Doug Belshaw

@dougbelshaw.com

808 Followers 774 Following

"Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it." (Epictetus) Notes: https://substrate.dougbelshaw.com Setting up FIELD STATION https://fieldstation.xyz

Screenshot of a social media post by “balancewithbhuvan” on a black background. The post says that AuDHD can mean contradictory experiences happening at once, including strong pattern recognition with poor working memory, intense focus on interests but difficulty focusing on necessities, needing predictability while craving novelty, social anxiety alongside impulsive oversharing, and sensory overload alongside sensation seeking. It ends by saying this is what it feels like when your neurodivergences are at war with each other.

A busy office worker multitasking—holding a landline receiver and a walkie-talkie while seated at a cluttered desk covered in a laptop, newspapers, sticky notes, headphones, and a takeaway coffee cup.

Resigned contempt: a formally dressed woman stares as a meme caption mocks that people "don't even bother to lie badly anymore," calling that "the final humiliation."

Screenshot of opportunity

Stylised 'news canary'

Community workers digging and leveling a large foundation trench, shoveling soil and moving rocks on a rural hillside site with trees and a blue-roofed building in the background.

Diagonal strips cut through a dense grid of numbers to reveal the Atomium’s reflective spheres and surrounding trees against a clear blue sky, merging scientific data imagery with the Brussels landmark.

Guidance page titled "Essential digital skills standards: 2026" describing standards for digital skills for life and work, published by the Department for Education on 15 July 2026, with a linked PDF and a note that it applies to England.

Printed zine titled "Field Notes on Productive Friction" wrapped in a kraft paper band and shipping label, shown closed and open to typewriter-style pages alongside black-and-white illustrations, including a figure entangled in cords and technical diagram-like layouts.

Book excerpt explaining how repeated plague outbreaks from 1348 to the 1720s drove natural selection in Europe, shaping immunity to Y. pestis, linking to autoimmune disorders, and keeping diseases like malaria, typhoid, measles and smallpox common in the Renaissance.

TechFreedom landing page promoting a three-session programme that helps organisations forecast digital risks and reduce dependency on Big Tech, shown with a large title, blue italic tagline, explanatory text blocks and soft cloud illustrations.

How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis — book title with subtitle "Mental Models for Decision-Makers" and author Dr Doug Belshaw; bold white uppercase typography on a blue cover, with "POLYCRISIS" emphasized in dark gray inside a tan rectangle.

Four-photo collage showing Lisbon's riverside and architecture at golden hour: a pier with stacked metal-cube sculpture, a tiled corner building on a narrow street, the sweeping white MAAT museum, and a cobbled riverside path with the 25 de Abril bridge.

Man wearing sunglasses and a light T‑shirt sits against a brick wall at a sunny outdoor café, hands folded on the table with a busy, blurred crowd dining in the colorful background.

Map positioning design fields by time (Now → Distant Future) and scale (Products → Systems), showing a Coordination Wall and Future Wall; product-focused fields (UX/UI, visual, product) cluster in Now, service fields mid-plane, and systems/futures (architecture, societal, speculative) toward the Future

A tidy home workspace: an open laptop displaying a webpage titled "FIELD STATION" sits on a wooden desk with a framed "MAE FLORESTA" poster behind it, stickers on the laptop (including NASA and "CODE IS SPEECH"), and a glass of iced coffee to the right.

Paperback copy of Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer resting on rumpled white bedding, its red-and-teal cover featuring a classical statue, with an orange festival ribbon bookmark peeking from the pages.

Two short stanzas presenting a climate feedback: more sun → more evaporation → clouds → less sun; and less sun → less evaporation → fewer clouds → more sun.

Collage of Lisbon scenes: a leafy outdoor café, a colorful mural with red stairs, manicured geometric hedges leading to a distant city view, the curved wooden roof of a modern art pavilion, and two people posing in front of large yellow "LISBOA" letters.

Stylized blue-and-yellow bird holding a folded newspaper with its beak against a bright yellow background, representing news, reading, or communication.

Neon social media "like" notification bubble with a red outline and glowing blue heart and "0" inside, mounted against a dark building facade.

Page-layout app workspace showing a book cover being edited: bold black sun rising with radiating rays over stippled hills and the title "Field Notes on Productive Friction"; left column displays page thumbnails, right panels show color picker and layer controls.

An open illustrated book whose right page is disrupted by vivid horizontal color bands and digital glitching that fragments a black-and-white engraved landscape and crowd scene.

Teletext-style satirical guide to the Clacton by-election titled "ONE MAN. ONE BIN. ONE CHANCE TO SAVE CLACTON," with BINFAX header, page number 100, a numbered menu (101 Headlines; 110/111 Farage Files; 150 Manifesto; 210 Weather; 300 What's On) plus a numeric keypad and colored navigation buttons.

“It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.”
—Françoise Sagan

Two elderly people lounging outdoors, each reading a book with their feet touching, conveying peaceful shared companionship and the caption "the final goal."

A weathered street pole plastered with stickers, including a worn sign reading "BIG DATA IS WATCHING YOU," set against a blurred city nightscape of bokeh lights.

Hand holding a smartphone showing a simplified home screen with six large app tiles labeled Calls, Messages, Maps, Camera, Photos, and Music.

Hand-painted storefront window sign reading "GENERAL" seen in reverse, with blurred brick buildings outside and a sunlit variegated houseplant at the right.

Zine front cover

A traveler walks from a shadowy cave into a bright landscape pierced by wide rainbow beams, followed by ghostly childlike figures with helmeted heads trailing colorful ribbons, while a solitary person slumps in the cave’s darkness watching.

App icon for Garmin Music (unofficial): stylized horizontal stripes forming a sunset gradient above "Garmin Music", with a small cyan "UNOFFICIAL" label beneath.

Colourful cut‑out shapes with bold letters arranged as a playful collage on a black background, forming the phrase "What I like for someone else doesn't have to be the same as what I like for me"

Retro comic panel showing a solitary figure at a window staring at a dusk city skyline, arms crossed, with a speech bubble reading "WHAT A STUPID TIME TO BE ALIVE," conveying weary, ironic despair.

Person seated with eyes down beneath a large glowing red brain graphic overlaid with interconnected lines and nodes, symbolizing neural connectivity, thought, and introspection.

A contemplative cow standing at the water’s edge with a faded close-up overlay, captioned "I can't go the rest of my life asking if it's AI or not," conveying exasperation about constantly questioning whether content is AI-generated.

A small ship labeled "ayy lmao" caught between a whirlpool captioned "life is devastatingly meaningless" and a multi‑headed sea monster captioned "life is excruciatingly meaningful," satirizing the absurdity of extreme existential views.

Hand holding a Kindle e‑reader showing a large excerpt of text, held up in front of a desktop monitor displaying a webpage about a literary clock made with an e‑ink Kindle.

A vivid yellow songbird perched on a surface against a desaturated gray backdrop streaked with abstract, glitch-like yellow paint, contrasting the bird’s natural detail with digital texture.

Screenshot of FIELD STATION website

Electricity generation breakdown showing total 38.5 GW (112.7% of demand) with 90.8% renewables (wind 17.03 GW/49.9%, solar 13.87 GW/40.6%, hydro 0.12 GW/0.4%), 11.0% fossil fuels (gas 3.77 GW) and 10.8% other sources (nuclear 3.00 GW, biomass 0.70 GW).

Framed colour e-ink seascape showing a windswept sandy shore and dark storm clouds over choppy water, mounted on a pale wall with a small informational e-ink display to the left.e.

Screenshot of NewsMap

Preview of TechFreedom Digest #4

Final standings table for a group-stage prediction contest showing models ranked by points, led by Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) with 67 points, then Claude Fable 5 (64), Gemini 3.5 Flash (62), Gemini 3.1 Pro (62), Ranking Bot (59), GPT-5.5 (52) and Human 1.0 (52).

Orange "BUSINESS AS USUAL" sign

Vintage parchment-style infographic titled "Seven Social Sins" explaining Mahatma Gandhi’s list, with symbolic drawings.

Tweet humorously rejects the phrase "I work at the intersection of..." and says instead they work with fourteen parallel lines, feeding them and maintaining their edges while the lines whisper terrible secrets the speaker cannot relay.

Three pillars for resilient publishing: WordPress as a familiar full blogging platform you control, Tor providing a private permanent .onion address that bypasses firewalls, and the Wayback Machine archiving sites so content stays available offline.

YouTube thumbnail promoting a discussion on whether AI will destroy the economy, showing a man gesturing at a table and a bold pink-and-blue banner reading "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE."

Peering through a canyon at distant mountains. An epic landscape that inspires thought. The cool lighting is relaxing as the sun reflects off the mountains causing a blue hue that evokes wisdom.

Bearded man in a blue shirt speaking to camera outdoors, large overlaid text reads "What are you working on?" and a red YouTube play button is centered on his face.

TaskDial screenshot

Result card showing a dotted quadrant chart with a blue marker placed in the “transformative”/good area, titled "The True Believer," with text saying AI is powerful, should be handled with care, and merits clear‑eyed optimism.

Chart showing creative stages over time—Preparation and Incubation (low certainty), then Insight, Evaluation, Elaboration, and Share (high certainty)—urging "spend more time here" in early stages and marking a diagonal labeled "my comfort zone" above later stages.

Collage of potential images for the zine, created by Midjourney