their meals. Chesky reasoned that Airbnb would need to significantly strengthen its identity verification. He even thought he could get people to use the app as a credential, something as respected as a government-issued ID. If he could transform Airbnb into a storefront for real-world services, Chesky thought, he’d catapult his company from a nearly $10-billion-a-year business into one that boasted membership in tech’s pantheon."
Steven Levy
The Who Cares Era
A good blog from Dan Sinker about the same-ification effect of AI, and the value of being a messy human.
"Without getting into too many specifics, I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed.
Until.
Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They glowed with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.
They were human.
They were written by people that cared.
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care."
At Google I/O, everything is changing and normal and scary and chill
Casey Newton reports from Google' annual developer conference. Worth a read just to keep up with what interesting/awful/unnecessary/ridiculous things are being promised.
"Other AI labs talk about artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence; a country of geniuses in a data center. Not Google; not today. Onstage, the head of search is planning a trip to Nashville with AI, and a VP of engineering is showing videos of some science experiments he did with his kids this weekend.
Everything is changing, but not too much, and not too fast.
There is slop, of course. A new image model that can render text, like OpenAI's; and a new video model that will also generate sounds. In an AI-generated video clip, a slop owl noisily flaps its wings while descending on a badger for a brief conversation. The dialogue makes no sense."
Casey Newton
The Association of Swedish Illustrators and Graphic Designers announce collective opt-out from AI training
An interesting AI development closer to home, with the announcement that if you want to train AI with the work of anyone who is a member of the Association of Swedish Illustrators and Graphic Designers then you their need explicit permission.
How successful this will be remains to be seen, outright theft has served the AI companies pretty well so far.
Vacancies
Digital Content Manager - Opera Rara - London, UK - £40,000 to £50,000 - deadline 02/06/25
This week's consumption
I finished Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, which I really enjoyed. Also, it had beautiful cover art.
I'm now reading The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce which is an easy, enjoyable read so far.
My copy of Strangers need strange moments together (by Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat) arrived this week, I haven't started it yet but it looks intriguing.
Season 4 of Hacks continues to be so great, I love it.
See you next week
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Please enjoy this list of (rotating) 3d scans that someone has made of a lot of sandwiches: rotatingsandwiches.com.
To finish, a quick reminder that I'm a consultant who helps cultural organisations do better digital work - if it sounds like I could be useful, then let's chat.