Steve Bowbrick

I’ve been caught up in the web, digital, social media and so on since the early nineties: starting and running businesses, travelling, consulting, writing for many publications - including the Guardian and the FT. There was the dot.com boom; a dalliance with venture capital, America, private equity, the Saatchis. Exhilaration, exhaustion, misery, repeat: you know the kind of thing (told the story here). These days I have a social media job at a major broadcaster. There's less drama but I get to bring my wisdom to a variety of interesting projects, from AI to accessibility to sustainability (my actual stupid CV is over on LinkedIn).

Meanwhile, I obviously can’t stop blogging: I’ve been doing it for over 25 years at bowblog.com. My current obsession, though, is a materialist history of cinema told on Substack. Short essays about the top-grossing Hollywood film from each year since 1913 - The Birth of a Nation, Napoléon, It Happened One Night, Ben-Hur, 2001: A Space Odyssey… Eventually I will get to the present day. In the meantime I insert the occasional contemporary piece - the 2025 Oscars, Villeneuve's Dune movies, the magnificent Gene Hackman - that kind of thing. It's called GROSS (the reviews are also on my Letterboxd obvs).

I write poems. You can download a pamphlet that uses Chaucer's rhyme royal that I cleverly called ROYAL from my blog (or email me and I'll send you a lovely, colourful, tabloid-sized hard copy in the post at no charge). I share my photos on Flickr, like an old-timer, and I've also been contributing to a local politics blog, on which we are mostly sarcastic about our MP, for a long time.

Popular posts at Bowblog.com: Some bullet-points about regulation, an explainer; How do you fund a monarchy?, some history; What have we learnt? Realism vs the liberal world order and Paragraphs about AI, my intrusive thoughts.

At Radlett Wire: the Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two; a local elections post-mortem. Reform UK shredded the Tories and terrified Labour in England last week - here's how it went in Hertfordshire. Plus Hertsmere steps into history, a three-part guide to the project to build 'Europe's biggest data centre' in our neighbourhood.

And in GROSS, materialist cinema criticism in newsletter form: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: they fought the law; Donald Trump's beef with foreign movie production, as usual there's a core of truth in Trump's arbitrary actions; a two-parter about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: Working in orbit and Brilliant, fastidious, ridiculous.