How I'll Figure Things Out Now

Happy 2025! I’m starting a new thing and I hope you’ll join in.

These are usually called newsletters, an awful name. It implies PR, PDFs, and listicles. This one won't be that or my thoughts on the news, whatever news means now. Corporate social media, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter etc, used to be a place, however imperfect, where somebody could write something, and their contacts could discuss it. Not anymore. Now their algorithms bury anything interesting or wild, rewards the banal and divisive. We remain hypnotized even though the feeds are all so dull; and so many people have left these various platforms. Different geographies and generations are on different ones anyway. So I'm out.

In tough times, it's always worth looking back to see what used to work. So that's what I'm doing. I guess you could even call this a blog. I know all of you and like you, or at the very least we have come across each other and had what was for me a positive interaction.

The ancient curse, “may you live in interesting times”...well, we sure got that! We all have shorter attention spans due to scrolling and the incentives of corporate social media to keep us scrolling for ever higher profits. It is now much easier to retreat into silos and bubbles. But now more than ever in my life, I am desperate to understand what is happening and why it is happening, what is important and why it is important, and what actions this understanding will lead us to. That is generally what I will write about and hope you will discuss it with me; I am unsure of so much.

What specifically will I write about, you ask? Not sure yet but not much commentary about the events of the past few days. Plenty of people smarter than me already have that covered. I’m more interested in what I think are the less discussed reasons behind these events. Sort of under-the-radar macro-causality. Some examples: the fall and rise of the Commons, How fascism has changed since Mussolini, Togo, and Hitler, interoperability and the right to repair, how best to smash monopoly capitalism, how elections are different now, how communities have changed, how we make decisions, neo-practicality, and much much more!

If you don’t want these, it will be easy to unsubscribe and then you just won’t get them. If you decide to try it out for a while, I hope they will be interesting enough to discuss, give opinions, and ask questions. I am not sure how this will work, and will try to set it up so that it is easy to participate but not bothersome. Tell me how you feel about that. Not sure how often; let’s see what groove we settle into. Maybe once or twice each week and we can see how that feels. I’ll send out a survey every once in a while to see what y’all are thinking and get some advice. I don’t think I will ever ask for money and subscriptions, and will definitely never sell your contact information.

At least let's try this out and if in a few weeks or months you never read it and get sick of it, chuck it then. No hard feelings! in the meantime, comment in the comments, or write me directly and tell me what you think, etc. I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks, and stay relentless!

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