Introducing digital field notes
A publication about technology as culture, written for the tech-curious
Dear readers,
It’s official. I’m launching a publication. It’s a tech newsletter, but with a twist. I’m writing about technology as culture — the “culture of technology”, to put it another way.
What does that mean and, more importantly, why does it matter?
Technology has been written as a product, something that is built and exchanged. And to that end, a financialised one, something for investors to back and profit from, as well as trade in public markets. Technology has been covered as a platform, a digital space for people to live their lives (think social media). Technology is also data, both the thing to be mined and to extract value from, as well as the thing doing the mining and extracting. Technology is labour, a whole new kind of work — digital labour — has emerged from new technologies, and will continue to emerge.
Technology as culture is the thread that connects all these different ways of looking at technology. It’s what’s most likely overlooked when we talk about technology, because, more often than not, we focus on the tool and not the people. Technology as culture, in the way I’m using the phrase, is the set of assumptions that govern the relationship between the tool and the tool maker, as well as the tool user. I’ll explore more of that in a bit.
Before that, what is culture, exactly? Culture is not corporate slogans. It’s not company’s branding. It’s the common sense that people take for granted. Only when confronted with a different set of “common sense” do people start taking notice and go, “huh?” Think of your experience travelling or living in a place that operates differently from where you grew up. You probably wouldn’t have questioned all the ways your value system manifests in the things you do had you not been exposed to a different way of living.
This newsletter is about that. It’s an exploration of notions that make up the “common sense” in the world of technology. Essentially, my job as the writer for this newsletter is to put on an anthropologist's hat, hang out with technologists — people working in tech, or, more broadly, people whose work is tech-related — and understand what is commonsensical for them that might not be as commonsensical for other people.
The keyword here is worldviews.
Worldviews are delicate creatures. They are the frameworks that people hold in their heads that help them systematise how the world works. It’s the kind of framing that makes the world, in all its messiness and fluidity, digestible; governable. The project is not to moralise certain viewpoints as good or bad. The main goal is to do the work of describing what that worldview is, and then breaking down all the ways in which that worldview materialises in the day-to-day.
As I see it right now, this project doesn’t necessarily fit into a pre-existing template, at least not the templates I’ve come to learn to operate with. It’s an amalgamation of different kinds of writings. It’s part journalism, part ethnography, part creative non-fiction, part blog, part essay. The way I imagine it right now, some writings will be more reported than others. Some more of an argumentative exposition. The idea is that I want it to be an open canvas where I get to experiment with different ways of writing up the things I’m exploring and learning, to come up with different formats, and to see what resonates — with me and with you, the readers.
I believe that the project should change its form as I go about spending more time working on it. But the spirit at the centre of this project should stay the same. It’s about discovering hidden wisdom in spaces overlooked. It’s about opening up the world to different possibilities of what it could be. I’d like the writings I’ll be working on for this newsletter to be driven by a sense of wonder and awe, without losing a critical lens to assess what it is I’m witnessing.
I find that to be important because wisdom gets lost quickly in the world of tech. It’s easy to lose sight of why we build the things that we build and fund the things that we fund. Perhaps we’d find ourselves wondering how, in the process of building machines, we have become one ourselves. I think being able to locate what makes us human, in the context of the world we’re living in right now, becomes an increasingly important topic to explore. Wisdom helps us with that. It allows us to balance the difficult task of maintaining wonder and awe while keeping a critical outlook on the projects we’re building.
Readers, I still have much to work on to make this newsletter worth paying for. I’m working toward publishing more consistently. That is to say, I haven’t figured out what my publishing schedule will look like, so expect my emails to come on a random Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or Friday. Or Sunday. But the intention of building something worth paying for is there. If I have your support very early in this process, I will have the utmost thanks.
Who is this newsletter for? It’s for the tech-curious. It’s for people working in tech, or trying to find work in tech and wanting to learn the subtle rules of the industry; for people who have no specialised knowledge in tech and are curious to understand how the tech world runs, as well as for people with specialised knowledge and are curious to see their worldviews reflected on them; it’s for people who are keeping an eye on the tech space and want a more intimate look to what’s currently going on in tech. But above all, it’s for people who are looking for a fun, engaging read.
“What do you have in mind for the things you will cover?” you might ask. Well, I’ve been busy trying to get a pulse on London’s tech scene recently, and I’ve been taking notes.
In the past month: I went to a public talk featuring researchers studying algorithms and artificial intelligence; attended a networking evening hosted by an advocacy group that campaigns for policy measures against superintelligence; joined a research discussion about mapping online discourse around the manosphere; listened to industry leaders talk about the future of observability in an AI world; watched a dozen founders pitched their AI startups on stage; went to an AI developer meetup where most people have built an AI agent; followed an AI hackathon online; went to a conference and listened to presentations from people building in the decentralised science space; attended a panel featuring founders and investors in the Web3 space discussing agentic AI; sat in for another series of presentations, this time from researchers exploring the developments in GenAI for the application of 3D generative modeling.
My list of things I can explore is extensive and continues to grow.
In most of these instances, I arrived with no prior knowledge of the space. Many of the terms mentioned previously — superintelligence, observability, decentralised science, agentic AI — are new to me. But tech is not only for technologists. It is for everyone. This newsletter is my effort to unpack these jargons to make the world of technology more accessible to more people. On that note, I’m taking the leads I’ve gathered in the past month for my next few newsletter editions. Expect to see a write-up about how AI is changing the job market, how agentic AI is making us rethink why we work, how attitudes toward security vary within the tech world, and many more. In the process, I hope to illuminate the fascinating dynamic of how our worldviews are embedded in the tools we build and how those tools shape our worldviews.
Your readership means a great deal to me. If any of these intrigues you, like, share and subscribe. I’ll see you again next time!
Look forward to seeing this!