Jay Owens

Thank you! Though I am now quite curious as to what you expected...

James Butler · ‘Need a lord on the board?’: Mandelson and the Lobbyists Why​ did a man whose political expertise was acquired in the departed era of broadcast television maintain such...

I wrote on the fall of Peter Mandelson for the next issue of the @lrb.co.uk

Online early now:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Obv the issue is really how post-2010 platform design incentivises outrage and maximising engagement uber alles. But gossip communities like Fandom Wank are also highly engaging! Commentary persists, ofc. But authority erodes.

(I’m assuming it was widely known? fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_...)

Is it that we lack disciplinary institutions such as Fandom Wank that helped set norms and regulate behaviour — or is it that people now lack any sense of shame, such that censure just doesn’t stick?

Though it turns out my cousin's husband, travel journalist Simon Parker, went there in 2019, reporting on the boom in cruise visitors:
www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activ...

I'm off to Ammassalik - now known as Tasiilaq - in August, but that's rather more visited.

One of the Greatest Polar-Bear Hunters Confronts a Vanishing World In the most remote settlement in Greenland, Hjelmer Hammeken’s life style has gone from something that worked for thousands of years to something that may not outlive him.

In November, Ben Taub filed 9,800 words on the town, which I think may be the only major piece of English-language reporting on the town - or certainly the most substantial in a long while.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Ittoqqortoormiit in northeastern Greenland is one of the remotest settlements on Earth.

It came into being in 1925, when Denmark relocated 70 Inuits 800km from Ammassalik.

‘It is unclear whether they knew where they were going, or that they would never return.’

Worth taking some time to see Greenland through Greenlandic eyes.

Jason Farago on Inuuteq Storch's photography at MoMA PS 1:

‘Raw, sometimes romantic pictures taken across the island ... focus[ing] on the usual, the modest. What’s fleeting. What melts.’

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/a...

The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center How immigration authorities have weaponized medical neglect to encourage self-deportations.

California City in the Mojave desert: once a dream of utopia, now a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.”

Oren Peleg on the cruel conditions at ICE’s detention centre, where they’re using medical neglect as a weapon to make people self-deport.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

‘What might look from the outside like an over-formalization of chats for different kinds of information, or else like too little structure, coheres into a highly effective, self-organized, and well-maintained communication ecosystem.’

Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities The rapid response networks people organize to defend their communities have undergone a whirlwind evolution to keep up with ever-shifting ICE tactics.

How Minneapolitans are organising on the streets and on Signal to resist ICE abduction squads.

‘The people of the Twin Cities have paid close attention to their opponents. They know how ICE agents deploy, where ICE agents stage, how ICE agents dress, drive, react.‘

crimethinc.com/2026/01/15/r...

Full text and video: Mark Carney tells World Economic Forum 'the old order is not coming back' Read or watch Prime Minister Mark Carney's full speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Mark Carney’s speech today at Davos: 'the old order is not coming back'.

A remarkable speech for his willingness to address the elephant that Starmer’s pretending he can’t see:

The rules-based international order, always tenuous, is now dodo.

archive.ph/PRQDe

nationalpost.com/news/canada/...

How The New Yorker Became Irrelevant On the decline of America's premier magazine.

‘My contention is that 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳 has lost its soul, is virtually interchangeable with a number of other publications, and is—spiritually speaking—in terminal decline, just another gilded gargoyle on the cathedral of polite thinking.’

Sam Khan. Bracing.

www.persuasion.community/p/how-the-ne...

In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing In the face of technologies that sell us escapism at every turn, we need to build up tolerance for “inconvenience.”

In a different dialect, but to similar ends:

@kjezermorton.bsky.social on ‘friction-maxxing’.

‘An orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape.’

www.thecut.com/article/broo...

Waiting Is a Revelation The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 1

‘I find myself wondering whether certain virtues might be encouraged by the practice of waiting—patience, say, or prudence.

I believe we can come to see instances of waiting as freighted not merely with frustration but also with possibility.’

theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/waiting-is...

Well, have you ever seen the two of them in the same room? 👀

These are such good questions, and I find myself wondering this too.

Good post, and a timely one to read now — ty! There are enough people I like from Twitter on BSky that it seems like it must be possible to reconstruct something constructive here. But the protocol (reply more, post less?) is hard to ID.

Instagram Stories and the way those branch off into DM chats would seem to be the most enjoyable, genuinely social space in social media right now.

No idea what the future might hold - though I suspect increasing bifurcation between public ‘content creators’ and private ‘social media’, tbh

We actually both agree that the phenomenon exists, though disagree on matters of scale: you say “not all that much”, I said (somewhat hyperbolically) “always”.

But instead of noting that adjacency, you went to the insult

Beautiful irony to your post here, genuine round of applause, so neatly done.

Anyway: my bad for accidentally posting engagement bait.

Still figuring out if BSky is worth the effort. There are glimmers of interestingness: @aelkus.bsky.social and @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social seem to have built good communities around them?

There is no bringing back Golden Age Twitter tho :\

You can yell at Mr Beast without worrying what he thinks or feels, because he’s so huge and basically a corporation, not a person. Perhaps that’s been normalised down the scale, too.

Though the particular hectoring tone here seems unique to the Bsky ecosystem.

It is only a minority who default to disagreement as their first response, but it’s quite a big minority)

Is it a symptom of widening social and political polarisation?

Or it may reflect an expectation that anyone who posts online now is a ‘content provider’, not just a person sharing some ideas.

The less edifying thing I’ve been reminded of is how un-fun it is when a post escapes containment here.

It’s notable how many people default to bad-faith readings here, and assume that anyone who doesn’t 100% reflect their view of the world must think the total opposite, not just a bit different

The other thing I’ve learned from this discussion is that the “Followers plus replies” feed is a) an option b) a good one, for the way it makes BSky feel more social

(Not just posting into the low-engagement void.)

bsky.app/profile/kuku...

This seems impeccably organised! Good to learn what’s possible

It is interesting to hear about how this has spread, so thanks!

Some people also say they encountered it on For You or Discover feeds too, but anecdotally (and from what I can see of how people post) it seems that quote-posts are the #1 way content spreads and ppl get reach beyond their networks.

Sure, though I didn’t say “prefer”, did I? I simply asked about behaviour.

What I find fascinating is the kneejerk hostility of so many Bluesky users. People would rather wilfully misunderstand my point and caricature me as some defendant of Big Algorithm rather than actually have a dialogue.

I can’t imagine this makes you happy, but best of luck with it.

I’m a social media research professional and recognise the difference between anecdote and data. Anecdote doesn’t scale. As I say, I haven’t made my mind up as to proportions at all! Maybe it’s 50/50, maybe it’s 80/20 one way or the other. The extremely limited evidence I have could fit any of these