iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 25/09/2026

I played that on a loop for 25 days in our flat (kids were at school and Mrs H was at the office) starting two days after the Brexit referendum result. At the end of that time I looked like Bela Lugosi and I had a first draft.

Playlist:

You Turn Me On
Beat Happening
…
Britney
Toxic (Remastered)
Britney Spears
...
I Fought the Law
The Clash
...
The Lovecats
The Cure
...
Praise You
Fatboy Slim
...
19-2000 (Soulchild Remix)
Gorillaz
...
Sweet Child o' Mine
Guns N' Roses
...
Lust for Life
Iggy Pop
...
The Man Comes Around
Johnny Cash
...
Immigrant Song
Led Zeppelin
...
Goin' Down
The Monkees
...
World's Smallest Violin
AJR

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 23/09/2026

My relentless assault on your good nature and your Autumn/Winter shopping list is beginning... Bookshop.org is offering a 20% discount on pre-orders of The Taper Man until 27th of this month (code below). Get 'em while they're hot!

Purple card with the Taper Man book jacket - a silhouetted man in a long coat and hat walking pensively with hands behind his back from left to right, set in a hazy beam of light against a monochrome silver nitrate US flag hung vertically with the stars top right. TEXT BOX: 20%
OFF WITH CODE: SEPT20
23-27 Sept. Supporting Indie bookshops. T&Cs apply etc etc.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 11/09/2026

I picked this up almost by accident because I didn’t have any Sharpies. I say “almost” because this was one of my dad’s pens. So now I’m feeling a bit contemplative.

A black and gold Parker rollerball resting on a tablecloth.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 11/09/2026

This is the “done” pile. It grows, but does not affect the “undone” pile. I think the ”undone” pile may be made of Dark Matter.

A huge stack of paper on a table. It’s my table and my huge stack of paper. These are the ones I’ve signed.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 01/09/2026

Raise your hand if, when you get a paper cut, you bleed geek :) cc @foliosociety.bsky.social #booksky

Black and white filtered image of the Folio Society edition of Neuromancer clasped in a pixelated hand (mine).

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 01/09/2026

Sooooo it's a very (VERY) busy autumn for me, kicking off in a small way with the Kindle deal on Karla's Choice. If, like me, you find the coffee a bit questionable here - I don't know, it just doesn't look that appetising - please ignore that. But do considering buying the book.

Kindle with the Karla's Choice cover showing on the screen resting on (well, all right, matted over) a rosy, honey coloured wood tabletop with a cup of coffee. I'm going to be honest, the coffee looks pretty bad. I'm not sure how to justify that: it just screams cold and stale to me, and I'm not sure it was exactly a luxurious roast to begin with. But look, I'm really proud of the book, so if you haven't read it and espionage, paranoia, emotional tensions and betrayal are your kind of thing, it's 99p at the moment. Oh, and the next book comes out in November, so this is the perfect time to read KC.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 05/08/2026

Heh. Eheheh. Oooooooh, man :)

Text: The human-created stories were sourced from a literary journal, while the AI-generated ones
were created using ChatGPT 4.0.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 19/07/2026

Unidentified skull found on beach. Daughter: “I‘m trying to identify how many temporal fenestrae it has.” Species? Any other info welcome.

Long narrow unidentified skull on wooden table. ~5cm long. Parallel holes in rows at an angle to some kind of central ridge line.

Same skull from the side. Two holes, presumably eye and temporal fenestra.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 08/07/2026

Ngram search for "God's noble experiment" gets nothing. There's a peak for "noble experiment" in the early 1930s. Does anyone know where this phrase actually comes from? I can't find it anywhere.

Google Ngram graph for "noble experiment". Some low level use from 1800, then a peak in 1932 for some reason. There's nothing at all for "God's noble experiment" - I could append a screenshot of the no result page but it seems unexciting.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 30/06/2026

I feel seen and I don‘t like it

4.4 User and Password
Create your user account. Don't use "admin" -
that's so 1999.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 26/06/2026

I take my digital security very seriously and I do serious things.

My hand holding a Legami Miilano keyring USB drive, rainbow colours with a smiling fluffy thing in white rubber at one end which I think is supposed to be a cloud, but could be an appallingly cutesy cat. Blurred background: a red rug with a Middle Eastern design. My hand needs moisturising STAT.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 10/06/2026

My copy has been on quite the journey

Title page:

KHRUSHCHEV REMEMBERS
With an Introduction, Commentary and Notes by
EDWARD CRANKSHAW
Translated and Edited by
STROBE TALBOTT
Illustrated with Photographs
Andrews Barracks
Special Services Library
Ha. Berlin Brigade
APO 09742
ANDRE DEUTSCH
Property of US Army

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 09/06/2026

For some reason this link doesn’t preview, so here’s a random doodle I did over lunch. Please click the link. www.instagram.com/reel/DZUlUSB...

Pencil doodle on rough paper: a man with bushy eyebrows and shaggy hair. Torso and head only, wearing a shirt or jacket. Pensive. Could be me, could be a young version of my dad. Could be a face in the crowd.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 05/06/2026

This is a nonsense poem I wrote years ago for my kids. I found myself reciting it this morning. Maybe it’ll brighten your Friday :)

Copper Feet
(Nick Harkaway)

As I went boldly down the street
I met a man with copper feet.
He said: “I beg to disagree!”
I said: “But surely not with me?”
“Why, yes!” averred the cupric bloke;
“But sir,” I said, “I have not spoke!”
“Indeed,” said he, and then reflected:
“It was your silence I rejected.”

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 02/06/2026

YOU look up “schnauzer“, you digital imbecile.

A wet lurcher who is very much not a schnauzer and is offended at the very idea. You can see it in her infinitely limpid, sorrowful eyes as she lies on the sofa under a blue blanket from a boat trip we went on on the Thames. She is consumed with the futility of her own path because some dismal nitwit in Apple’s HQ thinks it acceptable to conflate her noble, suffering self with some schnauzer. I mean, what’s the point?

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 31/05/2026

Literally in front of me right now

My glasses plus a pack of Ricola honey & lemon with echinacea lozenges

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 24/05/2026

Camilla Cavendish in the FT, somewhat surprisingly paraphrasing early Karl Marx. If that was on your bingo card for today, felicitations. AI makes curious patterns in the world.

Text: Yes, the west must try to win the AI race with China on national security. But if that contest simply enriches a few, at the expense of the many, voters could conclude that we might as
well embrace communism.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 20/05/2026

Chris Bryant, via the Guardian, pasted here because the breaking news updates disappear over time. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Text: I want to make it absolutely clear that our sanctions regime today is tougher than it was
yesterday or last week. In fact, thanks to the Russia (sanctions) (EU exit) (amendment) regulations 2026 statutory instrument we will for the first time from today, for the first time, ban the import not only of uranium but also the import of Russian
oil products processed in a third country.
We are not lifting any existing sanctions at all. We are, like other countries, phasing in these sanctions, which is why, in the light of the situation in the Middle East, we have issued a targeted temporary licence to allow the continued import of diesel and jet fuel. These
licences are temporary and targeted. We will review them regularly and repeatedly and will suspend them as soon as we possibly
can. As a result of all of the measures that we have taken, and there will be less Russian oil on the
market, not more. Russia will be poorer.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 15/05/2026

Every so often there comes a statistic that reminds you that about a quarter of the population is at any time wandering around with a lampshade on its head singing the Marseillaise to an invisible duck. In this case, 23%. bsky.app/profile/ther...

Text: Only 23 percent of the G-P respondents said they have total confidence in Al accuracy. Those concerns mean 69 percent said they spend more time monitoring and reviewing Al, while 61 percent expressed concerns about using Al to craft sensitive documents because they doubt the output is legally accurate.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 15/05/2026

First and most important remedy:

Vegan cinnamon bun. A swirl of carbohydrate sin liberally doused in icing and full of a heady mix of sugars and cinnamaldehyde.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 13/05/2026

As Wilde might have it: the incapable in pursuit of the inert.

FT HEADLINE: Starmer prepares to fight
leadership bid by Streeting

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 10/05/2026

This went exactly how you’re thinking it did.

My dog, furry little face intense, contemplating sniffing a cactus.

Reader, good sense did not preclude, and there was much sorrow.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 10/05/2026

Just started @mollycrabapple.bsky.social’s remarkable book. So far: amazing.

Molly Crabapple’s book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country - matte cream background, variegated title text, figures, red banner.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 01/05/2026

My quest to own all the @mxfrankduffy.bsky.social T-shirt designs continues…

Me: shabby and whimsical. The shirt I am modelling (if you want to be generous): Carpe Diem shirt in aqua blue with the three crows above a skeleton. Love it :)

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 21/04/2026

This looks very cool. Is it a thing that you did or is my browser imploding?

Botched bsky text - code or something layered over text. Beautiful but weird.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 25/03/2026

Authentically alarming moment reading the book on Kobo :) cc @qntm.org @mtamblyn.bsky.social

Kobo screen (framed by a red cloth case) showing a page from There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division, a book about predatory and undetectable memetic threats which, in the course of the action, frequently consume memories abd information.

A system pop-up box explains that there are “missing letters or numbers” for this section.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 22/03/2026

And then you have this, which is if anything even more infuriating. This is like if the Streisand Effect and Chalmers Johnson had identical twins and moved to a house in FFS City.

Text: While Iran had previously threatened to close the strait, the western official said, "they never knew [they could] until they tried it"
"Now they know, and it's pretty effective," the official said. "The risk is they will keep holding the world

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 22/03/2026

So - astonishingly - Iran has been paying attention to history, notably the Millennium Challenge exercise, which was originally an Iran war game, and in which US Marine Col. Paul van Riper, playing the baddies, handed an invading US force its hat with both its ears in it BY DOING THIS.

Text: The Iranian close to the regime said the Revolutionary Guards were behaving more like a militant group in their effort to take on the world's most sophisticated and powerful armies
- abandoning their bases and scattering in order to reduce the risk of being hit while launching retaliatory attacks.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 19/03/2026

Is there no way you can link to the time-stamped entry you’re talking about? Khan’s statement is AWOL and replaced by an endless stream of twaddle from Farage.

Guardian live listing. Endless Farage entries. Top line: Farage backs Tory attack on Muslim iftar event, saying public prayer 'was a shock'.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 12/03/2026

Properly dressed for the day.

Hoodie with text - NO COMMERCIAL RESEARCH EXCEPTION

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 02/03/2026

It is SUPPOSED TO BE A JOKE, you bastards

Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetorico-circumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war.

The difficulty is what happens next, which is that various nations and groups of nations who are notionally friendly to one another and here for identical, similar or compatible purposes get into disagreements. The good kind of disagreement comes to an end with harsh words and apologies, but disagreements between men and women trained to kill and armed with the best weapons available, who know that they are disagreeing with people who are similarly trained and equipped, are generally the other sort. Giving someone a jolly good talking-to becomes an exchange of warning shots and suddenly there’s a minor battle going on. Minor battles become international incidents; international incidents foster distrust; distrust fosters conflict.

It’s almost as if, now that this place exists as a war zone, everyone feels it would be rude not to use it.

Cover of the UK paperback of The Gone-Away World: black with red spatters or cracks stretching horizontally across the middle. What text with the title abd my name.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 27/02/2026

“Worst outcome” should not be a party with similar underpinnings besting a party that would destroy everything you have achieved since the 1940s.

Text:
Speaking before the result, one Labour MP said: "The worst outcome for us would be a win for the Greens, or any result which shows us finishing behind them. That could herald the kind of split in the left which we saw in the right at the last election and which gave us a landslide
victory."
Lucy Powell, Labour's deputy leader, said: "What I take from this is that people want to see the Labour party shout more loudly about our values and how we are trying to change people's
lives for the better." Andrea Egan, the general secretary of the trade union Unison, said: "The Greens won for a simple reason: many traditional Labour supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully
abandoned.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 27/02/2026

Eager to see what lessons Labour draws from this.

Graph: Gorton & Denton by-election results. Labour vote share plummets as Green share rises. Similarly Reform rises and Conservative falls. End result: chunky Green win, Reform slightly higher than Lab, Cons dismal.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 15/02/2026

God, this annoys me. If you “don’t know” then the precautionary principle applies. You either accept that it’s possible and behave as if you’ve created a novel consciousness with rights, and your company is now essentially a nature reserve/maternity ward… OR…

NYT:

OPINION
INTERESTING TIMES
Anthropics Chief on A.l: We Don't Know if the
Models Are Conscious' Dario Amodei shares his utopian — and dystopian — predictions in the near term
for artificial intelligence.
Feb. 12, 2026

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 14/02/2026

Notionally a shark pen, but that curved fin looks cetacean to me. Anyone?

The top half of a blue pen, held horizontally in front of blurred gravel or mud. The cap has a proposed shark fin coming out of it, but the biology is uncertain.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 14/02/2026

So @jim.londoncentric.media’s @londoncentric.media is excellent and you should subscribe, and this is just a sidebar from his latest, but I wanted to point at it and yell:

Text:

Nathan, another reader, got in touch with a report from the United Arab Emirates, where the BBC World Service has been replaced with Elon Musk’s X world service:

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 28/01/2026

I’m thinking I’ll just show up to everything in mirrored aviators

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 26/01/2026

My online life from this point onwards will be a constant effort to use this image.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 15/01/2026

If I had a DOG, instead of a mobile scarf with ambitions of becoming a pillow, she would have stolen a pair of my shoes and I could wear those. But no.

My foot in a Swiss flag slipper. My unrepentant, immobile dog lying grey and hirsute in the corner of her bed in what I can only call hoggish slumber.

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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 10/01/2026

THE SCREAMING SQUIRREL CLAN DEFIES YOU

The Uffington White Horse, upside down, has a cartoonish, vaguely Roadrunnerish head, four limbs and a tail. Seen by a skygod, it could be… something disturbing shouting and falling?

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