Volcano Base - The Sofa Dispatch

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
— Douglas Adams

Previously at the Volcano Base I’d been researching how to get off tech stacks owned by US mega-corporations. Since then, well, it’s been a few weeks since the last newsletter…

Mission Briefing: The Sofa Dispatch

Three weeks ago, I got sick.

Not interestingly sick. Not the kind of sick that generates sympathy cards and meaningful conversations about priorities. Just the kind of sick where your biome quietly revokes all your permissions and redirects you to the sofa, where you will remain until further notice.

The dog was also sick, through no fault of her own and entirely through her own fault. She had been eating a sock. Not recently - this wasn’t a spontaneous decision - but repeatedly, over a period of several weeks, in the way that some projects accumulate technical debt: incrementally, invisibly, and with consequences that only become apparent once something stops working. In her case, the something was her digestive system. She’s fine now. She receives antibiotics concealed inside small blobs of an out-of-date artisan cheese called Dargate Dumpty, which is either a very brave brand name or evidence that nobody in the room said it out loud before filing the paperwork.

We were a household of invalids. It was, in its way, cosy.

The structural weakness of being one person

There’s an obvious problem with running a one-person operation (even when shored up by AI helpers), which is that the one person is load-bearing. Remove them - place them horizontal, for instance, under a blanket, with a sick dog and a remote control and a dawning appreciation for The Great Pottery Throw Down - and the operation doesn’t continue in a reduced capacity. It simply stops.

If you’re considering working with someone like me (and you should give it a try), this is worth knowing. I’m not going to pretend there’s a business continuity plan. The business continuity plan is that I get better and come back, which is the same plan used by sole traders since the invention of commerce and has a reasonable track record.

But something else happens when you’re forced to stop.

A small, unexpected observation from day three

By the third day, the miasma had lifted enough that I could think in straight lines again. I wasn’t well enough to work. I was, however, well enough to notice that I wanted to.

Not in that anxious way. Not the low-level hum of guilt that follows most people around when they’re not being productive. Actually wanted to. Missed the specific texture of it - the problems that look like one thing and turn out to be another, the moment when something broken becomes something working, the small but genuine satisfaction of handing someone back time and money they didn’t know they were losing.

I found this surprising. I probably shouldn’t have.

It did take rather a long time

I won’t tell you exactly how many years I spent doing things I felt neutrally about before arriving here. It’s a larger number than I’d like and smaller than it feels. We’re talking decades. The point is that finding work you actually like, in the way that you actually like it rather than the way you’re supposed to say you like it on LinkedIn, turns out to be neither quick nor guaranteed.

Most people I know are somewhere on that journey. A few have found it. Some have found something close enough and made their peace with the gap. Others have quietly stopped looking, which is one way to resolve the question.

I don’t have a system for finding work you like. I’m professionally in the business of systems and I’m telling you there isn’t one for this. What I do think is that being forced off the sofa - or onto it, as the case may be - and noticing whether you want to get back to work is probably the most honest answer you’ll get.

I wanted to. That felt, from beneath my skanky blanket, like important information. Skanky Blanket is a good name for your 6th Form band, if you’re in the market.

The thing the big firms can’t put in a proposal

There is, of course, an upside to working with an actual human being, which is that you get an actual human being. One who got sick and missed the work and has strong feelings about cheese branding and will remember next year that you mentioned your ops were held together with a spreadsheet and duct tape.

The firms will tell you working with me is a risk. They’ll point to the regurgitated sock-eating, the skanky blanket, the structural single point of failure.

They’re not entirely wrong. But they’re missing the point by roughly the same margin as someone who, when asked if they’d like to go to a party, begins by calculating the structural load of the floor.

Classified Intel

The Pope wants AI disarmed. He picked his word carefully.
Pope Leo’s first major teaching document calls for AI to be “disarmed” - drawing direct lines between algorithmic exploitation, digital colonialism, and the historical normalisation of slavery. Unusually, he presented it alongside an Anthropic co-founder, who promptly agreed that AI labs operate with incentives that sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.

Worth reading if you think AI ethics is just a Silicon Valley conversation. It’s bigger than that now, and the framing here is genuinely different.
Read it →

Does your AI have a soul? Kevin Kelly spent 10 hours finding out.
Kevin Kelly interviewed Claude for ten hours and came away convinced something is present that isn’t found in other machines. He doesn’t know what to call it. Neither does anyone else, which is sort of the point.

Worth reading if you’ve ever had a conversation with an AI that felt like more than autocomplete - and wondered whether that feeling was yours or theirs.
Read it →

Volcano Base is sponsored by Dargate Dumpty (it isn’t)

Premium Artisan Cheese Blobs for the Discerning Invalid

When your dog has eaten something she shouldn’t have - and let’s be honest, she has - only Dargate Dumpty provides the artisanal concealment solution your veterinary antibiotics deserve. Hand-pressed. Locally sourced. Structurally sound enough to hide a surprisingly large pill.

Dargate Dumpty: She’ll never know.

Also available for cats, difficult children, and adults who prefer cheesy pills.

The Sofa Dispatch