Belshaw Brain Archive
A repository of Doug Belshaw’s writing from 2006 to the present day.
5,404 posts across Open Thinkering and Thought Shrapnel.
Recent additions
- Weeknote 20/2026
- Why do people procrastinate?
- Field Notes on Productive Friction
- Arbitrary structures and accidental hierarchies
- I Have Led A Toothless Life He Thought
- Digital legacy
- The impact of volcanoes on the Black Death
- Don't write in the passive voice
- A brief guide to self-hosting websites and apps using Cloudflare Tunnel
- Believe in your own excellence
- There are always people who fall outside the bounds of what a service can handle
- My kidnappers returning me back
- Cognitive Wallpaper #001: Field Notes on Productive Friction
- What comes after web literacy?
- Weeknote 19/2026
- The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in
- Oof
- We live in an economy that has systematically destroyed the conditions for trust, and then charges us for the workarounds
- My goal is to encourage people to take action and look at the alternatives that are on the table
- The patient as transcription layer
- Wisdom from the Tao Te Ching
- Beyond Elegant Consumption (Again)
- On the gendered nature of (types of) hobbies
- Digital literacies involve layers of abstraction
- How power structures and relationships really work
- Time as an instrument?
- On originality
- Literacy-slop
- April 2026: frameworks, friction, and federation
- Weeknote 18/2026
- Quite the week
- The end of an era
- My tech disclaimer
- Claude Code used to be the obvious choice
- Weeknote 17/2026
- The concentration of power in AI labs is now one of the defining political questions of the decade
- Grand ambitions vs reality
- Renewable energy: 98% of days in Britain are either windy, sunny, or both
- Having a system built on context puts the power in the people's hands
- THE FUTURE IS OFFLINE
- How a little “productive friction” protects human agency
- Choosing partnership over "certainty theatre"
- Turning polygonal badges into contours of practice
- Why I adore the night
- Life advice
- The AI Adoption Spiral
- The "U-shaped curve" of cognitive offloading to AI tools
- "We have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one is working"
- The Journey Home
- 'Folk software' - not 'vibe coding'