A 2024 update for my Substack
Welcome to this infrequently updated Substack. Unlike the many journalists and pundits who I follow here, I am not trying to build a career from this content. This is more like a journal for me, one that allows me to document my various intellectual hobbies. I research and write for a profession, but I also read and write for fun. Here I share some of that non-professional content. Occasionally I focus on a particular theme for a period. I did a long series on masculinity that was very personal; some of you enjoyed it. That led me into a series focused on muskets (yes, muskets) that was interwoven with discussions of the 2nd Amendment and related issues.
In 2023 the trail went cold here because I got pretty busy with other matters. I still have my musket and my other period firearms (a Kentucky pistol and Kentucky rifle). But I don’t write about or produce videos about them anymore. For now I’m turning to something else for these virtual pages.
Futurity
In my professional life I write about the future, in particular the future technology-related behaviors of consumers. But my interest in doing this work stems from a long-standing interest in the future generally. I am of that generation that experienced the first Star Wars movie as a revelation, and I ate up every possible TV show in the '70s and '80s about the future, from Buck Rogers to Battlestar Galactica. I have always been impressed with the way people imagine the future based on the present or some loose adaptations from the past.
It has also been obvious that people are terrible at imagining the future. Sometimes because the future is just hard to imagine but also because we are terribly unwilling to accept even the present much less extrapolate it accurately into the future. This principle is true in my professional life, but it is even truer when we start looking at fiction or other speculative envisionings of the future.
I think I'm going to spend some of my sub stack time trying to imagine the future differently. Some of it will just be variations on other great narratives, but some of it will be grounded in what we see today in the politics and social concern about things as basic as gene-modified crops or the dreaded AGI. I hope you find something you enjoy.
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