The domain names watchification.com, speechification.com, audiolibre.net and dronestories.net are for sale. Here's more information and do get in touch if you'd like to buy any of them.
I’ve been caught up in the web, digital, social media and so on since the early nineties: starting and running businesses, travelling, consulting, writing for many publications - including the Guardian and the FT. There was the dot.com boom; a dalliance with venture capital, America, private equity, the Saatchis. Exhilaration, exhaustion, misery, repeat: you know the kind of thing (told the story here). These days I have a social media job at a major broadcaster. There's less drama but I get to bring my wisdom to a variety of interesting projects, from AI to accessibility to sustainability (my actual stupid CV is over on LinkedIn).
Meanwhile, I obviously can’t stop blogging: I’ve been doing it for over 25 years at bowblog.com. My current obsession, though, is a materialist history of cinema told on Substack. Short essays about the top-grossing Hollywood film from each year since 1913 - The Birth of a Nation, Napoléon, It Happened One Night, Ben-Hur, 2001: A Space Odyssey… Eventually I will get to the present day. In the meantime I insert the occasional contemporary piece - the 2025 Oscars, Villeneuve's Dune movies, the magnificent Gene Hackman - that kind of thing. It's called GROSS (the reviews are also on my Letterboxd obvs).
I write poems. You can download a pamphlet that uses Chaucer's rhyme royal that I cleverly called ROYAL from my blog (or email me and I'll send you a lovely, colourful, tabloid-sized hard copy in the post at no charge). I've been contributing to a local politics blog, on which we are mostly sarcastic about our MP, for a long time.
Popular posts at Bowblog.com: Some bullet-points about regulation, an explainer; How do you fund a monarchy?, some history; What have we learnt? Realism vs the liberal world order and Paragraphs about AI, my intrusive thoughts.
At Radlett Wire: the Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two; a local elections post-mortem. Reform UK shredded the Tories and terrified Labour in England last week - here's how it went in Hertfordshire. Plus Hertsmere steps into history, a three-part guide to the project to build 'Europe's biggest data centre' in our neighbourhood.
And in GROSS, materialist cinema criticism in newsletter form: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: they fought the law; Donald Trump's beef with foreign movie production, as usual there's a core of truth in Trump's arbitrary actions; a two-parter about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: Working in orbit and Brilliant, fastidious, ridiculous.
