If This Road
A book in forty pieces · First of three
A quiet walk through what is shifting, and what we might leave behind.
A shop on a high street that closed during the years no one quite remembers. A canal towpath in early March, when the light comes back. A bench at the top of a hill where someone has stopped longer than they meant to. A small room being built, somewhere quiet, by people who are not making a fuss about it.
These are some of the rooms in this book. They are not illustrations of the argument. They are the argument.
All the books
The trilogy (April 2026)
- ifthisroad.com — the wake. A quiet walk through what is shifting. (this site)
- orphans.ai — the diagnosis. Twenty-five years of unrecorded work.
- theheld.ai — the disposition. The working relationship between a person and a machine.
And separately
- thebearwasright.com — a small picture book.
- thebearloved.com — a small book in twenty-three days.
- themanybuilders.com — a place where the names of the people building AI sit alongside the names of those who held the rest.
The walk begins
There was a shop at the end of my street called Hadley's. It had been there longer than I had. Mr Hadley ran it. His father had run it before him. It sold small useful things. Batteries. Screwdrivers. The kind of bread that is not pretending to be anything else.
Last winter, it closed.
I thought about Hadley's more than I expected to. The shop was not important. Mr Hadley was friendly but we were not friends. I could buy batteries somewhere else. None of it mattered, really.
Except that, thinking about it in bed one night, I started counting the things on my street that had gone, and I could not think of many things that had come. The library is open three days a week instead of six. The post office is gone. The bank is now a Thai restaurant. The Thai restaurant before the current one was also a restaurant, and closed.
None of this is a tragedy. Streets have always changed.
But something happens when you add up small changes none of which matter. The total matters, even if none of the parts did. You look up one day and the place you live has become a different place. Not better, not worse. Different. And you realise you did not choose any of the changes. They happened while you were looking the other way, and now they are your life.
This book is about that feeling.
Read it to the end.
For press and sharing
About this book
The book, in a paragraph
If This Road is a book in forty short pieces by Doug Scott. It is a quiet walk through what is shifting — the closing shops, the thinning friendships, the emptying kitchens, the machines we are building — and what small things might still hold. It is written in the voice of a woman Doug imagines: childless, middle-aged, someone who has been paying attention. He chose that voice because the people who have most often held things together through hard times have been women like her. It is not an academic work. It is not a polemic. It is a careful description of a moment, and a few specific things that have helped in other hard moments. The book is free to read, free to download, and free to share.
The author, in a paragraph
Doug Scott spent twenty years building and backing technology companies. This book is not about that. His LinkedIn profile features a teddy bear and his current job title is "Alice in Wonderland and Pooh Bear Fan." All three things — the business, Alice, Pooh — are true at once. Doug lives on Earth.
If you want to write
If the book reached you, and you want to say something: moc.daorsihtfi@guod
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Laid out for reading or printing. 103 pages.
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The book is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0. Share it freely. Translate it. Print it. Turn it into an audiobook. Make it reach someone it would not have reached.
The only thing the licence asks is: do not sell it for profit, and credit the author. That is all.
A few things people have done with books like this
- Sent the EPUB to a Kindle using the Send to Kindle app — it reads on-device like any other book.
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- Uploaded the EPUB to a free self-publishing service (Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg mirrors) for wider distribution.
- Translated a single piece into another language and shared it with people in that language.
- Read a chapter aloud and sent the recording to someone who does not read.
About the author
Doug Scott grew up in North Shields. He left school at sixteen, turned down a job at the Swan Hunter shipyards, and spent his twenties on the edges of various things.
In 2003 he started carrentals.co.uk, which rented a million cars without owning any. In 2016 he started Redbrain, which he ran until 2025. When he stepped back it was managing over a billion pounds a year in sales for its clients, on sixty-eight million pounds in revenue, profitably, without venture capital. He owns most of it but no longer runs it. The people running it now are the reason it works.
Across the same twenty-five years he backed founders privately, through accelerators, and as a direct angel investor.
He believes a kitchen table is a piece of infrastructure — in the same way water, electricity, and the internet are pieces of infrastructure. He believes the patch of grass at the top of a street is one too. He believes an aunt's house eight doors down is one. He believes a hand of cards in his grandmother's kitchen was one. He believes the people who held that infrastructure in place are the people the machines are missing.
He is the author of three books: If This Road, orphans.ai, and theheld.ai.
moc.daorsihtfi@guod