David Pennington

Do we need to practice being human again?

You Don’t Have To Make Art

The early chorus of generative AI tools:
“Now everyone can make art regardless of their skills or tools.”

• Could you not make art before? Even elephants can paint. Our ancestors created well known art by etching with a stone into the walls of the caves they called home. A kid with a box of discount crayons has no problem

... See more

Some people say that if you do what you love at work, you never work a day in your life. I would argue that, at least under a capitalist system, if you do what you love at work, what you love could eventually become what you hate. That is why capitalism kills creativity.

In every organisation, whether in the public or private sector, a great inversion has taken place where the people who do actual, useful work (from surgeons to call-centre staff) find themselves working at the behest of a vast army of box-tickers and pen-pushers who demand that they must conform to a host of metrics and proxy targets so their... See more

This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather. This page shows live data relating to power supply, power demand, and energy storage.

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more

Content served by algorithms is effective in part because it’s disorienting, which helps to short-circuit the defenses against impulse—discernment, self-restraint, patience—that are the hallmarks of emotional maturity, rendering most of us a little bit more childish.