(saturday edition) Robb Knight shared this rad site: Tiny Little Office. “Office” tools that are simple and no login or bloatware required. Now that I’m on a dumb phone, I am so tempted to pick up one of the Echo MP3 players from FiiO. It doubles as a DAC and has a number of other nice features including buttons! I loved this other post by Robb about Types of Time Travel Zines. I Touched the Sun: A Tender Illustrated Fable About How to Find and Bear Your Inner Light A curiosity: Lots and Lots and Lots of Control Panels Guilford College is hiring for a College Librarian Speaking of libraries, I learned about this “Library Freedom Project” the other day and they have some really great resources, especially on AI. I plan to watch some of these: 10 essential films from the ‘Slow Cinema’ genre. Does anyone know anything about Dark Forest OS?. Lastly, how to become worthless to tech companies.

Here are the 2026 best inventions making the world better, smarter, and more fun.

Wess and M. at Phoebe Bridgers Concert in Charlotte (photo edited by M. with Phoebe’s signature ghosts in the background) **“The event is the medium.”** This phrase, the title and theme of a zine floating around attention activist circles in New York City, was rattling around in my head this past Friday. If you can find a copy, the zine is worth reading (and sharing), I have a .pdf version that was shared with me privately. It opens with: > “Our society is saturated with images and mediated experiences. You can look at a painting on your phone. You can take a photo of a painting that you will file away never to be seen again. You do not have to go to the movie theater anymore. You do not have to go anywhere. Any experience can be packaged for consumption. For this reason, the event is the medium” (The Event is the Medium). For the authors of the zine, the event is free, avoiding the transactional nature of paid-for-events. It’s also inclusive of anyone who wants to join — broad perspectives and experiences are welcome — and it is participatory. My favorite. The event is rooted in personal experiences, play, and aims to build a “spontaneous community” across a spectrum of “every type of person in the world.” The event is a dress rehearsal for the future. If we want it, we have to create it now. I got a taste of the event on Friday when I went to see one of my favorite musician’s, Phoebe Bridgers, with my daughter M. She’s touring on her most recent record, Lost Weekend that touches on the loss of her father, love, disillusionment of fame and more. The concert was incredible in just about every way and M. and I had a blast experiencing it together. While the concert wasn’t an event in exactly the same way that the zine talks about, we had to buy a ticket to get in the door and there was alcohol and merch available for purchase. “The Event,” as the authors describe it, centers around free events in public spaces without the influence of capitalism, drugs, alcohol, or dogma. No small difference from the Bridgers concert. However, there was one major way in which Phoebe was the medium of a very powerful experience: it was four hour plus phone-free for the 15,000+ concert-goers. No small task for sure. This large-scale “off-tech” experience dramatically shifted not only my experience but everyone who was there. To have such a prolonged attentional event in these days is unheard of. Everyone there knew what they were in for, prior to purchasing the Ticketmaster website made it clear there would be no electronics. Not to mention that this tour has become pretty well-known for its no-phone stance given the generation of Phoebe’s audience, not all of whom were excited about the prohibition. Not to mention, it’s become a bit of a thing among fans to bring notebooks to capture in drawing parts of the concert. Therefore, M. and I brought our notebooks and pens to sketch some part of the experience. This strange act immersed us much further into the whole experience than I could have guessed. Line drawing of the two stages at the Phoebe Bridgers concert in Charlotte, NC. I planned to leave it in the car but where we parked required my being able to re-up our time via an app before the concert was over. (I knew I was going to need to use one of the cell-phone zones in order to do this, which ended up being a whole thing not worth retelling here. However, I will say the experience of being in two different roped-off-spaces with people just scrolling their socials frantically mid-concert was surreal.) However, after entering the Spectrum Center, I quickly forgot that my phone was in locked away in a Yondr pouch in my back pocket. I was surprised to see so many people talking to each other as they stood in lines and no phones were out. It honestly took me a few minutes of marveling over this before I remembered why this was happening: we didn’t have access to our devices. I think the fact that we had our phones on us but were unable to access them made the experience doubly weird. There was no need to double-pat my back pocket to check if my phone was there. This gave the illusion that people were choosing to not be on their phones. Imagine such a world!? > “The event is essential because it is an action. We consume mass amounts of knowledge everyday - much of it about terrifying, seemingly unfixable problems. The event - no matter how trivial - is the actualization of knowledge and an attempt to remedy the world by choosing to participate in it rather than consume it” (The Event Is the Medium). Inside the stadium, everything was dark except for the lights on the steps and beaming out from the two stages Phoebe performed from. There was no Jumbotron. To scan the crowd and see that everyone was participating, usually by belting out every word of just about every song was something I will never forget. To call what I saw, and experienced there that night, collective effervescence would be to undersell it. It was something closer to a vision of an alternative world. Concert goers standing outside the Sprectrumcenter to get a picture with Phoebe’s sign > “At its core, the event is people in a room deciding whether they will accept a premise, play a game, engage with a topic, or whether they will revolt and creating something new - either way it is a practice in collective action” (ibid.) Pheobe’s fans went along and accepted the premise and because of that we all experienced something pretty radical in this day and age. Even still, a little social media culture could be seen after the concert as the crowd outside the stadium armed with our phones again stood and waited to take a picture of the advertisement for the concert. Evidence we were there. The no-phones allowed us as concert-goers to be fully present and immersed in the experience. But Pheobe played her part as well. She and her crew had impeccable stage design: two stages for two different styles of music that she moved between that had everyone wandering what was coming next. As she travelled she interacted with fans which added to the excitement. During one return to the main stage, she walked with right and left hands extended high-fiving fans on either side of her down the entirety of the walkway. Drawing of the light orb creatively used throughout the concert for lighting effects - straw.beez on IG. The light show was attention grabbing, stunning in its effects, and changed to color match theme of the album the song she was playing was from. It felt like Phoebe and her team went all out making the show into an event. Something that captured and held our attention from the moment she began until the last song of the encore (when she came out in a white dress to contrast with the black one she wore for the rest of the concert). Was she symbolizing new life? Resurrection? As she left the stage her band played _Never Going Back!_ > Never going back again > The way it used to be is not the way that it is At one point in the show, Phoebe thanked everyone for being willing to give up their devices to make this show possible. The crowd erupted in cheers and “we love you!” She explained a bit of why, saying that it takes a not-great-experience for her —seeing everyone on phones while she performs — not to a good experience but to an incredible one. I couldn’t agree with her more. It was uncanny to be with 15,000 people for four hours and not a soul was on a phone. It was absolutely invigorating. Seeing people talk to each other while they waited in line for 30-45 mins to buy merch was something I haven’t experienced since before the iPhone was invented. M. even made friends with one of our neighbors before the show. They swapped IG handles after the concert. The concert was a reminder of the power of in-person, unmediated experiences. One last thing I learned about what this event made special that I hadn’t considered until someone pointed it out to me. We saw a friend from Greensboro while we waited in line to buy matching concert shirts. She told me later when I asked her how the show was for her, “I loved that everything in the show was a surprise to me because I there were no clips circulating on social media beforehand.” Another thing about the event as the medium is that it is not easily guessable or imaginable. The surprises within the concert, the space for our attention to be fully present to each other and the music, and the feeling of you had to be there really made this a ton of fun but also a transformative experience. I hope others who were there will remember what it was like to put down their phones and experience reality in this way again. Well done, Phoebe. Wess with his daughter, M. before the concert **For Further reading:** 1. https://www.theblueandwhite.org/post/the-gnomes-are-taking-over-new-york-city 2. https://www.404media.co/luddite-events-nyc-off-tech-summer-of-ludd/ 3. NYC Off Tech Newsletter **Recently Posted on gathering in light:** * Protect Cognitive Strain * Inktober No. 3 Miniature

Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don't value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility? I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given the opportunity, you try and reduce the value they can extract from you. That's very often your data, but it can also be a direct financial relationship. * * * Signing up for a service? Well, your birthday is January 1, 1970. Your email address? Give them a throwaway or use a different alias for every service. Your name? Do they need it? Maybe it's James Smith. Or John Smith. Or Mary Smith. Or Patricia Smith. Phone number? 321 is a valid area code. Throw it and seven other digits in. Don't need the account long term? Delete it. Make all of your privacy settings as restrictive as possible. Turn off AI features. Opt out of everything that defaults to opt in. Live in California? Request your personal data—you may not need it, but you do need them to waste their resources handling the request. Delete yourself from data brokers with the state's Delete Act platform. Block their ads as best you can. Your cookie preferences are "Reject All", always. It's their responsibility to improve their product(s), it's not your responsibility to provide them with personal information that they claim will help them do so. Install ad-blockers for your friends and family and teach them how to use them. Block at the network level—Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, NextDNS—pick one. Block their crawlers as best you can. Do you have to use or choose to use AI products? Why not use every single one of those tokens available to your subsidized subscription? Did your search engine build in a "free" AI product? Ask it as many useless questions as you'd like. Getting emails from AI agents? Why not chat with them and lead them on until they hit a billing wall? You can block their whole TLD when you get bored. Cancel your streaming services. Buy music again. Get a library card and check out Blu-rays and DVDs. Maybe you rip them, maybe you don't. Buy ebooks from any vendor that doesn't apply DRM. Use tech platforms based outside of the US. Self-hosting things? Use a provider outside of the US for that as well. Support indie developers. They're more responsive and charge a fair price for great software. Buy subscriptions on the company's website and don't let the app store get a cut. Wait as long as you reasonably can between hardware upgrades. Run an open operating system (if you can—and not one developed by a fascist). Buy refurbished or used hardware. Repair what you can. Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don't buy anything. Want it? Open your browser and buy it without the attribution from the app. Subscribe to RSS feeds. Publish RSS feeds. Post on your site first and send links out to platforms. See someone or a business using AI art or branding? Gently let them know that it looks like a caricature of a _Men's Health_ cover. Did you get an AI agent when you called a business or open a chat? Ask them about programming questions or chat them up—get those vendor costs up—and then ask for the person you wanted to talk to in the first place. Tell that person that the chatbot sucks. Is your healthcare provider taking notes using AI? Opt out of that and explain why. Opt out of arbitration (many terms of service let you do it via email or a letter within 30 days of signing up). Use virtual cards if you can. Cancel any subscriptions you can. If they give you a retention offer, take it and then cancel as soon as it expires. Don't sign in with Google or Apple or Facebook. They get data out of it and lock you into their platform. Don't do unpaid labor for platforms. Was this helpful? Don't bother answering that. Skip the survey, reject the review request and don't rate anything. Use the website, not the app. There's less telemetry, fewer permissions and no push notifications. * * * Your worth to these companies is determined by what they can derive by exploiting you. Be as worthless as you can.

I recently purchased a Baisl special edition pen from Everyday Karas, and it’s a lovely pen with the bold action, but it did not fit the Pentile Energel refill cartridge like I had hoped. The diameter of the Energel is slightly, almost imperceptibly bigger than the Pilot G2. After some tinkering around, I realized that using very fine sandpaper (220 g) worked perfectly for sanding the barrel. I just wiped the barrel of the Energel down for just a couple of minutes in testing until it adjusted just enough to fit into the barrel. I did wipe it down with a wet napkin to kind of polish it a little bit, and it works perfectly.

Hi Friends, I hope that you are well. I mentioned in a previous post that I've been hard at work with a number of projects this summer. Here is the video of my plenary from NEYM I gave this past weekend if you're interested. New England Yearly Meeting

Why the Same Tool Can Help a Teacher and Harm a Student

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Techno-cynics are all just wounded techno-optimists.

Attached: 1 image This is how the AI bubble bursts: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/917380/ai-monetization-anthropic-openai-token-economics-revenue There is no conceivable way to break even for the AI industry—let alone to repay an investment that requires $2Tn a year from now to the end of the decade. That's about 3% of the entire planetary GNP. Just to break even.

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This is a sermon I preached at Camas Friends Church in Camas, WA about the Attention, Empire and the Good Samaritan on March 8, 2026 Empire's Algorithms I have been thinking a lot about attention recently. Last fall I taught a first year class for Guilford students called "Boredom as