The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Painting of the Technological Empowerment of the Workforce.'
I just had a funny moment on Twitter. Someone had posted about the US bombing Yemen, which I wasn't aware of. I knew we'd been backing Saudi atrocities there but didn't know we'd been bombing Yemen directly. So I asked for a source and got back two replies. The first said that there were many sources. The second said that I was stupid. Neither reply included a definitive source for the information.
Today I sent out my latest Substack newsletter. Titled 'The Technological Empowerment of the Workforce,' the piece considers worker solidarity, the economic drivers of unrest, and the way that technological advancement is changing power relationships. If you read this blog, you've probably already read much of what it has to say. But it's still nice to have all of the ideas presented together in the same place.
At this point, I've sent out eight newsletters in as many weeks. Each one presents perspectives that seem under-represented in public discourse. They're longer pieces that took a fair amount of work to complete. Getting them done consumed much of my free time during the last two months. Even so, despite having only a dozen subscribers, I'm feeling good about the project.
My initial goal for the newsletter was to use it as a space to organize ideas from my books and blog into a more concise collection of documents. The broad strokes of this have now been accomplished, leaving me with a solid foundation on which to build the next thing. There are many directions I could go from here.
To be honest, part of me wants to take a fiction break. And I'm sure I will eventually. I may even do a whole newsletter as a fiction chapter at some point. But my next one will probably be about control regime manipulation of the information environment or some comparably serious subject matter.
Part of the issue here is that there's too much to say. The mainstream press has been controlled for decades. The web has always been intertwined with the national security state. Even Wikipedia. The privatization of mass surveillance is its whole own subject. So are the constitutional acrobatics used to rationalize increasing infringements upon our freedoms.
One thing I've playing with is imagining myself in the future looking back at what I write. This helps me sort the more relevant from the overly temporal. It also challenges me to further refine the character of my writing. Sometimes this means making it more consistent. Sometimes it means selectively amplifying idiosyncrasies.
The main area I'm not so confident with is emotional language. When I was younger, I worked very hard to drastically limit my use of emotional language. These days, I barely use it. My thinking is that nobody wants to hear it. But maybe they do.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.