I Can Predict The Future | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

As you’ll all now know, my latest video was released last Sunday.

The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon is currently performing really well and has started lots of conversations about the current state of Patreon and where it might go in the future. As ever, I’ve really appreciated everyone’s feedback and thoughts.

Whilst I was working on the video, I was well aware that Patreon was preparing to undertake a fairly significant overhaul of their website. What I didn’t know was that the overhaul in question would launch mere days after our video went out (you can see their... interesting… new logo below)..

So, maybe I can predict the future? Or maybe I’m just good at paying attention to what large companies in the “creator economy” space are doing…

Either way, it’s been interesting (and sad) to see many of my analyses of Patreon confirmed by this update, which consists of a huge amount of future bloat and an express attempt to try to tie creators further into Patreon’s ecosystem.

As I said in my last Friday Update and in the video, I really love Patreon’s core service and am so, so very grateful for the support you give my work through the site. Hopefully, we’ll be able to hang on in here for some time still!

And outside of work?

This weekend was relatively chill. I’d had a few weekends in a row where I was away; once to speak on some panels at a festival and once for a friend’s stag do. I love having the opportunity to get away and do exciting things, but sometimes it’s nice to just chill a little bit.

This was perhaps for the best. As I was cycling home from the co-working space we use last Friday, I fell off my bike which resulted in quite a big smash to my knee. It was in the park luckily, so there was no chance of being squashed by a car; but crashing into concrete at speed isn’t entirely ideal whatever the context!

The most I got up to last weekend, then, was to hobble to our local museum where we watched a play by an old friend and took a look around some of the exhibits which had been refreshed since we’d been in last. I particularly like the media room, which has a fascinating collection of old cameras and plays loads of old clips from the news in South West England. As someone who spends a lot of time digging around in archive footage databases, I always find that fascinating!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

As part of my super chill weekend, I finished reading Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics.

Most of my thoughts on the book carry over from last week’s Friday Update really. This one took me a little longer than a lot of books have been taking me to reach lately and I think it was that I occassionally a little over abundant in its use of examples.

The overall argument of the book, and its exploration of the flaws of dominant modes of thinking in economics and ways of rethinking those to create an ecologically safer and more socially just world is absolutely brilliant; it was just the case that each chapter was 25% longer than it felt it needed to be.

Nevertheless, the impact the book has had is well deserved. If you’d like a primer on progressive economics and how to think about economics in a way which takes both the climate crisis and matters of social and economic injustice into account, I’d highly recommend it!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!