FOUNDER'S NOTES

Walking through a museum like Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, most of what you're looking at survived by changing shape. A lost Greek bronze survives today mostly as later Roman marble copies, made because the copies were valued enough to keep recreating even after the originals were melted down for their metal. A wall painting that would otherwise be gone gets recorded in an engraving before the plaster crumbles. A woven pattern gets translated into stone relief, a story told for ce

I went to the Glyptotek in Copenhagen in June and spent the whole morning moving through the floors and exhibitions without much of a plan, ancient stone sculpture on one level, nineteenth-century painting and bronze further along, the kind of museum where you can lose an entire morning without noticing the time passing. There's a feeling you get in a museum like that which is genuinely hard to put into words. It's something close to travelling back in time while staying comp

My daughter is almost two and she's in the middle of discovering agency. At dinner, instead of sitting where she's asked to sit, she stands up in her chair and screams at the top of her lungs. It's her choice, and she chooses whatever happens next, being picked up and removed from the table. She has learned the natural consequences of doing something and living with what came after. That's what agency actually looks like at its most basic. Action, then consequence, both genui

Part of what I actually do at The Changing Booth is curation, going looking for digital spaces worth someone's time and attention, filtering out the noise, deciding what's worth surfacing on a blog nobody is paying me to run. Most weeks that means me finding something. Recently, something found me instead. A fellow founder got in touch after his platform showed up as a recommendation inside AI-generated search results that linked back to a post on TCB's blog. Someone had aske

I wrote my Master's thesis in 2019 about organisational culture surveys, the kind most companies run once or twice a year, a set of standardised questions, a five-point scale, an aggregate score fed back to leadership a few weeks later as a single number meant to represent how an entire organisation feels about itself. The argument I made, stripped down to its core, was that these tools claim to capture what's actually going on inside an organisation but end up flattening it

I stopped to rest in a forest windbreak hut with my daughter a few weeks ago, one of those simple wooden shelters you find along Nordic hiking trails, three walls and a roof, built for exactly this, waiting out weather that hasn't decided what it's doing yet. She thought it was a good place to run in circles. I ended up reading the walls instead. Someone had been carving and writing on that wood for decades. Names, dates, hearts, the odd swear word, wonky handwriting layered

Commenting on social media has become cringe. Not exactly unpopular or risky, just cringe, which is somehow worse. Cringe is the word people use for things they'd be embarrassed to be seen doing even if nobody could actually punish them for it. At some point about a decade ago, the public comment started dying and the private message took over. If you had something to say about a post, you didn't say it under the post anymore. You hared it or screenshotted it and sent it to a

Back in January, I kept circling one observation. Almost everything we do online runs through words. We read them, write them, react to them, argue about them in comment sections that exist purely to generate more words. Even the tools marketed as creative are word-first underneath. You type a prompt to generate an image. You caption a photo to make it findable. You write a review to prove you felt something. Language sits between you and almost every digital experience, doin

I hear people talk about AI a lot lately, mostly in passing rather than in any organised way. At a bus stop, in a shop queue, at the school gate. And it's almost always dismissive. It's a threat, or it's beneath their interest, or it will never really touch their life. Which is fine. None of that changes anything for me directly. But it does make me think about timing. Not whether AI will change things, that argument is basically settled, but when the change people are alread

I switched from ChatGPT to Claude a few weeks ago, mostly because it felt like everyone was doing it, but also because I had a project I actually wanted to build. Not a conversation, not a back and forth of prompts and answers, but something with a website behind it. That distinction turned out to matter more than I expected. The signing up part was easy. It always is. Pay, access, watch a tutorial, copy someone else's clever prompt from a thread you found at midnight. Consum

🖊️ By Samantha Booth Jacobsen, Founder of The Changing Booth Malmö, Sweden - December 2025 Ever felt a stuck, a restless, bored or desperately unhappy with your current circumstances? This letter is for you. I’m Samantha Booth Jacobsen, founder of The Changing Booth , and this is the story behind our vision for Digital Discovery 2031 - and why I believe we’re standing on the edge of a new era of recreation and digital discovery. 🌱Feeling Stuck Is a Signal to Explore The Ch