in the London live coding? scene we’ve developed a tradition of writing down and sharing what has become known as “unstructured thoughts” after every event.
I don’t know how it started but it involves writing down your thoughts about anything in any (unstructured) order afterwards: maybe on the train home, maybe on the sofa the next day, maybe on your commute, maybe at your desk at work while you’re supposed to be doing something else
They’re supposed to happen soon after the event. It’s okay to do your belated unstructured thoughts late, but you’ll probably have forgotten or missed or lost out on some feeling compared to the immediately-after-the-event thoughts.
You write down bullet points, or a numbered list. Each point is a thought. They can be long or short. I think the idea is that you write down everything! They can include positive or negative feelings.
Here are some examples:
https://social.toplap.org/@synte/115146081063067064
https://universeodon.com/@jamesholden/114313832164497641
https://social.toplap.org/@hellojoey/116332730501427659
https://mas.to/@TodePond/116459307414412645
The examples above come from mastodon. At some point we created an unstructured thoughts channel on the London live coding? discord server, and that’s where most of the unstructured thoughts go nowadays but i try to share them outside too.
eg: https://mas.to/@TodePond/116334698402973862
You might notice the occasional person that they “must” share their unstructured thoughts, or they’ll call them “obligatory”. This is true: You must. It’s considered a donation: You are donating your thoughts and feelings and experiences to the scene. The idea is this:
No one is in charge. There’s no central figure running the scene. There’s no central brain or store of information. There are many people running and attending many different events. We’re not competing with each other, we’re working together. By sharing information, we can all learn together and become smarter. We’re not geniuses: We form a larger scenius.
Even the smallest thoughts… Sometimes you might think “This is such a small thought. It feels pointless to share it!” but it’s sometimes those small thoughts that.. when combined with other thoughts.. show you patterns of bigger things.
And I think it’s especially important to share negative feelings you experience from events. They identify problems that don’t necessarily get fixed right away, but they make everyone aware of them, not just a small handful of organisers, and it makes people watch out for those problems, and then we build up a bigger picture of it and (eventually) (hopefully) try to fix it.
Positive feelings are nice too though!! Unstructured thoughts are a great destination for all those warm fuzzy feelings you get a day after an AlgoRhythms, for example. They can be really sweet: They can involve showing your appreciation for someone, or the scene in general: Warning! Unstructured thoughts can make you cry 🥹
I think: Unstructured thoughts represent a rejection of the BIG DATA tech nob-head norms we’ve begun to (unfortunately) submit to in everyday life. INFORMATION is valuable: It’s powerful. Your thoughts are a precious tool that let you make decisions and take actions. Currently, in 2026, the BIG TECH evil corpos of the world have all the information they want. It’s a completely unfair / one-sided matchup. They have huge amounts of personal information about all of us, despite our best efforts, and we, as individuals, we have almost nothing in comparison. But UNSTRUCTURED THOUGHTS is a small meaningful effort to undo / reverse / move on from some of that imbalance. We don’t need one person / one entity / one computer / one company to store all the data. Our unstructured thoughts don’t exist anywhere other than the ephemeral dialogue between us. They only exist because the jam keeps going. If the scene stops, the data vanishes. No one sees the entire picture: We see it together: We all touch different parts of the elephant / the world. With trust and sharing and good will and love we can move it forward / make it better.
I think of all this in the context of:
It’s cool to see “unstructured thoughts” spread to other parts of the world via the pastagang network.
https://social.oc.is/@reckter/116462461077998881
but I wish other scenes in other places would do more unstructured thoughts too. we have so much to learn from them / you. I know some other scenes are more private / reserved than us, and I get that, but also, we can’t play to lose. I think: If we are to understand how to work together globally: whether that’s on important things like live coding or unimportant things like dealing with fascism, we NEED to make communication networks that ANYONE can use. While “unstructured thoughts” probably isn’t the be-all and end-all……. it’s better than nothing.
from me here in London, i invite you to join the global scenius. i am ready to receive your unstructured thoughts 🫡 and i donate these unstructured thoughts to the scene 🫡
back to the bbbbbbcfghjjn