Hi!
If you are subscribed to this newsletter and are surprised to be seeing this in your inbox, all I can say is “yes, it has been more than a year since I’ve published here”.
I was recently laid off from a well-paying tech job. After taking a month to rest and recalibrate, I’ve decided that I should probably start writing again.
It’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.
My goal here is to write about what I find interesting–cultural shifts, the internet and something I’ll call “enlightened prepperdom”(ie “how to start a land project with your friends to live cheaply, freely, and safely in this Age of Catastrophe”).
The name of this newsletter will stay the same, Things That Should Exist. That name encapsulates that idealism, and a far-sighted hopefulness that we will someday exercise collective power to fix or abandon the coercive, toxic systems in which we’re all forced to participate.
Table of Contents
Here’s a short table of contents for this issue.
Reasons Why I’m Rebooting This Newsletter
My Vision for the Newsletter (Why Read TTSE?)
Meme of the Week
What To Expect
Let’s get into it.
Reasons I’m Rebooting This Newsletter
TL;DR–I’m rebooting this newsletter because the one saleable thing that I can do with any competence is writing.
I have 1-3 months I can spend as I please thanks to a severance check and unemployment from New York State, so I’m going to make another run at publishing writing online consistently, and seeing where it gets me.
Here’s a bit more context on why I’m rebooting Things That Should Exist.
I spent a month learning to code again(and hated it).
Some of learning to code again was stimulating but towards the end of the month, I started to hate it. I truly could not imagine having to deal with HTML and CSS five days a week, for the rest of my employed life.There are aspects of programming that I enjoy. There’s certainly an appeal to being able to build software products, from both a monetary perspective and a creative perspective.
Programming is always going to be a hobby for me. I’m a better writer than programmer. I’ll stick to what I know.I’m bored!
As previously stated, I’m unemployed. So why not rediscover the city/reconnect with friends/find new sources of inspiration in the service of reinventing myself?
To be honest, I find NYC kind of boring. I’ve lived here for almost six years. It’s been a challenge to find new patterns here, and new things to be excited about.For now, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home. I’ve taken up songwriting again, with a “one song per day” goal, but that only takes up 1-3 hours a day. I do have an internalized need to be “productive”.
Much of this boredom I think comes from my self-diagnosed, post-layoff agoraphobia. I have a strong felt sense NYC is a city in decline, but hasn’t it always been this way?
A week ago, I had to break up a fistfight on the L train between a 30-something homeless man and young woman half his size. I wrote a short description of the event. You can read it here.
That event further validated my feeling that “going outside is bad”, in addition to having to navigated Covid-era NYC and being sick off-and-on for the past year and a half.
I’m not (yet) a complete hermit–I still leave to get groceries, to skateboard 1-2x per week with friends, and to see my girlfriend. However, at this point, I prefer to stay inside most of the time. Especially during NYC’s historical summer “murder season”(my term, I don’t know that anyone actually calls it that).This 3-to-6 month span (in which I will not work) is a chance to potentially create an income stream as a self-published writer.
I’d prefer to never work for someone else–I hope this doesn’t burn me when looking for a job in the future–ha.
I’ve always had a hard time working for a boss, and to the deepest parts of my being, I resent having to sell my time and efforts just to eat food and have healthcare and housing. I suppose I will resent it less if I am working for myself and any potential readers.
I’ve tried this numerous times, writing this straight-to-Amazon eBook about my experiences working on film sets, and attempting to blog for fun and profit as a freelancer and employee. I blogged every day for 10 weeks while attending School for Poetic Computation.
Most recently, I published this piece scoping out an idea for a way that group of friends could buy a piece of land and live on it together.
I am giving it another go.
What To Expect from Things That Should Exist
A few things you can expect from TTSE going forward.
One of my goals in rebooting this newsletter is to catalogue and critique the work of other newsletter writers.
I remember coming across a tweet that said something to the effect of “I wish there was a place where I could go to get the gist of all of my favorite newsletters.” That’s what I aim to do here, although the newsletters in question are my favorite newsletters.
I’m hoping that the venn diagram of the 10 or so newsletters that I read regularly will engage readers enough to vibe and subscribe.
Some of these writers are friends and acquaintances, for others I’m just a fan. Writers like Venkatesh Rao, Paul Millerd, Pony Isaacsohn, Katherine Dee, Anne Helen Peterson, Drew Austin, Byrne Hobart, Ryan Douglass, etc.
Also newsletters by committee such as Dirt, Milk Road, HellGate, Cheap Old Houses, FWB’s WIP newsletter, and others.I want to research, explore, and connect with others about ideas for surviving the years to come.
"Surviving”. It’s a scary word, I know.
I should admit a bias here–my perspective is 100% shaped by being a depressive, often financially-unstable, loner.
I like people, they’re great, just in small doses.
Anyway, when I use the word “surviving”, it’s not out of hyperbole. There are facts, and easily observable phenomena to give weight to this prediction.
It costs more than ever to buy a home. Not to mention national health crises in the forms of Covid and the opiate epidemic(both ~1m deaths each in the US, if we track the opiate crisis from 2000), and so on. Tent cities springing up in cities across the country.
As I wake up each day in the United States, I see that there is no way things can or will improve in this country.
Technocrats, your tech-optimism has failed you. We are not going to “engineer” our way out of this one.
America is fucked.Which is why I see the need for something like Earthseed DAO–it is definitely a thing that should exist, imo.
When you own your house, and grow your own food, surviving the continual recessions of capitalism is much easier.
And it’s not something most people can do alone. With a rise in violent extremism to boot, I can’t think of a wiser thing to do than to create a small, land-based community with your friends, and to start farming and arming yourselves.
Very much easier said than done, but seems like the move, to me.
When I was employed earlier this year, I was starting to look at land to provide the starting point for the first Earthseed DAO community. For now, I will continue to write about the project here and via this Mirror page.If the version of the future I propose seems extreme, here are some visions of the future that seem plausible to me:
• This recent piece by Deep Socks, which offers a humorous and prescient sequence of predictions that highlight truths about political power in America.
• Children of Men (2006, dir: Alfonso Cuarón) – In 2027, humanity has almost instantly loses it’s ability to reproduce. The human race faces the prospect of being wiped out entirely by it’s own ability to repopulate itself until…a young woman named Ki becomes pregnant. Theo, the main character, is tasked with getting her to safety aboard a humanitarian yacht.
• Cyberpunk 2077 – In 2077, America is basically a corporate state, organ harvesting is commonplace, speed is legal, and it’s entirely normal to have your body parts replaced with cybernetic implants, which makes new kinds of sex possible(and it’s pretty weird).
The end result of all of this is that human beings are now capable of experiencing new, excruciating levels of pain which were previously unthinkable. Life is cheaper than ever, yet somehow everything seems to be “business as usual”.
I recently played this and really enjoyed it. There have some significant critiques about how the game portrays queer characters, a lack of epilepsy warnings, lots and lots of bugs in the game, and other issues.
Honestly, I loved playing it, logging 50+ hours within a couple of weeks.
• Octavia Butler’s Parable series – In 2024, the only safe communities in America are neo-feudal company towns and gated suburban communities. A significant portion of the country is homeless. When the 14 year-old Lauren Olamina’s gated community is attacked by a meth’ed-up gang, she’s forced to go on the road with her backpack. Later she finds others on the road, and they found a community in Northern California. She also has visions.
There are many things in this book that resonate with me, and it’s the principal inspiration for Earthseed DAO, as mentioned above.
For more near-future fictional dystopian narratives, there’s always Black Mirror.In addition to tracking what my fellow bloggers are writing, Things That Should Exist will be an outlet to share my own images and memes I’ve collected.
I am the self-proclaimed, “right-click-save” king.
I’d estimate that I’ve spent the majority of my time online looking at(and right-click-saving) images. Not just looking at memes on Facebook or Instagram. I mean spending hours and hours on sites like tumblr, ffffound(RIP), apina.biz(careful with that one), Pinterest and so on.
Maybe at some point, I’ll spin up another newsletter to document visual culture as it emerges. For now, I’m excited to finally have an outlet to share the images that I both create and collect.
This segues nicely into what I’m thinking may be a recurring feature of this newsletter…
Meme of the Week
I recently stumbled upon a Youtube channel named MemeAnalysis. The guy seems to do a pretty good job of doing just that, of analyzing memes.
Here’s his most popular video, currently. It’s a little dry and nerdy, but you may enjoy if you’re a meme appreciator.
I’m less interested in analyzing and breaking down memes–we have MemeAnalysis and Know Your Meme. I am very interested in how memes reflect the experiences of human beings living in the present moment.
Take for instance, Guy Debord’s spray-painted revolutionary street slogans, or the OG-est of memes in modern times, Kilroy Was Here(another brief and interesting piece here). Both of those “memes” reflected particular qualities of the times in which they first began to appear.
I’m not sure how this will come off, it’s a bit of an experiment. I’d count it as a success if this recurring section starts a discussion in the comments at some point.
Here’s the meme of the week:
The “Little Miss” meme took off/found virality around 10 days ago. I suppose it’s because many Americans remember the “Little Miss” series of books from their childhood(apparently it’s a British thing from the 70’s?) and it’s easy to repurpose the meme and make it your own.
Here’s a link to the Know Your Meme entry.
What’s Next?
I expect it will take time to build a readership for this newsletter. I’ve kinda gone ghost from the crypto communities I was once a part of, that seemed receptive to my Earthseed post about buying and living on communal land with friends.
I learned about the Unprepared newsletter recently and I think I’d like to go in a similar direction, but more qualitative, speculative, and oriented towards the practicalities of buying land and living on it.
Also, I put up these demos recently. They’re pretty rough but if you like acoustic-guitar, singer-songwriter stuff, check it out. I’m not going for any particular vibe, just writing what comes out, but maybe it has a sort-of “doomer Daniel Johnston vibe”.
That’s all for now. Will publish another one next week.