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The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury
I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.
That exchange is where the book starts. It is also where the book’s argument starts, because what happened on Baldwin Avenue is a precise physical enactment of a larger institutional habit: the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, for smoothing the surface rather than examining what lies beneath.
The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse is now available from David Boles Books.
What the Book Does
The book conducts autopsies. Twenty of them, organized into five taxonomies of urban failure, spanning two millennia, three continents, and one diagnostic framework that I built to answer a question nobody in the urban planning literature seemed to be asking: why do we refuse to study the cities that died with the same rigor we bring to the cities that worked?
The five taxonomies are catastrophic erasure, economic exsanguination, the utopian misfire, slow municipal death, and the never-built city. Each describes a distinct mode of urban death. Each contains case studies drawn from published sources, government records, journalistic accounts, and in several cases my own observation. I have walked the streets described in this book. I have taught at the universities that serve them. The Jersey City Heights, Camden, Newark: these are places I know from the sidewalk, not from the satellite view.
Pompeii is in the book because it is the oldest and most complete case of catastrophic erasure in the Western record. Pripyat is in the book because it is the newest, a city of 49,000 people evacuated in thirty-six hours after Chernobyl and never reoccupied. Centralia, Pennsylvania, is in the book because the coal mine fire that started beneath it in 1962 is still burning, and because the state’s decision to bury Graffiti Highway under dirt is the most literal act of concealment I have encountered in any case study. Galveston is in the book because it was the largest city in Texas in 1900 and it is not anymore, and the reason it is not anymore is that Houston built a ship channel and absorbed Galveston’s port function, which meant that the hurricane that destroyed Galveston was fatal precisely because the economic function that would have justified rebuilding had already migrated fifty miles inland.
Gary, Indiana, is in the book because U.S. Steel built it in 1906 and then left. Cairo, Illinois, is in the book because its own governing class burned it down through a sustained campaign of racial violence so thorough that the city lost ninety percent of its population. Flint is in the book because the governance structure appointed to save money ended by poisoning the water. Pittsburgh is in the book because it did not die, and the reasons it survived expose the reasons the others did not.
Laurent, South Dakota, is in the book because it is the most instructive failure I have ever encountered. A planned Deaf community where more than a hundred families signed reservation forms and zero relocated. The idea was serious, the enthusiasm was real, and the distance between signing a form and packing a truck turned out to be the distance between a vision and a life. I have worked in the Deaf community for decades through HardcoreASL.com, ASL-Opera.com, and the CUNY-SPS ASL Program, and Janna Sweenie’s characterization of Laurent as a “Deaf Utopia” captures the arc perfectly: enthusiastic communal aspiration followed by collective inaction.
Where the Argument Came From
A colleague of mine at Rutgers-Newark, years ago, made a case for the publication of failure that I have carried forward as an intellectual commitment ever since. His field was research methodology, and his contention was that failed scholarship, research rigorously conducted that ended by disproving its own thesis, deserved publication with the same velocity and seriousness as research that confirmed its hypothesis. Journals published findings. Careers advanced on discoveries. The experiments that did not find what they were looking for were filed away, and the filing-away constituted a loss of the knowledge that the failure itself contained.
He was not a person I admired, and the reasons for that are his own business. But the argument he made that day was better than the person who made it. That fact is itself a version of the thesis this book advances: useful knowledge does not confine itself to attractive sources.
The Failed City applies that principle to urban collapse. Failed cities generate data. Abandoned plans produce evidence. Collapsed communities contain information about what went wrong, when it went wrong, and what the conditions were that made the failure possible. That data is as valuable as the data generated by the cities that succeeded. Our refusal to publish it, to study it, to assemble it into a systematic account, guarantees the repetition of errors that have already been committed and documented and then filed away.
The Diagnostic
The book builds a diagnostic framework with three levels: the baseline condition (what the city had before the crisis), the triggering condition (what initiated the decline), and the cascade (the self-reinforcing cycle that follows). The framework is offered as a tool. It works for every case study in the book, and I suspect it works for cases the book does not examine. The Prairie Voice article I published alongside this book, “The Other Side of the Blacktop,” argues that the same framework applies to rural collapse with equal precision. Any rancher in western Kansas who has watched the feedlot close and the equipment dealer follow it and the diner follow that can diagram the cascade on a napkin.
Jane Jacobs and the Missing Half
Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The title promises a study of death and life. The book delivers overwhelmingly on the life. It is one of the great books of the twentieth century, and I assign it in every course I teach that touches urban questions. It is also a book that does not deliver on the first word of its own title. Jacobs studied what makes cities work. She did not study what makes them die.
The Failed City is the death half of the equation, the book that Jacobs’ title promises and her text does not deliver. Jacobs remains one of the great urbanists. The gap in the literature remains real. No comparable book exists. The field has single-city studies (Sugrue on Detroit, Gillette on Camden, Gordon on St. Louis) and academic shrinking-cities literature, but no cross-taxonomic diagnostic framework for a general readership. The Failed City is, as far as I have been able to determine, the first.
The Cobblestones
The cobblestones are still there. Under the asphalt on Baldwin Avenue, under the dirt that covers Graffiti Highway in Centralia, under the grass that grows over the graded roads of California City. The evidence of failure is more durable than the surfaces we lay on top of it. Asphalt cracks. Dirt erodes. Grass thins. And the substrate will still be there, waiting to be examined by anyone willing to look at what lies beneath the blacktop.
The answer is beneath the blacktop. It has been there the whole time.
#bolesBooks #book #camden #city #cityLife #cobblestones #davidBoles #diagnostic #failedCity #failures #fireDepartment #janeJacobs #jerseyCity #newJersey #photography #technology #university #writing -
The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf
I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.
The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.
The Question O’Neill Could Not Close
The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?
That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.
The Five Threads
The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.
The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.
The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.
The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.
The Analytical Machinery
Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.
A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.
This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.
What This Book Is Not
The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.
There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.
The Company It Keeps
This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.
The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.
The Scholarly Apparatus
I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.
The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.
The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.
The Sign Above the Shelf
I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.
That is the argument. That is the book.
#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire -
The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf
I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.
The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.
The Question O’Neill Could Not Close
The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?
That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.
The Five Threads
The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.
The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.
The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.
The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.
The Analytical Machinery
Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.
A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.
This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.
What This Book Is Not
The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.
There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.
The Company It Keeps
This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.
The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.
The Scholarly Apparatus
I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.
The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.
The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.
The Sign Above the Shelf
I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.
That is the argument. That is the book.
#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire -
The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf
I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.
The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.
The Question O’Neill Could Not Close
The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?
That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.
The Five Threads
The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.
The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.
The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.
The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.
The Analytical Machinery
Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.
A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.
This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.
What This Book Is Not
The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.
There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.
The Company It Keeps
This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.
The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.
The Scholarly Apparatus
I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.
The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.
The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.
The Sign Above the Shelf
I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.
That is the argument. That is the book.
#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire -
The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf
I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.
The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.
The Question O’Neill Could Not Close
The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?
That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.
The Five Threads
The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.
The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.
The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.
The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.
The Analytical Machinery
Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.
A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.
This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.
What This Book Is Not
The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.
There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.
The Company It Keeps
This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.
The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.
The Scholarly Apparatus
I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.
The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.
The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.
The Sign Above the Shelf
I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.
That is the argument. That is the book.
#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire -
The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf
I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.
The God in the Wire: Technology, Meaning, and the Empty Shrine is now available from David Boles Books as a Kindle ebook, a trade paperback, and a free PDF download. It is a work of cultural criticism, twelve chapters, an introduction, a coda, and a full scholarly apparatus including endnotes, a glossary of analytical terms, and a reader’s guide to the Eugene O’Neill plays that give the book its governing argument. It is the book I have been circling for a decade without knowing it, and it is the book I am proudest to have written.
The Question O’Neill Could Not Close
The book’s thesis comes from a playwright, not a technologist. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill described a trilogy of plays he intended to write about “the death of the old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new one.” He wrote one of those plays, Dynamo, about a young man who loses his religious faith and transfers his worship to a hydroelectric generator. The play failed. The trilogy was never completed. But the question O’Neill was asking turned out to be the defining question of the century that followed: what happens when a civilization replaces its gods with its machines, and the machines turn out to be structurally incapable of doing what the gods once did?
That question drove Dynamo in 1929. It drives every chapter of The God in the Wire in 2026. The difference is that we now have a century of evidence to examine. O’Neill was diagnosing a crisis in its earliest stages. We are living inside the crisis at full maturity, surrounded by machines of extraordinary power that deliver everything except the one thing we keep asking them to provide: meaning.
The Five Threads
The book weaves five threads through its twelve chapters.
The first is the Deaf experience of communication technology. My wife is Deaf. Her fifty-year relationship with the tools of distance communication, from the TTY through the pager, the video phone, the smartphone, and the video relay service, runs through the book as testimony. Her words appear as direct quotation. Her perspective is not a case study or a sidebar. It is the book’s emotional center, because when you examine the history of communication technology through the experience of someone who was excluded from its founding medium, the telephone, you see things that hearing people cannot see. You see what the technology actually did, stripped of the mythology that the hearing world built around it.
The second thread is my own fifty-year relationship with the tools of composition: the manual typewriter, the electric Selectric, the Kaypro word processor, the networked computer, and the large language model. Every writer who has lived through this transition has a version of this story, but I wanted to tell it with the specificity it deserves, because the details matter. The resistance of the manual typewriter key is not the same as the frictionless completion of the language model, and the difference is not nostalgia. It is a structural change in the relationship between the writer’s body and the act of thinking on the page.
The third thread traces the transformation of American teaching from chalkboard to cloud. The fourth follows the democratization and fragmentation of public expression from the mimeograph to social media. The fifth examines medicine and environmental crisis, the domains where technology most directly confronts death and the limits of the material world. The cardiac catheter. The mRNA vaccine. The ozone layer. The climate. The places where the machine genuinely saves and the places where saving the body does not answer the question of what the body is for.
The Analytical Machinery
Every chapter applies what the book calls the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? Who profited from the substitution? Those questions are not rhetorical. They have specific, documented answers in every case, and the answers follow a pattern that is the book’s central argument.
A technology arrives with a promise. It achieves dominance. During that dominance, it substitutes a lesser good for a greater one: efficiency for understanding, connectivity for communion, information for wisdom, engagement metrics for attention, fluency for thought. The substitution is profitable for someone, usually the platform or the manufacturer, and the profit motive ensures that the substitution is never publicly identified as a substitution. It is marketed as progress.
This is what I call the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance triad, and it governs the structure of every chapter. The technology arrives. The technology dominates. The technology disappears or transforms, and the meaning it was supposedly carrying disappears with it, because the meaning was never in the machine. It was in us.
What This Book Is Not
The God in the Wire is not a Luddite tract. I use technology constantly. I am typing these words on a computer. The book was typeset in LaTeX, built as an ePub, and formatted for print-on-demand. I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the worship of technology, and there is a difference so fundamental that collapsing it is itself a species of the category error the book diagnoses.
There is a chapter called “Moments of Grace” that identifies the times technology got it right. The TTY is one. The early internet, before the advertising model consumed it, is another. The mRNA vaccine, developed in under a year against a novel pathogen, is a third. In each case, the technology remained instrumental, it preserved the human grammar of the act it mediated, and it did not demand worship. The moments of grace are real. The problem is that they are moments, not the default condition, and the structural incentives of the technology industry push relentlessly against their repetition.
The Company It Keeps
This book enters a conversation with predecessors I admire and from whom I have learned enormously. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. These are important books about technology and human meaning. What none of them does, and what The God in the Wire does, is place Deaf experience at the center of the argument. That is not a criticism of their work. It is a description of a gap this book attempts to fill, because the gap matters, and the perspective it opens changes the argument in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing.
The book also draws heavily on Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, particularly the “Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter that recounts Adams’s confrontation with the dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Adams felt a moral force radiating from the machine, the modern equivalent of the force that had built Chartres. He was right about the power. He was wrong about the meaning. That gap, between power and meaning, is the empty shrine.
The Scholarly Apparatus
I built the back matter to be genuinely useful, not decorative. The endnotes provide full citations to the clinical, historical, and sociological literature: the Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness, the Case and Deaton research on deaths of despair, the Twenge data on adolescent mental health, the Molina and Rowland ozone research, the IPCC assessments, the Gruentzig cardiac catheterization, the Palella antiretroviral data. Every empirical claim in the book is sourced. Every statistic is documented.
The glossary defines the analytical terms the book develops: the Arrival-Dominance-Disappearance Triad, the Category Error, the Substitution Test, the Moments of Grace. These are the book’s constructions, and I wanted readers to have a reference that collects them in one place.
The reader’s guide to the O’Neill plays walks through every work referenced in the text, from Beyond the Horizon through Long Day’s Journey into Night, because I am asking readers to engage with a playwright many of them may not have read since college, and I owe them the context to make that engagement meaningful.
The Sign Above the Shelf
I went back to LaGuardia. The sign was still there. The shelf was still empty. And standing in that corridor for the second time, I understood something I had not understood the first time: the sign was never pointing to the machine. The sign was pointing to the need. The need that existed before the TTY arrived and that persisted after the TTY was gone. The need to reach another human being across distance. The need that no technology has ever created and no technology has ever satisfied and no technology ever will, because the need is not technological. It is the most human thing about us, and the machines, for all their power, can only carry it. They cannot create it. They cannot sustain it. They cannot replace it.
That is the argument. That is the book.
#amazon #bolesBooks #book #davidBoles #drama #eugeneOneill #god #paperback #publishing #sociology #technology #wire -
The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege
Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.
But there is an immediate problem with the obituary. You are reading this right now, right?
That small fact does not prove that reading is thriving, but it does expose the real situation: the page is not dead so much as displaced. Reading has been pushed from the center of ordinary daily life into the margins between pings, feeds, meetings, errands, exhaustion, and the restless need to check what someone else is saying somewhere else.
The more accurate question is not whether books are dead, but what kinds of reading are being replaced, by what, and who benefits from the replacement.
Begin with what refuses to disappear. Print persists, stubbornly, in a market that has had more than enough time to abandon it if abandonment were truly inevitable. In U.S. print tracking that publishers and booksellers use, print book unit sales in 2024 totaled roughly 782.7 million, a slight increase over 2023, and notable precisely because it contradicts the simplistic narrative of collapse.
Now set beside it the other undeniable reality: audio is not a novelty. It is a major growth engine, and it is rapidly becoming the default way many people “read” books in the practical sense of finishing them.
The Audio Publishers Association reported U.S. audiobook sales revenue of $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13 percent over 2023, with digital audiobooks accounting for virtually all revenue. Industry reporting from the Association of American Publishers likewise places digital audio well into the multi-billion-dollar range and growing strongly year over year.
So the honest headline is not that books are dead. The honest headline is that books are mutating into a two-body system: print persists as a durable cultural technology, while audio expands as the most convenient literary delivery system ever built. The question is what this mutation does to attention, comprehension, memory, and the moral habits that a serious reading culture quietly trains.
Here is where the real crisis lives, and it is not a format war.
It is the collapse of leisure reading as a daily practice. A major study published in iScience, drawing on the nationally representative American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, reports a sharp drop in the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day, from roughly 28 percent in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2023. The same research emphasizes widening disparities by income, education, race, and geography, which should trouble anyone who still believes reading is part of a democratic baseline rather than a luxury good for the secure.
It is worth saying plainly what is at stake. Reading is not only entertainment. It is one of the few broadly accessible disciplines that trains sustained attention, inference, patience, perspective-taking, and the capacity to follow an argument beyond a slogan. When that habit shrinks, it is not merely culture that changes; it is citizenship that thins.
Why does it feel, in the body, as if nobody reads? Because the default posture of modern media is designed to fracture the mind. The attention economy does not merely offer alternatives to reading; it profits from making deep attention difficult. That is why the battle is less about paper versus headphones and more about whether anyone can still defend unbroken time against systems engineered to interrupt it.
Across the contemporary media landscape, the pattern is visible in sober measurement. Recent national communications data in the United Kingdom reports substantial daily online time for adults and heavy use of platform video, including YouTube, which has become a default entertainment and information channel.
Even if you resist importing one country’s metrics into another’s conclusions, the direction remains unmistakable: devices have shifted the human posture from sit down and attend to carry it with you and sample.
At this point, many people reach for a comforting relativism: perhaps listening is simply the new reading, perhaps it is all the same, perhaps we should stop worrying. I reject the smug sneer that listening is cheating, because it is historically illiterate and culturally vain. For most of human history, literature lived in voice: in recitation, sermon, theater, public reading, storytelling. Audio is not a betrayal of literature. It is one of literature’s native bodies returning with modern convenience.
But the return of voice does not erase the distinct cognitive environment of the page. Listening is not inferior. It is different. Scholarly reviews comparing audiobook listening and print reading emphasize again and again that outcomes depend on context, text type, and learner characteristics, which is another way of saying that the medium shapes the mind in specific, contingent ways.
Listening is temporal and flowing; it can deepen immersion and restore tone, pacing, irony, and emotion through performance. Yet it can also invite passivity when treated as background noise, a productivity hack, a way to consume a book while doing something else. The art of listening, like the art of reading, requires intention, and our era trains intention poorly.
The printed page survives not because it is romantic, but because it performs certain tasks better than anything else. A printed book is finite, quiet, and spatial.
It does not ping.
It offers stable visual architecture, which matters when you are following a complex argument, revisiting earlier claims, tracking structure, or simply trying to remember where an idea lived on the page.
This is not nostalgia; it is cognition. Large-scale research syntheses comparing reading comprehension on paper versus screens have found a modest but consistent comprehension advantage for paper in many settings, with the size of the gap influenced by factors such as time pressure and reading purpose. Screens can host deep reading, yes, but most screens are not designed to protect it. Most screens are designed to keep you moving.
If there is a single sentence that captures the future, it is this: print will increasingly become a premium environment for attention, while audio will increasingly become the most widespread on-ramp to books. Consumer research from the audiobook industry reports that a majority of American adults have listened to an audiobook, which makes audio not an edge case but a normalized channel for literary experience.
There is another force constricting reading that has nothing to do with social video and everything to do with power: restriction. If we speak honestly about the death of reading, we must name the political and institutional assault on access.
PEN America’s reporting on U.S. public school book bans for the 2023 to 2024 school year documents 10,046 instances of bans affecting 4,231 unique titles. The American Library Association’s data for 2024 reports hundreds of censorship attempts across libraries, schools, and universities, involving thousands of titles. A society does not innocently drift away from books while simultaneously organizing to remove books from young readers’ reach. One is a technological pressure; the other is a deliberate project.
So what is the future of the word on the page? It will not die off, but it will change its social role. Reading will become less default and more chosen, more ritualized. People will read the way some people now cook from scratch: as an act that signals values, protects mental health, and asserts autonomy against convenience.
That is a loss, because reading as a democratic baseline is better than reading as a boutique practice, but it is also a realistic description of where our incentives have pushed us.
The book will also become more explicitly multi-modal.
Not in the shallow sense of attaching gimmicks to text, but in the practical sense that many works will live as a set: print for study and annotation, audio for performance and immersion, digital text for portability and search. Industry survey work already suggests emerging tensions about synthetic narration versus human performance, pointing toward a future in which audio splits into low-cost synthetic delivery and premium human interpretation.
And the word will become more contested, not less. As reading time becomes scarcer and access becomes more politicized, books become sharper symbols.
That is exactly why they are targeted. It is also why libraries, schools, and independent bookstores remain civic institutions rather than mere retailers. The future of the page will be decided less by technology than by whether citizens insist that access to ideas is not negotiable.
If you want the historical arc, it is not a clean fall from Eden but a long series of shifts in media attention. Industrial printing expanded mass literacy and mass publishing; television displaced some leisure reading; early digital text and then smartphones turned reading into an always-available screen activity; algorithmic short-form video normalized rapid sampling as a default leisure pattern. By the early 2020s, measurable decline in daily pleasure reading had become stark even as print unit sales remained resilient and audio revenues surged.
The lesson is that forms persist. What changes is the ecology of attention.
My conclusion is simple and unsentimental. Books are not dead. Print is not finished. Audio is not the enemy. The real enemy is the conversion of human attention into a strip-mined resource, and the use of moral panic to restrict access to what remains.
A culture that abandons deep reading does not merely lose a pastime. It loses a mode of thought that underwrites serious self-government.
So yes, the word will transform. It will hybridize. It will travel by paper and by voice and by pixels. But whether it dies off depends on something far more basic than format.
It depends on whether we still believe, stubbornly and publicly, that sustained attention is a virtue, that access to books is a civic right, and that the interior life is not an inconvenience to be optimized away.
And if you are reading this right now, you already know the page is not dead. You are holding it open.
#audiobooks #bolesBooks #davidBoles #digtal #ereader #experience #life #meaning #reading #silo #socialMedia #words -
The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege
Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.
But there is an immediate problem with the obituary. You are reading this right now, right?
That small fact does not prove that reading is thriving, but it does expose the real situation: the page is not dead so much as displaced. Reading has been pushed from the center of ordinary daily life into the margins between pings, feeds, meetings, errands, exhaustion, and the restless need to check what someone else is saying somewhere else.
The more accurate question is not whether books are dead, but what kinds of reading are being replaced, by what, and who benefits from the replacement.
Begin with what refuses to disappear. Print persists, stubbornly, in a market that has had more than enough time to abandon it if abandonment were truly inevitable. In U.S. print tracking that publishers and booksellers use, print book unit sales in 2024 totaled roughly 782.7 million, a slight increase over 2023, and notable precisely because it contradicts the simplistic narrative of collapse.
Now set beside it the other undeniable reality: audio is not a novelty. It is a major growth engine, and it is rapidly becoming the default way many people “read” books in the practical sense of finishing them.
The Audio Publishers Association reported U.S. audiobook sales revenue of $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13 percent over 2023, with digital audiobooks accounting for virtually all revenue. Industry reporting from the Association of American Publishers likewise places digital audio well into the multi-billion-dollar range and growing strongly year over year.
So the honest headline is not that books are dead. The honest headline is that books are mutating into a two-body system: print persists as a durable cultural technology, while audio expands as the most convenient literary delivery system ever built. The question is what this mutation does to attention, comprehension, memory, and the moral habits that a serious reading culture quietly trains.
Here is where the real crisis lives, and it is not a format war.
It is the collapse of leisure reading as a daily practice. A major study published in iScience, drawing on the nationally representative American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, reports a sharp drop in the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day, from roughly 28 percent in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2023. The same research emphasizes widening disparities by income, education, race, and geography, which should trouble anyone who still believes reading is part of a democratic baseline rather than a luxury good for the secure.
It is worth saying plainly what is at stake. Reading is not only entertainment. It is one of the few broadly accessible disciplines that trains sustained attention, inference, patience, perspective-taking, and the capacity to follow an argument beyond a slogan. When that habit shrinks, it is not merely culture that changes; it is citizenship that thins.
Why does it feel, in the body, as if nobody reads? Because the default posture of modern media is designed to fracture the mind. The attention economy does not merely offer alternatives to reading; it profits from making deep attention difficult. That is why the battle is less about paper versus headphones and more about whether anyone can still defend unbroken time against systems engineered to interrupt it.
Across the contemporary media landscape, the pattern is visible in sober measurement. Recent national communications data in the United Kingdom reports substantial daily online time for adults and heavy use of platform video, including YouTube, which has become a default entertainment and information channel.
Even if you resist importing one country’s metrics into another’s conclusions, the direction remains unmistakable: devices have shifted the human posture from sit down and attend to carry it with you and sample.
At this point, many people reach for a comforting relativism: perhaps listening is simply the new reading, perhaps it is all the same, perhaps we should stop worrying. I reject the smug sneer that listening is cheating, because it is historically illiterate and culturally vain. For most of human history, literature lived in voice: in recitation, sermon, theater, public reading, storytelling. Audio is not a betrayal of literature. It is one of literature’s native bodies returning with modern convenience.
But the return of voice does not erase the distinct cognitive environment of the page. Listening is not inferior. It is different. Scholarly reviews comparing audiobook listening and print reading emphasize again and again that outcomes depend on context, text type, and learner characteristics, which is another way of saying that the medium shapes the mind in specific, contingent ways.
Listening is temporal and flowing; it can deepen immersion and restore tone, pacing, irony, and emotion through performance. Yet it can also invite passivity when treated as background noise, a productivity hack, a way to consume a book while doing something else. The art of listening, like the art of reading, requires intention, and our era trains intention poorly.
The printed page survives not because it is romantic, but because it performs certain tasks better than anything else. A printed book is finite, quiet, and spatial.
It does not ping.
It offers stable visual architecture, which matters when you are following a complex argument, revisiting earlier claims, tracking structure, or simply trying to remember where an idea lived on the page.
This is not nostalgia; it is cognition. Large-scale research syntheses comparing reading comprehension on paper versus screens have found a modest but consistent comprehension advantage for paper in many settings, with the size of the gap influenced by factors such as time pressure and reading purpose. Screens can host deep reading, yes, but most screens are not designed to protect it. Most screens are designed to keep you moving.
If there is a single sentence that captures the future, it is this: print will increasingly become a premium environment for attention, while audio will increasingly become the most widespread on-ramp to books. Consumer research from the audiobook industry reports that a majority of American adults have listened to an audiobook, which makes audio not an edge case but a normalized channel for literary experience.
There is another force constricting reading that has nothing to do with social video and everything to do with power: restriction. If we speak honestly about the death of reading, we must name the political and institutional assault on access.
PEN America’s reporting on U.S. public school book bans for the 2023 to 2024 school year documents 10,046 instances of bans affecting 4,231 unique titles. The American Library Association’s data for 2024 reports hundreds of censorship attempts across libraries, schools, and universities, involving thousands of titles. A society does not innocently drift away from books while simultaneously organizing to remove books from young readers’ reach. One is a technological pressure; the other is a deliberate project.
So what is the future of the word on the page? It will not die off, but it will change its social role. Reading will become less default and more chosen, more ritualized. People will read the way some people now cook from scratch: as an act that signals values, protects mental health, and asserts autonomy against convenience.
That is a loss, because reading as a democratic baseline is better than reading as a boutique practice, but it is also a realistic description of where our incentives have pushed us.
The book will also become more explicitly multi-modal.
Not in the shallow sense of attaching gimmicks to text, but in the practical sense that many works will live as a set: print for study and annotation, audio for performance and immersion, digital text for portability and search. Industry survey work already suggests emerging tensions about synthetic narration versus human performance, pointing toward a future in which audio splits into low-cost synthetic delivery and premium human interpretation.
And the word will become more contested, not less. As reading time becomes scarcer and access becomes more politicized, books become sharper symbols.
That is exactly why they are targeted. It is also why libraries, schools, and independent bookstores remain civic institutions rather than mere retailers. The future of the page will be decided less by technology than by whether citizens insist that access to ideas is not negotiable.
If you want the historical arc, it is not a clean fall from Eden but a long series of shifts in media attention. Industrial printing expanded mass literacy and mass publishing; television displaced some leisure reading; early digital text and then smartphones turned reading into an always-available screen activity; algorithmic short-form video normalized rapid sampling as a default leisure pattern. By the early 2020s, measurable decline in daily pleasure reading had become stark even as print unit sales remained resilient and audio revenues surged.
The lesson is that forms persist. What changes is the ecology of attention.
My conclusion is simple and unsentimental. Books are not dead. Print is not finished. Audio is not the enemy. The real enemy is the conversion of human attention into a strip-mined resource, and the use of moral panic to restrict access to what remains.
A culture that abandons deep reading does not merely lose a pastime. It loses a mode of thought that underwrites serious self-government.
So yes, the word will transform. It will hybridize. It will travel by paper and by voice and by pixels. But whether it dies off depends on something far more basic than format.
It depends on whether we still believe, stubbornly and publicly, that sustained attention is a virtue, that access to books is a civic right, and that the interior life is not an inconvenience to be optimized away.
And if you are reading this right now, you already know the page is not dead. You are holding it open.
#audiobooks #bolesBooks #davidBoles #digtal #ereader #experience #life #meaning #reading #silo #socialMedia #words -
The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege
Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.
But there is an immediate problem with the obituary. You are reading this right now, right?
That small fact does not prove that reading is thriving, but it does expose the real situation: the page is not dead so much as displaced. Reading has been pushed from the center of ordinary daily life into the margins between pings, feeds, meetings, errands, exhaustion, and the restless need to check what someone else is saying somewhere else.
The more accurate question is not whether books are dead, but what kinds of reading are being replaced, by what, and who benefits from the replacement.
Begin with what refuses to disappear. Print persists, stubbornly, in a market that has had more than enough time to abandon it if abandonment were truly inevitable. In U.S. print tracking that publishers and booksellers use, print book unit sales in 2024 totaled roughly 782.7 million, a slight increase over 2023, and notable precisely because it contradicts the simplistic narrative of collapse.
Now set beside it the other undeniable reality: audio is not a novelty. It is a major growth engine, and it is rapidly becoming the default way many people “read” books in the practical sense of finishing them.
The Audio Publishers Association reported U.S. audiobook sales revenue of $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13 percent over 2023, with digital audiobooks accounting for virtually all revenue. Industry reporting from the Association of American Publishers likewise places digital audio well into the multi-billion-dollar range and growing strongly year over year.
So the honest headline is not that books are dead. The honest headline is that books are mutating into a two-body system: print persists as a durable cultural technology, while audio expands as the most convenient literary delivery system ever built. The question is what this mutation does to attention, comprehension, memory, and the moral habits that a serious reading culture quietly trains.
Here is where the real crisis lives, and it is not a format war.
It is the collapse of leisure reading as a daily practice. A major study published in iScience, drawing on the nationally representative American Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, reports a sharp drop in the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day, from roughly 28 percent in 2004 to about 16 percent in 2023. The same research emphasizes widening disparities by income, education, race, and geography, which should trouble anyone who still believes reading is part of a democratic baseline rather than a luxury good for the secure.
It is worth saying plainly what is at stake. Reading is not only entertainment. It is one of the few broadly accessible disciplines that trains sustained attention, inference, patience, perspective-taking, and the capacity to follow an argument beyond a slogan. When that habit shrinks, it is not merely culture that changes; it is citizenship that thins.
Why does it feel, in the body, as if nobody reads? Because the default posture of modern media is designed to fracture the mind. The attention economy does not merely offer alternatives to reading; it profits from making deep attention difficult. That is why the battle is less about paper versus headphones and more about whether anyone can still defend unbroken time against systems engineered to interrupt it.
Across the contemporary media landscape, the pattern is visible in sober measurement. Recent national communications data in the United Kingdom reports substantial daily online time for adults and heavy use of platform video, including YouTube, which has become a default entertainment and information channel.
Even if you resist importing one country’s metrics into another’s conclusions, the direction remains unmistakable: devices have shifted the human posture from sit down and attend to carry it with you and sample.
At this point, many people reach for a comforting relativism: perhaps listening is simply the new reading, perhaps it is all the same, perhaps we should stop worrying. I reject the smug sneer that listening is cheating, because it is historically illiterate and culturally vain. For most of human history, literature lived in voice: in recitation, sermon, theater, public reading, storytelling. Audio is not a betrayal of literature. It is one of literature’s native bodies returning with modern convenience.
But the return of voice does not erase the distinct cognitive environment of the page. Listening is not inferior. It is different. Scholarly reviews comparing audiobook listening and print reading emphasize again and again that outcomes depend on context, text type, and learner characteristics, which is another way of saying that the medium shapes the mind in specific, contingent ways.
Listening is temporal and flowing; it can deepen immersion and restore tone, pacing, irony, and emotion through performance. Yet it can also invite passivity when treated as background noise, a productivity hack, a way to consume a book while doing something else. The art of listening, like the art of reading, requires intention, and our era trains intention poorly.
The printed page survives not because it is romantic, but because it performs certain tasks better than anything else. A printed book is finite, quiet, and spatial.
It does not ping.
It offers stable visual architecture, which matters when you are following a complex argument, revisiting earlier claims, tracking structure, or simply trying to remember where an idea lived on the page.
This is not nostalgia; it is cognition. Large-scale research syntheses comparing reading comprehension on paper versus screens have found a modest but consistent comprehension advantage for paper in many settings, with the size of the gap influenced by factors such as time pressure and reading purpose. Screens can host deep reading, yes, but most screens are not designed to protect it. Most screens are designed to keep you moving.
If there is a single sentence that captures the future, it is this: print will increasingly become a premium environment for attention, while audio will increasingly become the most widespread on-ramp to books. Consumer research from the audiobook industry reports that a majority of American adults have listened to an audiobook, which makes audio not an edge case but a normalized channel for literary experience.
There is another force constricting reading that has nothing to do with social video and everything to do with power: restriction. If we speak honestly about the death of reading, we must name the political and institutional assault on access.
PEN America’s reporting on U.S. public school book bans for the 2023 to 2024 school year documents 10,046 instances of bans affecting 4,231 unique titles. The American Library Association’s data for 2024 reports hundreds of censorship attempts across libraries, schools, and universities, involving thousands of titles. A society does not innocently drift away from books while simultaneously organizing to remove books from young readers’ reach. One is a technological pressure; the other is a deliberate project.
So what is the future of the word on the page? It will not die off, but it will change its social role. Reading will become less default and more chosen, more ritualized. People will read the way some people now cook from scratch: as an act that signals values, protects mental health, and asserts autonomy against convenience.
That is a loss, because reading as a democratic baseline is better than reading as a boutique practice, but it is also a realistic description of where our incentives have pushed us.
The book will also become more explicitly multi-modal.
Not in the shallow sense of attaching gimmicks to text, but in the practical sense that many works will live as a set: print for study and annotation, audio for performance and immersion, digital text for portability and search. Industry survey work already suggests emerging tensions about synthetic narration versus human performance, pointing toward a future in which audio splits into low-cost synthetic delivery and premium human interpretation.
And the word will become more contested, not less. As reading time becomes scarcer and access becomes more politicized, books become sharper symbols.
That is exactly why they are targeted. It is also why libraries, schools, and independent bookstores remain civic institutions rather than mere retailers. The future of the page will be decided less by technology than by whether citizens insist that access to ideas is not negotiable.
If you want the historical arc, it is not a clean fall from Eden but a long series of shifts in media attention. Industrial printing expanded mass literacy and mass publishing; television displaced some leisure reading; early digital text and then smartphones turned reading into an always-available screen activity; algorithmic short-form video normalized rapid sampling as a default leisure pattern. By the early 2020s, measurable decline in daily pleasure reading had become stark even as print unit sales remained resilient and audio revenues surged.
The lesson is that forms persist. What changes is the ecology of attention.
My conclusion is simple and unsentimental. Books are not dead. Print is not finished. Audio is not the enemy. The real enemy is the conversion of human attention into a strip-mined resource, and the use of moral panic to restrict access to what remains.
A culture that abandons deep reading does not merely lose a pastime. It loses a mode of thought that underwrites serious self-government.
So yes, the word will transform. It will hybridize. It will travel by paper and by voice and by pixels. But whether it dies off depends on something far more basic than format.
It depends on whether we still believe, stubbornly and publicly, that sustained attention is a virtue, that access to books is a civic right, and that the interior life is not an inconvenience to be optimized away.
And if you are reading this right now, you already know the page is not dead. You are holding it open.
#audiobooks #bolesBooks #davidBoles #digtal #ereader #experience #life #meaning #reading #silo #socialMedia #words -
FALLING BEHIND: Wales’s jobs gap with the rest of the UK has widened again — and wages are lagging too, new research finds
Wales has fallen further behind the rest of the UK on jobs, pay and living standards, according to a major new independent report published today — with the employment gap that narrowed during the 2000s and 2010s now wider than at any point since before the last financial crisis.
The findings come from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, one of the UK’s leading independent economic research organisations, in a briefing paper published as part of a series specifically examining the Welsh economy ahead of next month’s Senedd election.
The headline finding is stark. Wales’s employment rate for 16 to 64-year-olds stands at around 71%, compared to 75% in the rest of the UK — a gap of approximately four percentage points. That gap had been narrowed significantly in the decade leading up to the pandemic, falling to around two percentage points in the second half of the 2010s. But Wales’s employment rate fell more sharply after Covid-19 than the rest of the UK, and has not recovered at the same pace, reopening the divide.
As Swansea Bay News has previously reported, Wales already has the lowest employment rate of any UK nation and the highest economic inactivity rate in Great Britain — with nearly one in four working-age adults not in work and not looking for a job. The IFS findings add independent academic weight to a trend already visible in national statistics.
On pay, the picture is similarly challenging. Welsh workers earned a median monthly wage of £2,401 in 2025 — around 5% below the UK median. That gap has narrowed only marginally over the past decade, from just over 6% in 2015. The mean pay gap is even wider at 16%, reflecting the fact that Wales has relatively few high earners, both because of the shape of its economy and because Welsh employers tend to host fewer of the highest-paid roles within any given sector.
The pay divide between Wales and the rest of the UK is almost twice as large in the private sector as in the public sector. That imbalance has a striking consequence: public sector workers in Wales out-earn private sector workers of the same age, sex, education and experience — the reverse of the pattern seen across England as a whole.
Those lower wages, combined with lower employment, feed directly into household incomes. Median household net incomes in Wales are nearly 6% lower than the UK average. The gap is present across the entire income distribution but is largest at the top — 4% lower at the tenth percentile, widening to 13% lower at the ninetieth. Lower housing costs in Wales provide only partial relief, according to the IFS.
Jed Michael, one of the report’s authors and a research economist at the IFS, said the data presented a clear challenge for whoever forms the next Welsh Government. “After catching up during the first two decades of the 21st century, more recent data suggest Wales’s employment rate has fallen behind the rest of the UK,” he said. “When combined with lower earnings, this lower employment rate means both lower average household incomes and a slightly higher poverty rate than the UK as a whole — despite lower housing costs.”
Michael added that the structure of Welsh devolution limited the tools available to address poverty directly. “The Welsh Government has limited control over benefits, which are generally the most direct way to boost the income of low-income households,” he said, pointing to employment, productivity and earnings as the levers that must be pulled instead.
The report also notes that improving the employment picture would not only raise living standards but directly benefit the Welsh Government’s own finances — through higher devolved income tax revenues and lower spending on devolved benefits such as the council tax reduction scheme.
The findings landed immediately in the election campaign. Samuel Kurtz MS, Welsh Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, said the report confirmed “what people across Wales already feel.” He said: “Fewer people in work, lower wages, and living standards lagging behind the rest of the UK. The Welsh Conservatives have a clear and credible plan to get Wales working — cutting taxes, backing businesses, and creating the conditions for higher wages and more jobs.”
The IFS report is the fourth in a series of Welsh election briefings funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It does not attribute blame for the trends it identifies to any particular party or government, focusing instead on the data and its implications for future policy.
The employment picture is particularly relevant to communities across South West Wales. Swansea has recorded the weakest payroll performance of any Welsh city region in recent months, with a net loss of more than 1,300 jobs on payroll in the year to January 2026. That places the city at the bottom of a league table of Welsh regions at a time when the national picture is already challenging.
The picture in Swansea is not entirely bleak, however, and the IFS data captures trends at a regional level that don’t always reflect the grain of individual investment decisions. A significant wave of business activity has been reported in the city in recent months. Amazon-owned tech firm Veeqo has opened its new headquarters at the 71/72 Kingsway development, where global workspace operator IWG has also taken 20,000 square feet — part of a Kingsway scheme that has attracted its first wave of tenants and formally opened in recent weeks, with a further office development now under way at the former St David’s site. Amazon itself has pointed to £2.4 billion in Welsh investment with Swansea at its centre.
Beyond the office sector, retailers including Skechers and Boyes have arrived in the city, Greggs has opened a larger city centre shop as part of the ongoing regeneration programme, and a Penllergaer distribution warehouse — approved by Swansea Council’s planning committee this week — is expected to create around 250 jobs when operational. Homegrown businesses are also making their mark: a Swansea firm recently secured £8 million to develop deep-sea wind power technology, Swansea Building Society has expanded its branch network and launched a new app on the back of strong demand, and a women-led city brewery has been celebrating growth. Travis Perkins has relocated its Swansea branch to a larger site in Llansamlet, creating new jobs in the process.
The IFS report itself acknowledges that improving the employment and earnings picture is a long-term structural challenge, not one that turns on any single investment or announcement. For people in Swansea and across South West Wales, the question the data poses is whether the visible signs of regeneration and investment are translating into better-paid, more secure work — and the IFS findings suggest that on the numbers currently available, the answer is not yet a clear yes.
The IFS’s analysis is based on a range of official data sources including the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings and the Family Resources Survey, with the authors noting that well-documented problems with UK labour market data mean the precise employment figures should be treated with some caution, even as the broader trend is clear across multiple datasets.
Related stories from Swansea Bay News
ONS figures show Wales unemployment at highest level since 2015
The national statistics that set the backdrop to today’s IFS findings — Wales already had the worst employment rate of any UK nation.BOTTOM OF THE PILE: Swansea recorded as weakest for jobs in Wales as payroll numbers plunge
The local dimension to the national picture — Swansea sitting at the bottom of the Welsh jobs league table.Amazon says £2.4bn investment has boosted Wales — with Swansea at the centre
The investment case being made for Swansea — and the question of whether it’s closing the gap the IFS has identified.SENEDD SHAKE-UP: Winners and losers revealed as First Minister on course to lose seat
#Business #Economy #employment #IFS #InstituteForFiscalStudies #jobs #livingStandards #pay #unemployment #wages #WelshEconomy
The election context in which today’s IFS report lands — and what the economic picture means for voters on May 7. -
You can now connect your Box and #Dropbox accounts to #DeepResearch on #ChatGPT and pull data, which will be used by the #AI to conduct #research. Please do not do this - you will add to the unending pool of data being sucked out of creators and repurposed for profit - not your profit or benefit. #copyright #KM #research #legalresearch #education #copyright #intellectualproperty https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-deep-research-can-now-pull-data-from-dropbox-and-box/
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DATE: May 14, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Scientists discover a new gut-brain-heart connection that regulates blood pressure
Recent research published in Circulation Research provides evidence that a specific molecule produced by gut bacteria can protect the heart from stiffness and dysfunction by communicating directly with the brain. The study suggests that restoring this bacterial by-product might offer a new way to approach high blood pressure and related heart conditions.
Hypertension and related cardiovascular conditions involve a complex interaction among the digestive, nervous, and cardiovascular systems. High blood pressure tends to force the heart muscle to become stiff and lose its ability to relax properly between beats, a condition known as diastolic dysfunction. This stiffness represents a major physiological cause of heart failure, but the biological signals that initiate this structural change remain poorly understood.
To understand this process, researchers aimed to identify the chemical messengers that link these physiological systems. “Hypertension is a systemic condition driven by complex interactions between the gut, brain, kidneys, and cardiovascular system,” said study author Suphansa Sawamiphak, a principal investigator at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association in Berlin, Germany.
“While we knew that high blood pressure is associated with gut dysbiosis and often compromises the heart’s ability to relax, the precise molecular signals linking these systems were missing. We wanted to bridge this gap and identify the specific microbial metabolites that mediate this interorgan communication during hypertensive stress.”
To study this biological connection, the scientists used a specialized zebrafish model. Zebrafish larvae are largely transparent, allowing researchers to observe their beating hearts and circulating blood in real time using high-speed microscopes. The team induced high blood pressure in the larvae by rearing them in water with progressively lower salt concentrations over five days. This low-ion environment forced the fish to activate internal hormonal mechanisms to retain sodium, which in turn increased their blood pressure and caused their heart muscles to stiffen.
The researchers first analyzed the gut bacteria of the zebrafish after the five-day hypertensive challenge. By sequencing the genetic material of the bacteria in the digestive tracts of ten treated groups and eleven control groups, they found a marked decrease in overall bacterial diversity. The stressed fish lost specific bacteria responsible for breaking down tryptophan, an amino acid found in food, into indole molecules.
The team then tested whether the presence of gut bacteria was necessary to protect the heart. They raised groups of eight to twelve germ-free zebrafish, meaning the fish completely lacked any gut microbes. When exposed to the same low-salt stress, these germ-free fish exhibited more severe blood pressure spikes and worsened heart stiffness compared to fish with normal gut bacteria. This finding provides evidence that a healthy microbial community helps shield the cardiovascular system from damage.
Next, the researchers examined the specific chemical by-products produced by the gut bacteria. Using mass spectrometry, a specialized laboratory technique that measures the mass and concentration of different molecules, they analyzed the intestines of the fish. They found that the stressed fish had significantly lower levels of indole-3 acetic acid, a specific byproduct of tryptophan metabolism, compared to healthy fish.
This depletion of beneficial molecules has a cascading effect on the body’s stress response. “Our gut microbiome actively protects the heart during hypertensive challenges by producing specific molecules, notably Indole-3 Acetic Acid (IAA), derived from dietary tryptophan,” Sawamiphak explained. “When high blood pressure disrupts the microbiome, the resulting loss of IAA removes a brake on the brain’s stress signaling, specifically within hypocretin-producing neurons. This missing brake leads to sympathetic overdrive, compromising the heart muscle’s ability to properly relax between beats (diastolic dysfunction).”
To see if replacing this missing molecule could help, the scientists administered indole-3 acetic acid directly into the digestive tracts of the fish. Fish that received this supplement maintained normal blood pressure and healthy heart function, even when exposed to the low-salt stress. The treatment prevented the individual heart muscle cells from enlarging and kept the main pumping chambers of the heart relaxing normally between beats.
The researchers then looked at the brain to understand how a gut molecule could protect the heart. They focused on hypocretin neurons, a specialized group of brain cells in the hypothalamus that help regulate involuntary functions like heart rate and blood vessel constriction. Using special fluorescent markers that light up when neurons are active, they observed that the hypocretin neurons became highly overactive during the hypertensive stress. Giving the fish indole-3 acetic acid quieted these brain cells back to normal baseline levels.
Further experiments revealed exactly how the molecule influenced the brain. The scientists found that hypocretin neurons possess a specific chemical sensor called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor. When they injected indole-3 acetic acid directly into the brain cavities of the fish, it activated this receptor and protected the heart from stiffening. If they blocked the receptor with a chemical inhibitor, the protective effects completely disappeared.
By preventing the hypocretin neurons from becoming overactive, the indole-3 acetic acid stopped an excessive cascade of nervous system signals from reaching the heart. Using a technique called calcium imaging to monitor nerve activity in live fish, the team saw that the treatment calmed the sympathetic nervous system, which is the network responsible for the body’s physical responses to stress. The treatment also lowered the systemic levels of hormones that constrict blood vessels, acting on multiple fronts to protect the cardiovascular system.
To determine if these findings translate to humans, the researchers analyzed blood samples from a cohort of 194 individuals under the age of fifty. This group included 97 patients with high blood pressure and 97 healthy individuals, matched for age, sex, and body mass index. The scientists found that the patients with hypertension had significantly lower levels of indole-3 acetic acid in their blood.
This clinical data strongly mirrored the physiological changes observed in the animal models. “We were struck by how potently a single microbial metabolite, IAA, could act centrally in the brain to simultaneously prevent both neurogenic (sympathetic overdrive) and hormonal (renin-angiotensin system) drivers of hypertension,” Sawamiphak said. “Furthermore, finding that this specific depletion of circulating IAA is strongly conserved in a human hypertensive cohort, with a particularly pronounced sex-specific reduction in female patients, was a remarkable validation of our zebrafish model.”
While the study provides substantial evidence for a gut-brain-heart connection, it has some limitations. Zebrafish models offer a simplified view of biology and do not capture the full complexity of human aging or metabolic diseases that often accompany heart problems. The human data used in the study is observational, meaning it shows a link between low indole-3 acetic acid and high blood pressure but does not prove that one causes the other in people.
The authors caution against viewing these results as an immediate clinical treatment. “It is important not to misinterpret these findings as evidence that simply taking an over-the-counter IAA or tryptophan supplement is a standalone cure for high blood pressure,” Sawamiphak noted. “While we established a direct cause-and-effect mechanism in our animal models, the human data we analyzed is currently correlational. Hypertension is a highly complex, multifactorial disease, and IAA deficiency represents one component of a much broader systemic dysregulation.”
Future studies are needed to determine if restoring this molecule can safely and effectively treat or prevent heart disease in human patients. “Our immediate next step is to understand exactly how microbial metabolites like IAA regulate neuronal activity at a molecular level,” Sawamiphak said. “Beyond IAA, we are also examining a broader range of microbial metabolites that shift during disease states, particularly those known to regulate the immune system.”
The long-term objective is to map out these complex biological interactions to pave the way for medical advancements. “Ultimately, our overarching goal is to decode this complex, system-wide communication network between the gut, the brain, the immune system, and the heart,” Sawamiphak explained.
“While our laboratory focuses on fundamental biological discovery rather than conducting human clinical trials, pinpointing these precise disease mechanisms and molecular targets provides the essential foundation. It allows clinical researchers to eventually develop targeted therapies, such as postbiotics that deliver the exact missing beneficial molecules, to restore balance in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.”
The study, “Indole-3 Acetate Limits Dysbiosis-Driven Diastolic Failure via Hcrt Neurons,” was authored by Bhakti I. Zakarauskas-Seth, Giovanni Forcari, Harithaa Anandakumar, Ilan Kotlar-Goldaper, Clara M. Barraud, Nina Jovanovic, Ulrike Brüning, Jennifer A. Kirwan, Nicola Wilck, Sofia K. Forslund, Dominik N. Müller, Alessandro Filosa, and Suphansa Sawamiphak.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #GutBrainHeart #Indole3AceticAcid #IAA #HypertensionResearch #DiastolicDysfunction #GutMicrobiome #HeartHealth #Hypocretin #GutBrainAxis #Postbiotics
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The governance of #Mastodon has been a heated subject for a long time: here is an excellent article by Ana Valens (dated 2019) on the power plays in Mastodon development: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-fediverse-eugen-rochko/ #benevolence #power 🌈#alphabetMafia #networkPolitics #devGovernance #longread #peopleNotUsers
⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺
#benevolentDictator #EugenRochko #Rochko #leadership #security #moderation #MastodonHistory #governance #protection 🌱#dataProtection #dataPrivacy #privacy (to be continued: 👇🏾) -
{About #MastodonForks; #installment 1}
I have a hint that a conversation on the #governance of #Mastodon flavours would be useful. Here is a #longThread 🧶
Let us talk about the struggle between creator and #community. This time we include newly arrived people.
I will propose how to alleviate with shortcuts.
⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺⸺
#benevolence #benevolentDictator #leadership #power #politics #longRead #peopleNotUsers #networkPolitics 🧩#orgGovernance #devGovernance 👇🏾 -
In five short weeks, Kevin O’Leary’s Utah version of Wonder Valley has thrown the state into a massive conflict over water, air pollution, heat islands, and the community benefits of AI data centres.
Throw in questions about property rights, accusations of paid protesters, a mysterious Department of War connection, and a Chinese government interference conspiracy…well, you’ve got a story.
Here’s my update on how a Canadian celebrity investor has shaken a US state facing a drought and water crisis.
#AIdatacentres #AIDataCenters #technology #ableg #abpoli #cdnpoli #sustainability #AIhyperscalers #WonderValleyAlberta #Stratos #WonderValleyUtah #GreatSaltLake #drought #water
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In five short weeks, Kevin O’Leary’s Utah version of Wonder Valley has thrown the state into a massive conflict over water, air pollution, heat islands, and the community benefits of AI data centres.
Throw in questions about property rights, accusations of paid protesters, a mysterious Department of War connection, and a Chinese government interference conspiracy…well, you’ve got a story.
Here’s my update on how a Canadian celebrity investor has shaken a US state facing a drought and water crisis.
#AIdatacentres #AIDataCenters #technology #ableg #abpoli #cdnpoli #sustainability #AIhyperscalers #WonderValleyAlberta #Stratos #WonderValleyUtah #GreatSaltLake #drought #water
-
In five short weeks, Kevin O’Leary’s Utah version of Wonder Valley has thrown the state into a massive conflict over water, air pollution, heat islands, and the community benefits of AI data centres.
Throw in questions about property rights, accusations of paid protesters, a mysterious Department of War connection, and a Chinese government interference conspiracy…well, you’ve got a story.
Here’s my update on how a Canadian celebrity investor has shaken a US state facing a drought and water crisis.
#AIdatacentres #AIDataCenters #technology #ableg #abpoli #cdnpoli #sustainability #AIhyperscalers #WonderValleyAlberta #Stratos #WonderValleyUtah #GreatSaltLake #drought #water
-
In five short weeks, Kevin O’Leary’s Utah version of Wonder Valley has thrown the state into a massive conflict over water, air pollution, heat islands, and the community benefits of AI data centres.
Throw in questions about property rights, accusations of paid protesters, a mysterious Department of War connection, and a Chinese government interference conspiracy…well, you’ve got a story.
Here’s my update on how a Canadian celebrity investor has shaken a US state facing a drought and water crisis.
#AIdatacentres #AIDataCenters #technology #ableg #abpoli #cdnpoli #sustainability #AIhyperscalers #WonderValleyAlberta #Stratos #WonderValleyUtah #GreatSaltLake #drought #water
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Harnessing AI in Blogging: Benefits, Challenges, and Personal Insights
In today’s digital landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a progressively popular tool across various domains, including blogging.
WordPress integrated AI into its platform a few years ago, joining numerous other sites that now offer AI as an option.
I have witnessed many bloggers who are afraid of what AI can do, but I have also seen many bloggers embrace AI and utilise it for the benefits it can offer.
However, like any tool, there are pros and cons to consider.
What are your thoughts about using AI to blog?
This post examines the advantages and disadvantages of integrating AI into your blogging process.
Pros of Using AI in Blogging
1. Improved Efficiency
AI tools can streamline the writing process. From generating topic ideas to creating content drafts, AI can save bloggers considerable time, allowing them to focus on refining their unique voice and style.
This may prove beneficial to bloggers who publish daily, but those bloggers who publish less often may not see any benefit.
2. Enhanced Creativity
AI can assist in brainstorming and generating creative content ideas. With access to vast databases and algorithms that identify trends, AI can offer fresh perspectives and innovative suggestions.
However, some consider this to be plagiarism, a term that specifically refers to taking another person’s work—words, ideas, and so forth—and presenting it as one’s own without proper attribution.
Did you know that WordPress users can choose to stop their blog’s content from being shared with a WordPress-licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models? To achieve this, navigate to your blog’s dashboard, select Settings—Reading, and tick the box next to ‘Prevent third-party sharing...’.
Tick this box to stop AI from using your blog content.3. SEO Optimization
Numerous AI-based tools can analyse keywords and optimise content for search engines. They offer insights into the types of content that rank well, assisting bloggers in enhancing their visibility and reach.
I utilise AI to generate titles for blog posts when I struggle to think of a captivating title that will entice readers to read and engage further. Consequently, I have observed a significant increase in engagement and visitors to my blog.
4. Data-Driven Decisions
AI can analyse reader behaviour and feedback to inform content strategy. By understanding what resonates with the audience, bloggers can create more targeted and engaging content.
However, your WordPress statistics can also provide this information by analysing the stats of posts that receive higher engagement. Typically, you’ll observe a correlation between those posts that engage readers more and those that attract less engagement.
5. Consistency
AI can assist in maintaining a consistent posting schedule by automating aspects of the content creation process. This guarantees that the blog stays active and engaging for readers.
It is widely known that blogs which publish on a schedule tend to retain readers; however, it is unwise to publish content merely for the sake of it. There is nothing wrong with occasionally missing the publication of a blog post or taking a break from blogging. Nevertheless, if you choose to take the latter route, ensure that you inform your readers.
Cons of Using AI in Blogging
1. Lack of Personal Touch
AI-generated content often lacks the emotional depth and personal touch that human writers naturally provide. Readers tend to connect more readily with personal stories and unique experiences that AI is unable to replicate.
If you let AI compose all your posts, you’ll soon notice a decline in visitors and engagement.
2. Quality Control
While AI can generate content rapidly, the quality does not always meet high standards. Bloggers must review and edit AI-generated content to ensure it aligns with their voice and is factually accurate. Remember, it is your blog, not that of AI. Your voice matters.
3. Dependence on Technology
Over-reliance on AI can hinder writing skills. Bloggers may grow overly dependent on tools, stifling creative development and originality. This is particularly evident in the fiction world, where I have observed AI produce stories that lack emotion or feeling, thus making them dull and unappealing.
My advice is that if you are going to AI, mix it with your written content.
4. Ethical Concerns
The use of AI raises ethical questions, such as plagiarism (which I discussed earlier) and authenticity. Bloggers must ensure that their use of AI does not compromise their integrity or mislead their audience. Always check (and check again) what AI produces.
5. Costs
Although some AI tools are free, many come with a cost. For bloggers on a tight budget, investing in AI technology might not be practical. However, this won’t affect those who choose not to use AI.
Do I use AI in blogging?
Yes, I utilise AI to assist with spelling and grammar corrections. I have also used AI to verify if I have omitted anything essential from a post, as well as for generating titles for blog posts.
The featured images I use in my blog posts (including this one) are primarily created using the WordPress AI image tool. However, I have found that the tool is not always particularly effective at generating images, especially when more than a few words are included. More work is needed to improve it.
Conclusion
Utilising AI in blogging offers both exciting opportunities and significant challenges. While it can enhance efficiency, creativity, and data-driven decisions, it is crucial to maintain a balance and preserve the unique voice that attracts readers. By carefully weighing the pros and cons, bloggers can make informed choices about incorporating AI into their writing process.
If you wish to utilise AI, do so with your own writing rather than generating posts entirely composed by AI.
Finally, we must never forget that we all have a choice regarding AI. We can either use it or leave it be. What we must never do is persuade other users to use it or not. It’s a personal decision. Never criticise those who choose to use AI if you are against any use of AI in writing. Likewise, don’t criticise anyone who refuses to use AI if you use it.
Recommended reading about AI in blogging from other bloggers.
If you want a guide on AI on WordPress, check out this excellent article from Fedora, ‘A Guide To WordPress.Com’s AI Assistant.’
This post from Debbie at Deb’s World, “Reinventing Blogging: A Look into the Future,” dives into the controversial realm of AI in blogging, and trust me, it’s a must-read that has ignited plenty of debate. Are you ready to jump into the fray and add your voice to the discussion?
Are you hopping on the AI train in your blogging adventure? If so, what tools are you using, and what benefits has AI brought you and your blog? Does the use of AI in the blogging world concern you? Are you against using AI in Blogging? If so, what are your reasons? We want to hear your thoughts if you’re for or against AI. Drop your thoughts in the comments, and let’s chat!
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Considerations for adding an AMA feature
My initial question was “What is the best way to add some AMA (ask me anything) feature (like on Tumblr) to one or more of my websites?” I’d thought about it for all of ten seconds before I realised that “best” was entirely subjective.
If you already know what we are talking about, feel free to skip to the ideas section. For the rest of us, let me briefly introduce the concept to you.
What is this AMA thing, then?
On the hybrid of social media and blogging that is Tumblr, users can enable the option to ask questions. When the user replies to the question and the answer appear together as a single post.
Questions can be anonymous, answered privately (if not anon) or answered as a public post.
Why would you want something like that?
An AMA (ask me anything) can be a great way to build a sense of community with your readers. For example, an author with an AMA can interact with fans but in their own time while creating content that the wider community will probably enjoy looking at. While yes, this is far from common, I think more artists of words and of images should do this more often.
Even if community building (or platform building if you want to call it that) cn be a goal, AMAs can just be a fun way to stay connected. In that regard, it feels like a most IndieWeb idea (even if it probably isn’t). (I like IndieWeb stuff BTW)
I think an AMA would be fun. I want to add the feature somewhere.
Where would you use this?
I see five use cases for my own use.
- Author Buzz UK user blogs (like this one)
- isBrill/isPants as an optional feature
- My social node
- My music blog
- My health blog
Where would you use this?
Authors and other creatives wanting to build a rapport with readers should consider such a feature. The easy answer is to start a tumble blog, but of course, I wouldn’t be your favourite old geek with a cop-out answer like that.
Chatty folks with IndieWeb personal websites featuring a blog or forum might be a good fit.
Anyone who likes answering random questions, I guess.
What about you? Pop into my comments and leave your use case.
Ideas for AMAs, depending on what exactly you want
Now we come to the brainstorming part. I’ve divided this up into potential solutions to explore the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach along with how copyable the idea is. After all, if I’m having fun with AMAs, I bet others would too.
AMA built on existing IndieWeb stuff like WebMention
If you are already set up for WebMention, this should be dead simple. Make a page which accepts mentions, call it Ask Me Anything. Let people mention said page when they want to post questions to you.
The good
- Easy to set up
- No new code needed
- Will probably work just fine
- Very IndieWeb
- Super easy to copy
- Low effort
The bad
- Not private
- Not anonymous
- Not inclusive for passing average citizens
- A bit of a faff to maintain
- No private replies
Conclusion on WebMention
If I am honest, I imagine an AMA built on WebMention will end up like the guestbook pages I have done this with – rarely used by humans but regularly attacked by spam bots. WebMention is great, but I do not think it is the tool for this task.
I would be delighted to be proven wrong if someone wants to implement AMAs this way.
AMA via ActivityPub (Mastodon inclusion mode)
The next approach I considered was to lean on ActivityPub. After all, most of my websites implement it (mostly via a WordPress plugin). For me, this would take the same approach – slap up an ActivityPub-enabled page and call it AMA.
The good
- Compatible with the WebMention approach
- A bit more inclusive
- Easy enough to set up
- No new code needed
- Easy to copy
- Low effort
- Use the WP Reply block to display the question
The bad
- Not (entirely) private
- Not (entirely) anonymous
- Only inclusive for Mastodon ActivityPub users
- Still a bit of a faff to maintain
- Not really what ActivityPub is for
- Quickly lost in the timeline’s history
- No private replies (sorta)
Conclusion on ActivityPub
With the plugin for ActivityPub I use on my WordPress blogs, this would probably be the least effort approach that would kind of display the way I would want it to. Mostly. It would be close enough that I could live with it.
However, a strong AMA launch could start with lots of questions as ActivityPub replies, but I can picture it tapering off in fairly short order. For most users, this will be a single toot in an avalanche of content. Thus, soon lost and forgotten.
Just use a forum or group for an AMA
This blog is part of Author Buzz UK (for now). I could just create a group with an AMA forum or add an AMA thread to an appropriate forum or group. That’s how the Reddit AMA works.
The good
- Low effort
- Easy to replicate
- Can be taken to PMs for privacy
- Sort of what a forum is for
- Easy for passing average citizens to understand
The bad
- Forces users to create an account
- A massive faff to turn into blog posts
- Not private
- Not anonymous
- Looks dead until sufficient uptake
- A lot to set up without an existing forum in place
Conclusions of using a forum
This approach could be good for some people. If there is a forum or community that is okay with AMAs, you could set up shop there and just copy and paste back to your blog or personal website. This is mostly in the spirit of IndieWeb, I guess.
My problem with this is that I’m taking visitors off-site (sort of) and I can’t replicate this on sites like my social node, my music blog, isBrill, etc. as none of them have a forum. Also, this is not really in the spirit of the Tumblr feature I want to implement. It is more of the meme, “we have AMAs at home…”
Just use an AMA WordPress plugin
In this section, I’m going to take a look at the plugins and/or themes that implement AMA for WordPress specifically. All other platforms will have to roll their own.
Let’s see what I can find.
Spoiler: I found a lot of listicles about plugins to run a full-on Q&A forum/community. Not features to allow people to post a paragraph for you, the author, to reply to.
The also ran that was ask-me-anything-anonymously
A lot of blog posts (including WP Beginner) recommend this plugin. Except it was last updated about a year ago and has been closed due to security concerns (or WP Drama, one of the two).
The source code is on GitHub, though.
Conclusion: Nope.
CM Answers
CM Answers is a QnA plugin. It has a free and a pro version. Like many plugins it seems to take the kitchen sink approach. If you want to run something a bit like Stack Overflow or Quora, I’m sure this is fine. For an AMA feature, this is not the tool for the job.
Conclusion: A cannon to swat a fly
OMG WTF?
Searching WordPress.org was a hot mess of unrelated plugins, forums, and things no sane person should add to the WordPress install. Seriously, WTF?
Conclusions on “just use a plugin”
After a bunch of searching, I came up dry for a plugin that just implements “asks”. What I did find that seemed to be what one might want were thinly veiled adverts for AMA sites, code that should never be used in production, and a lot of irrelevant search results.
I have zero recommendations I am willing to make here.
Well, I guess we have to roll our own or something
I’ve reflected on a few ways to code this up. Let’s start with the least effort idea.
Just a form that creates a draft post
My first thought was that the least effort would be a form on the front end that anyone can fill out. The back end then does a few basic checks and puts the sanitised text inside a quote block in a draft post.
The good
- Not all that much work
- Would work as intended
- Easy to copy
The bad
- Spam would be a nightmare
- Infrequency asks could get lost in the drafts section forever
- Open to abuse
- So much abuse potential
- Dear lord, the possible abuse
Conclusions on just adding a form
On reflection, this is a terrible idea. There are many other ways to do this and almost all of them are better.
Okay, let’s spec this thing out properly then
It was at this stage of the rabbit hole that I thought to actually draft out what exactly it is I am looking for. I even went and found a quote to go with my work.
Write down this vision and clearly inscribe it on tablets, so that a herald may run with it.
Bible, Habakkuk 2:2b
I do like a good quote to go with things.
The vision: What I want this to be
Must haves
- A form people can submit “asks” via
- Strong anti-spam and abuse mitigation
- An admin page with all pending asks ready to be turned into “ask posts”
- Track which asks have answers (posts)
- Asks are private until published in a post
Nice to haves
- Option to private reply
- Optional anonymous asks
- Obvious link back to asker
- Can work with WebMention
- Can work with ActivityPub
- Uses microformats
Running with it: How to make this happen
The way I see it, there are three possible approaches: (1) A custom post type, (2) a custom database table, (3) a third option that we already passed over.
A custom post type would store a lot of cruft in the database and come with a whole host of security and privacy problems. Posts are designed to be looked at so a custom type that is entirely hidden, while doable, is not really in the spirit of what these are made for. Also, it would be a lot of work, and I am lazy.
A custom database table solves a lot of problems. Each ask has a row to itself, and we could run the text through the input validation and sanitisation built into WordPress. Tracking which post contains the ask would be as simple as adding a field for post ID. Not the worst idea. Certainly workable.
The idea we walked right by is to just use a single page called AMA. Hear me out, now. Think about the spec I have just listed. Does that remind you of anything that already exists? It sounds a heck of a lot like the user comments feature. A plugin that just nominates a page and tracks its comments would benefit from WebMention, ActivityPub, and spam filtration as they are already built in (assuming you also use those plugins like I do).
Okay, smarty pants, how do we do that?
The page itself would have to have a custom template to skip showing comments. Plus or minus a few mitigations to stop them from showing up on “recent comments”. Other than that, and the post tracking, this is basically just native comments that don’t get published.
WordPress comments can have a comment type applied to them. If we set a hook that checks the page ID, we can modify incoming comments for that page to take the “ask” type. Then, I imagine there is a filter we can hook to remove that comment type from anything other things do with comments (like display the most recent ones).
Comment meta is a thing. In there, we can store any extra data such as which post contains the answer, if the ask has been closed, privately replied to (via email), or whatever.
Pair all that up with an admin page and a site can take asks. Go a step further, and you could probably make that a per-user ask. That’s only one more comment metadata point – user who is being asked. The list filtering for active users might not be screamingly fast but this is low enough use that this should not be a problem.
I’d want the admin area page to have a button to turn the ask into a post (a simple enough automated copy and paste into a quote).
In theory, you can then take AMAs via fediverse, WebMention, or onsite. You can use the existing tools to decide who gets to “comment”.
Could this work?
Theory is a great place; everything works there. In theory, this is a great idea. Use comments as asks. An idea that could be copied to most any CMS or software. My question now is, would this work?
Are there any gotchas waiting around the corner that I’d want to know about?
Please do criticise me on this as much as you feel is necessary.
Where does this leave us?
In this post, I looked at a number of ways to implement the AMA “asks” feature of Tumblr. I skipped over WebMentions and similar ideas as not going to work, but came all the way back to, with a little effort, maybe they could.
What I do know is that WordPress does not have a plugin that I could find to implement this. A modified page template could be a good solution. I can see this needing a custom template per theme to look really nice, but an out-of-the-box page with some custom CSS would probably look okay.
By reusing existing structures, there would be less work and more features. I’m not going to try coding this myself just yet. Tiredness is kicking my arse right now. I need to have my head on and brain working to do this myself.
I’d love it if someone else took my idea and made it a thing, but I’ve been around long enough to know that I’ll probably have to do it myself.
TL;DR: Anything that takes comments could probably be made to take asks with a little faffing about.
Thoughts?
I want to know what you think. I thrive on interactions – comments make me happy. In this case, I have a bunch of questions, but any thoughts in your head – please share with me.
- Are you familiar with Tumblr’s asks?
- Would you want an AMA on your personal blog or website?
- Of the things I have explored, which seems to you like a good fit for adding asks?
- Should I (or some cool geek) make this?
- Do you wanna take a crack at it yourself?
- What have I missed?
- Is there anything I have overlooked?
Whatever you have to say – let me know. Please reply, mention, or comment – I want to hear from you. (Also share or boost if you are feeling particularly kind.)
Syndicated to:#AMA #asks #blogging #IndieWeb #makeWhatYouNeed #planning #SocialMedia #thinkingThroughAProblem #TumblR #WordPress
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Who Actually Benefits When Nepal Sells Hydro to Silicon Valley?
Nepal is being courted for green compute. Ireland tried it first. Here is what saying yes to multinationals actually looks like.
https://www.jonathanclarke.ie/2026/05/07/nepal-hydro-data-centres-the-wrong-deal
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La X brigata partigiana rimane a Cespedosio fino alla metà di luglio circa
Una vista dal rifugio Cespedosio. Fonte: Visit BergamoDal canto suo anche il comando della 40^ brigata Garibaldi “Matteotti” operante in Valsassina e Valtellina tenta di ristabilire i contatti. Ma l’impresa fallisce. In data 25 luglio 1944, Al, comandante del fronte sud della 40^, deve dichiarare che, malgrado gli sforzi: “con il distaccamento di Val Taleggio non è stato possibile il contatto. Pare che questo sia inquadrato nella brigata bergamasca. Ad ogni modo cercheremo i comandanti, ora irreperibili, definendo la loro posizione.” (8) Sembra strano che il comando partigiano della Valsassina non riesca a rintracciare Gastone [Gastone Nulli] e i suoi; tanto più che i partigiani della Valsassina, avendo avuto modo di aiutare gli uomini della X quando questi si trovavano alla capanna Castelli, potevano conoscerne il nuovo rifugio. Ma le difficoltà del momento spiegano molte cose e tra le altre anche questo inconveniente. Non si può comunque evitare di riflettere sulle voci raccolte da Al a proposito dell’inquadramento della formazione taleggina nella brigata bergamasca. Il PCI bergamasco e la 40^ Matteotti sono dunque le organizzazioni che cercano di allacciare rapporti col gruppo di Gastone. E si può notare un certo qual legame tra le due iniziative nell’unica matrice politica da cui entrambi dipendono, ma il legame appare abbastanza tenue: sono solo voci quelle che Al raccoglie a proposito dell’inquadramento della X tra le formazioni di un partito che allora spendeva molte delle proprie energie per costituire un’efficiente brigata garibaldina in terra orobica. I collegamenti clandestini sono lacunosi anche all’interno delle forze garibaldine e non c’è quindi da stupirsi che le informazioni pervenute ad Al diano per certo ciò che invece è per ora solo una speranza. La documentazione tace completamente sugli esiti della menzionata missione di Alberto a S. Pellegrino, invece, per quel che concerne la presa di contatto del PCI di Bergamo con Gastone, ci fornisce qualche utile, anche se debole, spunto. Si può così affermare che, di fronte alla richiesta di instaurare rapporti organici con i comunisti bergamaschi, Gastone oppone un sostanziale rifiuto, motivandolo con l’esistenza di precedenti collegamenti con organizzazioni milanesi del PCI: “Fidandomi delle assicurazioni di Dario (9), rifiutai di aderire a formazioni dipendenti dagli organi di Bergamo” (10) osserva Gastone e precisa di aver mantenuto tale orientamento fino alla cattura di Dario(ottobre 1944?). Come è noto, Dario riscuote la fiducia di talune organizzazioni comuniste milanesi e torna quindi comodo a Gastone scaricare su di lui le responsabilità della mancata collaborazione con il PCI di Bergamo; ma proprio qui sta la debolezza della sua asserzione, infatti, come si potrà constatare, non esisteva alcun antagonismo tra comunisti milanesi e bergamaschi in relazione ai gruppi della Val Taleggio. Semmai esisteva in quel momento una sfasatura di ordine informativo che presto verrà colmata. D’altra parte non è possibile sostenere che Gastone rifiuti categoricamente ogni rapporto con Bergamo. Al contrario, per quanto concerne le Fiamme Verdi, ne promuove la ricerca e dal PCI provinciale accetta senza esitazioni gli aiuti almeno fino a quando non furono ristabiliti i precedenti contatti con Milano.
Così delineata, la questione presenta una sua logica (11) che diventa particolarmente evidente se si ricorda l’insistenza di Gastone nel proclamare la volontà di mantenere alla formazione un “pieno carattere apolitico” ed a se stesso l’indipendenza dal “PCI come partito”. Egli infatti dispone di una formazione i cui uomini tendenzialmente fanno capo a due organismi molto diversi tra loro (le Fiamme Verdi ed il PCI milanese), senza contare quelli che si considerano completamente autonomi. Il problema di tenerli uniti può dunque dipendere dalla capacità del comandante di evitare influenze troppo dirette e condizionamenti che spostino l’asse d’equilibrio a favore degli uni o degli altri. Così egli lascia cadere i contatti con il PCI di Bergamo e molto probabilmente anche quelli con le Fiamme Verdi (12); insiste sulla propria autonomia e non rinuncia a soddisfare le richieste di uomini (come Dario) che gli erano stati vicini fin dalla fine di maggio, perché in ogni caso i legami che essi ristabiliscono pongono in essere un collegamento con comandi superiori che sono lontani e solo difficilmente potranno, influire in modo decisivo sull’andamento del gruppo. La linea di condotta di Gastone dunque si può efficacemente sintetizzare fin da ora in questi termini: unità nell’autonomia, due fattori destinati a pesare costantemente ma in modo diverso in tutta l’attività dei gruppi partigiani taleggini.
La X rimane a Cespedosio [n.d.r.: frazione del comune di Camerata Cornello (BG] fino alla metà di luglio circa. Sono giorni duri, mitigati solo dal clima estivo. Gli uomini dormono all’addiaccio, si accontentano di mangiare polenta e formaggio; criticano il loro comandante perché non condivide la loro vita (13), ma tutti quasi indistintamente ne subiscono l’ascendente. Verificano lo sforzo del comando di riorganizzare le formazioni, (14) ma soprattutto registrano la solidarietà della popolazione che spontaneamente contribuisce come può al loro vettovagliamento. Superate le più gravi difficoltà, ristrutturata la formazione, Gastone trasferisce gli uomini alla Castelli anche se i problemi alimentari non sono risolti, anche se il mancato chiarimento con gli organi di Bergamo provocherà un rinvio nel tempo dell’inquadramento della X nelle formazioni garibaldine o comunque nel movimento partigiano organizzato. Nella seconda metà di luglio il gruppo ritorna alla capanna Castelli. Gli uomini sono poco più di una cinquantina (15). Le armi sono sufficienti ma scarseggiano le munizioni. Un rapporto fascista, sempre riferito a fine luglio, inizio agosto, li segnala a “Cima di Piazzo-Pizzo Racimonti (leggi passo Baciamorti)- Venturosa-Taleggio-Pizzino e Vedeseta”. (16) Dalla base alla Castelli infatti venivano effettuati spostamenti nella zona per provvedere alle necessità della formazione e, a quanto
pare, alcuni partigiani con il comandante si erano stabiliti nelle frazioni del comune di Taleggio allora prive del benché minimo presidio fascista. Fino agli ultimi giorni di luglio a all’inizio di agosto comunque non è pensabile che la formazione si sia abbassata verso i paesi della Val Taleggio.
[NOTE]
(8) MCL – 40^ brigata Matteotti, com; fronte sud, 25/7/44
(9) Purtroppo di Dario si sa ben poco e non è quindi possibile determinare la qualità della sua influenza su Gastone. Gastone sostiene che gli fu presentato a Milano come “membro di un comitato” dalla signorina Lella Pizzo d’Ambrosio il 23/5/44, cioè poco prima che entrambi prendessero la via della montagna. Romolo (non meglio identificato) funge da collegamento tra il gruppo milanese e Dario. Anch’egli era in contatto con la d’Ambrosio, anzi entrambi abitavano a Milano in via Lambrate 13 e insieme furono arrestati nel febbraio ’45 dai tedeschi; dopo di allora non si sa più nulla di Romolo, mentre della d’Ambrosio Gastone parla come d una delatrice che per salvare la pelle si era rassegnata a far da amante agli ufficiali tedeschi. Quanto a Dario, le sue tracce si perdono dopo il settembre del 1944, mese in cui svolse funzioni di commissario nella 86^. In quel periodo si registrò una notevole tensione tra lui e Gastone
(10) CPV – C 51
11) Ci sono stati vari tentativi di spiegare la logica che guida l’operato di Gastone fin da questa fase e nella maggior parte dei casi essi adombrano il sospetto del tradimento. Più esplicita delle altre è l’ipotesi di P. Pallini (Penna Nera) che considera l’azione di Gastone in Val Taleggio alla stregua di quella di un agente provocatore assoldato ai fascisti e perciò rifiuta di credere all’autenticità dei suoi contatti con organizzazioni milanesi. Secondo il Pallini, Gastone avrebbe vantato rapporti con un misterioso”comitato Tito” risultato poi sconosciuto alle indagini del comando delle Fiamme Verdi; ma non si può dimenticare che, malgrado le riserve, fu proprio il comando delle FFVV ad autorizzare Pallini ad intavolare buone relazioni con Gastone. Questa ipotesi a nostro avviso non è attendibile: l) perché chi teneva i contatti con Milano non era Gastone, ma Dario 2) perché a partire da agosto la formazione sarà visitata ripetutamente da scrupolosi ispettori del PCI che non misero mai in discussione né l’esistenza né l’autenticità dei collegamenti con Milano 3) Perché si può affermare che la stessa denominazione del gruppo rimanda a una formazione milanese: La X brigata, (una di cui si sa pochissimo e su cui non esiste alcuno studio).
(12) Questa affermazione si fonda sulla assoluta carenza di documenti per il periodo in questione; l’unico elemento concreto è la citata missione di Alberto a S. Pellegrino per ricollegarsi al col. Richetti; sondaggi precisi al riguardo hanno consentito di chiarire che la cosa non ebbe seguito, ma si tratta di testimonianze orali e comunque non è escluso che si potessero riallacciare rapporti per altra via
(13) Egli vive in camere d’affitto o in albergo con la madre ed effettua spese considerate futili incidendo così pesantemente sul già, tanto magro bilancio del gruppo.
(14) Nel periodo di Cespedosio e comunque in luglio sono vari i tentativi di riorganizzare la formazione anche sotto il profilo finanziario e alimentare. La gente della zona collabora come può facendo in modo che i partigiani trovino al loro giungere a Cespedosio sacchi di farina (la famiglia Redondi e Benetto di S. Giovanni Bianco si segnalano in questi aiuti spontanei), ma lo stato di abbandono in cui si trovano gli uomini e l’incertezza dei contatti col centro inducono il comando a cercare di risolvere questo problema di propria iniziativa. Si tenta così di riattivare il canale finanziario di G. Cima, che però risponderà positivamente solo dopo l’adesione di Gastone alla II divisione; anche qualche altro borghese benestante viene interpellato allo scopo e la X ne ottiene una certa collaborazione (si leggano i nomi dei contattati: A. Pesenti, G. Milesi, M. Gianati di Piazza B., A. Mismetti e si ricordino le succulente riscossioni effettuate alla banca di Olmo al Brembo). Questa linea diverge da quella comuniste che temeva un eventuale condizionamento delle formazioni da parte dei benestanti. La X però si muove con noncuranza su questa strada, forse anche per rafforzare in questo modo la propria autonomia dai centri politici clandestini.
(15) Secondo alcune fonti tra la fine di giugno e la metà di luglio il numero è cresciuto a 90 unità, ma la cifra è esagerata. Gli informatori fascisti danno una cifra più attendibile (e si tenga conto che il loro rapporto si riferisce alla metà di luglio-inizio agosto): 50/60 uomini. In effetti ai 30/35 sfuggiti al rastrellamento di fine giugno, vanno aggiunti i circa 15 del gruppo Paganoni, alcuni sbandati nascosti nelle baite della zona (sia presso Camerata Cornello che in Val Taleggio). Al totale va però tolto il gruppetto del Canadese che si allontana all’inizio di luglio.
(16) ISML – Bg. 5 L 1/2269
Maria Grazia Calderoli, Aspetti politici e militari della Resistenza taleggina. Luglio 1944-aprile 1945, Tesi di laurea, Università degli Studi di Milano, Anno accademico 1975-1976, qui ripresa da Associazione Culturale Banlieu#1944 #agosto #Bergamo #brigata #CamerataCornelloBG #Cespedosio #comunista #fascisti #FiammeVerdi #GastoneNulli #guerra #Lombardia #luglio #MariaGraziaCalderoli #Matteotti #partigiani #partito #provincia #Resistenza #SanPellegrinoTermeBG #Taleggio #tedeschi #Val #Valsassina #Valtellina #X
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La X brigata partigiana rimane a Cespedosio fino alla metà di luglio circa
Una vista dal rifugio Cespedosio. Fonte: Visit BergamoDal canto suo anche il comando della 40^ brigata Garibaldi “Matteotti” operante in Valsassina e Valtellina tenta di ristabilire i contatti. Ma l’impresa fallisce. In data 25 luglio 1944, Al, comandante del fronte sud della 40^, deve dichiarare che, malgrado gli sforzi: “con il distaccamento di Val Taleggio non è stato possibile il contatto. Pare che questo sia inquadrato nella brigata bergamasca. Ad ogni modo cercheremo i comandanti, ora irreperibili, definendo la loro posizione.” (8) Sembra strano che il comando partigiano della Valsassina non riesca a rintracciare Gastone [Gastone Nulli] e i suoi; tanto più che i partigiani della Valsassina, avendo avuto modo di aiutare gli uomini della X quando questi si trovavano alla capanna Castelli, potevano conoscerne il nuovo rifugio. Ma le difficoltà del momento spiegano molte cose e tra le altre anche questo inconveniente. Non si può comunque evitare di riflettere sulle voci raccolte da Al a proposito dell’inquadramento della formazione taleggina nella brigata bergamasca. Il PCI bergamasco e la 40^ Matteotti sono dunque le organizzazioni che cercano di allacciare rapporti col gruppo di Gastone. E si può notare un certo qual legame tra le due iniziative nell’unica matrice politica da cui entrambi dipendono, ma il legame appare abbastanza tenue: sono solo voci quelle che Al raccoglie a proposito dell’inquadramento della X tra le formazioni di un partito che allora spendeva molte delle proprie energie per costituire un’efficiente brigata garibaldina in terra orobica. I collegamenti clandestini sono lacunosi anche all’interno delle forze garibaldine e non c’è quindi da stupirsi che le informazioni pervenute ad Al diano per certo ciò che invece è per ora solo una speranza. La documentazione tace completamente sugli esiti della menzionata missione di Alberto a S. Pellegrino, invece, per quel che concerne la presa di contatto del PCI di Bergamo con Gastone, ci fornisce qualche utile, anche se debole, spunto. Si può così affermare che, di fronte alla richiesta di instaurare rapporti organici con i comunisti bergamaschi, Gastone oppone un sostanziale rifiuto, motivandolo con l’esistenza di precedenti collegamenti con organizzazioni milanesi del PCI: “Fidandomi delle assicurazioni di Dario (9), rifiutai di aderire a formazioni dipendenti dagli organi di Bergamo” (10) osserva Gastone e precisa di aver mantenuto tale orientamento fino alla cattura di Dario(ottobre 1944?). Come è noto, Dario riscuote la fiducia di talune organizzazioni comuniste milanesi e torna quindi comodo a Gastone scaricare su di lui le responsabilità della mancata collaborazione con il PCI di Bergamo; ma proprio qui sta la debolezza della sua asserzione, infatti, come si potrà constatare, non esisteva alcun antagonismo tra comunisti milanesi e bergamaschi in relazione ai gruppi della Val Taleggio. Semmai esisteva in quel momento una sfasatura di ordine informativo che presto verrà colmata. D’altra parte non è possibile sostenere che Gastone rifiuti categoricamente ogni rapporto con Bergamo. Al contrario, per quanto concerne le Fiamme Verdi, ne promuove la ricerca e dal PCI provinciale accetta senza esitazioni gli aiuti almeno fino a quando non furono ristabiliti i precedenti contatti con Milano.
Così delineata, la questione presenta una sua logica (11) che diventa particolarmente evidente se si ricorda l’insistenza di Gastone nel proclamare la volontà di mantenere alla formazione un “pieno carattere apolitico” ed a se stesso l’indipendenza dal “PCI come partito”. Egli infatti dispone di una formazione i cui uomini tendenzialmente fanno capo a due organismi molto diversi tra loro (le Fiamme Verdi ed il PCI milanese), senza contare quelli che si considerano completamente autonomi. Il problema di tenerli uniti può dunque dipendere dalla capacità del comandante di evitare influenze troppo dirette e condizionamenti che spostino l’asse d’equilibrio a favore degli uni o degli altri. Così egli lascia cadere i contatti con il PCI di Bergamo e molto probabilmente anche quelli con le Fiamme Verdi (12); insiste sulla propria autonomia e non rinuncia a soddisfare le richieste di uomini (come Dario) che gli erano stati vicini fin dalla fine di maggio, perché in ogni caso i legami che essi ristabiliscono pongono in essere un collegamento con comandi superiori che sono lontani e solo difficilmente potranno, influire in modo decisivo sull’andamento del gruppo. La linea di condotta di Gastone dunque si può efficacemente sintetizzare fin da ora in questi termini: unità nell’autonomia, due fattori destinati a pesare costantemente ma in modo diverso in tutta l’attività dei gruppi partigiani taleggini.
La X rimane a Cespedosio [n.d.r.: frazione del comune di Camerata Cornello (BG] fino alla metà di luglio circa. Sono giorni duri, mitigati solo dal clima estivo. Gli uomini dormono all’addiaccio, si accontentano di mangiare polenta e formaggio; criticano il loro comandante perché non condivide la loro vita (13), ma tutti quasi indistintamente ne subiscono l’ascendente. Verificano lo sforzo del comando di riorganizzare le formazioni, (14) ma soprattutto registrano la solidarietà della popolazione che spontaneamente contribuisce come può al loro vettovagliamento. Superate le più gravi difficoltà, ristrutturata la formazione, Gastone trasferisce gli uomini alla Castelli anche se i problemi alimentari non sono risolti, anche se il mancato chiarimento con gli organi di Bergamo provocherà un rinvio nel tempo dell’inquadramento della X nelle formazioni garibaldine o comunque nel movimento partigiano organizzato. Nella seconda metà di luglio il gruppo ritorna alla capanna Castelli. Gli uomini sono poco più di una cinquantina (15). Le armi sono sufficienti ma scarseggiano le munizioni. Un rapporto fascista, sempre riferito a fine luglio, inizio agosto, li segnala a “Cima di Piazzo-Pizzo Racimonti (leggi passo Baciamorti)- Venturosa-Taleggio-Pizzino e Vedeseta”. (16) Dalla base alla Castelli infatti venivano effettuati spostamenti nella zona per provvedere alle necessità della formazione e, a quanto
pare, alcuni partigiani con il comandante si erano stabiliti nelle frazioni del comune di Taleggio allora prive del benché minimo presidio fascista. Fino agli ultimi giorni di luglio a all’inizio di agosto comunque non è pensabile che la formazione si sia abbassata verso i paesi della Val Taleggio.
[NOTE]
(8) MCL – 40^ brigata Matteotti, com; fronte sud, 25/7/44
(9) Purtroppo di Dario si sa ben poco e non è quindi possibile determinare la qualità della sua influenza su Gastone. Gastone sostiene che gli fu presentato a Milano come “membro di un comitato” dalla signorina Lella Pizzo d’Ambrosio il 23/5/44, cioè poco prima che entrambi prendessero la via della montagna. Romolo (non meglio identificato) funge da collegamento tra il gruppo milanese e Dario. Anch’egli era in contatto con la d’Ambrosio, anzi entrambi abitavano a Milano in via Lambrate 13 e insieme furono arrestati nel febbraio ’45 dai tedeschi; dopo di allora non si sa più nulla di Romolo, mentre della d’Ambrosio Gastone parla come d una delatrice che per salvare la pelle si era rassegnata a far da amante agli ufficiali tedeschi. Quanto a Dario, le sue tracce si perdono dopo il settembre del 1944, mese in cui svolse funzioni di commissario nella 86^. In quel periodo si registrò una notevole tensione tra lui e Gastone
(10) CPV – C 51
11) Ci sono stati vari tentativi di spiegare la logica che guida l’operato di Gastone fin da questa fase e nella maggior parte dei casi essi adombrano il sospetto del tradimento. Più esplicita delle altre è l’ipotesi di P. Pallini (Penna Nera) che considera l’azione di Gastone in Val Taleggio alla stregua di quella di un agente provocatore assoldato ai fascisti e perciò rifiuta di credere all’autenticità dei suoi contatti con organizzazioni milanesi. Secondo il Pallini, Gastone avrebbe vantato rapporti con un misterioso”comitato Tito” risultato poi sconosciuto alle indagini del comando delle Fiamme Verdi; ma non si può dimenticare che, malgrado le riserve, fu proprio il comando delle FFVV ad autorizzare Pallini ad intavolare buone relazioni con Gastone. Questa ipotesi a nostro avviso non è attendibile: l) perché chi teneva i contatti con Milano non era Gastone, ma Dario 2) perché a partire da agosto la formazione sarà visitata ripetutamente da scrupolosi ispettori del PCI che non misero mai in discussione né l’esistenza né l’autenticità dei collegamenti con Milano 3) Perché si può affermare che la stessa denominazione del gruppo rimanda a una formazione milanese: La X brigata, (una di cui si sa pochissimo e su cui non esiste alcuno studio).
(12) Questa affermazione si fonda sulla assoluta carenza di documenti per il periodo in questione; l’unico elemento concreto è la citata missione di Alberto a S. Pellegrino per ricollegarsi al col. Richetti; sondaggi precisi al riguardo hanno consentito di chiarire che la cosa non ebbe seguito, ma si tratta di testimonianze orali e comunque non è escluso che si potessero riallacciare rapporti per altra via
(13) Egli vive in camere d’affitto o in albergo con la madre ed effettua spese considerate futili incidendo così pesantemente sul già, tanto magro bilancio del gruppo.
(14) Nel periodo di Cespedosio e comunque in luglio sono vari i tentativi di riorganizzare la formazione anche sotto il profilo finanziario e alimentare. La gente della zona collabora come può facendo in modo che i partigiani trovino al loro giungere a Cespedosio sacchi di farina (la famiglia Redondi e Benetto di S. Giovanni Bianco si segnalano in questi aiuti spontanei), ma lo stato di abbandono in cui si trovano gli uomini e l’incertezza dei contatti col centro inducono il comando a cercare di risolvere questo problema di propria iniziativa. Si tenta così di riattivare il canale finanziario di G. Cima, che però risponderà positivamente solo dopo l’adesione di Gastone alla II divisione; anche qualche altro borghese benestante viene interpellato allo scopo e la X ne ottiene una certa collaborazione (si leggano i nomi dei contattati: A. Pesenti, G. Milesi, M. Gianati di Piazza B., A. Mismetti e si ricordino le succulente riscossioni effettuate alla banca di Olmo al Brembo). Questa linea diverge da quella comuniste che temeva un eventuale condizionamento delle formazioni da parte dei benestanti. La X però si muove con noncuranza su questa strada, forse anche per rafforzare in questo modo la propria autonomia dai centri politici clandestini.
(15) Secondo alcune fonti tra la fine di giugno e la metà di luglio il numero è cresciuto a 90 unità, ma la cifra è esagerata. Gli informatori fascisti danno una cifra più attendibile (e si tenga conto che il loro rapporto si riferisce alla metà di luglio-inizio agosto): 50/60 uomini. In effetti ai 30/35 sfuggiti al rastrellamento di fine giugno, vanno aggiunti i circa 15 del gruppo Paganoni, alcuni sbandati nascosti nelle baite della zona (sia presso Camerata Cornello che in Val Taleggio). Al totale va però tolto il gruppetto del Canadese che si allontana all’inizio di luglio.
(16) ISML – Bg. 5 L 1/2269
Maria Grazia Calderoli, Aspetti politici e militari della Resistenza taleggina. Luglio 1944-aprile 1945, Tesi di laurea, Università degli Studi di Milano, Anno accademico 1975-1976, qui ripresa da Associazione Culturale Banlieu#1944 #agosto #Bergamo #brigata #CamerataCornelloBG #Cespedosio #comunista #fascisti #FiammeVerdi #GastoneNulli #guerra #Lombardia #luglio #MariaGraziaCalderoli #Matteotti #partigiani #partito #provincia #Resistenza #SanPellegrinoTermeBG #Taleggio #tedeschi #Val #Valsassina #Valtellina #X
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La X brigata partigiana rimane a Cespedosio fino alla metà di luglio circa
Una vista dal rifugio Cespedosio. Fonte: Visit BergamoDal canto suo anche il comando della 40^ brigata Garibaldi “Matteotti” operante in Valsassina e Valtellina tenta di ristabilire i contatti. Ma l’impresa fallisce. In data 25 luglio 1944, Al, comandante del fronte sud della 40^, deve dichiarare che, malgrado gli sforzi: “con il distaccamento di Val Taleggio non è stato possibile il contatto. Pare che questo sia inquadrato nella brigata bergamasca. Ad ogni modo cercheremo i comandanti, ora irreperibili, definendo la loro posizione.” (8) Sembra strano che il comando partigiano della Valsassina non riesca a rintracciare Gastone [Gastone Nulli] e i suoi; tanto più che i partigiani della Valsassina, avendo avuto modo di aiutare gli uomini della X quando questi si trovavano alla capanna Castelli, potevano conoscerne il nuovo rifugio. Ma le difficoltà del momento spiegano molte cose e tra le altre anche questo inconveniente. Non si può comunque evitare di riflettere sulle voci raccolte da Al a proposito dell’inquadramento della formazione taleggina nella brigata bergamasca. Il PCI bergamasco e la 40^ Matteotti sono dunque le organizzazioni che cercano di allacciare rapporti col gruppo di Gastone. E si può notare un certo qual legame tra le due iniziative nell’unica matrice politica da cui entrambi dipendono, ma il legame appare abbastanza tenue: sono solo voci quelle che Al raccoglie a proposito dell’inquadramento della X tra le formazioni di un partito che allora spendeva molte delle proprie energie per costituire un’efficiente brigata garibaldina in terra orobica. I collegamenti clandestini sono lacunosi anche all’interno delle forze garibaldine e non c’è quindi da stupirsi che le informazioni pervenute ad Al diano per certo ciò che invece è per ora solo una speranza. La documentazione tace completamente sugli esiti della menzionata missione di Alberto a S. Pellegrino, invece, per quel che concerne la presa di contatto del PCI di Bergamo con Gastone, ci fornisce qualche utile, anche se debole, spunto. Si può così affermare che, di fronte alla richiesta di instaurare rapporti organici con i comunisti bergamaschi, Gastone oppone un sostanziale rifiuto, motivandolo con l’esistenza di precedenti collegamenti con organizzazioni milanesi del PCI: “Fidandomi delle assicurazioni di Dario (9), rifiutai di aderire a formazioni dipendenti dagli organi di Bergamo” (10) osserva Gastone e precisa di aver mantenuto tale orientamento fino alla cattura di Dario(ottobre 1944?). Come è noto, Dario riscuote la fiducia di talune organizzazioni comuniste milanesi e torna quindi comodo a Gastone scaricare su di lui le responsabilità della mancata collaborazione con il PCI di Bergamo; ma proprio qui sta la debolezza della sua asserzione, infatti, come si potrà constatare, non esisteva alcun antagonismo tra comunisti milanesi e bergamaschi in relazione ai gruppi della Val Taleggio. Semmai esisteva in quel momento una sfasatura di ordine informativo che presto verrà colmata. D’altra parte non è possibile sostenere che Gastone rifiuti categoricamente ogni rapporto con Bergamo. Al contrario, per quanto concerne le Fiamme Verdi, ne promuove la ricerca e dal PCI provinciale accetta senza esitazioni gli aiuti almeno fino a quando non furono ristabiliti i precedenti contatti con Milano.
Così delineata, la questione presenta una sua logica (11) che diventa particolarmente evidente se si ricorda l’insistenza di Gastone nel proclamare la volontà di mantenere alla formazione un “pieno carattere apolitico” ed a se stesso l’indipendenza dal “PCI come partito”. Egli infatti dispone di una formazione i cui uomini tendenzialmente fanno capo a due organismi molto diversi tra loro (le Fiamme Verdi ed il PCI milanese), senza contare quelli che si considerano completamente autonomi. Il problema di tenerli uniti può dunque dipendere dalla capacità del comandante di evitare influenze troppo dirette e condizionamenti che spostino l’asse d’equilibrio a favore degli uni o degli altri. Così egli lascia cadere i contatti con il PCI di Bergamo e molto probabilmente anche quelli con le Fiamme Verdi (12); insiste sulla propria autonomia e non rinuncia a soddisfare le richieste di uomini (come Dario) che gli erano stati vicini fin dalla fine di maggio, perché in ogni caso i legami che essi ristabiliscono pongono in essere un collegamento con comandi superiori che sono lontani e solo difficilmente potranno, influire in modo decisivo sull’andamento del gruppo. La linea di condotta di Gastone dunque si può efficacemente sintetizzare fin da ora in questi termini: unità nell’autonomia, due fattori destinati a pesare costantemente ma in modo diverso in tutta l’attività dei gruppi partigiani taleggini.
La X rimane a Cespedosio [n.d.r.: frazione del comune di Camerata Cornello (BG] fino alla metà di luglio circa. Sono giorni duri, mitigati solo dal clima estivo. Gli uomini dormono all’addiaccio, si accontentano di mangiare polenta e formaggio; criticano il loro comandante perché non condivide la loro vita (13), ma tutti quasi indistintamente ne subiscono l’ascendente. Verificano lo sforzo del comando di riorganizzare le formazioni, (14) ma soprattutto registrano la solidarietà della popolazione che spontaneamente contribuisce come può al loro vettovagliamento. Superate le più gravi difficoltà, ristrutturata la formazione, Gastone trasferisce gli uomini alla Castelli anche se i problemi alimentari non sono risolti, anche se il mancato chiarimento con gli organi di Bergamo provocherà un rinvio nel tempo dell’inquadramento della X nelle formazioni garibaldine o comunque nel movimento partigiano organizzato. Nella seconda metà di luglio il gruppo ritorna alla capanna Castelli. Gli uomini sono poco più di una cinquantina (15). Le armi sono sufficienti ma scarseggiano le munizioni. Un rapporto fascista, sempre riferito a fine luglio, inizio agosto, li segnala a “Cima di Piazzo-Pizzo Racimonti (leggi passo Baciamorti)- Venturosa-Taleggio-Pizzino e Vedeseta”. (16) Dalla base alla Castelli infatti venivano effettuati spostamenti nella zona per provvedere alle necessità della formazione e, a quanto
pare, alcuni partigiani con il comandante si erano stabiliti nelle frazioni del comune di Taleggio allora prive del benché minimo presidio fascista. Fino agli ultimi giorni di luglio a all’inizio di agosto comunque non è pensabile che la formazione si sia abbassata verso i paesi della Val Taleggio.
[NOTE]
(8) MCL – 40^ brigata Matteotti, com; fronte sud, 25/7/44
(9) Purtroppo di Dario si sa ben poco e non è quindi possibile determinare la qualità della sua influenza su Gastone. Gastone sostiene che gli fu presentato a Milano come “membro di un comitato” dalla signorina Lella Pizzo d’Ambrosio il 23/5/44, cioè poco prima che entrambi prendessero la via della montagna. Romolo (non meglio identificato) funge da collegamento tra il gruppo milanese e Dario. Anch’egli era in contatto con la d’Ambrosio, anzi entrambi abitavano a Milano in via Lambrate 13 e insieme furono arrestati nel febbraio ’45 dai tedeschi; dopo di allora non si sa più nulla di Romolo, mentre della d’Ambrosio Gastone parla come d una delatrice che per salvare la pelle si era rassegnata a far da amante agli ufficiali tedeschi. Quanto a Dario, le sue tracce si perdono dopo il settembre del 1944, mese in cui svolse funzioni di commissario nella 86^. In quel periodo si registrò una notevole tensione tra lui e Gastone
(10) CPV – C 51
11) Ci sono stati vari tentativi di spiegare la logica che guida l’operato di Gastone fin da questa fase e nella maggior parte dei casi essi adombrano il sospetto del tradimento. Più esplicita delle altre è l’ipotesi di P. Pallini (Penna Nera) che considera l’azione di Gastone in Val Taleggio alla stregua di quella di un agente provocatore assoldato ai fascisti e perciò rifiuta di credere all’autenticità dei suoi contatti con organizzazioni milanesi. Secondo il Pallini, Gastone avrebbe vantato rapporti con un misterioso”comitato Tito” risultato poi sconosciuto alle indagini del comando delle Fiamme Verdi; ma non si può dimenticare che, malgrado le riserve, fu proprio il comando delle FFVV ad autorizzare Pallini ad intavolare buone relazioni con Gastone. Questa ipotesi a nostro avviso non è attendibile: l) perché chi teneva i contatti con Milano non era Gastone, ma Dario 2) perché a partire da agosto la formazione sarà visitata ripetutamente da scrupolosi ispettori del PCI che non misero mai in discussione né l’esistenza né l’autenticità dei collegamenti con Milano 3) Perché si può affermare che la stessa denominazione del gruppo rimanda a una formazione milanese: La X brigata, (una di cui si sa pochissimo e su cui non esiste alcuno studio).
(12) Questa affermazione si fonda sulla assoluta carenza di documenti per il periodo in questione; l’unico elemento concreto è la citata missione di Alberto a S. Pellegrino per ricollegarsi al col. Richetti; sondaggi precisi al riguardo hanno consentito di chiarire che la cosa non ebbe seguito, ma si tratta di testimonianze orali e comunque non è escluso che si potessero riallacciare rapporti per altra via
(13) Egli vive in camere d’affitto o in albergo con la madre ed effettua spese considerate futili incidendo così pesantemente sul già, tanto magro bilancio del gruppo.
(14) Nel periodo di Cespedosio e comunque in luglio sono vari i tentativi di riorganizzare la formazione anche sotto il profilo finanziario e alimentare. La gente della zona collabora come può facendo in modo che i partigiani trovino al loro giungere a Cespedosio sacchi di farina (la famiglia Redondi e Benetto di S. Giovanni Bianco si segnalano in questi aiuti spontanei), ma lo stato di abbandono in cui si trovano gli uomini e l’incertezza dei contatti col centro inducono il comando a cercare di risolvere questo problema di propria iniziativa. Si tenta così di riattivare il canale finanziario di G. Cima, che però risponderà positivamente solo dopo l’adesione di Gastone alla II divisione; anche qualche altro borghese benestante viene interpellato allo scopo e la X ne ottiene una certa collaborazione (si leggano i nomi dei contattati: A. Pesenti, G. Milesi, M. Gianati di Piazza B., A. Mismetti e si ricordino le succulente riscossioni effettuate alla banca di Olmo al Brembo). Questa linea diverge da quella comuniste che temeva un eventuale condizionamento delle formazioni da parte dei benestanti. La X però si muove con noncuranza su questa strada, forse anche per rafforzare in questo modo la propria autonomia dai centri politici clandestini.
(15) Secondo alcune fonti tra la fine di giugno e la metà di luglio il numero è cresciuto a 90 unità, ma la cifra è esagerata. Gli informatori fascisti danno una cifra più attendibile (e si tenga conto che il loro rapporto si riferisce alla metà di luglio-inizio agosto): 50/60 uomini. In effetti ai 30/35 sfuggiti al rastrellamento di fine giugno, vanno aggiunti i circa 15 del gruppo Paganoni, alcuni sbandati nascosti nelle baite della zona (sia presso Camerata Cornello che in Val Taleggio). Al totale va però tolto il gruppetto del Canadese che si allontana all’inizio di luglio.
(16) ISML – Bg. 5 L 1/2269
Maria Grazia Calderoli, Aspetti politici e militari della Resistenza taleggina. Luglio 1944-aprile 1945, Tesi di laurea, Università degli Studi di Milano, Anno accademico 1975-1976, qui ripresa da Associazione Culturale Banlieu#1944 #agosto #Bergamo #brigata #CamerataCornelloBG #Cespedosio #comunista #fascisti #FiammeVerdi #GastoneNulli #guerra #Lombardia #luglio #MariaGraziaCalderoli #Matteotti #partigiani #partito #provincia #Resistenza #SanPellegrinoTermeBG #Taleggio #tedeschi #Val #Valsassina #Valtellina #X
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Gerarchi repubblichini a Torino agli inizi del 1944
Avevamo lasciato la descrizione della federazione di Torino, alle prese con lo scioglimento della squadra “Muti”, autonomamente gestita dalla “generazione storica” dello squadrismo torinese, con conseguenze luttuose per gli stessi comandanti squadristi. La successiva contrapposizione violenta con le strutture tradizionali dello Stato aveva portato, dopo l’aggressione all’aula del tribunale di Torino all’intervento del capo della provincia Zerbino, che nel novembre del ’43 si era presentato come tutore delle prerogative del suo ufficio. Tra l’inverno e la primavera del ’44, in considerazione della continuazione dei cicli di rastrellamento germanici e fascisti, nella provincia ed in generale in
#1943 #1944 #autonomi #autunno #EnricoMartini #fascisti #febbraio #federazione #GaetanoSpallone #GiuseppeSolaro #GNR #industriali #JacopoCalussi #marzo #Mauri #operai #PaoloZerbino #partigiani #Pfr #Piemonte #repressione #repubblichini #RSI #sciopero #tedeschi #Torino
Piemonte, Solaro appare come fortemente attivo nel difendere le prerogative del proprio ruolo, anche in relazione alla difesa dell’ordine pubblico, unita, in una provincia che accoglieva più di 200.000 operai al confronto con gli scioperi del marzo del ’44 e con la strategia, ambigua e autonoma, degli industriali della città <489. Abbiamo in tal senso fatto riferimento alla contrapposizione evidente tra Solaro e “suoi” sostenitori in federazione e i settori dirigenziali dell’industria torinese, indirettamente più vicini alla compagine squadristica originaria del PFR torinese, almeno in alcuni dei suoi rappresentanti. Ad essi, i fascisti repubblicani unirono una vemente vis polemica contro l’altro “potere” provinciale e cittadino, la Chiesa, con particolare attenzione alle sue strutture inferiori, viste generalmente come conniventi delle bande partigiane, qualora la parrocchia avesse compreso al suo interno aree effettivamente segnate da un’estesaa presenza ribellistica.
Come abbiamo visto nel caso di Padova e di Milano, le autorità apicali della gerarchia ecclesiastica tentarono per tutti i 600 giorni di intervenire nei difficoltosi equilibri del policentrismo repubblicano. Un’intromissione che veniva “sdegnosamente” rigettata e contrastata dalla compagine “intransigente” che a Torino faceva capo a Solaro, sin dall’autunno del ’43. Così ad esempio Lorenzo Tealdy, caporedattore e futuro direttore del settimanale della federazione, “La Riscossa”, si esprimeva nei confronti dei parroci della provincia: “La Patria, in quest’ora grave, tragica, dolorante, chiede alla gioventù il tributo delle sue energie (…) c’è la gioventù che brancola nel buio e non sa decidersi (…) se servire la Patria in pericolo, oppure lasciarla allo sbaraglio di chi l’ha tradita (…) La fede che impararono sulle ginocchia materne e nella loro chiesa parrocchiale, ricorda loro: è giunto il momento di dare a Cesare quel che è di Cesare. Ma poi una, molte voci lo assordano, dicendogli: fuggi, tradisci! (…) Basterebbe a quel momento un’autorevole parola del parroco per scuoterlo, per farlo riflettere (…) Ma il parroco – forse perché spera ancora nella realizzazione di una ripetuta libertà badogliana, dimenticando che durante essa, a rivoli, ingrossatisi a torrente, il bolscevismo si preparava a scendere in Italia e a sommergere la famiglia – tace. Ogni sacerdote che dice ad un giovane: non ti presentare, pone volontariamente “fuori dalla legge” un giovane che disonora sé stesso (…) Sacerdoti di Cristo, la Patria, l’Italia chiama pure voi (…).” <490 Nelle contingenze critiche della prima chiamata dei coscritti della Repubblica, Tealdy – uomo non legato direttamente all’esperienza squadrista, pur essendo nato nel 1897 – interpretava l’atteggiamento attendista o, più semplicemente, legato a dinamiche ed equilibri particolari dell’area parrocchiale dei sacerdoti, come tradimento <491.
Un atteggiamento che si ripeté a Torino da parte di Solaro, nella primavera successiva, quando il successo dello sciopero rafforzò l’interpretazione di “estraneità” della federazione fascista <492, rispetto alla comunità cittadina e provinciale del Torinese <493. Qui gli arresti furono migliaia ed i deportati più di 400, a differenza di Milano <494. Adduci, riprendendo Chevallard <495, afferma infatti che fu proprio dal marzo del ’44 che la contrapposizione tra cittadinanza e intransigenza fascista si andò a rafforzare; anche a causa delle impressioni di quest’ultima che interpretava l’atteggiamento operaio come puro e semplice tradimento della svolta “sociale” della RSI <496. È in questa fase che nelle dinamiche di potere interne alla provincia, la GNR, comandata dal console Gaetano Spallone, sembrava aderire pienamente all’intransigenza del federale, in contrapposizione diretta con il questore di Torino Rendina, già incontrato, come obiettivo “preferito” degli strali della polemica di Solaro contro l’attendismo e l’a-fascismo provinciale. Il “giovane” commissario federale, al quale spesso venne imputata la mancata partecipazione alla fase squadrista “storica”, ricoprì volontariamente un ruolo segnato dalla partecipazione personale alla repressione dell’antifascismo. All’inizio del febbraio del ’44, fu Solaro a incentivare una repressione dura e spietata rispetto ai comuni della Val Pellice, investiti da un ciclo di rastrellamenti italo-tedeschi, che probabilmente videro la partecipazione anche dei militi di Spallone <497.
Dal tardo inverno del’44, gli uomini di Solaro si videro tuttavia inseriti in un contrasto sempre più evidente con il capo della provincia Zerbino, caratterizzato dalla competizione tra autorità per quanto riguardava la responsabilità della repressione, come in altri casi già descritti, e le modalità attraverso le quali l’azione antiribellistica doveva esser condotta. Zerbino, già prefetto di Spalato tra 1941 e 1942, inviò la seguente comunicazione a Mussolini, che oltre a riconnettere la “cultura della violenza” e quella propriamente strategico-militare alle azioni di controguerriglia guidate in Dalmazia, introduce le motivazioni che portarono al contrasto con Solaro. “È cosa ben nota che le bande debbano esser combattute da altre “bande”: siam riusciti in Croazia ad opporre (…) i Cetnici (…) ai partigiani <498 (…). Non vi è quindi ragione per non tentare di valersi dello stesso mezzo in Italia, facendo concorrere all’eliminazione del banditismo vero e proprio, elementi che (…) sembrano essere contrari a tutte quelle forme di attività ribellistica che contrastano con gli interessi degli italiani”. <499 La strategia di Zerbino in questa fase andava quindi a conformarsi come all’insegna del compromesso con le cosiddette “bande autonome” slegate cioè dai partiti politici “rossi” e generalmente della sinistra ciellenistica; in tal senso è da notare la piena comprensione dei “partigiani” nella categoria di “anti-nazione” ed in generale di “nemico”, “degli interessi” della patria. Il caso più noto, anche perché vedeva direttamente le forze armate tedesche partecipare alle trattative con i partigiani, fu il tentato abboccamento con le bande del maggiore Enrico Martini, il comandante “Mauri” <500. Nella provincia di Torino, con un progetto che vedeva la “benedizione” del duce per il suo avviamento, paiono esser state portate avanti per alcune settimane anche le negoziazioni con il generale Operti, già incontrato nel paragrafo sulle conseguenze dell’otto settembre. In un appunto inviato a Mussolini il 20 febbraio, Zerbino confermò di aver aderito alla scelta di continuare le trattative, per quanto si lagnasse degli scomposti interventi di altre autorità, nello stesso “affare diplomatico”; in tal senso il prefetto imputava il rallentamento delle negoziazione ad ufficiali della Guardia, incaricati dal sottosegretario Barracu di intervenire nelle trattative <501.
Una confusione di autorità ed interessi contrapposti che è sostanzialmente una delle peculiari caratteristiche della Repubblica e nella quale la federazione non esitò ad inserirsi. All’intervento diretto e personale in zona di operazioni <502, Solaro unì un contegno particolare, indirizzato da una parte a contrastare l’opposizione “interna” alla propria federazione, dall’altra a porsi in maniera autonoma e con una posizione ben definita nella strategia di repressione del partigianato piemontese e torinese. Solaro in una comunicazione a Tamburini segnala le criticità proprie dell’attività politica del fascismo in provincia, con una forte attenzione al problema della sicurezza delle singole personalità fasciste <503. Pur apprezzando l’opera della GNR e dei camerati germanici, Solaro appare critico verso le impostazioni compromissorie nei confronti delle bande partigiane. Pur non facendo un diretto riferimento alle trattative con Operti o Mauri, nella sua carica di commissario federale e di delegato del PFR per il Piemonte <504, Solaro si diceva fortemente contrario al portare avanti qualsiasi trattativa con i ribelli, soprattutto in un periodo in cui le azioni antifasciste avevano ripreso con forza a colpire le personalità sottoposte al federale <505. Inoltre le trattative con il generale Operti sembrarono in quel momento accrescere a dismisura alcuni traffici illeciti di denaro, sottratto, secondo alcune testimonianze del dopoguerra, alle casse della IV armata, gli ammanchi milionari delle quali probabilmente finirono negli uffici dell’UPI di Torino, guidato dal maggiore Serloreti e dal suo comandante, il colonnello Cabras <506. Solaro fece anche riferimento ad un accordo diretto tra segreteria del PFR e federazione di Torino, sia in relazione alla creazione del battaglione ausiliario, preposto alla difesa dei comuni della provincia più “esposti” all’attività delle bande <507, sia per la sopravvivenza del servizio investigativo del maresciallo Ferraris. In particolar modo tra il febbraio e la fine del marzo del ’44, Solaro appare impegnato nel difendere l’attività dell’ufficio di informazioni federale, guidato da quello che il commissario definiva un “ottimo fascista” di fronte al capo della polizia Tamburini, teoricamente diretto superiore del questore Rendina.
[NOTE]
489 AA. VV. La città delle fabbriche, (a cura dell’Istituto piemontese per la storia della Resistenza e della società contemporanea), 2003, pubblicazione on-line consultabile (in data marzo 22 febbraio 2017) sul sito http://www.istoreto.it/to38-45_industria/pdf/citta_industria.pdf .
490 Poche parole ai parroci, in “La Riscossa” del 16 dicembre 1943, citato in Adduci, Gli altri, op. cit. p. 164.
491 Accusa ricambiata con una certa “freddezza” da parte del vescovo Fossati, cfr. Lazzero, Le Brigate nere, op. cit. p. 109, La Resistenza alle porte di Torino, F. Angeli, Milano, 1989, p. 202.
492 Sul concetto di estraneità, che come vedremo si tramuterà in “alterità” e aperta ostilità contro l’intera popolazione provinciale si rinvia a Adduci, Gli altri, passim.
493 G. Oliva, La Resistenza… op. cit., pp. 147-156, in particolare, il paragrafo La scoperta della politica.
494 C. Dellavalle, Lotte operaie, Torino, in Bertolo, E. Brunetta, op. cit. p. 235.
495 Chevallard, op. cit. pp. 220, l’autore parla di “tradimento” degli operi, interpretato dai fascisti repubblicani, in conseguenza del manifesto rifiuto della Socializzazione d’Impresa.
496 Adduci, Gli altri, op. cit. p. 179.
497 Ivi, pp. 165, 166, Chevallard, op. cit. p. 121, mancano tuttavia dati precisi sull’azione e l’effettiva influenza di Solaro sulle 14 fucilazioni finali, a cui si aggiunsero decine di case incendiate nei comuni di Villar e Torre Pellice.
498 “Partigiani” è in questo senso utilizzato in maniera dispregiativa, come da uso comune, nel Ventennio. Potrebbe essere interessante il fatto che, anche nella schiera dell’antifascismo, almeno in quello democristiano, il termine venga utilizzato con simile significato, Sturzo, da Washington, disse sul finire del marzo del ’45, che sarebbe stato meglio chiamarli patriots piuttosto di partisans, per le loro doti di combattimento e per i loro ideali politici, cfr. relazione dell’OSS su Don Sturzo, residente a Brooklin, New York, del 20 marzo 1945, in NARA Rg. 226, e. A1 106, b. 26, Italy general, records of the NY Secret Intelligence Branch, f. 113.
499 Relazione s.d. ma dell’inizio di febbraio del ’44, di Zerbino a Mussolini, probabilmente inviata dopo l’incontro del 3 febbraio 1944, a Gargnano tra i due. In ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, b. 8, f. Torino.
500 Klinkhammer, L’occupazione, op. cit. pp. 386-389, Adduci, Gli altri, op. cit. pp. 153, 154. Nel luglio seguente, il generale Tensfeld fa riferimento ad un’operazione di avvicinamento, tentata da “Mauri” verso le forze nazifasciste, per una sorta di “tregua d’armi” nell’area di Cuneo, nella quale, il maggiore avrebbe ricoperto il ruolo di “tutore dell’ordine”. Tensfeld in proposito vuole evitare di dare eccessiva “importanza” al comandante partigiano, in relazione all’incontro tra Graziani e Tensfeld del 5 luglio 1944, in ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, b. 31, f. 238, sf. 7, Graziani.
501 Appunto per il duce del 20 febbraio 1944, in NARA, Rg. 226, e. 174, b. 22, f. 151. Le trattative andranno comunque ad essere bloccate successivamente.
502 Nella zona del generale Raffaele Operti, ad esempio, Solaro figura tra i comandanti di un plotone di esecuzione che portò alla morte di 3 antifascisti a San Maurizio Canavese: probabilmente il reparto, pur facendo riferimento alla GNR, doveva essere formato dai militi del “battaglione ausiliare” della Guardia, sorto dopo lo scioglimento della “Muti”, cfr. http://www.straginazifasciste.it/?page_id=38&id_strage=1039 , visitato il 5 giugno 1917. Solaro avrebbe guidato alcune azioni in provincia anche dopo il marzo del ’44, cfr. comunicazione di Solaro a Olo Nunzi della segreteria di Pavolini del 24 maggio 1944, in ACS, RSI, PFR, b. 2, f. 4, sf. 3, doc. cit.
503 ACS, RSI, PFR, b. 2, f. 4, sf. 3.
504 Solaro fu investito del ruolo il 10 aprile 1944, cfr. Adduci, Gli altri, op. cit. p. 203.
505 ACS, RSI, PFR, b. 2, f. 4, sf. 3. Doc. cit. punto 5°.
506 Allegra, op. cit. pp. 158-161, in riferimento al doppiogiochista Bernocco, definiti dalla CAS di Torino “intimo di Serloreti”.
507 La stessa GNR in questo periodo soffre deficit gravi di organico come attestato nella comunicazione al prefetto Zerbino del generale Raffaele Castriota, Ispettore regionale della Guardia, che il 7 aprile 1944, riferisce l’impossibilità di collocare un distaccamento a Ciriè, in ASTO, G. P. b. 148/1, f. 2402 Elenco Ufficiali o militari presentatisi, 1944.
Jacopo Calussi, Fascismo repubblicano e violenza. Le federazioni provinciali del PFR e la strategia di repressione dell’antifascismo (1943-1945), Tesi di dottorato, Università degli Studi “Roma Tre”, 2018 -
In my rush to get a basic docker build tekton pipeline working I made a bit of a noob mistake... Using an emptyDir workspace to store data between tasks.
I didn't realise that the emptyDir workspace is only persisted for the duration of a specific task so at the end of the clone task it's discarded and a fresh emptyDir is supplied for the build task...
I was caught off guard cos I didn't really think that would be too useful but after doing some reading it's probably used when running/testing single tasks in isolation. Using it for CI/CD would mean you're not getting the benefit of cached data between runs.
Setting up a PVC won't take long, I'm just being lazy. Serves me right.
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In my rush to get a basic docker build tekton pipeline working I made a bit of a noob mistake... Using an emptyDir workspace to store data between tasks.
I didn't realise that the emptyDir workspace is only persisted for the duration of a specific task so at the end of the clone task it's discarded and a fresh emptyDir is supplied for the build task...
I was caught off guard cos I didn't really think that would be too useful but after doing some reading it's probably used when running/testing single tasks in isolation. Using it for CI/CD would mean you're not getting the benefit of cached data between runs.
Setting up a PVC won't take long, I'm just being lazy. Serves me right.
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In my rush to get a basic docker build tekton pipeline working I made a bit of a noob mistake... Using an emptyDir workspace to store data between tasks.
I didn't realise that the emptyDir workspace is only persisted for the duration of a specific task so at the end of the clone task it's discarded and a fresh emptyDir is supplied for the build task...
I was caught off guard cos I didn't really think that would be too useful but after doing some reading it's probably used when running/testing single tasks in isolation. Using it for CI/CD would mean you're not getting the benefit of cached data between runs.
Setting up a PVC won't take long, I'm just being lazy. Serves me right.
-
In my rush to get a basic docker build tekton pipeline working I made a bit of a noob mistake... Using an emptyDir workspace to store data between tasks.
I didn't realise that the emptyDir workspace is only persisted for the duration of a specific task so at the end of the clone task it's discarded and a fresh emptyDir is supplied for the build task...
I was caught off guard cos I didn't really think that would be too useful but after doing some reading it's probably used when running/testing single tasks in isolation. Using it for CI/CD would mean you're not getting the benefit of cached data between runs.
Setting up a PVC won't take long, I'm just being lazy. Serves me right.
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Ready To Level Up? Looking Back at 2025 and the Four-Body Problem Facing Scotland in 2026
As we head rapidly for the holidays, it’s time for the Scottish Games Network (me) to do what we always promise: be the ‘Honest Architect’ for our ecosystem. That means celebrating the victories, acknowledging the foundations we’ve laid, and – most importantly – address the real structural challenges waiting for us in the new year.
2025 has been, frankly, turbulent. We’ve seen national highs – like some of the excellent events springing up across the whole of Scotland, the new talent support from organisations such as SGDA, Game Space (and SGN) – but also the deep, personal impact of global layoffs and job losses across our whole community.
Yet, despite the headwinds, the belief in our sector’s potential has never been higher. My personal highlight of the year was delivering the closing keynote at the TechUK Digital Economy Conference. The response in the room to the potential of games, their value to the UK’s tech sector and the ‘More Than Games’ mindset was incredible. I’ve had more connections and strategic conversations following that event than almost any other. It proved to me that the external appetite for understanding and engaging with games as a central economic and cultural engine is huge. The doors are open. I’ll ensure that more events like this happen in 2026.
The Victory: The Scottish Games Action Plan
The biggest victory of 2025 is the completion of our ‘billion-pound blueprint’. Yes, after two years, I’m delighted to share that the Scottish Games Action Plan is complete. The final notes are with the graphic designer, and I’ll be sharing the completed document with trusted individuals in the coming days. We are now actively looking for the perfect launch date and venue in early 2026.
The Games Action Plan is our collective roadmap. Based on over 1000 data points, drawn from over 250 organisations and individuals across Scotland, it is detailed, strategic, and gives us a unified voice to take to government, education, and the wider creative sector. The goal is simple, make Scotland, the UK’s first games ‘supercluster’.
The Challenge: The Four-Body Problem
However, as we look to execute the Games Action Plan in 2026, we must address the single biggest risk to its success: fragmentation.
We now have four separate, significant, and well-intentioned organisations operating in very similar areas within the ecosystem:
- SGN: The independent, non-profit ecosystem builder. Online resource hub, editorial channel, event organiser, educator and advocacy org.
- SGDA: By game developers, for game developers, focused on studio membership, Scottish-Government-funded to run the developer accelerator
- GameSpace: Business-focused ecosystem org, running the UK-Government-funded business incubator.
- IES (Interactive Entertainment Scotland): The new Scottish arm of the UK trade body, UKIE. Focused on advocacy and policy.
All four are critically important, but the sheer number of initiatives running in parallel creates the potential for confusion, duplication of effort, and – most dangerously – dilution of the limited resources and attention span of our public sector partners.
The Question for 2026 is simple: How do we align?
As the Honest Architect (and OG), I must question how we ensure every one of these initiatives works together to support the Games Action Plan. We cannot afford to have these great new organisations pulling in different directions. The challenge for all four organisations – myself included – is to establish a framework for collaboration, synergy, and clear boundaries that benefit the entire Scottish games ecosystem.
I’ve already spoken to the teams at SGDA and Game Space. I hope to catch up with the new policy advisor from IES in early January.
2026: Scottish Games ‘Fest’ and a Call to Action
On a personal note, I will be looking to focus my efforts on two key areas next year: making the Games Action Plan a reality and making Scotland’s games ecosystem more visible, connected and collaborative.
I am thrilled to formally tease the biggest announcement on the SGN calendar: the inaugural Scottish Games ‘Fest’ (SGF), scheduled for September 2026. This will be a multi-day event designed to put Scotland on the global map. Planning is underway, and I will be looking to the community for support and partnership in the new year to make this a reality.
Finally, a call to every single developer, freelancer, and student: We need your stories.
The narrative of 2026 cannot just be about politics and funding. It must be about the incredible games being made here. The studios, the events, the good work being created across the whole country.
Send us your news, your releases, your updates, and your milestones. Help us show the world why Scotland is more active – and creative – than ever. I’m looking for new writers and partners to expand our coverage into Company profiles, studio interviews, opinion pieces, thought leadership and sector analysis.
Have a safe, peaceful (and fun) well-earned break. The foundations are laid. Now, let’s all go build the future.
#2025 #games #IES #scotland #ScotlandSGamesActionPlan #SGDA