Greetings new listeners. Love to old friends.
(header image from (https://twitter.com/animalartcrimes/media))
It's been quiet, but I'm un-quieting it. I am also moving it away from Substack on account of being more conscious of 1. The value we all have in generating attention, even (especially) at small scale and 2. Who that attention supports financially. Many things are terrible, but in terms of web technology we are in a golden age: there is no reason not to run your own online infrastructure if you know how. (that's a big if, but it turns out I have this option and I'm taking it). Welcome back to the new-old DIY internet, of the Whole Earth Catalog.
- You do not need to do anything if you still want to hang with me. If you're reading this you've been moved to my new platform, which is running a self-hosted copy of Ghost and Stripe.
- Paid subscriptions have been converted to free. All newsletters will now be posted free. I've also shut down my Patreon. If you still want to subscribe (thank you, it helps! <3) you can do that by clicking the button in the lower right and then "view plans."
- If you forgot you signed up at all and want to unsubscribe, please sign-in with the email you received this on and then uncheck "subscribe." I will miss you, but I get it.
- If you want me to totally delete your account (or you have other questions) please email me: [email protected]
The truth is I've been overwhelmingly busy just trying to keep the lights on. Prior to the pandemic I sent out a tweet asking who I might hire to work on a handful of projects as I built out... something... but the bottom fell out of.. well.. everything. I definitely didn't hire anyone. The office is gone. I haven't left a 1km square in more than a year. I sent out an optimistic post last summer but really there's nothing left of my practice: There are no speaking gigs, no freelance work, no residencies, conferences, lectures, grants, writing projects or workshops. There are no future plans. Most everything I was working on has ended or failed in spectacular and very un-fun fashion. We're all Pandemic Fine: decently healthy and well fed, and that's a lot, but now what? I haven't a clue. Not sure there's a world left to engage.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
Forward again:
- I started this newsletter as a vehicle for extended essays on internet culture related topics, beginning with The Timeline and the deliberate destruction of linear time as an advertising ploy, which has largely reconfigured the way we consume culture and life. This is still true and relevant, and I have more chapters about Other Stuff, I just couldn't figure out how they made sense right now, so I paused. There will be more of these once I figure it out. I'm sitting on a multi-part essay about VR as well. I think. I'm going to try and organize them with a table of contents. And I might add some more expository introductions to each section. Crazy, I know.
- Originally this newsletter was intended to help me build a coherent narrative around the academic, art, professional consulting and production work that I've done for decades. I'm completely giving up on this: I can't make heads or tails of the day, forget my weird-ass life's work. I'm going to just dump content ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- I am going to attempt more frequent and much shorter posts, which knowing me will probably not be short.
The Feral Exit is dead. Long Live The Feral Exit.
