Updated on 4/19/2023:
To reflect my reflections done over time. Feedback was helpful in refining them; click the links to read updated versions. Thanks to all whose comments shaped the revisions.
Preface to Readers in Review
Substack is the first platform I’ve used for reflective writing. I wrote business copy for 13 years to avoid this very situation. Selling commercial text enabled me to avoid being in the position of marketing any creative works at all, i.e. “selling my soul.”
Creative writing and/or political themes were excluded topics in my paid work, and I liked it that way just fine. All this time, I didn’t want to share what was on my mind; and now, I just can’t seem to stop.
Nor can I avoid noticing that the value of my writing is measured and quantified only in two ways: algorithm feeds, and my incapacity to connect on a personal level to a social world that I’ve come to view as pathological.
Both render my work as effectively: Demonetized. This is how the algorithm communicates: “You have no value here.” So, everything is getting a Review, now.
Readers need to be reviewed, too.
Alien-Nation, Atomized Pain-Voyeurism, Defining Terms
Letters to the Abyss is a term referencing the deep alienation between writer and reader. One must write about what you know, and I know how to write about internal conflicts; physical, mental and economic pain. It was excruciating to write - so I’m sure it’s not an entirely comfortable read.
The experience-chasm between the two is the Abyss.
Systemic medical neglect produces people like me. I am not writing here for enjoyment, neither for mine, nor yours.
I’m certainly not expecting financial support from people who endlessly have better things to do than reflect seriously on the various kinds of damage done to people in my situation.
This damage was inflicted by a “privatized for-profit medical service system that functions as a wealth transfer machine; it is designed to maximize profits from illness, injury and death,” to paraphrase Dr. Bronston.
“There are stunning advances in health systems and medical research…..why are we not all benefiting from these advances? Why are these advances not being used universally? Why is wealth a determinant rather than being alive and human.” - Dr. Bronston
Avert your eyes, if you must: I cannot.
This damage is legitimized through social norms, which social media distributes.
Publishing here ignited dormant internal tensions. Here’s the key contradiction: Substack packages (externalizes) the intrinsic value contained in these texts. One of them was penned in 2011 - twelve years in the making - for example.
Again, I never intended to market this kind of content. Certainly not to social media!
And yet, Substack’s owners now have my 12-year article, “Nuclear Gaslight.” Just like that: *snap* Instant transfer of value from writer to platform algorithm.
Publishing here does not negate hyper-exploitation; it is reinforced and amplified.
Extraction of creative value fueled the tech industry’s rise to power. Content creators can’t bear to calculate the rate of extraction numerically - it’s just too painful.
Feed the algorithm - or die. This is the new “publish, or perish.” Censorship regime, the new curator. No other censorship regime in history even came close.
Content creators now churn out thousands of hours of free manual labor - while insatiable algorithms curate it automatically. And they’re so happy about it all!
You should be, too. Unspoken rule.
On YouTube, the creators’ risk of being deleted increased the more high-quality work was done. Like how they deleted six years of Chris Hedge’s videos. Overnight. Poof.
Censors risked nothing.
Here, there is a new model. Social censorship serves in lieu of the formal kind. The result is the same; a tilted playing field that favors those who hold the “correct” views.
Seems like a fair fight.
Let’s get blunt: Humanity is owed a basic income at this point. Tech feudalism must end. Instead, we get more hyper-exploitation from the rentier class.
It takes no effort to pressure content creators to produce for a mass audience with questionable tastes in entertainment; it’s all baked into the business model. Chris Hedges called it “the triumph of spectacle.”
Mmm…maybe I don’t want a large audience; does that mean I have no right to earn an income, suddenly? The answer is in the silence.
The WPA program of the 1930s was just a good start: Artists got paid regardless of the size of their audiences. Political leverage does wonders for the wallet.
In the absence of revolutionary pressure, it’s no wonder no new WPA appeared in the pandemic “aid” programs: McCarthyism by default, ugh.
I have much venting to do…
Website Writing to Substack Stories
The first piece, Website Writing to Substack Stories, introduces me as an author to the alleged reader - by giving my stats and “pen name” at the company: I was literally just a number.
The details of what happened was the topic of Website Writing. To be clear, this isn’t just about me; there are many other authors experiencing a sudden loss of income due to automation, post-ChatGPT.
Ghostwriters; an invisible labor force.
Who will hear our story if I say nothing of this collective and carefully concealed crisis….or, am I one hand clapping? Are we all to suffer this alone, in the dark?
Alone Together……great tune, btw.
Comment: Keep your head up.
Author response: This was a very interesting comment. What was most interesting is that the person who made it gave unprompted financial support. I couldn’t help but notice how that simple fact changed the way I read and reacted to the comment. Perception counts. During my lifetime, signs of life-support have always been few and far between. I now oscillate openly between unfounded optimism and interrogative pessimism (a deliberate process of interrogating the root cause of pessimism or hopelessness). Sometimes my head is up; sometimes it’s not - I’m probably looking at something. Either way, the financial support affected me on a visceral level, and that surprised me. It was a bit…different. Even as I write these lines, I’m still reacting, and don’t really have a pre-formed set of words for it. I rather like this awkward sense of stumbling around my brain trying to figure out what to write. It’s kind of…fun. Thank you for the material support that made this moment possible. I’m literally smiling.
Train Wreck, Palestine: The Perfect Metaphor
Comment: Our people should never forget this "too-expensive-to-be-preventable tragedy". Though, I fear that State Media soon will.
Author response: I’d only amend that by naming it as “corporate-state media.” Yes. The way this comment framed the tragedy really caught my attention: The "too-expensive-to-be-preventable tragedy." How many industries are driven by the same demonic energy that imposes conditions that make such a derailment inevitable? In so many horrifying stories that speckle the news landscape, a common thread emerges: Prevention Was Prevented.
Rebound Lady: Languid Surrealist, Melting Time
Comment: I think we all have an inner flame - some deeper, less accessible. I know that once accessed, its ignition surprises me, lights my way and fuels my passion, exposing the glorious me.
Author response: The inner world eventually finds its way into the physical environment, yes. As conscious beings enduring this corporate anticulture, we are pressured to neglect the inner garden. This meditation reflects the conditions needed for the inner life of any person to produce good things; the soil, sun, water of thought, feeling and connection. Any seedling of an idea can only express the conditions of its growth – whether nurturing or adversarial. Gravity is a potent adversarial resistance that demands the strongest of growth, for example. The image in my mind just now is one of the Spanish Moss oaks of New Orleans, which – if left unbound - have an odd habit of growing into the ground before emerging out again. This organically twisted shape isn’t possible unless it develops untouched by human cultivation.
Nuclear Gaslight: Groundhog Day
Comment: I joined the Columbia Riverkeepers to support local organizations that are challenging these pollution-for-profit industries.
Author response: I think local organizations are focused on local situations; from a distance, the work seems disconnected from a global picture. I could be wrong, but I’m not completely sure how this works. In this piece, I tried to connect the local to the international situation regarding the failed containment design at Fukushima Daiichi. I started it in Japan and worked back towards the United States, highlighting the 23 reactors in the U.S. with similar failed designs – and the officials who refuse to decommission the plants. These disasters are so predictable, by now - like a groundhog day that always somehow manages to take people by surprise: Yet again. As the Belt & Road brings renewable energy production capacity to scale, I somehow hold out hope that organizations like yours can advance the case of converting the U.S. economy to renewable infrastructure; the s/elected “leaders” rarely advance such visions inside this corporate-state. Conversion to a peacetime economy is yet a potent and unifying vision.
Meet: The Banksters!
Comment: Interesting... never knew about al-Riba.
Author response: Yes, I only learned about it by chatting with Arabic speakers online. Banking topics can come off as unduly complex, so I presented it as a comedic script. I visualized a kind of spoofy animated sitcom, and it seemed to work. The nuclear family dynamic popped into my mind when I was thinking about the differences between Wall St. private investment banks, public banks, and the mostly-unknown usury bans within classical Islamic banking theory. The link to the source document was the focal point of this piece. I had hoped to generate some more interest about the existence of a usury ban in any banking system.
Compound interest rates put an exponent on the rate of extraction.
At this point, people need to think about the lethal damage inflicted by CPI - a mathematical abstraction that enabled the extraction of labor value to exceed the productive capacity: of entire countries. In this “play,” al-riba haram was shortened to Riba (usury) as a proper name, with the ban being implied. I had initially toyed with the idea of producing this script into an animated short with voiceovers from readers, but that would require higher rates of compounded interest than currently exist.
Update: I added a link in the original piece to a new video where economist Michael Hudson explains how compound interest rates increase debt exponentially and concentrate wealth at the top just as fast. It starts at minute 4:28.
This is another example of how I’ve resigned to building my Substack to function more as a reference resource than a reliable source of income. All the links are in context.
I just need a few good readers to propel it into the great mystery of the Ocean-Abyss.
Substack: In Review, A Periodic
Comment #1:
1. How do you feel about the Substack as a tool for self-expression or release?
A. Self-expression and release are now social commodities: Effectively. Reality is what it is, not what I want it to be. For me, it’s far too early to tell. This platform would surely be ideal for any person who had an existing following or a social support network: I have neither, so this question doesn’t really apply. Yet, I’ve dealt with similar dilemmas many times before: Social networks are more important than education, skill, experience - or even sanity. For example, I maxed out student loans to get certified, licensed and insured only to find out that my hard-won therapeutic skills were treated as secondary to my ability to social network…and they were very secondary. Therapists were converted into salespeople for medical offices. Even though my results could be measured. No one was interested. By reviewing Substack in this light, I was bringing some critical attention to the hyper-exploitation model now embedded deep within every new “opportunity.”: It’s the hyper-extraction model I’ve become all-too intimate with – against my will. I understand its potential future value just like I understand how derivative markets extract future value before production even occurs. I continue to have ideas about all the possibilities presented here, sure: But, I’m no chump. Everything offered by techo-feudalism is predicated on the assumption that the “market” should be the one to reward all labor, including creative labor. This means the value of my work is to be judged and measured by people and/or algorithms - who can’t understand it. This value is only measured by how the platform is “served” with likes, comments and user engagement; not to mention monetary rewards, or neglect. If it fails, it must be my fault, right? I disagree with this base assumption. This is a real ideological conflict. Since when is this techno-feudalist market, shaped by capitalist propaganda, fit to judge the cumulative value of my lifetime of creative labor while simultaneously choking off its natural development during the formative years? That faucet is always on for the real platform owners, and we all know it. So much value has already been extracted from the public - from research and development to free user content. To produce these platforms, so much has already been extracted that we should have already won a basic income long ago. During the period when this fight could have won such a victory, all socialism discourse was strictly taboo. How would it be implemented? Meh. Through a public dividend, a negative income tax, or another Works Progress Administration program, WPA. This enabled New Deal artists to produce works independently of whether they’re popular enough with the “right” people – before rewarding the starving creature with a paltry stipend for rent, which is little more than a transfer of equity to the landlord class anyway. Or a simple bank transfer would do. Like they did during the pandemic. Like a dividend payment to the public instead of the platform shareholders….No matter how you look at it, artists/content producers are totally effed in this economic model. Who wouldn’t want to overthrow that?
2. Do YOU benefit from it?
A. See above. It’s a mixed bag. Besides, I only started this recently; too early to tell if I will ever benefit from my own work in this lifetime. Substack is all that’s available to me right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s what I need: My needs are irrelevant here. Rich people “gifted” us these social media platforms as income replacements. In their society, social value is also economic value, so they assume everyone can benefit from their models. But if I have an ongoing dental emergency, I won’t feel gratitude to receive a “gift” of equal dollar value if it’s a lifetime membership pass to a fitness gym, you know? If I need an effing dentist, I won’t benefit from a workout. To paraphrase Dr. William Bronston, “100 years of commodified medical care resulted in a profound fear in the general population. If you’re sick or disabled in some way, it puts you in a different caste in society.” I also have experience working as a therapist; both are true at the same time. It’s a dual-level scar.
3. Do you find it somewhat therapeutic?
A. Sure. Anything can be therapeutic; that doesn’t mean the wounds are healing. Only the appropriate remedies for the specific condition can do that.
4. Does it free you from material constraints, if even for fleeting moments?
A. Sure. Any social delusion can be used as a diversion from material conditions. Material constraints gave rise to dialectical materialism, did they not? The “freedom” to work for free (for the rentier class) - this is as dystopian as it gets! Certainly, the iterative revisions I do here are valuable on an artistic level - because that’s just how I work. Intrinsic value is now being packaged and hyper-exploited on social media, the nouveau lingua franca. Social media curates the realities of the underclasses for the comfortable consumption of the voyeur class. The word count alone on my already-published free articles could have paid for several months’ rent. There is no built-in financial supports for new or unpopular writers, and I can’t not be aware of this hard fact: Social value alone determines economic value. At the end of the month - the landlord still only accepts cash. I would prefer to abolish the landlord class as the first remedy. Then, perhaps I could answer your question properly.
5. Does Substack provide you with a space for introspection?
A. Mostly, it’s about organizing my thoughts, memories and reflections. I am now keeping track of time in a way that’s visible to others, and that’s new. It’s kind of hard to be authentically introspective about anything when my income just dropped to almost zero overnight after 13 years of consistent work writing business copy - a task which is now be done mostly by ChatGPT. I took up writing in social isolation for a good reason; I can’t just rebound overnight. Taking aim at the system that did this to me is an exercise in futility. It might be cathartic at times, but it isn’t quite the same as organic introspection, in my view. Each piece I write enables me to extract ever-more value from my previous experiences of being hyper-exploited, and re-package them into newer and more entertaining ways of exploiting myself for the amusement or neglect of the public: A dream come true, really.
6. Where would/could you similarly express and challenge yourself otherwise?
A. I’d tell you….but then I’d have to invoice you.
Generally, this line of questioning reflects a dominant social view that people in my situation should learn to be forever content with whatever society’s platforms deems me fit to receive - even if it’s nothing. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?
If a person is struggling, it must be their fault; this is just the social default.
Nothing personal.
Comment #2:
Comment: I live with chronic pain and I have yet to earn any money online but I've labored freely for years trying to educate people on ethics and such. To me this has just become a public journaling experience to try to stay alive while being gang-stalked.
A. Public journaling….that expression really sticks. In my craw, too. Kind of like that Buddhist visual where there’s a hot ball of iron stuck in your throat that you can’t dislodge, one way or the other. The pain accumulates in the tissues, and it disturbs the normal flow of energy. Our bodies are always attempting to self-repair, and the energy disturbances from chronic pain interfere in so many ways with this self-regulation. We can find a good therapist to intervene periodically, but that intervention needs to be maintained, and that’s costly. Any self-care regimen is strict and encompasses all aspects of daily life; environment, diet and exercise. Excluding pain triggers can only be done temporarily; eventually, they are necessary to gauge current sensitivity levels. Experimenting with different combinations of pain management methods, it’s like a reflex. Engaging others who aren’t in pain, it’s an exercise in testing the waters. When we do speak of it, what are we really trying to communicate? Or, what is the pain trying to communicate through our daily engagement with it? We know it’s a door to something the ego is incapable of touching directly; so it gets touched indirectly. The act of speaking about it can be cathartic, when handled a certain way; and there is a message encoded there. Social hostility is a confession of a sort: The gang-stalking isn’t just online; it’s also part of the routine of daily life. Attack what is feared or unknown. A reflex. Even “medical” professionals admit learning about conditions from their most engaged patients who often research with more urgency than anyone on the treatment team. Being harassed is a social ritual to be anticipated; one’s skills at avoiding, diverting or transforming that energy on a daily basis, a habit. After some time, the number of people in one’s life dwindles to a very small number because this all-consuming task of energy transformation is a daily ritual that demands undivided attention. This is the process I have come to call: Growth.
Injury is a spiritual growth that happened too fast.
*Dedicated to the human immune system.
That was beautiful & cathartic to read. I really appreciate you publishing this, and I think you're brilliantly talented. I relate to a lot of what you express here, tremendously. And I agree with you on that last one about growth, the online gang stalking was overwhelming to me only because in real life I've been alone mostly, no real friends at all, I have to avoid people for their own sake, lol, small talk is painful to me. It's impossible to function as myself at most employments. I also had once hoped writing online would be rewarding but I've never really made any money, and it's not really rewarding for me anymore. I need different outlets so I have other creative endeavors I'm working on in real life, I'm done with social media. It's just too easy to be misunderstood. People actually like me better in real life :)
You just put it so well my problems shrink away there are others like me😭🙏🏻