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About

Off The Shelf is a personal blog where I riff on a variety of topics from my professional life and personal interest. I've made some interesting 'career swerves' over the years, but like most people I can't claim any big plan. If you've ever read Julian Barnes' 'Sense of an Ending' you'll know what I mean.

I was an independent bookseller for 11 years, and now run a retail marketing consultancy. I'm also a Bookshop Mentor with the Unwin Charitable Trust. Once a bookseller, always a bookseller. Independent bookshops and small publishers are a KPI of a thriving culture, and they deserve our respect and defence at (almost) all cost.

I am mildly obsessed with stories (we are, after all, story machines) particularly when it comes to science and technology. I have been Chair of the ATOM Festival of Science and Technology, and run a podcast on what scientists and engineers do all day. I like to write about the intersection of science and technology, stories and bookselling, the impact of tech on society and communities, and why - ultimately - we need to go into space.

It's a weird combination. It should come as no surprise that Tim Harford's book 'Messy' is one of favourite all-time books...

Feel free to email me, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to an occasional newsletter (see above).

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Escaping the Technosphere

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One superpower of our species is the ability to quickly adapt to technological breakthroughs. We invent things, make them widely available, build platforms on which we can see further, do more. The speed at which we incorporate breakthroughs into our lives — from semiconductors to GPS — is breathtaking and inspiring. We are very good at standing on the shoulders of giants. But there is a dark side to platforms. We can be seduced — and become dangerously dependent — on technology. Greater connectivity leads to new forms of warfare. Energy and transport infrastructure makes us dependent on planet-wrecking fuels. Bacteria quickly evolve to outflank the antibiotics that save lives. These platforms allow us — metaphorically — to live at a higher level. Consequentially we have much, much further to fall if they fail. The technosphere (coined by Peter Haff ) refers to the ‘stuff’ humans have created to keep us alive on the planet, from factories and farms to planes and plastic bags. But it al...
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How Stories Change the World

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“ Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it .” — Hannah Arendt When recommending fiction as a bookseller, I sometimes heard the phrase “I don’t read fiction”. On enquiring further, there was a suspicion that fiction was somehow frivolous, made up, a poor alternative to reading non-fiction, which told you how the world really worked. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of narrative to shape the world. Humans are story machines. Homo Sapiens conquered the world because we evolved to think in the abstract. Up against a nasty, brutish environment we could rehearse alternatives: war-gaming alternative scenarios to avoid worst-cases. But we were also able to share wisdom, taking our experiences and hard-won knowledge, encoding them into the prehistoric version of a meme: stories that were easy to remember, could be acted out or spread using art and language. Stories encoded everything from plants that could kill us (or keep us alive), to the histor...
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The Creepy Internet

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“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” — Robert A. Heinlein Privacy intrusion, the surveillance state. Call it The Creepy Internet . A few months ago, I attended a day-long seminar at a well-known global technology company. They are partnering tirelessly with companies applying machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence to know you better than you know yourself. We’ve all experienced ‘stalker’ ads that follow you around online - even after you've bought the product - but this goes way beyond that level of creepiness. It’s not simply that disconcerting feeling of seeing a product before you consciously knew you wanted it. We piece together ‘reality’ from a remarkably small amount of information, and increasingly that reality is manipulated through your connection to the digital world. This can be positive: it can help us make healthy choices, avoid traffic jams, keep in to...
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