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Manifesto

I'm Seb Potter. I've spent thirty years in digital, building products and running companies, and for most of it the industry was busy forgetting why it was there. The work changed: from making things people needed into extracting things people could be persuaded to give up: their attention, their money, their time, their agreement. I was good at it. That is not a boast.

Now I build furniture, with CNC machines and hand tools, and I write about technology and the power it concentrates. This is where the writing lives.

Underneath all of it sits one argument. Technology should help people learn, and help them treat each other better. Most of it now does the reverse, because outrage and dependence pay better than understanding. That is a choice. People make it, and people can make it differently.

Kindness is the subversive act now. An economy this large runs on the opposite: on keeping people anxious, divided and scrolling, because a calm and generous person is harder to sell to. To build for understanding, to treat the reader as an adult, to make something genuinely useful and then refuse to extract from it, all of that cuts against the grain. The rebellion is in the conduct.

So the writing here questions things properly, shows its reasoning, concedes the strongest counter-argument, and then builds or backs something better. It is easy to complain, and the internet is full of it; the harder thing is to question well and make something. Nothing is for sale, because selling is where extracting starts, and the writing would soon bend toward whoever was paying. The aim is to keep a worthwhile argument going and pull more people into it, not to win it and leave.

None of this is about how loud it is. The real work is quieter and harder: thinking differently, acting on it in the open where someone can check, and being decent while you do.

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