Starting to Substack
At the behest of several current and former colleagues, I’ve decided to try my hand at substacking (is that a verb?). I used to blog, back when that was a popular thing, though eventually that got eaten up by Twitter, and for now I am going to try to go back to my old writing style for that blog, which was chatty, profane, and hopefully at least marginally enlightening.
I’m an intellectual omnivore, and at least for now I am going to write about whatever comes to mind. But in general, my topics will reflect the various things I’ve done in my professional life: American politics; intellectual history, especially the history of the social sciences; economic and political development; the ideology and marketing of tech; intelligence analysis and scenario planning; our changing planetary self-awareness; academia as a (collapsing) industry; and the failures and opportunities of technocratic governance.
A lot of what I try to do is understand how structural forces create different possibility spaces for the future, while also remaining open to the role of contingency and chance. I don’t think history has a meaning or a direction, but this does not mean it is merely a formless tale told by an idiot.
I’ll try to post once a day, and I’ll only start charging if/when I get to 100+ subscribers.