Matthew McDowell-Sweet | In Motion

Hi there, I'm Matt.

Meta

I'm a founder and researcher with a broad interest in complex systems, computing and communication. I'm located in the south west of England, in the UK. The best way to reach me is email: matt@thisdomain. I'm on active on Warpcast, Discord (@matt_ms) and Twitter, too.

Now

Right now, I'm focused on:

Building a new way to save, share and search
Researching motion-based approaches to computing and intelligence

Other activities? Producing digests of interesting things I find on the web; practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu and cross-training different forms of movement; hanging out at The Yak Collective and the Summer of Protocols forum; blogging (occasionally); keeping up with Critical Role and the NBA.

Previously

A selection of salient past activities, projects and milestones:

Product plus 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. My current reading tracks and my highest rated books from the past few years are 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).

Top Rated Books of 2023

All lists are based on the "Read" section of my 2023 annual review. A mega-thread of all of 2023's reads can be found here.

Top rated non-fiction, 2023