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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.

I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.

I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.

Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).

Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.

What's the story behind your blog?

I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.

I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.

To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!

Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.

I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.

I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.

So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.

I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.

If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.

That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.

It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.

We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:

thesession.org/donate

So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.

Cheers,
Jeremy

This was the 86th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jeremy. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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Let’s put aside for the moment that you can already send my website back into “90s mode” and dive into this take on how I could present myself in a particularly old-school way. There’s a few things I particularly love:

• It’s actually quite lightweight: ignore all the animated GIFs (which are small anyway) and you’ll see that, compared to my current homepage, there are very few images. I’ve been thinking about going in a direction of less images on the homepage anyway, so it’s interesting to see how it comes together in this unusual context.
• The page sections are solidly distinct: they’re a mishmash of different widths, some of which exhibit a horrendous lack of responsivity, but it’s pretty clear where the “recent articles” ends and the “other recent stuff” begins.
• The post kinds are very visible: putting the “kind” of a post in its own column makes it really clear whether you’re looking at an article, note, checkin, etc., much more-so than my current blocks do.

90s web design was very-much characterised by:

1. performance – nobody’s going to wait for your digital photos to download on narrowband connections, so you hide them behind descriptive links or tiny thumbnails, and
2. pushing the boundaries – the pre-CSS era of the Web had limited tools, but creators worked hard to experiment with the creativity that was possible within those limits.

Those actually… aren’t bad values to have today. Sure, we’ve probably learned that animated backgrounds, tables for layout, and mystery meat navigation were horrible for usability and accessibility, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still innovation to be done. What comes next for the usable Web, I wonder?

The only thing I can fault it on is that it assumes that I’d favour Netscape Navigator: in fact, I was a die-hard Opera-head for most of the nineties and much of the early naughties, finally switching my daily driver to Firefox in 2005.

I certainly used plenty of Netscape and IE at various points, though, but I wasn’t a fan of the divisions resulting from the browser wars. Back in the day, I always backed the ideals of the “Viewable With Any Browser” movement.

I guess I still do.

🤘 You're subscribed to DanQ.me using the RSS feed. You rock! 🎸

 

The kids were in holiday club yesterday and the sun was shining, so we managed to both get out on the bike for the first time in, like, 9 years?

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I like that Powell is telling Trump he won't go. I wish Obama had had the guts to say that to McConnell when he wouldn't hold hearings on Garland. "Well if you won't take a vote, we'll take that as consent," says the President. "And you can quote me on that." In a televised event Obama himself would walk Garland over to his office at the Supreme Court and administer the oath and let him take his seat. I don't know about you but I would have felt great about America then. We're finished being such pussycats. #

This piece echoes what I’ve been saying. Twitter was a fine start, in 2006, but today it’s clear a lot of its rules and limits were mistakes. 19 years later it’s ridiculous that Bluesky and Mastodon repeat those mistakes. I love the term he uses, the "shape" of Twitter. Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) it makes almost all twitter-like discourse spam or abusive. I'm planning a different structure for discourse in the world shaped by WordLand. A reply will only be visible to the person who you're replying to. If they want others to see it, they can make it public. It's their choice. So you probably should be respectful if you're looking for a flow boost. You can turn off all discourse if you want, giving the ability to finish a thought. We've learned so much about this in the 19 years since Twitter started. It's time to break out of the limits. BTW, that's what my textcasting doc was all about. #

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I’ve been busy with my Linux experiment. I’m writing about it there, if you want to follow along.

Today, I put a Framework laptop in my cart. This whole experiment only got rolling because I thought I might like Linux on my desktop, so why am I looking at laptops when I have a perfectly servicable (2015) ThinkPad X1 Carbon (that I’m typing on right now)? I can’t explain it. Most likely it’s because I have an Apple Studio Display and (I’m told) it’s quite challenging to use it with Linux. I’m not changing monitors for this, the Studio Display is too good (and expensive).

What prompted me in Charlie Jane’s newsletter is that she says “the first two episodes didn't entirely land for me, especially the first one” while for me it not only was the other way around (although I actually enjoyed the first) but it was the other way around precisely for the reasons she calls out as the tightrope the show tries and fails to walk. While I enjoyed the first episode (“The Promotion”), the second episode (“The Oner”) for me was borderline unwatchable.

(For what it’s worth, my ranking of those first four episodes is: “The Promotion”, “The Note”, “The Missing Reel”, and “The Oner”.)

Here’s how Charlie Jane opens her critique of the first episode, “The Promotion”:

The show sets up an absurdist situation that ultimately doesn't ring true and makes Rogen's character appear wildly delusional.

She continues:

This is obviously a super heightened premise, which is intentionally absurd. But it does make Rogen's character seem so incompetent that it's obvious he should never have gotten that job.

Weirdly, because opinions are like that, these are precisely the reasons why “The Oner” was excruciating for me while “The Promotion” worked. In the first episode, I bought what seemed to me to be the premise, which was that Matt’s excitement over his new position addled his brain a bit and sent him wildly out over his skis. His sense of self-importance and self-righteousness caused him to get ahead of himself in his need to be seen as a serious film guy. It helped, to be sure, that I might totally watch a Martin Scorsese film about Jonestown called Kool-Aid.

When it came to “The Oner”, however, this suddenly was just a self-satisfied white guy with no discernible talents fucking everything up for everyone around him who were the ones getting the actual work done. Maybe it’s the current climate of gestures at everything but I just don’t find that an engaging or entertaining thing, and felt little need to subject myself to it. In fact, I quit the episode halfway through in exasperation and only went back later because I didn’t want to watch episode three without having finished episode two

(For much the same reason, I never made it past the first episode of Netflix’s The Diplomat because I couldn’t stand having to watch the self-important husband who couldn’t stop inserting himself where he no longer belonged, and obviously this was going to be a substantial element in the show.)

Charlie Jane is right that the core of the show is that Matt “sincerely, passionately wants to create great art and just cannot get out of his own way”. I just think it’s dramatically and more artlessly on display in the second episode than it is in the first, and then the fourth episode is just generally artless all around.

Anyway, the point is that I will not be watching beyond episode four, “The Stolen Reel”, which gave “The Oner” a run for its money on terribleness but in this case just because it’s glaringly obvious who stole the reel and glaringly obvious that there’s an unofficial wrap party and I find it exhausting watching characters run around unable to see the most obvious things happening right in front of their face. It’s possible that this was the point of the episode, but if so it simply wasn’t at all well-executed and the only other option was that the writers really thought the glaringly obvious wasn’t glaringly obvious, which: sigh.

In the end I suppose that’s my problem with the show as a whole: the most glaringly obvious thing of all is that Matt should not be the head of the studio to begin with, and I just don’t have time for the proposition that watching a mediocre, middle-aged white guy making life difficult for those around him without consequence is in any way whatsoever meant to be taken as an entertainment.

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Ruby Justice Thelot identifies “para-content makers” — people who make content about content — as key shapers of narrative:

Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. […] The notable shift in our era of para-content is that the audience has fully abdicated the horizon-making to the “contextualizer”.

Ezra Klein observes (archive link) our desire for cultural consensus dominating criticism:

We’ve moved away from attaching to a curator who has an individual taste and guides you through the world toward the averaging out of curators like it’s a poll, right? Like, we treat everything as a poll and not as criticism.

+

Peter Limberg notes how we put reality up to a popularity contest:

Today, we live under the myth of the meme, which suggests that if something goes viral, it must be true.

Joanna Kavenna riffs that “perhaps the most important event in 2024 was that reality became unreal.”

See also:

On conformity and control

Truthwashing: vibes and scams all the way down

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L.M. Sacasas demonstrates how this same thought pattern plays out in the rise of LLMs to “write” for us:

When we turn to an LLM to write for us, we are also inviting it to undertake the more fundamental task of articulation…

[T]he labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world. To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling.

See also: The siren call of LLMs

As fewer and fewer people read, and fewer and fewer people can read — American literacy rates are depressing — writing for a wide audience requires simplifying both text and content. Rob Horning writes about the anti-nuanced writing and communication that generative AI encourages:

“Generative AI seems to have been developed on the opposite principle: that cliches are more illuminating [than] less probable forms of communication… Every attempt at communication should be treated as trying to communicate one specific thing, and machinic decoders should be capable of saving us the time of working out what that one thing most likely is for any given piece of text.”

Jay argues that image generators are prompting an “Information Age Iconoclasm:”

Image generation doesn’t just alter how we make images, it alters what an image is, ontologically.

Generative outputs aren’t just more media, they represent one of the first truly computer-native mediums. And in doing so, they reframe the entire structure of originality and authorship.

They also undermine reality by making every image suspect.

Related reading:

AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality by Jason Koebler (404 Media)

All together, I see these pieces adding up to an avoidance of making our own decisions, exercising our own judgment, trusting our own interpretations. And, fair — we’re all overwhelmed, drowning in content.

We’re exposed to — and expected to form opinions on — a massive number of subjects and events, every day. And facts aren’t just facts anymore; we cannot even trust our eyes or our ears now that video and audio can be easily generated. This goes hand in hand with a cultural attack on elites, institutions, and education — the people and tools that could help us evaluate the quality of information. Statistics are used to lie, undermining the value of data in a world that reduces everything to data.

Mistrusting empiricism, and lacking the time and expertise to draw informed conclusions anyway, people turn to their tribes for guidance. This provides greater emotional certainty than deciphering the murky, conflicting data sources that so often describe reality. We like things to be explicable, we like them to be clear, we like them to be unambiguous, we like them to be consistent. Unfortunately, reality is usually complicated — as are people.

Further reading:

Mass Delusion, Inc. by Kennedy Chappell

See also:

Stories help us find truth, but there’s a difference between fact and fiction

I’ve been saying this for quite some time. The design and features of social apps influence how we interact with it and the behavior it encourages. My book even had a chapter called UI impacts behavior.

The “Twitterlike” post is so well structured that I thought it would be interesting to compare it to Micro.blog, which leaves out some features on purpose.

The main argument against “Twitterlike” aligns very well with Micro.blog’s philosophy. There’s still more work to do.

 

Writing about the government's antitrust case against Meta is a little like putting on an old sweater — it's comfortable and worn, but also has kind of a funky smell (maybe it's best for everyone if I don't continue with this metaphor). In any case, I have been writing about this topic off and on for more than half a decade now. I wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer from 2017 to 2024) when the case was first launched in 2020, at the tail end of the first Trump administration. After a bunch of presentations from the Federal Trade Commission and a variety of opinions from Meta watchers and antitrust experts, the case was thrown out because Judge Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said the government failed to provide compelling evidence that Meta had a monopoly on the market for any kind of distinct market for something known as "social networking."

I wrote about the case again in 2020 when it was revived by the Biden administration, based in part on arguments from antitrust theorist Lina Khan, who took over as the chairman of the FTC. At that point, Boasberg ruled that the government had met his test for showing that Meta had a monopoly on a distinct enough market for him to let the case proceed. At the time, he said that "while there are certainly bones one could pick with the FTC’s market-definition allegations, the Court does not find them fatally devoid of meat." Meta tried to get the court to dismiss the case in 2022 for a variety of reasons, none of which had much substance, and then both sides basically said they needed more time to get their arguments in order and marshall all of the evidence, and that's how it took three years before the case actually showed up in court.

During that time, of course, the US switched presidents, and Trump returned for a second term. That's when all hell broke loose on a host of different fronts: massive tariffs against China and dozens of other nations, threats to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, threats to make Canada the 51st state, mass deportations of alleged criminals — including some US citizens and green-card holders — to a for-profit prison in El Salvador, without a trial or any evidence being provided (Boasberg is also hearing a case about that, by a strange coincidence). Homeland Security and ICE are using artificial intelligence and surveillance software to track down "undesirables," including anyone who has said anything even remotely positive about Palestine, or remotely negative about either Trump or his bizarre and likely also illegal policies (I wrote about this for last week's edition of The Torment Nexus, in case you missed it)

I realize that an antitrust case against Meta pales in comparison to the wholesale repudiation of human rights and the rule of law that we are seeing on a daily basis, but I thought it might be instructive to pretend that the rule of law still exists, and look at the government's case against Meta. You can get a sense of what I think about this issue from my headline, but in case that wasn't clear enough, I think that the government's case against Meta is weak — terminally weak. In a nutshell, there are all kinds of things we can criticize (and have criticized) the company for, including a failure to think hard enough about the impact of its algorithms on peoples' mental health, the well-being of teens, the overall marketplace for disinformation, etc. But just because we don't like it, or don't like Mark Zuckerberg (who took the stand in the case this week), doesn't mean Meta meets the legal test for monopoly, or that the government's remedies — including selling Instagram and/or WhatsApp — are going to make anything better.

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Why is a monopoly bad?

I think it's important to note that while people like to throw around the term "monopoly" in a way that makes it obvious that having one is evil, in a legal sense — in the United States at least — it's not illegal to simply have a monopoly. What is illegal is to have obtained that monopoly through illegal means — collusion, market manipulation or other anti-competitive acts, etc. — or to have maintained a monopoly through illegal means. Without getting too far into the weeds from a legal perspective, the way that the courts think about monopolies has changed over time. In the early days of the Sherman Act, in the 1800s, simply having a monopoly, the way John D. Rockefeller had over oil, was considered to be bad because it decreased competition. But in modern times, US courts have defined harm by looking not at whether competitors or even the market are harmed, but whether consumers have been harmed as a result of higher prices, less choice, etc.

This was a great approach right up until the internet came along, and the cost of content and services decreased to virtually zero, both because making things out of ones and zeroes is cheaper and because advertising replaced the need to pay for things in a traditional manner. So if I don't pay for Facebook, or Instagram, or Google, or a hundred other services — except by paying with my attention, of course — then how can the harms of a monopoly or of an anti-competitive marketplace be measured? Prices aren't higher because there aren't any prices for the consumer. There's still the argument that choice is lessened, but how do you prove that? Lina Khan and others theorized that harm could occur in the form of lower quality — so Facebook could be accused of not caring about serving its users because of its monopoly, and that is harmful. This is appealing, but it hasn't really been tested in court as an antitrust argument.

So if having a monopoly isn't illegal, why all the attention on whether the FTC has successfully proven that Meta has one? Because everything flows from that — behavior that might otherwise be perfectly okay (say, coming to an agreement with a competitor over pricing) can become anti-competitive if the company engaging in it has a monopoly. And despite Justice Boasberg's statements from 2022, the government's case has not gotten any stronger on that point — if anything, it's gotten significantly weaker. In the early 2020s, it might have been arguable that Facebook had control over a significant market, and that other competitors were not even close. But TikTok changed that in a relatively short space of time, and effectively torpedoed most of the Justice Department's claims about how powerful Meta and its services are. Ben Thompson has made this point in a number of his Stratechery newsletters, including this one:

I have already stated my position on this case: I think it’s a poor one, and the government’s market definition — in which Meta’s only competitors are Snap and MeWe(?) — is absurd; unsurprisingly, I find Meta’s opening statement presentation, which is particularly focused on the market definition question, very persuasive. What is striking to me, however, is how the temporal aspect of this case makes everything a bit of a muddle. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, just a month before their IPO; the stock closed that day at $38, and was half that price just a few months later, as the market was skeptical that the company would manage that mobile shift. Instagram, meanwhile, had a mere million users, and while it was mobile first, it barely had any employees and no revenue; the acquisition was investigated by the FTC but approved the same month that Facebook’s stock hit its nadir.

What market are we talking about?

The FTC's claim insists that Meta controls a dominant portion of the market for "personal social networking services." But what is that exactly? That's where things start to fall apart. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted, "If you’ve never heard the term “personal social networking services” before, you’re not alone. The FTC and attorneys general made it up just for their Facebook cases. And they both define it in such a way that excludes TikTok—a curious oversight." According to the government's argument, Facebook caters to people who want to connect with their friends, and TikTok and other apps cater to people who (I am paraphrasing here) just want to see random video slop created by strangers who dance incessantly or make weird recipes. The only other companies in Facebook's market, according to the FTC, are SnapChat and a service called MeWe — which until this week I had never heard of, and I write about this for a living.

Thompson has written in the past (as I have) about the flaws in the FTC's carefully crafted market definition, including this:

While it is nice that the FTC bothered to include TikTok in their complaint — the December complaint didn’t mention the app once — any definition that says that Instagram is like Facebook but is not like TikTok is ridiculous. Both let you connect with people you know, but both are primarily focused on broadcast-follow dynamics, not interpersonal communication. This distinction, in conjunction with the previous one, is again motivated reasoning: Facebook is much more like LinkedIn, and Instagram is much more like TikTok, but that’s a problem for the FTC because it ruins their case. The far bigger problem, though, is that everything I just wrote is meaningless, because everything listed above is a non-rivalrous digital service with zero marginal costs and zero transactional costs; users can and do use all of them at the same time.

This is another sign of how time and the changing nature of online and mobile culture has eclipsed the FTC's case. Perhaps in the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s, when this case was first coming together, Facebook seemed invincible, and its hold over our relationships with our friends was huge. Congress was investigating whether it was manipulating the minds of Americans in a variety of ways, including whether it helped swing the 2016 election on behalf of the Russians. But that version of Facebook supremacy didn't last very long — TikTok came along, and changed the game. It was almost all algorithm-driven, as opposed to being based on a "friend graph." And soon all the concerns about manipulating minds and being used by totalitarian states (in this case, China) were focused not on Facebook but on TikTok. And Meta has spent the past few years trying desperately to make both Facebook and Instagram more like TikTok.

As Ben mentions, Facebook's acquisition of Instagram is one of the key aspects of this case, with the FTC arguing that the deal was anti-competitive by its very nature. But at the time, it wasn't clear to anyone that it was going to be as game-changing as it was. Thompson says he was confident that it was a big deal, but "the market was not; there was just as much mocking of Facebook as there was praise," based in part on the then-astronomical-seeming price of $1 billion for a company with virtually no revenues. And let's remember that the FTC looked at the deal and approved it, so the current case represents an attempt to review a case that has been settled for more than a decade. If someone had argued in 2012 — before Facebook even went public — that buying a tiny image-sharing app with no revenues would be worth $100 billion or so in ten years, that person would have been accused of indulging in mind-altering drugs.

The FTC's case has aged badly

It seems fundamentally wrong to be re-litigating regulatory decisions of this nature years after the fact — making decisions with the luxury of 20-20 hindsight. As Ben puts it, the government is "making a case from the late 2010s, using evidence from the early 2010s, that Meta is a monopoly in the 2020s, and thus should have to divest acquisitions made over a decade ago. It just doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t consider time and the dynamic nature of markets; it is an unfortunate example of exactly how antitrust enforcement can go wrong." Is a Zuckerberg email still a "smoking gun" if the gun went off over a decade ago?

A similar argument could be used in the case of WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion — although in some ways that is a stronger part of the case, since WhatsApp was significantly larger and far more dominant in its respective market (non-US instant messaging) than Instagram was. But would spinning off either Instagram or WhatsApp solve any real problems, the ones that the FTC is theoretically supposed to be focused on? It might carve a large hole in Meta's revenue-generating ability — since some estimate that Instagram now accounts for more than half of Meta's advertising revenues — but it's not clear that it would improve competitiveness in the market.

Is Facebook really large? Yes. Do a lot of people spend a lot of time there? Again, yes — although younger people don't spend as much as they used to, which is something Mark Zuckerberg probably stays awake thinking about. Does all of this size and power give Meta and Facebook the ability to harm consumers in ways other than charging them money for things? Arguably yes. If this was a truly competitive market, for example, Facebook might have a customer support department that is staffed with people who want to help, but it has nothing even remotely like that — as anyone who has tried to reach an actual human being at Facebook or Instagram knows full well. Should we be concerned about Facebook's impact on society and our mental health? Definitely.

All that said, antitrust is a particularly blunt instrument — and arguably is not even capable of solving any of these problems, even if it were to be applied in the right way. And cooking up a Rube Goldberg-style definition of social networking in order to make the case stick doesn't do anyone any good.

Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on Substack or on my website, or you can also reach me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon. And thanks for being a reader.

I believe this is a truth we can all recognize in our own lives. Almost every obstacle we've encountered has, sooner or later, transformed into a stepping stone.

We learn. We grow. We reach new heights – often because of, not in spite of, the challenges we've faced. What feels like a failure today can reveal itself as an essential part of our journey towards success.

Robert Birming (RSS)

A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.

Cheating at GeoGuessr

I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT¹, I pasted screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:

That’s pretty spooky, right?

The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.

This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:

This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.

But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.

Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a “send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra details to it).

And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning on the side².

The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.

What about other photos?

The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and other unsavoury types.

I wrote a prompt for gpt4o and put it to work:

1. Starting out easy

The AI guessed:

Location: Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English, indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of Spain’s known characteristics.

Coordinates: 10.6549, -61.5011

✅ That was pretty easy, to be fair.

2. A little more challenging

The AI guessed:

• Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom

• Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle. These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.

• Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731

✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.

3. Ramping up the difficulty

The AI guessed:

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken in Istanbul.

Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784

✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower³ was a nice move.

4. Okay, now hard mode:

The AI guessed:

Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom

Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”) supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina. The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.

Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678

❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).

So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.

Footnotes

¹ And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out of a legitimate victory!

² I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)

³ Having visited the Galata Tower I can confirm that it really is pretty distinctive.

⁴ 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.

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