Five years ago, Liverpool City Council partnered with a newly-formed Blockchain company to go "carbon positive.". What happened next? . Well, as you've probably guessed from "blockchain company," nothing good. An investigation by me for @liverpoolpost.

First premium newsletter has gone live. It's a relatively short (sub-3,000 words) essay about how generative AI devalues what it means to be human, and our worth as people.

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My latest newsletter asks an important question: Why are some of the most powerful people in tech so. weird?. Not weird in a quirky way, but weird in a "I don't understand/like humans at all" kind of way.

RT @doctorow: Hey look at this. * How The Internet Died 3/

Then we get to my point about the Internet being a historical record. If you believe that the Internet is as "real" as real life, then it makes sense we might want to preserve the stuff that's online, right? .

According to one expert who consulted on the Online Safety Bill, the provisions are "classic rent seeking" for the age verification industry. Her concerns were dismissed and she was called a paedo by UK government officials. Great stuff! .

It's not merely that the core experience of using the Internet has changed. The architecture of the web has, too. We now have legally-mandated (privately owned) gatekeepers who must exist for the web to work, and you're forced to interact with them.

If you're in the UK, you know this. Earlier this month, the Online Safety Act entered into law. Now, something as basic as reading Reddit or sending a DM on Bluesky requires you to verify your age -- something that doesn't happen anywhere else.

I need you to recognize a broader point: That the way the web works is now different depending on where you live. The split isn't between free/unfree countries, but between free countries. And the differences are only getting more stark.

Put it another way: There are barriers to people living in the liberal democratic West that prevent them from knowing what's going on in the most powerful, wealthiest country on earth. It wasn't always like this, and it shouldn't be.

Badly. Lets address equality of information and experience. Americans: Did you know that Europeans can't access most US local news sites? Still? In the year of our lord, 2025? And it's because the site operators can't be bothered getting GDPR compliant?.

I came up with my own platonic ideal of what the web was, and what it should be. * Equality of information.* Equality of experience.* Decentralization.* A living historial record.* User driven and driven by user-utility. How does the web hold up? .

In this newsletter, I tried to put forward a coherent, less conspiratorial Dead Internet Theory. The first challenge is the question: What does the Internet even mean? Is it the protocols? The sites that dominate the web? What are we talking about? .

If you read the original manifesto, you see references to shadowy VC firms and the CIA. I don't buy that. But I do believe that the Dead Internet Theory tries to explain a broader decline in the online world that *everyone* recognizes.

You're probably familiar with the Dead Internet Theory -- the idea that, since 2016, an army of bots and paid posters have accounted for the majority of online interactions. It's an idea that caught on, in part because it *felt* true.

The Internet was once a shining beacon of potential and opportunity. Then it was destroyed. My latest newsletter is over 10,000 words about how it happened, who's responsible, and how we can build a better, fairer Internet.

I'll be honest, I didn't expect to write this story, but I was feeling down and pessimistic and I needed to get it out. It feels appropriate to finish with a Frankie Boyle monologue that sums up the mood.

We need to look at the rot economy and the AI-enabled annihilation of worker rights in generational terms. What affects you will affect your kids even more. As bad as things are now, they can always get worse. And if we do nothing, they will. /fin.

I want to live in a decent society. I also know that nothing good has ever comes when an entire generation is bereft of hope, and angry at the world, and not really sure who or what to blame. That kind of anger only ever goes to dark, dark places.

I care about this, because I care about you. I care about your kids, and your future kids, and their kids too. I don't want them to live unhappy, precarious lives. But I must confess, there's an element of self-interest here.

It's hard to summarise in a newsletter how pessimistic I feel for the next generation -- and how they'll have it even worse than mine. But we need to have this conversation because it matters.