Edge Cases
This is an occasional newsletter of writings and thoughts, about technology and life.
It started as an excuse to try out Substack. I’m always fascinated by new products. I love the way a new form changes the content. If I were to have handwritten these articles, if I were to have written them in Word or in Google Docs or on Medium, each would have been different due to the way the platforms shape my thinking. On Medium, Clive Thompson writes about “the novelty effect”, the way a new tool makes you more productive at first. “In French”, Julien Crockett said in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “we would call engineers viewing everything as an engineering problem a ‘professional deformity.’” Perhaps what I’m thinking about are “platform deformities”.
Over time, the structure of this newsletter has solidified into something… formatty. Which I like. I feel like it gives it some credence. It makes it into a series rather than just a random series of thoughts. A format introduces constraints, and constraints breed creativity. Think of a structure like Dinosaur Comics. After a while, part of the enjoyment becomes about seeing how new ideas fit into a structure that is so familiar and so restrictive. Weirdly, the closeness of the structure seems to open up possibilities rather than closing them down.
For a long time, I resisted tying the structure of this newsletter down too much. “Receive the newsletter every sometimes,” I said. Which I liked as a phrase, and I liked as a concept. It let me wriggle off the hook. And it let me do whatever I wanted with it, whenever I wanted. But sometimes it’s good to be on the hook. And so here are five points about what this has become:
It is a monthly newsletter
Sent the first Friday of the month at about 3pm (UK time).
It begins with a short piece, considering something about technology or media, of less than 1,000 words.
It is followed by three links to articles I found across the internet
Each link is accompanied by short thoughts prompted by each article. Potentially quite obliquely
In writing it, I’ve noticed a few topics that keep emerging:
The reality of what happens behind the scenes
The minor ways technology interacts with our life
The chaos of the modern world
And, weirdly, Columbo and Reacher. I genuinely don’t know why these topics keep returning. But I’ve learnt to accept that they do.
If you like my writing, you may also like my Medium articles, or you may even want to find out more about me.
