There was a time when, while attending art school, we were taught how to use a darkroom to develop photographs. A roll of film held just 24 shots, so thought had to go into every picture taken—there was no delete button. Materials were costly and the darkroom itself was a cramped, chemical-scented space where images slowly emerged in trays of developer and fixer. I have largely given up on photography as a pursuit, since everyone now carries a camera in their pocket in the form of a cell phone. With everyone acting as a photographer, much of the effort and ritual of the developing process has been removed, and the true meaning has lost some of its romance. Even the standalone digital camera has faded in importance. I received a Coolpix as a gift for my 21st birthday when the technology was relatively new; I took it everywhere. It produced decent shots for its time, though nothing like the latest phone cameras of today. Many of those images can be seen on my photography page on this site.
Not only has photography become a dying art, but computer design has also slipped away from my passionate attention. In art school I was taught a number of design programs: Photoshop, InDesign, Director, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash. Whatever happened to Flash? That was a program I poured hundreds of hours into, learning not only the ins and outs of the interface but also the underlying coding, ActionScript. I feel for all the coders who invested so much time in mastering that language only to see Flash rendered obsolete. I know the Flash movies on the internet required a plugin, yet many of us remember sites that opened with animated intros and, in numerous cases, entire sites built in Flash. I think the decline began when Adobe acquired Macromedia and the platform gradually faded away. There is very little of that kind of animation online today; I’ve heard the closest equivalent is HTML5, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve drifted away from the other design programs as well. I’m still a reasonably capable Photoshop user, but with the other applications I’ve been left behind. This site was created using Squarespace, where most of the design, layout and functionality are pre-built and easy to manage in a web-based environment. No coding is necessary and much is drag-and-drop, which makes it relatively straightforward for anyone to assemble a site. I have only good things to say about Squarespace.
The latest thing to have emerged over the last few years is artificial intelligence, and it has become a dominant topic of conversation everywhere. This really scares me, and I believe it should concern everyone who cares about freedom and human dignity. We are in a critical time in history where it increasingly feels like we are dealing with a real-life Terminator scenario. Nothing seems to shock us anymore. In the past six months alone, some 600,000 jobs in the USA alone have been made redundant because of AI, and the trend appears to be accelerating. I’m no expert in this field — I just watch internet documentaries and clips about the phenomenon that genuinely freak me out. Give us another few years and we could lose religion, see people microchipped, find that being judged a “bad person” results in your funds being cut off, with no help from the government because it will be promoting and enforcing this technology. Oh dear, the mark of the beast. I predicted this more than 20 years ago, and the Bible warns of similar things too. It’s reached the point where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real and what is not online, especially on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Is this the death of the web as we know it? Not to mention the massive environmental pollution being caused by AI datacenters. I’m struggling to post videos on this page, but I did find one that illustrates my fears — I’ve seen many clever AI videos, but this one takes the cake. Please watch and let me know what you think. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jchVIw9D73k I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but it still must be brought to everyone’s attention. We need to stand up and fight against it together!