That wouldn’t surprise anybody who really knows me, but the years I spent on the road in America in my twenties aren’t easy to see, here in the last year of my thirties. It’s 2011, and I’m sitting beside a cheap tent in a big, dark wood surrounded on all sides by the houses, lights and clearly audible roads of civilization. My lap is a graveyard of dead mosquitos, illuminated by the glow of my screen and prey to my fast hands.

Perhaps ten square miles, at the end of the Central Line, you just get off at Theydon Bois or Loughton and walk out of London and into The Wood. Epping Forest is not a big wood. It’s big enough that you could get thoroughly lost, and walk for an hour in any direction except the straight lenght of it, and hit civilization. But along the straight length it’s a few miles, and if you stay to the center of that, and occasionally dart off the path into a patch where they’ve cleared the scrub, or something’s made a side track, you pretty soon get the idea that, yes, this is The Wood. A small fragment remains of the Forest which once so dominated the hinterlands of our minds.

The fox got a pretty good crack at my food. A highly entertaining encounter with bears, and a few stories about the far, far more devastating mice trained me to be very animal-aware camping in the US. The bears were in a dangerous configuration indeed: mother and two cubs, highly habituated to humans, mooching like oversized labradors. They woke us all up in the middle of the night as two yahoos tried to scare them out of the back of their pickup truck by driving around the Yosemite parking lot, honking and hollering. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dumber thing, but apparently everybody, even the bears, escaped unhurt. I left a couple of plastic bags by a tree when I walked down into town to find some network and saw him skulking around when I came back, unable to master either the yoghurt or the peanut butter.

GPS turns out to be quite helpful for camping illegally in the deep wood. It’ll reliably get you within 20 meters of where you want to be. Closer than that is pushing it, so you want some kind of clear, visible landscape feature to navigate the rest of the way from. A ten meter error on your waypoint, and another ten meters on where you’re standing doesn’t seem much, but if you’re doing this in near-darkness, or a real thicket, and the woods all look the same, soon you’d have issues. I wouldn’t trust GPS in a real crisis, say to find a survival cache in the middle of nowhere without other markers, but it’s fine when the price of failure is only some inconvenience. I used to joke about planting a series of survival caches in rural Colorado, five gallon plastic pails buried in the ground, with an assortment of shelter, food, ammo, medicines and so on, with a regular math formula to calculate the GPS coordinates of the next bucket – a survival trail for crossing territory in the event of something Truely Horrendous happening. Add something to deflect IR tracking, and you’d begin to have a survival technology.

That was in 2002, when Americans were sending anthrax to each other in the mail. I worried that it might escalate from weapons-grade anthrax to weaponized smallpox, and the next thing we’d know, a third of the human race would be dead. They have it, you know, weaponized smallpox. If you ever want to scare yourself to death, google “engineered mousepox” and extrapolate to what must logically exist in the classifed domain.

They were pulling anthrax from somewhere out of the biowar establishment in America and mailing it to people in 2002. That’s actually far, far scarier than 9/11 when you think about it, because anybody with access to anthrax probably had access to agents which are infectious in the general population, like smallpox would be, and if they’d shipped one of those instead, goodbye Berlin, goodbye New York, and possibly goodbye civilization.

The laptop is eerily silent. The fan has a little daemon that turns it off when the machine is cold, and there’s enough of the chill in the air that, resting on my laptop, it makes scarcely a sound. There isn’t even a hard drive, going whirrrrrr in the background, so it’s just me, the birds, the mosquitos, and the incessant drone of traffic half a mile away on one of the through roads.

I found a tentpeg here earlier, and the remains of what must have been quite a large fire.

I don’t camp with fire. It’s illegal most places. Back in the first thrill of discovering advanced combustion, I had a little battery powered stove, not a wood gasification stove, something older and cruder. I spent a few weeks in the woods outside Santa Cruz, under a tree on top of a hill out the back of a national park. It was a cow pasture, and the views were amazing. Every few days I’d walk a kilometer or so down to the stream and pick up some water, sitting by the side of the water boiling it with the stove. I didn’t mind carrying shit then. Now I’d take bleach and, once it had purified, kill the taste of the chlorine with a pinch of vitamin C. A teaspoon of bleach left in a gallon of water overnight will get most things. You can probably use less if the environment is warm, and don’t use a fancy bleach with pine scent either. Simple bleach, and a pinch off the side of a fizzy vitamin C tablet.

You’d think someone might have tried that in Haiti. It’s funny how little cross-over there’s been from survivalism and backwoods camping to disaster relief. It’s all bikers and dog walkers here in the mornings, but the mindset, once acquired, only needs the slightest sniff to set it off again.

Colorado was fierce, but it was on freight trains that I went feral. Iowegian was said to make a living hooking Iowa girls on smack and selling them in Mexico, one every couple of years. I can’t even remember the road name of the guy I caught it off. He was an army ranger, they said, in Vietnam. Mother died when he was 13 or so, and without a father he walked off the farm and lived as a migrant laborer until the war. He pulled the eyelets out of his boots because they could reflect light, which I suspect was an affectation rather than ingrained habit. But he had something, a certain lean grace, and it was impossible to believe that he had not killed, and probably at close range, quietly and quickly. I went feral watching him over the course of a few days, the space and the slience of his presence, so different from the flagrant alcoholism of the Freight Train Riders of America, and the clanking bouyancy of the anarchist contingent. Jim – was that his name? – was different. He was feral.

Very strange things happened on that trip. It took forever to get from coast to coast. Just getting from Iowa to Minneapolis took five trains, the first a mob-handed obscenity where 17 people got on one moving freight train. It was as subtle as a brick. Listerine Tom helped the first of us on the ridable boxcar, and a mad scramble got the rest up.

You’d never believe how many moving freight trains I’ve gotten off and on. It’s less than a dozen, but it’s more than a couple. Skillful freight riders never, ever get on and off a moving freight train. They wait for the crew change points, a few miles outside of town, where trains pause and new staff alight. Wiley hobos hop off then, and take the half-hour trek into the city. Amateurs, and the daft young, like the anarchists and I run alongside, matching velocity with the train, then grab for the ladder of a grain car or, when conditions are good, make the chest-height vault to the box car. You can recover easily enough from missing a ladder, but missing a box car can plant you under the train very, very easily. I only did that one once or twice.

I learned about people, too. The despair and self-destructiveness of the hardcore gutter-dwellers. The cheerful amorality of the FTRA, and their surprising and staunch defense of one of their members who happened to be gay. Their outrage at discrimination against them because they weren’t cartoon hobos.

The brotherhood of the road are no more, or at least much reduced, by lengthy federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison for interfering with critial infrastructure. It’s a “get out of here ya bum” misdemeanor no more, freight train riding. Now they mean business. I’m sure plenty still ride, but the tone’s gone from youthful hijinks and the remnants of an old way of life to the grim pragmatics of the security state.

But I was writing about feral affairs

It really starts kicking in for me, on this unscheduled break, when I start to see mosquitos not as predators, but as prey. Pretty soon my hands snake out almost by themselves, and *bam* another one bites the dust. The woods feel different, when you realize that a few bites don’t mean nothin’ compared to the satisfaction of seeing another of the little bastards ground flat against a goretex sleeve. Sure, the tent’s a cheap Quencha pop tent, just a little bigger than is enough for one person. There’s no weather here, no wind, no hail, no surprise snow or midnight gale. It’s England’s green-and-pleasant, but out in the woods I wear shorts and squat on the ground, smelling the air like an animal.

It’s an attitude. You forget, pretty soon, when you’re crossing more than a few dozen miles with a pack on your back, what civilization is or is for. The little gadgets – how far the LEDs have come since I was a lad! – come from somewhere, sure, but once you’re on the trail they’re essentially magick, they Just Work. As I said I don’t camp with fire, not even with a stove, it’s just too much weight, too much hassle. Hard bread and dry cheese, a bit of sausage, stuff like that. Dense foods that pack tight and keep well, and are easy to nibble on in short stops. Nuts are almost perfect, half fat, half protein, that and honey-in-a-tube – the weight of your stove is three or four days of grub, if you’re rolling that way. Don’t neglect the space blankets, too – Adventure Medical Systems heatsheet is the size of a proper quilt, easily big enough for two and a small palace for one. I’ve spent a lot of time under space blankets, and the extra few quid for the good ones is entirely worth it. They don’t even make that horrible noise.

The fox failed to penetrate the peanut butter. I ate it with a spork, pondering the chocolate bar with the pawprint in bear drool on the paper wrapper, that we once ate as a trophy the night we survived the bears.

Civilized is a state of mind. It’s a way of seeing the world that masks or annhilates all the complexity of nature, and its simplicity too, the simple fact of four inches of leaf mulch crawling with bugs, and the warm, moist air of an English summer, and the occasional mammal, darting through the brush, trying not to be seen. None of that is in a supply chain, or the absent sterility of a supermarket. It’s not about walking into the woods – anybody can do that – it’s about not trying to make the woods seem more like home.

That’s what passed from me to Jim, or whatever his name was, around the camp fire. I realized, somewhere inside, that he’d walked away, out of the mess and the fuss, out of the framework of expecations and stories which made up the life that everybody expected of him, and into the life of a travelling man, hauling a pack, working hard with his hands, and living each day from sunrise to sunset.

Colorado nearly killed me. I spent a year at 7500 feet with a chronic lung infection editing a book that some people credit with turning the balance against war with Iran back in 2004 and 2005. I was never the same man afterwards – the confident stride of somebody who’d marched by fits and starts half-way across a continent, who didn’t need to sleep more than every other night or so if interesting things were happening, all that was gone. I’d pushed too hard and broken my body holding up the world for the brief moment when the load landed on me. I’d taken on a little of my own death, seen myself as expendable for the greater cause, and nobody is truely young after that. Once you know it’s not about you any more, whether that realization comes to you as a parent or as a humanitarian or as a hero, something changes.

I came out here because I needed to be in the wild. Epping Forest is not The Wild, but it’s like it enough that if you’ve seen The Wild, and you’ve got a vivid imagination, you can make the little mental leap and see it here. You get to the point where you can’t feel any people around, where it’s just you and the odd thing or two rustling the holly bushes, and a quiet, glowing screen.

I don’t know quite what happens next. I have a bad feeling about this year, something primal and primary that I can’t shake. I could have rearranged my life to stay in London but I didn’t, I took the gig in Ireland, which is in a place far, far from anywhere, and which has – did I hear that right – 5000 acres of Beech woods up on the hill. It gets cold in winter there, too, last winter was brutally cold, but that’s a lot of woods for not that many humans, and even in the worst of times, folks would stay warm. Plenty of food in Ireland too, not that they’re organized to grow it, but farming is worthwhile on such land, even if generations of cultural practice say that they should be an evolve, technical, professional economy, and not mere peasants, grubbing around in the dirt.

I just wanted to be in a place where, if something dreadful happened, I could watch it on TV, not wonder where my next meal was coming from now that the supply chains have gone down.

Something’s coming, I recon. I haven’t had this feeling since the year before 9/11, the sense of something having come off the rails, something sliding downwards into a worse, more complicated world. I left for Colorado six months before 9/11, some premonition of trouble, something that told me it was time to go, that I did not want to be in the city any more, as a matter of urgency. If a biowar had come of those antrax attacks, I’d have seen it with two person-years of food piled up in the bedroom, and all the basics to survive tucked away in one place and another. I never did build a network of GPS caches – that’s a community project, not something for one guy who can’t drive, and the scenarios where it would have been useful – most people would rather be dead than live in a world where a five gallon pail of lentils and wheat is a treasure trove to be sought out by a mission armed with a precious GPS tracker and solar panel.

I don’t want you to think I’m paranoid, but we’re surrounded by much, much worse futures that the one we’re currently in, and I wonder how long our luck can hold, now that Al Queda is free of Osama bin Laden’s “I won this one, mate” stabilizing influence, and with the US going bankrupt with all the cultural forces which might make their next president the right wing one that gets written up in the history books where they talk about the end of America as a positive force in the world. I am not saying that it is all going to end, but I am saying that we are running out of a certain kind of luck we have grown used to having, and the collection of forces which are pushing us down further have passed a critical mass, so it’s now hard to see a world five years from now in which the Western Democratic Consensus still holds.

I am a certified apocalypse technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.

It was the 1990s. Internet tribalism, loft living and a lot of long haul train travel connected me to an amazing network of some of the smartest, most vivid, most alive people I’d ever met. Creative magic happened, adventures were had, communities were built, lives were changed, people were transformed. Always the dominant feeling of an us, the network, the strength and vividness of the tribal experience. It formed me. It made me who I am today.

I think that we’re going into another round of internet tribalism, not based on the expansive wonder of the 1990s, that golden age of peace and prosperity, when so much of internet culture was forged, but based on our current concerns, which are much more about maintaining our current lifestyles against mounting outside pressures. I want to bring forwards a few things that I learned in the 1990s and share them with you.

The first is that the day-to-day warmth of community life built by celebration. It’s the expansiveness of the heart, of people who love and trust each other that builds community. Community is about sharing the course of our lives together. My community was young people who had just discovered the internet and cheap plane tickets, a sort of early couch-surfing scene that quickly evolved into sharing cheap apartments and finding jobs for your mates and some really great times. Once or twice a year as many of us as could come would assemble for a few days, throw a legendary party, and stoke the fire of community for the next year.

The second thing is that communities have a special alchemy. It’s not clear what it is that makes one group bond over a shared love, while another group simply appreciates it. It’s some confluence of forces that does it. One key that I saw over and over again is that community starts with gifts. There’s an expansion, a sense of being appreciated when you come to an event and somebody gives you, and everybody else, something. The thought – perhaps it goes back to birthday parties as a child – that one is receiving a gift opens the heart. At some old level, it says there is enough here to share, and you are welcome.

And we love that.

The third thing is that communities are more than the sum of the individual relationships that comprise them. This is one of the key places where I think that social networking tools like Twitter fall flat on their face. Twitter builds a link between two people at a time – I follow you. The list of people who follow you, and who you follow, changes one person at a time. It’s socially atomized. Now, don’t get me wrong, very strong communities form with Twitter, but those communities aren’t found on Twitter. What you see on Twitter is myriad individual friendships that a community emerges around, but you don’t see the community itself online. You see it at the social gatherings.

In the 1990s, the tools were different. We had mailing lists. And mailing lists were communities by default. The group had an address, a home, and a message to one went to all. The soft boundaries of social space that we see on Twitter were absent – a message was public to the place it was sent to, like putting up a message on a bulletin board in a physical room. The list was the core unit of social interaction, and individual emails held the social space. The computers were making “virtual places” and we went to those places to see our friends.

Twitter is more like being in a world of telepaths.

We send our thoughts out into the void, and people who want to listen do.

But we’ve lost the tight, casual, easy familiarity of the mailing list. We’ve lost the sense of a whole which is larger than the sum of its parts. Twitter’s community is “all users”, and we build our own real-world, face-to-face communities with people we meet on it, but the pairwise links deprive us of the electronic sense of place which was so much a hallmark of my experience as a tribal netizen.

Twitter is a beautiful tool, but it’s not the right tool for the digital village. In its heart of hearts, Twitter is urban – fast moving, broadcast, realtime, geolocated – “I’m in France, same as last month” is not how we use it, it’s “I’m in Trafalgar Square, who’s around for lunch?!”

It’s a beautiful tool that has literally changed my life – a big part of how I found myself settled in the friendships I did in London was Twitter – but the absence of “electronic place” is beginning to make me long for something a little different.

Electronic tribes need different infrastructure, both social and digital, to thrive. And I think we’re moving into a phase of the world where tribal connections that really work are going to be important in a way they have never been before.

I wonder what the platform will look like?

Somewhere in my foggy brain a thought emerged: well, if it was a buck a year, would that be easier?

Here’s sort of what I’m thinking.

Let there be a site, SimpleSubscriptions. This site takes money in $20 lumps – nothing smaller – to keep down credit card processing charges.

Partner sites can offer additional services to paid subscribers, fixed at $1 a year. SimpleSubscriptions mails them a cheque once a month for their subscriptions for that month. The price is fixed for much the same reason that iTunes fixed pricing.

So we have two simple, clean, plausible transactions which combine to implement a sort of “microsubscription” model. Moof tells me that age verification systems in the porn industry work something like this, which is generally a really good sign.

My feeling on this is that the key to microsubscription is that it cuts the mental accounting barrier to micropayments. A list of the 15 sites I’m paying a buck a year to is not problematic – I can read the list, understand there are 15 items on it, and know that I’m paying $15 this year. It’s not like looking at web pages and being charged a fraction of a cent per page view – or like having my eyeballs bought and sold!

I think that there’s a lot of room to combine this sort of service with single sign on – I have a login to my microsubscription service which I use for all the sites I’m paid up on. The combination of microsubscription and single sign-on seems to me like a highly credible infrastructure play.

I imagine that the microsubscription service would in itself be paid for with a microsubscription.

If anybody’s interested in thinking about this further, let’s get together in London some Friday afternoon after the Tuttle Club and kick around some ideas. Hashtag for this: #microsubscription

1) If I have any signs of possible flu infection I will stay at home.

2) I will stay away from crowds whenever possible and always wear a mask while in public places.

3) I will cleanse my hands at the doorway when I arrive at my destination.

4) I will encourage other people to follow these rules to protect us all.

We were talking about pandemic flu today and came up with this concept. It is still in development. The key principle is to protect each other by being responsible. These rules should be followed by everybody in any pandemic-affected area.

The Flu Code was featured in Wired’s swine flu primer.

Hashtag #flucode please RT. The short URL for this post is http://bit.ly/flucode.

Follow me @hexayurt on Twitter.

Here’s the skinny.

1> The Mexican Cluster has (as of Saturday April 25 AM) about 1000 cases and about 70 people have died so far. This gives us two pieces of data. It’s not likely to be more than about 7% fatal, which is bad, but basically within the planning envelope of many governments. It’s also spreading person-to-person rather than just pig-to-person or bird-to-person which is doctor speak for “we are totally screwed.”

2> There are reported cases in the US and containment of the bug is unlikely. The “SARS II” scenario is that the virus is contained and does not become a civilization-level threat. If we are not in this scenario, and the virus is indeed loose, international travel will stop, and there may be massive internal quarantine issues and health emergencies. In a city like London, an outbreak could kill a hundred thousand people. We could hear of cases as soon as right now if somebody was sick on a plane from Mexico.

3> Right now, there are four things you should do.

A> Prepare to stay at home for a month while a wave of flu passes by. This keeps you out of the way of the germs. Things to consider are medications, food and toilet paper. You should get and fill a three month prescription for anything you need now in case of quarantine / supply chain problems later. On short notice you can assume (hope) that water supply and electricity supply will continue, although if the flu wave is extremely severe that may not be the case.

Here is an absolutely minimalist food shopping plan. You should probably buy more different stuff, but I wanted to illustrate just how little is required. Here is a somewhat more comprehensive and gadget-oriented shopping list.

Readymoms have considerably more sane and comprehensive resource guides available. You should read their stuff.

B> Prepare psychologically for an extremely difficult period. This means doing things like visiting your parents, figuring out your relationships if they are in ambiguous states, making sure that you are not your job, your car, your house or any other such thing, but are yourself. The key to resilience is wanting to survive, putting yourself in the driver’s seat of the situation, and being clear about your goals. The psychological shock of a hundred million people dying of flu in the next year (a reasonable estimate: CAR20/CFR7) cannot be over-estimated. But the immediate challenge is not going into Ostrich-mode and putting your head in the sand: rather, remain alert to threats and act appropriately.

C> Understand what pandemic flu is and is not. Do some reading, not just the news, but the “flubie” sites – there are a number. You’ll see opinions from “end of civilization” through to “keep calm and carry on.” Prediction is difficult, especially of the future, but understanding the range of options and contingencies is critical at this time. You are an individual and community actor in a situation which is as threatening to your life as a car crash or an aeroplan crash in many ways. The fact that the threat is large and distant does not change that it is real. Your brain is poorly evolved to act rationally around large, remote threats but you can compensate by reading, thinking and acting.

D> Go out, today, and buy four things. Surgical or N95 masks, hand sanitizer, a gallon of bleach, and a week’s worth of groceries. You need these things not just to protect you, but to protect the people around you if you get sick. The surgical mask stops you breathing in infectious particles, but it’s even more effective at stopping you infecting other people. Hand sanitizer should be used immediately on returning home or arriving at the office: if everybody does this is really helps protect these spaces. Bleach is a contingency measure in case of things like water supply problems or a need to disinfect an area. The groceries trip is practice for social distancing by reducing your number of trips out, and gives you a little buffer. Social distancing is about avoiding unnecessary contact with crowds and public places to reduce infection risks. If you are in an area at risk, make one trip, not five. Pretty soon everywhere may be at risk at least some of the time.

All of these measures have two effects. The first is that they protect you. The second is that by protecting you, they protect the people around you, and if enough of us do these things, we all protect each other.

Right now, London has no reported cases. If you are reading this in Mexico, however, you should implement immediately. And if cases show up in London, we are on a war footing immediately: everybody does these things to protect everybody else, period.

UPDATE: The Flu Code is a set of rules we should all adopt if we find ourselves in a pandemic situation. If enough people do these things it will create “herd immunity” where we deprive the virus of hosts and all protect each other. Please pass it on. The short URL for the Flu Code is http://bit.ly/flucode

There is little doubt that the occupational self-image of the police is that of “crime-fighters” and that this is not just a distortion of what they do, it is virtually a collective delusion. A mountain of research has indicated that police have little impact on crime rates, are responsible for discovering few crimes and detecting few offenders, do not spend much duty-time on crime-related tasks and so forth (for a review of this literature see Morris and Heal, 1981).

“Police (canteen) sub-culture: an appreciation” by Jim Waddington who apparently helped to invent Kettling

Just to put this in perspective, I was in the same “kettle” where British police killed Ian Tomlinson.

I had my wits about me and was able to leave by civil discussion with an apparently rational officer. Tomlinson was not so lucky. He was some working man, a passer by, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and died trying to leave the area and go home.

This is not a service that I’ve made a formal offering on until now. I guess I’ve done it from time to time through my career, but I’d never really thought of peeling it off and making it available stand-alone to people who’s companies or projects are having those kinds of blocks, outside of my own projects.

Part of the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes at the Institute for Collapsonomics is radically re-examining what we knew about working together in teams, both at practical levels around brand management, equity, intellectual property and cashflow management and at the more profound level of allegiance, affiliation, cooperation and mutalism. We are rather a collection of goats and that has required us to really focus on our deepest ideas about how a 21st century consultancy should function. We are going our own ways together: it is more of a convoy than a company, and I think as we publish more you will see the advantages of this kind of thinking in terms of diversity and depth of domain-specific knowledge.

One of the things which has come out of that process for me is a focus on what I actually do aside from my core “think about the future, identify what should be done, do it excellently” lifestyle. I realized that the most value I’ve actually added to other people’s projects, in financial terms at least, has been lifting them over logjams, places where they needed an outside force to come in, knock over the bowling pins, and force a re-examination of fundamental goals in light of what had been learned in progress to date.

So I’m peeling that skill off and offering it to you unbundled from my futures consulting, policy planning and preparedness practice, open hardware design skills or anything else I do. You want your logjams busted, I’ll come talk to you.

Write me an email when you need my help.

In a networked environment, the person who knows what to do next is in charge.

Because, in a networked environment, everybody can propose action. Hierarchies using the network experience dissonance at the point where the feed coming off the network proposes a better plan than the feed coming off the hierarchy. There’s a counterlaw about facilitator / moderator power that I haven’t codified.

What’s interesting is that people slide in and out of the role of “knowing what to do next.” The next question is medical, the doctor steps in, the one after that is logistical, and the heavy traveller is now the person who knows what to do next. The situation creates the leadership.

1> Collaboration is not about what you do when things go right.

2> Crowdsourcing isn’t about what you know you want in all cases. Sometimes it’s about people who have totally unexpected angles just appearing to help.

3> I’m done on marketing. I’ve got a serviceable understanding of the very elementary basics of a few pieces of it – no deep aptitude – but it’s far enough along that I’m hitting my main challenges in governance, not marketing, and so I need to switch focus a little. I noticed a gap today that I had not seen before, where some space opened up and people could hear “I don’t know what to do next” not as a challenge, but as a place to sit together in not knowing. There’s real value in intelligent people trusting each other enough to say “I don’t know how to do this.”

This is rapidly becoming a new way of understanding the world for me – seeing what the unknowns are and how different projects and organizations store information about the unknowns, discuss them, work with them, own or disown their guesses, successful or otherwise. It’s always with us, sometimes far more than others, and I saw a good few places today where not knowing and being willing to not know for a while was the right answer.

I’m hoping tomorrow will be a day of conclusions, clear and strong. I don’t know if it will.

Oekonux in Manchester in the afternoon.

A little insane in terms of timing. There will be audio and probably video up as soon as possible after each talk.

One thing that I’m doing for a change is substantially talking without visual aids. I thought long and hard about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to face up to the challenge of holding an audience without lots of pretty pictures. Oratory, not entertainment.

New phase.