Enter 2023

Hello and welcome to the refreshed blog. This is a high-level kickoff and heads-up on what to expect over the next year.

I'll cover a somewhat diverse range of subjects related in ways to help make sense of the chaos and disorientation we've all been going through in recent years.

This isn't a niche blog and here's why:

On one hand, it's ideal for publishers to have one subject and focus. On the other hand, there's been an increased need for connecting and synthesizing disparate - even seemingly unconnected - ideas, observations, theories, lines-of-thought.

Everyone has been trying to make sense of the world over the last decade, especially since the start of the pandemic. There's been confusion, denial, maladaptation, emotional overload, and so on. Lately, there's been a desire to return to 'normal'. I believe that this desire is as misplaced as our adhesion to decaying frameworks.

When the world around you changes - when it breaks what seemed stable, when it resurrects monsters long thought dead - the most common response is to apply familiar frameworks to unfamiliar problems.

But frameworks are just that: frame-works. They aren't absolute realities - they're simply tools to construct working understandings based on observations - in short, to help us know the world.

Frameworks are never permanent fixtures - they 'work'...until they don't.

With this in mind, it can be said that we are living within a crisis of breaking and broken frameworks. Ensconced within this crisis is the failure to even recognize that we are living within a crisis of breaking and broken frameworks.

The list of threats and collapses goes on, but here's a small sample:

COVID and its colossal mismanagement. The invasion of Ukraine. The consolidating mobilization of Fascism. The disruption of material and intellectual supply chains. The commodification of idealogies. The concentration of precious capital resources invested in anti-human projects. The cancellation of futures past. The failure of trusted institutions to follow-through on their promises. And perhaps the the most dangerous event of all: the intensifying sense of helplessness under relentless pressures to be helpful.

Business leaders, activists, academics, venture capitalists, and everyone else struggle between the temptation to double-down on the ways of the past and their deep-down knowledge and fright that they need to envision and develop new ways.

Enter 2023. This blog will tackle this crisis of broken frameworks.

And while the subjects may vary widely, there will be one common approach, or tone. It will offer what is most needed right now: Constructive ideas for destructive times.

On that note, I give you a peak into one topic that is the single most important problem we have to tackle: The persistance of racsism. It may not seem like racism drives the world's major problems, but you'll just have to indulge me because the causative dynamic of racism also plays wider roles in determining societal desires and where to channel them.

The next post will jump into a reading of Todd McGowan's The Racist Fantasy. I leave with you a quote from his book that might shed a bit of light onto why we are where we are right now:

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Jamie Larson
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