Jonathan Pay

There’s a moment in Deus Ex that’s stayed with me for at least fifteen years. That conversation between JC Denton and the Morpheus AI. Morpheus: “JC Denton. Twenty-three years old. No residence. No ancestors. No employer.” JC: “How do you know who I am?” Morpheus: “I must greet each visitor with a complete summary of his file. I am a prototype for a much larger system… Human beings feel…

How turn-of-the-century stories taught us to fear our own creations I grew up in that strange window when the internet was new but already essential. The modem screech, the handshake, the brief silence before the connection held and then you got online. We were curious and slightly naïve, and nobody was asking what we were actually building. The stories we were consuming, though, seemed to be…

Everyone Has an Inbox Everyone who uses the internet has an email address. Not everyone is on LinkedIn. Not everyone uses Instagram, or TikTok, or whatever platform is currently being declared the future of marketing (even Reddit). But everyone has an email address. Sometimes more than one. Email marketing has been pronounced dead more times than I can count, and for the better part of thirty…

Stand outside on a quiet morning and listen. If you’re lucky, and the conditions are right, you’ll hear something remarkable: Birdsong. Then the crows arrive. One crow is fine. Two is manageable. But crows are social, and they’re loud, and when the conditions suit them they multiply. What was a varied, interesting soundscape becomes a single relentless caw. The individual voices aren’t gone.…

I use AI to help me write, guided by my own style guide to keep my “voice” intact. I’m also scrolling LinkedIn most days. The posts feel familiar. Polished but impersonal, templated. The rhythm’s too neat, the phrasing too clean, the structure too formulaic. It’s not the “good enough” AI-generated content that bothers me so much. It’s the why. People (real people, not just corporate brands)…

Most marketing channels have learned to talk at people. Email, at its best, talks to them. Of course, I’m speaking as an email marketer. I know the inbox isn’t sacred. We’ve all contributed to in some way, and definitely experienced, what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshitification” of platforms, and email hasn’t entirely escaped it. The automation, the endless “just checking in” sequences, the…

I own a copy of Systematic Theology. Like, the big one. Bought it during my “serious theology” phase in my early twenties. I never read it beyond a few pages. Same story with a few of Andrew Wilson’s books (UK not US). I even learned from him directly during my “Impact” year, a church-run volunteer programme through Newfrontiers. I have Francis Chan, Timothy Keller, and yes, a couple of Mark…

About ten years ago, I had an idea. I was watching friends and family share wildly different news articles on Facebook and Twitter. Some were outrage-driven. Others were clearly biased. More and more were outright misinformation. It was frustrating. Not because people disagreed, but because the how of news was becoming harder to trust. So I sketched out an idea. What if we could take a single…