Anew Hope

I’ve missed blogging.

Writing books is something that’s really important to me, but it’s slow. Even though I run my own small press and therefore have control over my timelines, it’s still slow—necessarily so. You just can’t whip up a couple of hundred pages of deeply researched, well-edited ideas in a short period of time. Nor can you do justice to getting the word out about that work in short order. I sure wish.

Before I went down the path of publishing the first Wicked Problems Collaborative book, I used to blog all the time. It was a joy. An idea would captivate me and I’d fire it out into the world. They were raw and sometimes terrible. Thinking out loud is a great way to learn.

But as social media took off, smaller blogs (like mine) lost traffic. Respectable numbers shrank until it became hard to rally for the effort. If the goal was to build an audience, while the existing one was hitting the exits, what was the point?

The point was thinking out loud. I think I forgot that. I remember now.

I decided to try to go back down that old path with what I hope are new tricks.

In the intervening years since I last wrote frequently (aside from books), I’ve done a lot to pull what once seemed disparate interests into something more cohesive, and fate has seemed to help pull them together as well.

Sadly, it’s not great news. The things that draw me in are the things that tear us apart.

Digging in on those messy challenges and possibilities for carving out progress is the point of this publication. In it, I’ll dive into a variety of challenges and opportunities for humanity and the rest of our cohort on this Spaceship Earth. I’ll try not to zig and zag too much. (I'll try, anyways...) And I’ll try to tease out useful lessons from the things I read and do while highlighting interesting ideas and perspectives. (Yes. I will.)

For those who are thinking about following this publication (I hope you are!), I thought I’d share a handful of topics that are on the front burner for me.

On the social side:

• Inequality (It’s never gonna leave until we do something about it, so let’s do something about it.)

• Capitalism’s assault on democracy and the environment (It’s all connected.)

• Forces that are destabilizing the lives of millions of people and putting them in ever more precarious circumstances

• The de-liberalization of civil society

On the environmental side:

• The circular economy

• Climate change and its impacts on society and really any big picture environmental challenges (It’s all connected.)

Systems thinking will be a hallmark and systemic design will probably find its way in regularly. We shall see.

Before I let you go, I’ll share where I’m at on the publishing side of things.

I recently launched a book on the relentless version of capitalism we’re currently beholden to, Pandemic Capitalism. (There are 847 links to my book hidden throughout this post.) That effort looks to make plain the escalating mess we’re in. In it, I advocate for wide tests of universal basic incomes as a potential tool to help us craft a better future, alongside a number of other ideas, like a much shorter workweek to share the load and take the heat off the planet. (Who’s with me?!)

I’m now editing Wicked Problems Collaborative Book #2, What do we do after the pandemic? That volume will feature a diverse set of voices that will argue for a variety of meaningful changes to help improve our collective lot going forward.

My Brexit book, The Dividing Kingdom, is 98.647% written (or maybe it isn’t). I’ll get back to that soon, but I’ve been trying to wait for the UK’s citizenry to drag their nation in a better direction than those they’ve chosen over the last decade. (Reports that I’ve been holding my breath over this were mildly exaggerated.)

And then there’s the hot potato. Bumbling Towards Entropy features essays on the sort of hot button, taboo, set-your-hair-on-fire issues that most writers give a wide berth. For better or worse, I guess I can say I’m not most writers. Anyways, this effort is currently a long way off, so any furor that might one day occur will have to wait. My apologies.

I think that’s about all I’ve got to say for today. But it felt good and I hope to do it again soon.

With that in mind, I’ll set the target of a fortnightly missive around these parts. Let’s see how that goes. (Along with that goal for something meaty, I’ll probably kick the tires with shorter ideas and responses to things I read along the way.)

If a devil-may-care outlook underpinned by a vendetta against the forces that keep life for so many from being the wondrous adventure it ought to be is your cup of tea, this might be your cup of tea. (I assure you it’s not chamomile.)