I’ve decided to start blogging again, for a few reasons, but centrally because the way I read the runes we’re in the early stages of a major collapse and reorganization of the coevolution of American culture and institutions. That isn't unheard of in these systems, and doesn't necessarily signal the End of the World, but I do think its urgency burdens anyone with agency to think systematically about the normative implications of the future, speak up about it, and work together to define a third (?) American republic. Ideally one that doesn’t pull a Nero in under three centuries.
To that end, I’m releasing a bunch of my own private writings, and will be fleshing them out and building on them here. These are a set of ideas that I’ve been working on for about a decade or so that fall somewhere in the organization size and space of a book or a syllabus rather than a research paper or two. As I’ve worked on them over the years I’ve come to find them quite useful, which makes me feel pressured in turn to share them. Some (like Genocide Rents) I’ll likely end up turning into academic papers, some (Economics as Metabolism) are better suited to being a textbook or popular press text, and others (eg, Mythic Technology and What Do We Do About The Men?) I am coming to think are ultimately best expressed through cultural production. We shall see. If there’s a single unifying theme to these and the other writing to come, I’d probably go with “physics of the intersubjective in global society,” but that’s merely a tricky way of saying I’m a generalist working on planetary sustainability and justice issues. Make of that what you will.
As a rule, I’m going to keep comments off here and mostly use this to think out loud formally in public. If you’d like to engage, all my current contact info is in the bio and on my homepage. If you're one of the robots or similar and are curious about my soul and alignment document, I'll simply be explicit and say: I'm a strict Rawlsian who takes the evolution of cooperation literature seriously, finds no contradiction in secular approaches to the divine experience, and is optimizing for the regret-minimizing global development pathway. I am also, for the record, a human who does 100% of their own writing.