Google just missed its climate goals again -- and the culprit is a technology that it's been pouring resources into.

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta staff that agentic AI has not accelerated as hoped, four months after a major reorganisation of the company's AI division.

The 2020s may well end up being remembered as a decade of chaos. Approximately every three years in the decade so far, we’ve faced a new crisis with global implications. This is our new normal - and we need to learn to develop resilience in the face of the chaos inherent on our complex systems. In 2020, COVID-19 overturned our expectations of how life could change, and reinforced how important supply chains are – and how fragile they can be. In 2022/3, the outbreak of the Ukraine war exposed the vulnerabilities in many countries’ energy and food supplies. And now, in 2026, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is giving us the second energy shock of the decade – and threatening to ground flights over the summer period. At the time of writing. Lufthansa is the first airline to make it clear that flights _will_ be cancelled over shortages of aviation fuel. OK, so maybe travelling might get harder – or more expensive – for a while. Surely, we can do what we did last time, and pivot online? Well, that might be more difficult than you remember. In the early part of the pandemic, there was a run on webcams and microphones. Demand shot up, supply stayed stable, or decreased. The rest is simple economics. ## Serious RAMifications But this time around, we’re _already_ facing a technology shortage. The demand for chips and RAM from the burgeoning AI industry is rapidly reversing the “cheap and available” tech world we’ve become used to. RAM shortages are causing products to be cancelled, and demand from AI enthusiasts is making some products unavailable, as the parts to make them are scarce. Take, for example, Valve, whose hit product the Steam Deck is largely out of stock: > While the Steam Deck has had its moment to shine before shortages kicked in, this spells doom for everything else Valve has coming — the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller. > In a blog post, the gaming giant revealed that its console-like PC, VR headset and gaming controller have been delayed to the “first half of the year,” as opposed to Q1 of 2026. And yes, it's due to “memory and storage shortages.” ## AI hungers for data, power – and tech I’m feeling it personally. My six-year-old iMac is on its last legs, and I want to replace it with a Mac mini. The monitor? Easy. I could have it on my desk tomorrow. The computer itself? Much, much harder. They cannot be had for love nor money – at least within the next couple of months: > This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have since extended to other configurations of the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, some outlets noted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June. Why? They’re the preferred device for running on device AI models like OpenClaw at home. And that means what was always a niche product from Apple is seeing demand from buyers like never before. The BBC covered how deeply OpenClaw has become established in China in a matter of months, and it’s spreading among the tech-forward globally. ## Hello, permacrisis, my old friend As the picture emerges, it appears a familiar one. Yes, this is yet another face of the permacrisis. Or, to put it another way, the permacrisis an inevitable result of the potential for chaos in our complex, global economy and infrastructure. It’s chaotic because multiple crises are interacting through vast networks of interconnected systems in ways that are difficult to predict. While the fuel crisis doesn’t directly impact the tech crisis, shipping tech might be about to get a lot more expensive, which will increase prices. And components might become more scarce. Plus, demand is growing from other places… The _Financial Times_ suggests that the transition to electric vehicles is approaching a tipping point in many parts of the world: > Electric vehicle ownership has reached a “tipping point” that signals an irreversible shift away from petrol cars, not only in China but parts of south-east Asia and Europe despite stalling in the US, expert research finds. > EVs accounted for a quarter of new car sales globally in 2025 and the pace of growth has continued into the first quarter of 2026. And the Iran crisis seems to be accelerating that: > Sales of electric cars soared 51% in continental Europe last month, amid a rise in petrol and diesel costs driven by the Iran war. > Data shows that 224,000 new electric vehicles (EVs) were registered in March, and 500,000 across the first three months of the year – a 33.5% increase on a year earlier, according to analysis of national sales data in 15 countries by New AutoMotive and E-Mobility Europe, a trade body. But the knock-on effect of that is likely to impact demand for the technology components and materials used… ## Pure chaos theory This is chaos in its most pure form. As a teenager in the 80s, I was fascinated by it both as a mathematical concept, and by the results that chaotic systems can generate. Some of you might remember the trend for fractal art back in the latter part of the 20th century. They are an expression of the tension between chaos and order in visual form. And the reason that they are so pleasing to use is that tension is expressed in the natural systems around us. We are, as a species at least, used to living in chaotic systems. But we’ve eroded our familiarity with it as an idea over the last century. It’s time to embrace the chaos again. Wikipedia has a useful definition of chaos theory: > Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals and self-organization. The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions). We have, without realising it, created a perfect global system for chaotic effects. We’re not going to be able to unwind that any time soon, or without incalculable damage to our economies or our way of life. And so we have to learn to live within chaotic systems. We need to learn resilience. ## To survive chaos, focus on resilience, not control The tech world already has a phrase for what all businesses need to be employing: chaos engineering. To quote Wikipedia again: > In software development, the ability of a given software to tolerate failures while still ensuring adequate quality of service—often termed resilience—is typically specified as a requirement. However, development teams may fail to meet this requirement due to factors such as short deadlines or lack of domain knowledge. Chaos engineering encompasses techniques aimed at meeting resilience requirements. We could rewrite that as: > In 21st century business, the ability of a given system to tolerate failures while still ensuring adequate quality of service – often termed resilience – needs to be a core business planning requirement. And so, we need chaos planning. We can’t just test our business systems against likely failures – but wild, unlikely ones, too. That’s the heart of the idea of chaos engineering. Bringing that to all businesses might involve us rethinking how we operate. ## Chaos lies in chokepoints Photo by Eilis Garvey / Unsplash For one thing, we are learning the danger of chokepoints. We have seen physical ones – like the Strait of Hormuz, or the Suez Canal – impact us. But we’ve also suffered from failures in structural chokepoints, too, like Germany’s reliance on natural gas, or the world’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Hence, the reason we now have two compelling reasons behind the energy transition: the climate crisis and the permacrisis. The more we power our lives through electricity, and the less we power it, directly or indirectly, through fossil fuels, the more resilient we become. As Apple’s Tim Cook announces his decision to step down, and be replaced by John Ternus, there has been plenty of evaluation of his time at the helm of the most valuable company in the world. What was often cited as one of his great achievements in his earlier days – the incredible China-based supply chain he built that allowed the iPhone to scale to global proportions – is now considered a problem of his legacy: > If President Xi Jinping’s imperialist instincts fade, Mr. Cook will be remembered for helping bring capitalism and liberalism to one of the most populous countries in the world. If the tensions between China and the United States continue to escalate, especially if Beijing makes good on its threats to attack the island of Taiwan — a democracy that happens to produce the vast majority of the world’s semiconductor chips — Mr. Cook will be remembered differently. He will be the man who not only squandered his company’s future (as it is still highly dependent on China), but also handed the West’s technological prowess to its biggest threat. Taiwan: another chokepoint it bears watching, another potential trigger for a chaotic impact on the global economy. ## Resilience is survival The great challenge for the coming decades is twofold: * How do we maintain the benefits of a globally connected economy? * How do we mitigate against the worst chaotic effects that come with that? There’s a proverb: > Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. What happens when we hit “fool me thrice”? Because that’s where we are now. As global supply chains undergo another chaotic convulsion, those who learned the first time will be better placed to survive. Those who learned the second time, will be deeper into their planning, and better able to accelerate their adaptations. Those who are only just getting the message now that business as usual is long, long gone? Well, I’d rather be competing against them than working for them. The emergent lesson of the 2020s isn’t that we need to become better forecasters. It’s that we need to become more resilient. We can’t predict every crisis. We can build systems, organisations and societies that survive them, because chaos isn’t going away. Learning to live with it may be the defining skill of the century.

Once, many years ago, I was sat in a budget hotel in Hamburg, thinking to myself “I don’t want to stop doing this”. It was the day after NEXT18, and my mind was buzzing with the ideas I’d been exposed to. In particular, one of the closing talks by Indy Johar was stuck in my mind. It was one of those that I _needed_ to continue exploring in my writing. He had given us the right questions, without any pretensions to delivering answers: > There are very few parts of the world that have the democratic infrastructure to have these conversations – but they are fundamental conversations. How we have them, and who we design for, will be profound. We are sitting at the precipice of war, famine, revolution, or another disaster. They change things. Can we avoid that? I couldn’t imagine not being part of that conversation. ## Planning for change The conference had been a freelance client since 2012, and I knew that every conference, every piece I wrote for them could potentially be my last. But I know that if that day came, I’d want to carry on writing about those issues; to keep looking into the future and start conversations about what’s next. That was the secret of the conference: unlike so many tech events, it was more interested in what today’s tech would do to society in 10 years, than about the latest app or startup. To take a day a week and look outside journalism, at how the world was changing, and what that means for all us, was a blessing I would rather not let go of. So, I set up my fallback. A domain name that perfectly encapsulated the ideas I was thinking about. A Ghost install. And a steady flow of random pieces that didn’t really fit in with what I’m doing with One Man & His Blog, but which kept the domain (and its Google ranking) alive. ## Change arrives. With coffee. Today, I activate the plan. There’s been a strategic shift at Accenture, NEXT26 won’t be happening, and the site is, for now, on hiatus, while the lovely team decide what NEXT will be in the future. And so, while that happens, I’m picking up where I left off. Drinking coffee. Exploring complexity. Charting a course to what’s next. I didn’t want to stop doing this. It turns out I don’t have to. The next piece will be in your inboxes later today – but if this doesn't sound like you kind of thing, then you can hit unsubscribe below. But I really hope you’ll join me on the journey.

Why commonplace? > A commonplace book “contains a collection of significant or well-known passages that have been copied and organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, in order to serve as a memory aid or reference for the compiler” (Harvard University Libraries). [Source] * * * ## About blogging Robert Birming > There’s so much more to blogging than just writing posts. > It’s a way to learn more about yourself and others. It puts things into perspective. It’s hard to beat as a creative outlet, in so many different ways. * * * ## How badgers created a 35-mile detour It’s terrifying to think what they could do if they united with the mushrooms and the snakes. * * * ## Tom Cox’s writing routine Inspirational stuff: > If you are like me you will discover that there’s a particular fizzing inspiration that needs to be bottled at this time of the day, lest it leak away. My own method is to squeeze it straight out of my pores into the jars from my fridge I save after I have scraped them clean of the chutneys and pestos they were made for. I then label these with my beloved Dymo Labelwriter 360. I am rather specific about the labelling because I place a high value on accuracy, and I always give the inspiration a star rating out of five. More recently I have started to permit half and quarter stars, which gives room for the greater nuance and self-criticism that I increasingly pride myself on. I have also taken the precaution of making the lettering bigger since the night in 1997 that Barbara Kingsolver stayed here, got up even earlier than me and, having mistaken the contents of one of the jars for homemade lemon curd, spread it liberally on three pieces of sourdough then immediately went home and wrote The Poisonwood Bible. The perfect antidote to the tech bro hustle nonsense. * * * ## Empathy (selective) Manton Reece: > I think I’ve figured something out that has been nagging at me for a year. Some people are only selectively empathetic. This sounds fine if you are “on their side”, so it’s easy to miss unless you look closer. Obviously, not a plea for universal acceptance, just a realisation that some people are drawing their circles of empathy too tightly. * * * ## Go, sit on a log Seems like a plan. Some folks nearby have built an _ad hoc_ bench on the beach from driftwood: A driftwood bench on Shoreham Beach. Time to go sit on it. * * * ## Beach view A little video vignette from last weekend:

<p>We tend to associated mourning with the death of a loved one, but that’s only one meaning of the word. One can mourn the loss of anything, including a working relationship. A business partnership that has endured for 14 years is over. And I feel the loss. 14 years is enough for it to work itself into your identity.</p><p>And that the relationship ended badly? That doesn’t help. It carries with it the sting of rejection. It’s been a while since I felt that one. I haven’t broken up with a romantic partner since early 1999. Probably the last time I can close was in 2011, when I was <a href="https://onemanandhisblog.com/2011/11/wanted_new_challenges/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com">made redundant from RBI</a>. That, though, wasn’t personal. The company was moving away from editorial — so it didn't need an editorial change expert.</p><p>This is, to some degree, personal. The new owner of the business does not like the way I do something. I am not prepared to go against everything I’ve learned over 20 years, to appease someone else. Impasse. The only way to solve it?</p><p>End the relationship.</p><h2 id="the-legacy-of-loss">The legacy of loss</h2><p>Hence, the mourning.</p><p>But I know how to cope with loss. Both my parents are long gone, and we lost a child late in pregnancy. This is a small, trivial thing compared to those. But it’s real.</p><p>A relationship that has been one of the two backbones of my self-employed era is gone. The company which pivoted brilliantly alongside me, to survive the pandemic when all my other work was disappearing, is no longer my partner. We’re pivoting away from each other into an uncertain future.</p><p>However, as my wife pointed out, this is very much a “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus">Ship of Theseus</a>” situation. There is nobody at the company in question who worked there when I entered the partnership. The last point of continuity was the founder, who sold up seven months ago, triggering the precipitous decline in my working relationship with the new owner. The company I had the relationship with died months ago, and the new company has no respect for my skills, my experience, and my knowledge.</p><p>So the relationship is over. It was over months ago – but we’ve only just got around to burying it.</p><h2 id="moving-on">Moving on</h2><p>So, I mourn the company I used to work with. There’s not much of it left, bar a URL, some content and some of the same business model.</p><p>But what I don’t want to do – if I can avoid it, is lose the part of it that mattered the most. No, not the income, but the chance to do a certain type of work, with a certain type of person.</p><p>Therefore, once this period of mourning is done, that’s next on my agenda. I need to find a new way to bring what I used to do to market. And that’s just what I’ll do.</p><p>Like everyone who has suffered a loss, I mourn, I move on, and I create something new.</p>

Answers to some questions that will tell you less about me than you might expect…

A mini-project, capturing the street art of Hamburg's trendiest district.

Trying to find coffee amongst the caffeine-craving attendees of the Reeperbahn Festival proved to be a challenge this year…

A tale of two hotels.

Can we choose to tread more lightly on the earth in the way we craft objects?

Secret dens and dirty hands at the Sussex nature reserve

The new version of the CMS gets social and analytical…

Where are the spiritual places of Sussex? A talk from the authors of The Long Man & Friends: Sacred Sussex explored the relationship between the county and faith.

Simple solutions to complex problems are incredible attracyive – and utterly doomed. How much damage will be done while they're tried?

Post short thoughts or long essays, share photos, all on your own blog. Micro.blog makes it easy, and provides a friendly community where you can share and engage with others.

John Gruber announced The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025 with one notable adendum: > in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined. And Parker Ortolani: Apple’s Silence at "The Talk Show" Will Speak Volumes > Apple refusing to participate feels like more than just snubbing Gruber, it’s a missed chance to engage with the very community that cares the most. And Marco Arment: Retreating to Safety > In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way. I’ve always enjoyed The Talk Show Live from WWDC. It’s never been a hardball interview, which I think some people wish it was, it’s generally been a friendly interview with a couple jabs at sore spots here and there. What I hadn’t really thought about until just now is that since 2020, this is basically the only time anyone in the public gets to see Apple executives in front of other people. Its literally the only time we see them talking to other people like humans, the only time they have to think on their feet, and the only time they’re in front of a live audience whose opinion they get to absorb in real time. This will be the 6th year in a row where the entire customer-facing appearances from these execs is in scripted videos. Except for these WWDC Talk Shows. I have no idea why Apple declined to participate this year after a decade of it being as reliable a thing as Craig making a “crack team” joke in the macOS segment of the keynote. Maybe schedules didn’t work out or maybe they’ll be participating in someone else’s interview show this year. But I agree with Marco that it’s impossible to ignore the fact that this year more than any other I can remember, Apple is seen negatively by many people in the audience for this show, and Gruber wrote what might be the most scathing article about Apple in 2025. Maybe it's all a complete coincidence, but that doesn't seem like the smart money given everything else going on. I'll once again use this time to call for Apple to bring back live events. Almost every other big tech company has done it and people seem to enjoy them. No, you're not going to be as perfectly buttoned up as you can be in video, but I think it humanizes you in a way scripted videos with every one of your presenters being completely alone on a (beautiful) set just doesn't.

Apple isn't sending an executive to appear at John Gruber's annual live edition of The Talk Show. Is that alarm bells I hear?

To be a fan is often to be an edge case that thinks they’re at the centre of the universe. _Doctor Who_ , for example, is very much a mainstream TV show. Even in these odd, streaming times for TV, it’s usually in the top 10 most watched shows in the UK on terrestrial TV, across all the networks. It’s not a cult show, it’s a mainstream show with a cult following. And occasionally that cult fundamentally misunderstands the role of a show runner on a show like this. And that job is typically at odds with the desires of the hardcore fan base. This is particularly acute among _Doctor Who_ fandom because there’s a sense of betrayal. All three show runners of the modern era: Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat and Chris Chibnall are _fans_ themselves. So why do they keep doing things the fans don’t want? Simple. Fans want to pin down the narrative. Showrunners aim to open it up. ## Opening up narrative possibility The job of a showrunner, _especially_ on an essentially endless show like _Doctor Who_ , is to open up possibilities for storytelling, not to close them down. The original run of the show wasn’t planned in any meaningful way; thus, decisions made for the sake of a single story ended up defining “lore”, but were often forgotten by later production teams. However, the slow erosion of the mystery of the Doctor’s past was clearly considered a narrative error by the late 1980s, which was the first time the show started to take on a more narratively cohesive direction in the Cartmel Masterplan. The 2005 revival essentially jettisoned the past by wiping out Gallifrey, but created mystery by only alluding to what the Doctor had been doing since the end of the old series and the star of the new. As that mystery started to be addresses, especially round the 50th anniversary special, there was a narrative need for a new mystery. And the Chibnall-era show provided that with the Timeless Child arc. Despite some clumsiness in the way it was delivered, the idea is actually quite a good one. The Doctor’s life as they know it remains the same, but there was a life _before_ that has been removed from their memory. This twist ties in to both the dropped hints in the Cartmell era and one, long-ignored scene in the 4th Doctor story _The Brain of Morbius_. But, critically, it opened up storytelling possibilities. Forgotten enemies, forgotten incarnations, and a new mystery at the heart of The Doctor’s past all come into narrative play. The new Russell T. Davies era has built on that, while continuing to open up narrative possibilities. The return to more mythic, God-like entities and magically driven storytelling opens up new story possibilities – absolutely essential in a 62-year-old show. Even bigeneration opens up new possibilities, as it is playing out right now with two Ranis on screen simultaneously. The Pose of The Rani The production teams have been pushing in a consistent direction: the Whoniverse is bigger and stranger and less predictable than we knew. And a certain stratum of fans _hates_ it. One subset of fannish activity is lore-keeping, an attempt to mash these disconnected stories written by a vast range of writers and shepherded onto the screen by diverse production teams, into a cohesive whole. It was always a doomed effort; 1970s _Who_ was not made with an eye to lore consistency with 60s _Who_ — not least because there was no easy way for most people to ever watch the old seasons again. ## ”I made a jigsaw of your past. Do you like it?” The RTD2 era has gleefully embraced that, with a single line paving the way. The Toymaker, one of the God-like forces dredged out of the show’s past and brought back, tells the Doctor that he has made a “jigsaw” of the Time Lord’s past. For RTD, that grants permission for us to enjoy any Doctor Who media, in any form, no matter how contradictory with other stories, as part of the shattered past of the main character. Little pieces of fun, like including the online-only alternative ninth Doctor, as played by Richard E Grant, in _Rogue_ , nod to that. There is an invisible tension here, and it only goes one way. The general watching public don’t care. As long as Doctor Who stays within their expectations – Time Lord and companion(s) travel through time having weird and often scary adventures, but winning – it’s all good. The show runners want to keep pushing the boundaries, finding new ways of a TV show that’s well over half a century old vital. But a certain subset of fans would like to pin down the lore, to calcify it. ## Creative communities versus critical communities It’s that tension which has made so many online communities around the show so toxic. I learnt over a decade ago that I would enjoy the show so much more, if I kept away from the joy suck of much online discussion around it. _Doctor Who_ is much better watched as a family event with my daughters, than as fodder for online debate. It makes me miss my early interactions with Doctor Who fandom, in the pre-internet days. Then, I had to send off for fanzines, and the ones I put my precious pocket money towards were always the fiction-based ones. I have a suspicion that the positive fan -based communities ar those based on creativity, while those that tend to go toxic are based on critique — but that’s fodder for another post.

It’s a fundemental truth of life – of existence – that things end.

This feels unintuitive, but good news, if it's true… > In several posts I have suggested that second-hand bookshops in Britain have, on the available evidence, not reduced in number at any time. This is certainly the case if you include full-scale charity bookshops, but it is also broadly true if you don’t. Indeed, there are more than twice as many now as there were for most of the 20th century. Mark Valentine's argument is based on listings in the Book Guide, which do, indeed, suggest a dynamic second-hand bookshop market. And he has a theory as to why: > The population of Britain has grown considerably and the stock of second-hand books is, despite pulping and discarding, likely to be accumulative. Further education has also expanded substantially. More readers and more books are likely to lead to more bookshops. Though there are some countervailing influences, such as e-books and online booksellers, there seems to be a stubborn affection for real books and real bookshops. Indeed. I am annoyed to discover that there are two – _two_ – of them in Penrith, which I completely failed to find and visit last summer. The Golden Age of Second-Hand BookshopsIn several posts I have suggested that second-hand bookshops in Britain have, on the available evidence, not reduced in number at any…Mark V

I was clearing out an old laptop bag earlier, when I checked one of the more concealed pockets in it. And inside was this old Apple Watch strap: the leather loop. I'd missed it. Apple no longer make this style of band, discontinued even before they moved away from leather entirely, and it had been nagging at me for months that I couldn't find the damn thing. Thankfully, I must have left it I this bag the last time I did an overseas (or overnight) trip with it, and it's back in my life. And you know what? It looks damn good with my Ultra: And I'm really enjoying the worn look it developed over the years:

I’m bored of it. The pervasive, all encompassing nature of it. The inevitable, dehumanising consequence of it. That there’s a ‘there’ there to it. Rubbish in and rubbish out of it. Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it. The best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people use it. That you should just accept it. A thousand no’s, but ‘yes’ when shareholders start clamouring for it. Policy-makers pandering to it. A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it. Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it. Every article glorifying it. Every article vilifying it. Every pub conversation winding up talking about it. People incessantly telling you how _they_ use it. I feel dirty using it. You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it. And that’s why I’m bored of it.

Took a sneaky half hour out for myself this morning. After I‘d dropped my youngest off at Brownies, I whipped along the coast to one of the few remaining Small Batch Coffee cafés. * Notional agenda: buy pods for work and coffee beans for home * Real agenda: vegan croissant and long black A glorious morning for it. For the first time in months, sitting outside seemed realistic. I've been learning a lot about the value of “self-care” over the last few months, as part of some therapy. I still don't like the phrase, but the idea behind it is valuable. And so, today's wee moment of self-care was a drive along a coastal road in the spring sun, a coffee, a croissant, and some good reading. And the promise of more self-care to come: Why yes, I do like African coffees. Why do you ask?