It’s about a month since the new Boards Of Canada album Inferno came out, and a week since I finally found time to listen to it. It’s not ideal for sound quality but the only uninterrupted listening time I generally get is when I’m in the car driving the hour-and-a-bit to my client’s HQ, every couple of weeks. It’s also a good time to reflect. For several reasons, almost all of which are good, I rarely find myself on my own outside of work time.
The BoC album is fine – pretty good actually – but I’m not writing about that. What struck me is that it’s been thirteen years since their previous album Tomorrow’s Harvest was released. I clearly remember the night when they live-streamed it, in June 2013. I was a new parent. My son was not even one year old at the time. He and his mum were away for the night and I got myself pizza and beer and opened Twitter and the live stream in parallel. In 2013 for me Twitter still held some of its original magic. It felt like a hivemind event - everyone listening to the album for the first time together. The comedian and actor Peter Serafinowicz was ‘big on Twitter’ at the time and joined in the conversation, replied to and liked some of my comments.
It used to be this great connector of people with similar ideas. Well... maybe it still is but as Stephen Fry said in 2016 “too many people have peed in the pool”. This isn't about Twitter / X in particular, that’s been done to death and it’s a bit boring. But I do lament what happened to that tech utopia of the 2000s. Twitter back then gave me a real sense of friendship and connection to groups and individuals I had never physically met; pretty great!
Going back a little further to 2012: I had never felt so optimistic and proud. My son had just been born and we were watching the London 2012 opening ceremony. Chatting about it in realtime on Twitter it occurred to me, purely from the sound, that the music to a key part of Danny Boyle’s production was quite distinctively Rick Smith of Underworld. How cool! That an act I’d danced to in tents was representing our country. I’m always wary of nostalgia but in some ways the Olympics felt like peak-UK. As it later transpired not everyone felt the same.
Around the same time, working in tech, things felt so exciting and optimistic. I had been privileged enough to go to the South by Southwest digital festival in Texas and in 2011 to San Francisco to see what turned out to be Steve Jobs’s last Apple WWDC Keynote. I felt part of some kind of frontier thing. We were building the future. People were sharing their lives on Flickr and checking into Foursquare. People got excited about new apps. Tech × The Liberal Arts was a magical thing.
But I guess there was always an undercurrent of discontent. Everything was amazing but some people weren’t happy. I know that my take is only one side of the story, and I don't want to get too much into the weeds of politics but 2016 felt like a disaster for obvious reasons and obviously it’s rumbled on since. Today I don't use X but I do have a stealth lurker account for when I want to look at stuff. And, God, it's horrible – skewed in the direction of Elon Musk’s rancid beliefs. An endless haters’ field day.
You should always follow the money. It seems clear that a handful of billionaires benefit from the rest of us fighting among ourselves, especially when it drives advertising revenue to them. We used to shake hands with strangers at four in the morning and mean it, now those of us who still have the energy argue online instead. Most liberals seem to have given up on it completely leaving these extremist partisan cesspools bubbling away. But none of these stirred-up arguments is fundamentally new. The good people are still out there, living their lives, they’re just not online. Which is good for them but I fear bad for politics because what’s online is what’s visible.
The pendulum swings left and right so I think things will resolve themselves. And despite all the aggro and this resurgence of anti-progressive ideas, I still believe we are living in the best of times. The tools and technology we have in 2026 are phenomenal and it’s a truly exciting time to be alive. To wake up each day in 2026 UK is an amazing privilege.
And at 48 I have somehow ended up with the white-hot love of my life, and we have a baby girl on the way.
I believe the true spirit of the human comes alive when we dance together. It’s 30 people throwing shapes in a yurt as the DJ blends two deep grooves. The ritual is older than recorded history. Something I’ve had on repeat since it came out is RA.1000 from Mark Ernestus, a two-hour set of beautiful Amapiano music. This for me embodies what it means to be human, together on this beautiful blue-green planet of ours hurtling through space. Life is too short for hate.
