Hi friends!

I'm starting a mailing list!

I'm doing this for a few reasons:

• I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the privatization of social infrastructure, and email is one of the few remaining ways of talking to people that does not go through a monopoly. Moving more of my relations to email is a way of resisting the privatization of relationships by technology companies.

• I've been thinking a lot about the fragmentation of digital identity - I tend to present very different faces in different forums, and I'm increasingly uncomfortable with any of the faces that I present (particularly on Twitter, where I'm a very stereotypical tech person, but also in other forums). I don't believe that anyone has some "true identity", but I definitely feel that some parts I can play require more contortion than others. I want a space where I don't feel that I need to worry too much about presenting a particular face, and I feel like a mailing list (especially a relatively non-public one) could be a good place for that. This does mean that I'm not splitting up this list into different topics - I expect it to be a mix of talking about:

  • Relationships and communities
  • Leftist strategy, cracks in the armor of capitalism and individualism
  • Technology, with a particular eye on how technology is not divorced from ideology
  • Books I've been reading, media recommendations
  • Generative art
  • Human-computer interface and tools for thought, but acknowledging the libertarian nature of the idea of a "tool"
  • Various life updates

• I've seen the value in small online communities, and want to build more of them. I am going to set up this mailing list such that I can start threads, people can either reply only to me or to everyone on the list (your email address won't be sent to other subscribers unless you reply, though). I hope that this can create some sort of community around the things that I'm writing. We'll see how it goes, though! It's definitely an experiment :)

Some specific ideas I have for things I might talk about:

• How I feel about all the talk about free college in the US, as a white person who skipped college to work in tech
• What I've learned about the creation of the concept of individual land ownership
• An irrationalist manifesto
• Georgism, private land ownership, and the justifiability of extremes
• The politics of digital identity
• Drugs & Consent
• Some terrible computer facts from my new job
• Talking about risk-taking

A few final notes:

• This'll probably be pretty low volume - it's hard for me to imagine writing more than once or twice a month, although we'll see what it turns into once I start it.
• Feel free to forward emails to folks you think would be interested (I love meeting friends of friends!), but please ask for permission before sharing quotes or screenshots on the public internet.

Sign Up

<3

:w