On Saturday I had the pleasure of speaking at the SHEconomy Global Business Showcase United Kingdom Edition, a room full of women building things they actually care about. Thank you to everyone who attended and hosted. It felt like coming up for air, really refreshing.

After the event I went on a trip down memory lane to 2020, and Rethink the Rainbow, the children’s mental health anthology I co-curated with Emily ‘Madge’ Payne during lockdown. The objective was simply to find twenty authors who could help us draw attention to a children’s mental health crisis we could see coming. We hit three times that target, sixty-plus contributors writing stories and poems in nine languages, a social commentary of the time written by the people actually living through it.

It made me smile that a couple of “two very down to earth women, with no previous experience in a project that big” built something fabulous for children’s mental health, managed mainly with a massive amount of stubbornness and plain old perseverance delivered despite a dodgy laptop, zero field knowledge, and a totally disastrous launch where none of the tech cooperated.

I really wanted to reread the weekly updates I used to post, the ones where I was hammering down doors and networking like mad. Or the one where I lost an entire interview to a sound failure and had to do it all over again. Unfortunately most of the articles are no longer available, they went into a digital black hole when I was deplatformed, the same way anything can go when the owner of the platform decides they don’t like what you say. We have unfortunately been funneled into confusing access with ownership.

One piece that did survive was the one for Psychreg, published on 13 July 2020. I couldn’t help but smile at the irony that we all have a massive digital footprint but some of the most memorable and useful stuff has effectively just vanished, well for me at least it’ll still be sitting on a massive server somewhere no doubt.

I have spent most of this year building an AI methodology precisely because I just don’t trust public platforms, and I certainly don’t agree with them having the power to flick a switch and delete your work. It’s the same argument I made about who gets to decide what news you’re allowed to see, different platform, same hand on the switch. The consultation is open until 31 August, and I urge you all to respond.

I’m now building something new, a study in a similar vein to Rethink the Rainbow, asking people what they think of new technologies across the generations who lived through each one differently. It’s not ready to launch properly yet, but this week the platform fragility I’ve been banging on about for years feels like exactly the right week to quietly re-enter the frame.

Much of my year so far has gone into building contAIn™, and somewhere along the way I’ve stalled on the crazy relationship-building that used to be such an enjoyable part of working. That stops now so I’ll be reaching out to people over the next few weeks who might be able to help share it, so if that sounds like you, give me a shout or drop me a connection request.

One final thought: what’s the last thing you built that you’d struggle to find again if the platform it lived on pulled it?