2026-05-01 · Call for Papers
Call for papers now open I have launched a call for papers with guest editor Gavin Keeney for a special section of Amicus Curiae titled Law and Cultural Production. The call is open to scholars across disciplines – law, economics, anthropology, critical theory, art history, and beyond – provided the work engages substantively with law. Full details, including the timeline and submission instructions, are on the dedicated call page.
As a secondary experiment, accepted essays may also be archived on a planned BLACKBOX platform, testing smart contract registration and blockchain‑based relational links. Participation is optional and does not affect the journal’s CC BY license.
2026-05-07 · Recent infrastructure updates
The site got a few upgrades this week.
First, I finally eliminated the Google Fonts dependency. The 3 typefaces I use (Inter, Libre Baskerville
and IBM Plex Mono) are now self‑hosted WOFF2 files served directly from this
IPFS directory. So, no more requests to fonts.googleapis.com or
fonts.gstatic.com. Google Fonts isn’t exactly a privacy disaster but it's nonetheless satisfying to fully deGoogle the site ;-).
Second, I built a heartbeat agent — a tiny non‑human steward that resolves the site’s IPNS address every morning and signs a cryptographic attestation that says “I saw this site, at this CID, at this time.” It then publishes the attestation to IPFS. The public log is at /heartbeat.html. The agent is a Python script that runs on a daily GitHub Actions workflow. It has its own Ethereum key.
For visual interest I also added a
relational link graph
— an interactive map of the conceptual and infrastructural connections behind this
website. The graph is powered by D3.js and a plain‑text links.jsonl file,
both self‑hosted.
2026-04-03 · First IPFS deployment test
Uploaded a static version of the page to Pinata. Works, but need to think about updating the log without breaking links. IPNS might be the solution.
2026-04-02 · Research writing in Obsidian
I use Obsidian for almost all my research and fiction writing. Its bidirectional linking and local‑first philosophy align with my own distrust of cloud silos. Obsidian is an opensource note management software, that uses markdown that allows for multiple project vaults, organised by topic. The next step is to automate the project log: write entries in Obsidian and push the markdown files to IPFS via GitHub (using Quartz to convert them to html). This will hopefully keep the writing experience tied to my habitual environment. Actually, the real process starts before I sit down at the laptop: I write the old-fashioned way, away from the distraction of the internet. For this I use a ReMarkable tablet (e-ink) which also functions as my e-book reader. All my handwritten notes, annotations and chapters can be converted to markdown text and directly imported into Obsidian for final processing.
2026-04-02 · AI‑assisted development: reflections
I’ve been tinkering with AI since the first OpenAI API release (around 2021) when I signed up to the developer’s program. My early experiments used the Python based PyGPT desktop app to query an AI-indexed database of texts. I then played with simple agents: the most memorable experiment involving an agent linked to Madhyamaka Buddhist texts, and another to a critical legal studies memoir, who I set to converse. It was entertaining but not ultimately very fruitful!
More recently, I’ve found AI very useful for web development: speeding up CSS (which I’m literate in, but not proficient) and navigating JavaScript (which I’m just barely literate in ;-) ). The BLACKBOX cube and scroll‑reveal js were written with heavy AI assistance. That said, I remain wary of relying on cloud‑based AI. So, I’ve installed a distilled LLM on my own server, which I now use to search, summarise, and organise my document library and Obsidian notes. It’s a lot more limited than ChatGPT (or DeepSeek etc) in that it doesn't have much in the way of generative 'chat' power, but it is local. And tbh I'm getting a bit fed up of the now ubiquitous faux-human machine chat experience (prompting me to finally ditch google as a default search engine).
Ethically, I think using AI to generate code for a site like this is fine – the output is open source, the prompts were my own, and I’ve understood (and often modified) every line. The danger is when AI replaces thinking rather than enabling it. I have seen it likened to a robotic exoskeleton for the mind, in which case overreliance leads to atrophy. I think that captures the issue very well. But, does that danger apply at the macro level and herald the mass atrophy of culture? Hmmm. For now, I treat it as a very patient pair‑programmer who doesn’t mind my stupid questions about flexbox.
2026-04-01 · Canvas cube: rotation + morphing + node regeneration
The BLACKBOX visual is now a rotating, subtly morphing wireframe cube. Clicking on it regenerates the internal node connections (diagonal lines). The holographic fill pulses inside. It is, I think, a neat metaphor for the work’s life – never fixed, always re‑linking.
2026-03-31 · Decision: no code repositories
To keep the site lightweight and auditable, I’m writing vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The cube and scroll observer are the only scripts. This aligns with the project ethos. But what about serving my favoured typfaces via Google Fonts CDN? I can’t quite bring myself to ditch the typography yet, so may have to look at serving the fonts locally from IPFS.
2026-03-31 · Project inception
Started sketching the BLACKBOX page as a complement to the book proposal. The goal: make the DAO’s concepts tangible via interactive web design.