spaceless.com has been online since 1997 — longer than Google, longer than most of the web as most people know it. This is its latest iteration: rebuilt from scratch in 2026, same address, completely new architecture. A lot of twenty year old half-finished coding projects have been tightened up, fixed up and made a bit more relevant.
Gordon Fletcher
I am Associate Dean: Research & Innovation at Salford Business School, University of Salford. My research covers information systems, digital transformation and AI using a social anthropology lens — my particular interest is how digital systems encode power, whose interests they serve, and what they obscure.
The tools and pages on this site have always been working experiments as much as they are useful utilities. The language games and browser tools — these lie somewhere between "real" research, research infrastructure and critical design. I have always been more interested in what a tool does to you than what it does for you.
Academic Work
My research is published across information systems and and management. I am also currently working on understanding the pathways of GenAI development through system card analysis — using the STEEPLE dimensions to understand the strategic decisions embedded in how AI companies present their systems to the world.
- Strategic Digital Transformation
- Digital and Social Media Marketing
- Digital Transformation during a Lockdown
Full publication list and citation metrics: ORCID · University profile
Projects & Experiments
Outside my formal academic work, I build things. Some are useful, some are deliberately provocative. Sometime they are a bit of both. The Situationist tradition of détournement or what can be described as the subversive repurposing of existing cultural material goes through a lot of it. Some of the Situationist perspective can be found in the magazine archive (Goole - the street magazine from Brisbane shows a lot of this) and my early thesis work are clearly influenced by this thinking.
A tool that looks like Excel but behaves unpredictably. Critique of corporate rationality as interface design.
An intentionally awkward energy logging interface that problematises individual consumption monitoring under capitalism.
Tools for exposing hidden labour, governance structures, and energy costs in open source repositories.
A text adventure game about navigating the UK Research Excellence Framework. You will not survive the impact assessment.
ASCII roguelike exploring organisational survival during polycrisis, structured around Beer’s Viable Systems Model.
A client-side GIS application for visualising CSV data on maps with intelligent marker clustering.
Text analysis: word frequency, keyword-in-context, readability statistics. One of my earliest "proper" coding projects built for language learning at Griffith University (Italian, if my recollection is correct). Updated a few times in Perl and PHP and then totally rebuilt in 2026.
Language play transformations into Pig Latin, Tutnese, Rövarspåket, Backslang and others.
Site History
The origins spaceless.com predates Web 2.0, predates social media and predates most of the commercial internet as it currently exists. It came from Goole magazine as it became clear that a magazine format online could reach many more people (for less cost to everyone). It has been through many incarnations and has been affected by dodgy operators quietly nuking their webhosting operations (around 2005 - always keep a backup!). Some of the earliest code was written as clunky Perl scripts including some of the earliest openly availe chat pages (before I managed to break everything with some equally clunky PHP code). The current version was rebuilt in 2026 keeping the "retro" random images on the home page and taking it even further with new layouts and themes that all change around (sometimes unexpectedly). Many of the ideas deserved a fresh coat of paint and a working navigation. If things have worked properly it even works on mobile (most of the time).
Elsewhere
I maintain a low profile across the web. The 217lemurs Tumblr was where I was posting for years instead of here and other work is more academic writings (doing the Tumblr blog did help me to get back into academic writing too.)
The Pokémon GO handle is @gsf (5589 4695 0771 if you need a friend - IYKYK). Find me in Macclesfield, usually
looking at something that has no business being a Pokéstop.
Contact
For academic enquiries, the University of Salford staff page is the right place. For everything else, the feedback page usually works fine. I do read it.
spaceless.com — est. 1997