Last week I attended the 2025 Public Spaces conference, in the funky Pakhuis De Zwijger Amsterdam. It was a popular and crammed event - hundreds of enthusiastic attendees committed to designing a version of the Internet based on public values. Here are five takeaways from the event. Rethinking the Metric: Current social media networks encourage quantiative, one way engagement - increase the number of followers! get more likes! Look at us and performative attention grabbing! How then can we...

A book's meaning depends on the knowledge a reader brings to it. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat is particularly sensitive to what you already know about the particular events of 24 November 2021, in the dark seas of the French / English Channel. Tired, generic headlines concerning shivering migrants packed onto leaky boats are familiar; but I didn't know anything about the events of this specific cold night. At the start of reading Delecroix's brilliant fictionalised account of the event, my vie...

A ghostly, matter of fact narrator who, like the characters, you never really grasp. The hero G is man, woman, unnamed, sculptor, painter. Acuqaintances float in a world of art, life, parenthood. Defined by opposites (man/woman, creation/destruction, see/be seen, in/out) that suddenly switch or dissolve. Plot is vague to non existent. If you like plot and clear narrative lines, you'll hate this. But if you let the words wash over you, there are grand observations on what it means to a creator, ...

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