iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Jake Goldsmith

David Collard @davidcollard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Help save Pothole Studio, a much-loved local resource. We need 2,000 supporters before the end of today. One click and you'll feel good for the rest of the week. Sign here: www.change.org/p/save-our-p... Thank you! #ceramics #pottery #davidandgoliath #urbanarts #cultureforall #Londonarts

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I was discussing this with a friend and he said there was a non-zero chance I could win. I guess there is a 0.00000000001% chance I could win, but I don’t think I am the jolt literature needs

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Question: do the editors of this stuff have such a low opinion of the general public that they think we might only be interested in literature if gambling is involved, or are the editors also stupid?

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm biased as I write essays, and essays can be ambiguous, but there is a perception, a vibe, about what it means to be a novelist, or an essayist, that means we miss access both novels and essays

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I've long said authors who are 'overexplicit' should drop the novelistic pretence and write essays, yet they simultaneously lack confidence and undervalue essays, and overvalue being 'literary', so think they must write fiction. But good fiction requires, often, ambiguity, and they don't know how

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I’ve said before that I want Pnychon to win for my own cheap, salacious reasons. An (in)famously private person winning the world’s biggest prize creates a buzz, and much more (both facetious and interesting) will be said about literature and literary life in general if he wins

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

For cheap reasons, I want Pynchon. The ‘buzz’ around famous reclusives creates talk about literature, we like the story of a loner winning the world’s biggest prize. I find it fascinating from every angle (idiot reactions or good ones). If he wins, there’s more to read

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I ask you @ronanhession.bsky.social because you’re the 2043 winner (source: it came to me in a dream)

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I haven’t seen much publicity or talk about the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, and it’s only in a few days. Normally I see articles and speculation, yet this year I’ve missed it? Or my algorithm hasn’t fed me. @ronanhession.bsky.social have you felt the same, or are you getting the news, etc?

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Reposted by Jake Goldsmith

The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

#OnThisDay in 1713, Denis Diderot was born. Read Philipp Blom on the importance of the French thinker's philosophical writings and how they offer a pertinent alternative to the Enlightenment cult of reason spearheaded by Rousseau and Voltaire: publicdomainreview.org/essay/a... #OTD

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Our leaders used to be much more 'literary' (see Ted Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Churchill, etc), while now it's remarkable if a PM has ever heard of Goethe or 'reads' much at all (I was happy to see Carney mention Goethe cogently in his recent speech)

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

If Burnham was cheeky enough to recommend an 'obscene' or controversial book, a cynical part of me thinks it might go unnoticed, if only for literary philistinism. I'm sure tabloids would actually care, but it's also sad that the idea of a PM reading novels is so... novel, today.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Bad food photography used to be more common, sometimes a little creepy and off-putting, even ‘fake’, but now so many establishments don’t bother with ‘real food’ at all and have AI-generated uncanny cartoonesque food, worse in every way.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I don't think so. I guess most people don't want to overlap with anything as significant as Holocaust Memorial Day, but organisations create days for anything. Pangolins, sheds, Shark Week, etc

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Upon further research, International Flamingo 🦩 Day is in April, and World Architecture Day is in October, but my point still stands. Do we have enough time to celebrate lizards if it clashes with agriculture?

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Apparently it's also International Coffee Day too. Too many national and international days for my liking. We can't have national architecture week interfering with international flamingo🦩day, there are only so many days and too many reasons for days

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It was World Cassowary Day the other day, which I also think should run for a week

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Or at least writing has been taught as if it is an algorithmic set of rules for a long time already. And a lot of LLM writing uses those same rules

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Not handy, or at least too broad. LLMs also make use of perfectly credible, if dull and robotic writing techniques that we have taught students for years before the advent of ChatGPT. We have been reaching students to write like ChatGPT at school for the past 25 years

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Some humans, having read too much LLM ‘writing’, begin to write like LLMs. ChatGPT parrots humans and human writing techniques, homogenises and makes them into a dull rubric, and now humans parrot ChatGPT/Claude/whatever is currently fashionable

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There’s an infamous example where a ‘detector’ claimed the opening paragraphs of Frankenstein were 100% AI-generated. LLMs make liberal use of the em dash — meaning translations of Homer and Jane Austen have been declared LLM products. Some now think any ‘ — ‘ is suspicious, unfairly

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I think there is also this uncultured attitude where people think various arts are elitist, so if you engage with them, but not popular stuff, you must think yourself better; and this creates resentment. Of course, we should be free to like what we want and ignore what we want

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

An immature person finds niche interests to be weird or silly. A reasonble person knows that there are whole worlds out there that they can discover or ignore at their leisure. This music isn’t my thing, but it’s your thing, and that’s great

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I like to think I know of many popular things as if I’m an anthropologist. I keep my ‘thumb on the pulse’ not because I like any of this stuff, but I want to know the lay of the land; what people are doing. But one doesn’t need to do that. I can just as easily lie in bed doing nothing

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Sometimes not engaging with popular things is indeed an affectation, where one purposely avoids things just to inflate a sense of their own worth/better nature, but equally, it isn’t. It’s easy to not watch TV. We don’t all scroll phones.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Some of us live in the woods. The thing is, everyone does this — where we are bemused when someone hasn’t seen/heard/read something. How have you not watched blank!? You haven’t read blank!? Well, yes. I’m reading Lichtenberg and Avishai Margalit right now, I don’t expect my interests to be common

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

And when we go to Tesco and hear Ed Sheeran played 100 times a day, some of us don’t listen or don’t care, ignore it, or simply don’t remember

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

We live in an atomised culture, some of us commute to a place and don’t listen to popular radio, we might listen to Bach or audiobooks of Diderot rather than tune in to Radio 2, so we might never hear Choosin’ Texas played 5 times a day, or we scroll phones and only see our algorithmic bubbles

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

To a degree, I can understand not frustration but at least bafflement that someone hasn’t heard/seen a popular thing, because we have so much popular media come at us involuntarily. Music especially is inescapable, shops play pop music all day, just being in public means you ‘know’, & yet…

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

‘Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation’ by Avishai Margalit & Assaf Sharon aligns with my pessimistic intuitions and prejudices about contemporary politics (and human nature). Perhaps I should read something less agreeable to me, but Margalit is one of our finest philosophers.

Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation by Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And yes, Scaramucci is honest. He does something remarkable, especially nowadays, that many of us will never do: he admits when he’s wrong.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The book itself is a light, easy read (I can mean this negatively, but I hear I mean well). And as Lichtenberg says, the plain style of writing is to be recommended if only because no honest man takes elaborate pains over what he says. I enjoyed his brisk style.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It’s foolish to dismiss Scaramucci due to his history or your political leanings. He’s a cogent analyst (& I don’t give such praise lightly; I’m impressed by few today). He’s also the person (with any public prescense, at least) with the best emotionally intuitive sense of who/what/how/why Trump is.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

He paints in broad strokes, but that’s valuable. It takes forever to fill a canvas using a tiny paintbrush, and we don’t always need to be overburdened by pedantic detail. Go elsewhere for that.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Accessible, honest, insightful, and a broadly accurate, if necessarily cursory, overview of history and how we’re in our current mess — with some hope for how me might get out of it and be aspirational instead of desperate.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Just finished Anthony Scaramucci’s new book ‘All The Wrong Moves’. One could accuse him of “log-rolling”, given all the endorsements from his friends, but that matters less when the book is good.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I hold the controversial opinion that it's better to read a book before you review it. It's also good to not be the sort of person who becomes erect after leaving a bad review.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I’m always happy to see your newsletters in my inbox. Especially liked this one. Thank you 🫡

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I think there are a lot of behaviours that go unnoticed because many ordinary people don't always parade their lives online. How many of us quietly read without posting about it, for example? Hard to tell. "Illiteracy" is still a problem in an apparently-literate society, though

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

People think it's a good thing to read, but are reluctant to actually read (for good or bad reasons). So they have the appearance of reading instead

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My sister has some copies of Jane Austen, and an edition of Frankenstein, in felt-covered hardbacks that are sold as display pieces. You can read them, technically, but they are meant to be used as signifiers: this is 'literary decor'.

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I remember over 10 years ago, students at uni would buy popular records like Dark Side of the Moon as a display piece, as paraphernalia, not to listen to. You can buy various literary 'classics' in special hardbacks that aren't really meant to be read, but rather displayed as ornamentations

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

There's the proliferation of more and more books, podcasts, etc, but they are easy to read and listen to. Look at one metric and you could think we're reading more than ever, but what exactly are we reading?

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It's similar to our complaints about attention spans. There are people who'll listen to 4 hour podcasts, but this is different to sitting with something you don't understand and not turning off. In a sense, it's easy to 'pay attention' to something easy. It's the quality of attention that's lacking

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Jake Goldsmith @jgoldsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

There are enough reasons why book shops can profit and succeed while there are fewer people reading, or at least reading the sorts of books you or I may enjoy (or used to be enjoyable to more of the public)

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