so long and thanks for all the fish

New times call for a new focus, a new approach, and a new project.

There are generally two invaluable pieces of advice all writers are supposed to follow, but all too often don’t. Either our feelings get in the way, or we get distracted and let it all spiral out of control and corral the mess later, or we fall victim to the sunk cost of a hefty amount of text we wrote but don’t want to admit should be abandoned or edited with the kind of brutality that the Doom Slayer would find unnerving.

The first is Chekov’s Gun. It says that you should never place a rifle on the stage if it’s not supposed to go off. Basically, don’t get distracted with your world building and set design that you forget they should fit the story and spend your and your reader’s time on irrelevant elements. Now, this is not an absolute rule. Some writers have made their entire careers and literary legacies violating it with great zeal. See Tolkien, J.R.R.

The second? Kill your darlings, those characters the writer either falls in love with and just can’t let go, or to which they have a sentimental attachment which keeps them in the background far longer than necessary. Maybe the darling character in question is a narcissistic reflection of the writer. Maybe they’re based on The One Who Got Away as a fantasy. Maybe they’re a kind of therapeutic avatar.

But no matter the case, they’re given plot armor thicker than a deity’s, so even when it would make far more sense, or create a way more exciting story if they just died at the right tactical juncture, they’re spared by the weapon, accident, or natural disasters, or brought back by something absurd, like a popular comic book character.

Which brings me to WoWT, a project that got me through some very hard times and holds a very special place in my — well, not heart because having extra things in your heart is really freaking dangerous, but you know what I mean. Through several major life-changing hiatuses and at least three reboots, I’ve kept it going for what is now a very significant part of my life. But the more I look at the stats, velocity, and changes around me, the more I think it’s best to let it go.

it’s a whole enshittified new world out there

In some ways, it was a product of its time. Mouthy weirdoes interested in science and technology to a degree that ordinary mortals would find downright pathological, spun up blog after blog to tear into then already misleading science headlines and watered down articles describing findings that may or may not have been accurate. And there was appetite for the weirder topics like ancient astronaut conspiracies, the search for real aliens, battles with creationists trying to pass off “intelligent design” as a science, and the future of humanity and AI.

This is still the case now, but it’s been bastardized by decades of Ancient Aliens and a social media environment that favors profitable rage bait or bite sized quotes that will go viral, flooding timelines not with the stuff the people you follow post or enjoy, but a steady stream of bait, of both click and rage variety, and ads, as per Darth Zuck’s own confession in court. In fact, we should probably forget the term social media and call it what it is: a bastard hate child of cable and shopping malls.

WoWT wasn’t built for this. A format of just grabbing an interesting piece of science, or tech, or a controversy in either world, then examining it in depth only works when you’re a known quantity not just on the web. No, it’s an approach that deflates when having to compete in hyper-focused niches where persistence is a given, but dogged consistency is key. And with WoWT, I simply could not and still can’t focus enough to stay in a lane, no matter how much I try.

There are too many memories, too many avenues to pursue, too much stuff that’s too hard to let go, like the digital equivalent of ADHD in a world that values precision and narrow focus. No matter how much I iterated, it simply didn’t work.

Now, all that said, none of this means that I’m bailing on Substack, or writing, or radio, or my videos. Nor am I going to do that thing where I pretend that after this eulogy for a pet project, I will be wandering in the woods in sorrow, wondering what to do next in the coming weeks and looking for a sign from the universe. Though I’ll, of course, give myself a few minutes to sigh and shrug before moving on.

the not exactly reboot and not quite rebrand

When looking back at the stats, what WoWT was best known for, what most bloggers linked to, what I was asked to talk most about on the radio and the occasional podcast or two, was transhumanism, AI, and the Singularity. The foundations of what just very recently became known as the TESCREAL movement, the grab bag of beliefs that are now hurtling us towards an incompetent technocracy, thanks to the enormous powers ceded to true believers who worship technology rather than use it.

Back in 2010 and 2011, this was a very niche topic, mostly for computer science folks many of whom outright refused to engage with it, seeing that as unnecessary, or as nothing more than the typical Big Tech vaporware in the industry’s constant quest for the Next Big Thing. It was almost like holding a sandwich board warning passers by of the end of the world, an end most dismissed as simply too stupid to actually happen.

In their defense, they were right to have that impression because the argument wasn’t that technology would doom society to chaos and turmoil, but that the people tasked with creating and controlling it would screw up on an epic scale. Which they did when they allowed the industry to be taken over by finance bros fluent in technobabble and spending their days dreaming about ruling the galaxy as digital gods by 2045, maybe 2055 at the latest, in incessant group chats.

And so, we find ourselves in a world where we’re gaining increasingly advanced and sophisticated technology which is being controlled by just a few, ever more powerful interests, and applied with no regard for morality. Society seems to be decaying, we started to question what will become of humanity and how we will change ourselves in the none too distant future, while corporations are becoming as powerful as some governments. In other words folks, we’re officially entering a cyberpunk dystopia.

So, what do you do? It’s simple. You try to survive and carve out a space that you can claim as your own and learn to adapt so you can thrive, build a community, and take it one day at a time.

But you might want a guide to help you. Someone who’s been studying these topics for years not just as a sci/tech commentator, but academically and professionally as well. A sort of… Cyberpunk Survival Guide, if you will, to let you keep your pulse on a rapidly evolving world full of robots, AI, ever weirder and more powerful software, and soon to be swarmed by cyborgs and genetic engineering, not to mention ever more ambitious space programs set on mining and colonizing other worlds.

surfing the neon retrowave to dystopia

Again, based on the stats and conversations with readers, this kind of content seems to be what attracted most of WoWT’s current subscribers in the first place, so I would love a chance to have you follow me to the new newsletter the easier way possible if you’re interested: by simply rolling your subscription over when I have everything fully up and running in the coming weeks.

This way, you don’t have to worry about paying attention to an announcement post in your inbox. Conversely, if you’re not a subscriber but want to get a steady fix of what I would like to call realistic futurism, complete with deep dives into the inner workings of technology that’s changing pretty much everything at an accelerating rate, just add your email below and you’ll get the first post in your inbox automatically.

If you’d rather not because this is either not a subject that appeals to you, or you had more than enough of it and want a long term tech detox, or you were just here for the science briefings, feel free to unsubscribe. I can completely understand that this new spinoff project may not be for everyone.

So, If you enjoyed WoWT, thank you for reading. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side if you want to keep following me, and once again explore the bizarre half fact half sci-fi world of transhumanism and bleeding edge technology with a skeptical, professional, but still somewhat hopeful eye.