Moving Forward in Reverse
The Red Telephone Magazine: February 2026
It’s simple mathematics that as we age, each year takes up a smaller proportion of our life.
For a two year old, a single year is fifty percent of their entire life. By the time you hit twenty, that number has fallen to five percent. In relative terms, the years are passing by faster and our soul can feel it.
To acompany this quickening, we now have a ubiquitous digital space trying to pull our attention in every direction.
As I scan across my bookshelf and consider the influential people sitting there, I see artists, musicians, writers and politicians. I see distinct cultures yet to be shaped by the endless intrusion of the digital landscape.
We live in a time where these cultural markers are being replaced by oligarchs and technologists. We an in the midst of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) experiment providing detailed and comprehensive answers where we’re not sure what the question are.
When we do get specific, the answers reveal something unsettling about our current circumstances. Who is the Jimi Hendrix of the digital age?
Mark Zuckerberg.
If that doesn’t raise a red flag, then perhaps the past has already slipped too far from your grip.
The relentless advance of neo-liberalism since the early 80’s has seen Western culture transformed from a democracy of makers to an oligarchy of takers. Our commonwealth has been chiselled away into the hands of the top tier of society. The promised trickle down was simply cover for the endless extraction of what we assumed belonged to us all.
Yet reactionary forces in the West that look at the post war era with tear-jerking nostalgia often overlook that that too was built on the theft of indigenous land and resources. And now the comfortable middle class finds the capitalist colonial project coming for them. Why is anyone surprised?
It pays to see the internet and the digital landscape as an ecosystem. Some things will naturally grow better in certain locations.
With the advent of social media we’ve seen the rapid rise of an online monoculture where the doom scroll finds the various platforms blurring into one.
This, combined with the idea that the technologists are the avant-garde of our time, dragging us into an “own nothing” future, is something I’m reflecting on at the moment.
In many way, social media, from the red-neck dumpster fire of Facebook up to the more rarified tone of Substack, wouldn’t have made it to where it is without offering something that people want. For myself, the matrix of friends† that I have built online has transformed my creative practice. Yet, the mere participation in these online platforms also has a degenerative effect.
The Twentieth Century, built off the back of the Industrial Revolution saw and incredible cultural flowing abetted by everything from recorded music, to global communications, computers and the electric society.
In many ways, I see this technocrat avant-garde dragging us away from these advances.
So this first magazine edition of The Red Telephone is partially about a process of reclaiming the cultural advances that are being taken away from us.
Ideally or not, I hope to see manifest in a printed edition at one point. However, for now, my step away from demagoguery arrives in the form of a simple PDF, a seemingly ancient technology. This is to say that for me, as an artist, the script has flipped. Progress is now relative. It’s not about building something new, it’s about avoiding erosion.
Welcome to the l’arrière-garde. The Rear Guard.
This is not about nostaglia, retroism or even creativity. It is about infrastructure. It is about countering a creative infrastructure intent on homogenising us into metrics-controlled work units, where with a single wave of the capricious digital overlord’s finger, our presence, our existence, can be erased.
This isn’t about exiting online. It’s about preparing to survive offline.
† - Matrix of Friends is a term coined by Hakim Bey in his pamphlet Immediatism. I find it much more useful as an artist to notions of community, which increasingly seek to establish new hierarchy than provide creative freedom.
As previously discussed, I’m experimenting with producing this magazine (newsletter) as a printable PDF. Not that I’m encouraging you to print it out, it’s more to allude to a physical format of a magazine and to create the opportunity to view it offline. The approach will be to publish the feature article of the month (above) and then to save the rest of the content for the magazine. I’d love to hear what you think.
The Mark Suckerberg reference to Jimi Hendrix was like a bucket of cold water in my face. Because it's true and sickens me to realize just how much we have lost. Waking up happens in degrees. I look forward to reading your .pdf in detail. My only regret is I don't have a color printer. And more book shelves, but I haven't filled all the chairs yet. I once attended a tech conference where a young, arrogant, overpaid, knows nothing about how the world works, asshole referred to books as artifacts that would soon die away. I seriously considered being the arbitrator of his immediate demise in that moment.
You have some things in here that really made me stop and think. Things like "Western culture transformed from a democracy of makers to an oligarchy of takers" and social media offering us something that people want. It offered me a place to share my writing, to talk with like-minded people, but I also experienced a Twitter mob for the first time, something which left me with panic attacks for months.
Then this: "It’s not about building something new, it’s about avoiding erosion."
I'm looking forward to following The Red Telephone.