I have been threatening to start a Substack for months. Okay, I’ve done it.
Like all of us struggling in an attention economy, it feels as though I haven’t written for myself in years. As freelance opportunities have dried up more than ever, even that modestly monetized form continues to evaporate. And so, my voice—whatever that means—feels lost.
Substacks, of course, are not a perfect solution by any stretch. First of all, imagine the narcissism of someone willing to ask their friends and colleagues to subscribe to their unedited words. To say nothing of the business model, and countless other misgivings about any platform we use.
In a selfish way, that’s a place to begin for this newsletter, though. The title, Unwanted Utopias, comes from the title of my ongoing dissertation, and it refers to the futures that we are sold which might look like dystopia to us but are, in fact, utopias to the corporations narrativizing them. My contention is that we must intimately understand how these stories of the future are woven and enacted if there’s any hope of constructing alternatives.
So, in part, this newsletter will be about technology and capital, and the politics that coalesce around it all. Academia remains as desperately cloistered as ever, and I want to be able to hash out my thinking on things in a place where someone might actually read it (even if it’s just my mom).
But it will also be about movies, or whatever I want!
It will also be free. There is no scenario in which I attract enough subscribers to make payment feel like anything more than fleecing those closest to me for a few bucks. But never say never, I guess. It’s also true that writing has value, and whatever else I think about myself, I do think I can write. This, I suppose, is the question for any “creator” within the “digital economy” hoping to “express themselves” but also “pay rent.” Maybe a topic for a future newsletter. I’m told that real, human-originating words are going to be in hot demand as we become further enveloped in AI-generated text, so I’ll be ready to cash in once that happens.
So, if I had to boil it down, my aim here is to point out the bullshit that I see every day, specifically in the tech press. In my research, I spend hours reading the insane stuff that tech CEOs and their cronies say, whether to the public or their shareholders or whoever else has a stake. Far too often, it is repeated ad nauseam, and we end up in cyclical hype patterns and the critiques only come once it all blows up. NFTs were the future, until they weren’t. web3 and crypto were the future, until they weren’t. The metaverse was the future, until it wasn’t. Now, ChatGPT is the future—this time, trust us, it’s the real deal.
I aim to send something out once a week, likely Fridays, with a simple structure — one (or two) primary topics, then a round-up of links and other ephemera I think you might want to click on.
More than anything, though, I want to remember what it was like to write because I liked it. I haven’t felt that way in such a long time. I hope you’ll follow along with me as I try to get it back.
Ephemera
While I don’t agree with everything here, James Bridle wrote one of the better takes I’ve seen on ChatGPT and what is actually “dangerous” about it, for The Guardian.
Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski wrote about the post-metaverse moment with acuity, for Dissent. “While the real future appears to us as either unavailable or catastrophic, Meta offers us a post-solutionist anesthetic.”
Similarly, in case you missed it, Paul Murray asked, “Who is still inside the metaverse?” for New York, and unsurprisingly the answer is: no one you want to be around!
Movie Recommendation
Every week, I will try to include a movie rec at the end of the newsletter, preferably an underseen gem or something of that nature. I’ll start out, though, with something a bit more familiar: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s masterpiece Millennium Mambo, newly restored in 4K. If you live in a city big enough to have a theatre showing it, definitely make it out; if not, wait impatiently for it to stream. One of those movies that simultaneously feels very much of-its-time (2001) and also timeless, both looking to the embodied future and reflecting on the hazy past, to reach some kind of contested present.
Cool. So happy to see you doing something you loved to do since the day you learned to read and write. Writing for the love of writing.
Looking forward to you educating me and making me to stop and think.