Matthew McDowell-Sweet | In Motion

Hi there. I'm Matt. I'm a founder, researcher, scout and storyteller with a broad interest in complex systems, computing and communication. I'm located in the South West of England, in the United Kingdom. The best way to reach me is email: matt@thisdomain. I'm also on Farcaster, Bluesky and X/Twitter.

Now

Right now, my priority is building Subset: a better way to save, share and search the web. Other activities include exploring motion-based approaches to computing and intelligence, magpie'ing things online, devising a novel way to produce works of fiction, and practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu (alongside other forms of movement).

Previously

Previously, I've done a bunch of things: three-plus years of product and content at a B2B software marketplace startup, organised and hosted YakCon, taught myself product management and computing, self-published four books, contributed to Ribbonfarm twice, blogged daily for three years, worked in a factory for three years, and spent time waiting, bartending, movement coaching and doing event security. A fuller list with links and approximate timings is below.

A selection of salient past activities, projects and milestones

Sent out 222 weekly email digests with 1500ish links (summer 2020-Oct. 2024)
Reacquianted myself with Git branching (Oct. 2024)
Learned how to learn (Sept. 2024)
Product and content at a B2B software marketplace startup (late 2020-early 2024)
Yak Governance Studies Sequence contributor (May-June 2023)
Contributor to the tinker's tale within the Wanderverse (March 2023)
Temporary Benevolent Dictator, YakCon (Jan. 2023)
Contributor to a YC pop-up consulting project (Dec. 2022)
Learned to Product Own (Aug. 2022)
Intro'd myself to data science (June-July 2022)
Self-published Riven, a novella (June 2022)
Learned about CLIs, IDEs and Git (late 2021)
Learned the fundamentals of computing (late 2020-late 2021)
Explored elements of product management (summer 2020)
Contributed to Yak Talk (summer 2020)
Learned to Scrum Master (July 2020)
Self-published Ss, a short story collection (July 2020)
Self-published Barker, a novel (May 2020)
Provided freelance editorial services (2017-2019)
2 x Ribbonfarm contributor (2017-2018)
Completed The Art of Longform (summer 2017)
Produced six Paris-Review-style interviews (2016-2017)
Self-published Disconnected, a collection of blog posts (Aug. 2016)
Three years of daily blogging (Aug. 2015-Aug. 2018)
Factory work (mid 2017-mid 2020)
Waiting/bartending, movement coaching, event security response (2010-2017)
Mediocre student, okay athlete (2000s)
Born (early 1990s)

Reads

Much of the goodness in my life has and continues to emerge from reading. So, in order to encourage others to adopt the practice (and to benefit from the serendipitous dialogues that may occur), I've posted my current reading tracks, my highest rated books from the past few years, and a couple other lists below.

Active reading tracks

I read continuously and in parallel. I'm a moody reader and reading multiple texts simply increases the probability that there's always something I'm excited to read at a particular moment. I accomplish this by having defined tracks that act as attentional braces, and it's a stance that applies to both fiction and non-fiction.

The current tracks for non-fiction are:

Motion: the study of motion as an abstract phenomena (flows, folds and fields) and as an applied concept (flows, folds and fields in different domains)
Computing: the study of computing across the entire range of the technological stack, from the boring edge to the bleeding edge and from established paradigms to alternative, adjacent possible, truncated ones
Intelligence: the study of how one (a person, an animal, an entity, a system, agents, sub-agents, or super-agents) situates themselves in the world, constructs realities, makes decisions and embodies actions

For fiction, I am splitting my reading like so (and with an emphasis on female and minority authors): one fantasy read, one sci-fi read and one read that is classic or a fresh work (genre agnostic).

Quake books

A "quake book" is a text that radically perturbs how one thinks about and acts within the world. The shift is experienced, individually and ideally societally, as positive (as opposed to the negative shifts associated with ideological or epistemological info hazards). A quake book may make an existing belief, value or stance especially legible to oneself, or provide irrefutable evidence for something felt at a deep level. It may catalyse a novel perspective or insight, or provoke new questions because it's wrong in a particularly interesting or sacrilegious way. No matter how it happens, a quake book terraforms one's existence upon engagement. I first heard of them via Ryan Holiday sometime in the mid-2010s. He heard of them via Tyler Cowen. These are mine: