A compliment I often receive is “you’re totally yourself, you don’t care what other people think”. Unfortunately, it’s not true. I worry a lot about how other people perceive me. It’s a bad habit, and an embarrassing one to have carried this far into adulthood. I’ve been told not to worry about this since I was a teenager who was verbally bullied a lot, and I’ve always found the advice illogical. I can’t separate who I am from the way I am perceived by others or from the way I move through the world. This doesn’t mean I feel empty. I feel like a dense mix of reactions that is permeable with the outside world. I try to make art that is responsive and permeable in that way. Intrapology is my project in live interactive online theatre that centres disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ people. Our shows run on our own free open source software Intrinsink, which we’ve developed in community with other artists working in games and theatre. Intrinsink allows the audience to influence what characters say and do through multiple-choice voting and free-entry text. A script shown to actors changes during the performance to reflect these audience interactions. Intrinsink integrates narrative design approaches from videogames with the liveliness and authenticity of theatre, so we get to tell stories about sociotechnical systems, with sociotechnical systems. The movement between rigidity and fluidity is meaningful, as is the gap between what’s perceived as “human” and what’s perceived as “unnatural” in performance. This is all the more relevant in the AI bubble, when a machine’s capacity for social mimicry is being mistaken for an indication that it is developing sentience. Since social masking can be mechanised, we should look into the gaps in our own everyday performance to find our humanity. I began working in this format in 2021 as a collaboration with D. Squinkifer, who first developed this approach to software-mediated interactive queer performance for their MFA project Coffee: A Misunderstanding. I suggested that we modify their existing approach to focus on collective voting, and hoped that this might allow us to reflect the way that our social context shapes who we are, what we think, and what we do. We created a test piece about our experiences of autistic masking, and the collective construction of social scripts. Today we make a series of online interactive science-fiction performances set in a universe of many worlds, where each world is created (consciously or unconsciously) by the society that inhabits it. When people have conflicting worldviews, their world splits, and they find themselves living in two separate fragment worlds. We develop the worlds of this universe through collaborative worldbuilding workshops, using tabletop storygames. This means that our work reflects multiple modalities of interactive storytelling, and decentres the single author while still retaining a clear authorial voice. I worry that people from interactive theatre prefer the fluidity and openness of improvised performances over the rigidity of scripted work like Intrapology. I am sympathetic to that position, and in fact I’m not even sure I can name anyone who has articulated it, so it may just be my own opinion that I’m projecting onto others. Nevertheless, I want to lean further into this aesthetic rather than seeing it as a flaw to be erased. Part of it is that as a neurodivergent person, I want to defend the value of stilted speech and scripted interactions. This reflects thinking by neuroqueer theorists such as M. Remi Yergeau, who has argued for the rhetorical agency in autistic ways of communicating that are seen as disordered under neuronormativity. Yergeau highlights non-verbal communication such as hand flapping; Bernadette Bowen has argued in defense of stilted speech and the communication needs of hyperlexic autists. Autistic and transgender social psychologist Devon Price advocates for a process of “unmasking” that includes processing our fears about how we are perceived, and accepting the value of divergent ways of being in the world. The interaction features in Intrinsink reflect both polarities: the need to follow scripts to fit in, and accepting that our authentic ways of communicating might be seen as less “natural”. We should get curious about the expressive aesthetic of awkwardness. This is a running theme in D. Squinkifer’s work - to take just a couple of examples, Interruption Junction highlights how expectations around conversational turn-taking can make a person feel or seem invisible, and Hold In Your Farts Or Die suggests that both masking and unmasking carry costs. Coffee: A Misunderstanding taught me that awkwardness is not necessarily something to be avoided - a tense silence and a lack of eye contact can mean many things, and we should grant ourselves a degree of agency over that meaning, rather than just seeing it as an intrusion that detracts from desirable, fluid interactions. Part of my aspiration for Intrapology is to create a space where we might rewrite social scripts for ourselves, and invent idealised contexts in which we can imagine ourselves thriving. And yet, as soon as we invented a utopian community in the Intrapology universe, we started talking about the ways it would fall short, the ways “good communication” can be performative and even violent, and using interruptions to deepen the fissures in smooth interactions. A healthy and authentic relationship with the world doesn’t fit the cultural ideal of smooth communication that is so easily mimicked by Large Language Models. Things should glitch and pause, our breath should catch, our eyes should meet only briefly. We are permeable beings, and the connections between us are sites of vulnerability. It’s not normal for interaction to feel normal.

Dr Kim Foale very kindly invited me to do an interview for the Geeks for Social Change blog about digital archiving. It felt so validating to take a moment to reflect on one specific thread of my career, particularly one that connects to the museums side that goes all the way back to my undergrad year abroad experience. This interview was prompted by my two upcoming workshops with Raju Rage’s Desperate Livin project, on 22nd November online and 2nd December at Studio Voltaire in London. > ### How would you encourage our readers to get into archiving? > > For some people archiving is a practice of collecting physical things like zines and artwork. You keep your collection somewhere safe: probably in your own home, rather than in a stranger’s garage, for example. Ideally, we’d approach digital archiving the same way. So, if you’re doing something digital, take a bit of time to think about your relationship with corporate power, and consider learning from the IndieWeb. Your safety strategy here depends on how nerdy you want to be - maybe you’re just periodically exporting a backup to an external hard drive, or maybe you’re self-hosting tools on your own server. I’m somewhere in the middle personally! > > I wish more people who share their own experiences and perspectives with a community online were thinking about how they archive their contributions. We need searchable permalinks for the things people are posting on Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube. It’s remarkably easy to set up an automatic archive on PeerTube that takes in videos from Youtube and Tiktok.

Free, booking essential Saturday 22 November 2025, 4–6 pm UK time I’ll soon be running an online workshop on digital archiving, building on the Desperate Livin project that collects grassroots resources for trans people and our supporters in a handmade indie website (see desperatelivin.com) Participants will learn how to build and share their digital skills; centre Trans health, autonomy and community-led knowledge; improve accessibility across the Desperate Livin’ website; and keep the archive socially active and sustainable. This workshop will be a space for dialogue around digital archives, Trans archiving, the IndieWeb, autonomous content, social web and community knowledge-sharing. Digital Archives (Sharing and Discussion) is the first of two workshops held as part of Desperate Livin’s Trans-digital-archiving series. Please note that this workshop is intended for and by Trans people. More info at the Studio Voltaire website

Pablo wrote a good post on the hurdles to joining the indieweb and getting your voice heard, offering a not uncommon solution: > …we must make software tools that make self-hosting and website ownership easy and beginner friendly. To be clear: here, “indieweb” means a website you host, rather than publish via a platform, such as Substack, Medium, Typepad, Blogger, Pika or Bear. In this regard, it’s not just owning your domain, such as thisdaysportion.com, but also the server it sits on (or at least renting it – defining “self-hosting” is tricky). The trouble with this solution is that self-hosting and publishing will always involve _some_ technical effort which the likes of Substack and Medium remove. Pablo cites Giles’ post Let’s make the indie web easier, where he envisages a simple way to install an SSG: > Why not build static website generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they’ve just paid for, and start using via a browser? That sounds great (although more difficult than setting up a WordPress site up on a host like Pikapods), but unzipping and uploading can’t be trivialised by the addition of a “just”. Even buying hosting represents quite a conceptual leap compared to signing up for Substack, where you’ll be joining thousands of other writers and bloggers who are already publishing. And that’s before you even get your FTP credentials, install and configure Filezilla and start navigating your folder on a shared host. This seems an intractable problem, which results in an indieweb unsurprisingly dominated by people who work, or are interested, in tech. That’s why you’ll find no shortage of posts about getting computers to do things by typing esoteric commands, or about configuring blogs – blogs about blogging, if you like. Of course, there’s nothing wrong _per se_ with forming a hobbyist community on shared tech, but a robust, independent web is an important missing piece of the puzzle if we’re trying to foster a healthy cultural and political online life. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara compares Substack with the mid to late-2000s media blogosphere, where he and other academics and journalists such as Mark Fisher and Richard Seymour cut their teeth: > it [the political blogosphere] felt simultaneously democratic and curated… The result wasn’t a canon, but a shared public square with porous borders… We seem to be building fewer lasting collective institutions and more ephemeral vehicles for individual advancement. Plus, paywalls, necessary as they are to sustain writers, turn arguments into gated micro-publics. Substack is interested in conversation and debate only in as far as it generates subscribers and subscriptions – and as Sunkara states, that’s essentially an individual, transactional relationship between writer and reader. It’s a business that looks to monopolise and monetise thought and writing, just like any other social media platform. That’s why it’s happy platforming neo-Nazis, and why venture capital will gamble on it becoming _the_ de facto way of publishing long form texts, a tool of wealth and social power in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are. So how do we get more writers off centralised platforms and on to the indieweb? It’s not unsurprising that a tech audience thinks the answer lies in more, better or “easier” tech. But I think it requires a shift in perspective, away from an individualistic call for everyone to “skill up” and work out how to set up their own website. We need to think collectively, and pool resources. Those who can do all this need to help those who can’t. This is what one element of what I termed blogging collectively might look like. It’s not about setting up, say, an online magazine (although that could be part of it) – it’s more about enablement in the first instance, which would then result in better discovery and more diverse voices. We have models already: the fediverse consists of a collection of volunteer run servers that, for all Mastodon’s failings, more or less manages to provide a decentralised platform for people whose main online interest isn’t tech (although of course there is no shortage of programmers there). And people are just helping other people set up their websites. So, a starting point for collective blogging is a pool of folk with a range of skills to set up websites. This is no trivial undertaking: we have jobs, families, rent, mortgages, food to pay for, and work takes up an increasing amount of our time and energy. The way we think of the web is fundamentally libertarian and individual. Perhaps this is one area where tech will help. We could use simple, cheap tech stacks with a few options – LAMP, WordPress and a set of robust themes seems an appropriate approach. But having established this foundation, we might be able to make the indieweb a more diverse place, where non-tech folk find it easier to publish their work.

There's a special new opportunity to experience our whimsical, earnest, and extremely gay way of building characters and worlds. This October half-term, Intrapology is bringing a series of alternative indie tabletop storygames to High Street Rotherham. We're going to use cards, dice, crystals, and our own imaginations to tell stories

TL;DR: Most Trans+ people in the UK will wait more than a third of their adult life to get their first appointment at an NHS gender clinic…

Here’s something that connects a lot of the moral injury and just awkward conversations that I have as a digital artist in the 2020s: A concept, tool, or field of enquiry was once a broad possibility space, explored by folks with lots of different perspectives and interests. A big pond that you can swim around in around fairly freely, without feeling a strong pull in one direction or another. Some currents lead you closer to capital, some lead you further away. Participants imagine the space they’re exploring in lots of different ways. Some schools look askance at others, temporary alliances and exchanges form and dissipate, activity ebbs and flows. Then some arsehole with a lot of capital notices that this field could be useful to him - typically, he can use it to justify the value of some technology in which he has invested heavily, despite it being highly inefficient and having no demonstrable purpose. This investment probably now looks like several massive datacentres full of GPUs. I think of this arsehole as Dodgy Derek, because I picture him as a kind of Only Fools and Horses wheeler-dealer who owns a garage full of useless crap that’s poisoning the environment and needs to find a way to make money out of it. So, Dodgy Derek comes along into this wide open possibility space, persuades his friends to invest some of their cash into his venture, and puts a load of resources into system. Immediately, the possibility space starts to collapse. Whirlpools form, and things that used to be distinct are now pulled into each other. Dodgy Derek’s garage of crap poisons the pond, it smells really bad, and it starts to attract attention. It’s at this point that people start asking you about the new massively-hyped thing. And you have nothing positive to say about it at this point. Perhaps you vaguely remember when this was a much broader, vaguer, and more interesting space, but you don’t really want to say that because it sounds snooty. People will hear “I was into this before it was cool” but that’s not what this is - you were into it when it wasn’t a horrifying churning morass of toxic crap. You share a couple of points about why people should probably stay away from the nasty pond, and maybe the other person hears you or maybe they get defensive, or maybe they label you technophobic. “But think of the possibilities” they say, as if you haven’t been thinking about the possibilities for a very long time, as if you haven’t seen Dodgy Derek’s antics actively destroy most of those possibilities. In the process of all of this, it becomes apparent just how differently your fellow swimmers were imagining the pond. Some people were there to explore the various interesting things living in the pond, and some were there to become the biggest fish in it. After you’ve left the pond, it’s mostly those bigger fish who stay behind. They think they’re going to keep eating the smaller fish and getting bigger and bigger. They think the naysayers are just resentful because they didn’t become a bigger fish. But the pond is toxic. Why do they want to be the biggest fish in a toxic pond? Why would you keep going in a space that has no life in it?