Everyone is asking "where are the Democrats"...
Democrats are going on TV and saying they're being caught flat-footed...
So what has become of the "Left" in the blitzkrieg since the election?
Let's look at this a different way.
What year do you think the following was written?
What emerges is a Left that operates without either a substantive critique of the status quo or a substantive alternative to it. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is deathly, whose structure of desire is backward-looking and punishing.
That's from Wendy Brown's 1999 essay Resisting Left Melancholia. That's right: a quarter of a century ago. So I'll ask again: What has become of the "Left" in the blitzkrieg since the election?
It's not a secret that I'm disappointed with where we are now and where I think we are heading as a country. I've been outspoken about my discomfort around the trajectory of our technologically mediated realities; the same energy that pushed me to joining the Marine Corps right out of high school is the same energy that compelled me to help bring clarity to what was going on, in the best way I knew how: converting public data into public intelligence.
Many of you followed me across platforms as I experimented with piercing algorithmically-reinforced silos of realities—whether it was my public work that you found on TikTok, or my private, pseudonymous work in right-wing media spaces. I appreciate your financial support of my educational work around disinformation and media bias, as well as my reflective work here that I've been publishing post-election.
Since leaving salaried employment back in October 2024, I've tried hard to pour time and energy into this space and this work to generate positive traction as well as confidence in potential future revenue so that I can continue to do this. The energy inside me that led me to joining the military—the Night's Watch energy, the community safety energy, the part of me that feels a primal need to protect humans in my physical and digital proximity—has been feeding off my creative energy. But it's gotten to the point now that my creative energy needs to be redirected to what I feel is my core purpose or throughline or existential duty—whatever you want to call it.
The truth is that I've never felt energized or fulfilled by post-action analysis work. What I mean by that is someone prominent does something and now I come in and help people comprehend and interpret what that person did (or what is going on) in a way that's palpable. I did this a lot on TikTok because I felt like disinformation was (and still is) an existential threat to our communities. I did this a lot here because of the natural extension of that energy post-election into a more reflective, written form.
One thing I'm grateful to my past self for is quitting employment to give me the mental space to slow down and stop & think about whether what I am doing is intrinsically fulfilling. I'm confident that a lot of what I do is extrinsically fulfilling; the performer in me, the artist, the creator, whatever you want to call it, can recognize when what I do or create is well-received by an audience. I say an audience because I find myself at the intersection of a number of different communities online, each of which have varying degrees of push and pull in terms of energy traction and generation. Like other creators, I have honed my social periscope to more efficiently understand the relationship between creative output and monetary input, and while I hope that doesn't influence the choices I make, I know that it's impossible to fully comprehend why we do the things we do without an honest acceptance of our tiny places in this great big capitalist economy.
Often times we come across people who peddle ways of living without living those ways themselves. I don't like that at all. And the more I try to fit myself into a specific kind of puzzle piece for an audience—someone who brings you intelligence, someone who dissects disinformation, someone who reflects on social technology—the less I am honoring the natural ebbs and flows of my creative energies and attention. On top of that, pressures to gain some kind of revenue traction in order to avoid the Descent Back Into Madness (i.e., returning to a corporate technology job) leaves me at times unable to intuit whether my drive at any given time is toward honoring the way I myself resonate in this universe or rather a pseudo-performative crux that absolves my inner work from the responsibility of taking risks to fully know and comprehend myself and what brings me joy.
We could argue for days about whether or not this is a subconscious reflection of internal pressures on myself to be a particular kind of creative individual—to fit myself into a specific kind of puzzle piece implies that I am aware of some other state to exist in, some ideal state of creative productivity and output that maximizes some utility function that leads to me not having to worry about how I will pay my mortgage or afford groceries. I've spent an enormous amount of time dissecting myself and experimenting with different brands of bespoke social identity to achieve my own objectives of dispelling disinformation and helping people unpack and process the firehose of data we're all drowning in.
I just don't feel like this is the right path for me at this moment in time. Not with what's going on around us. It might come off as counter-intuitive; I've been reassured more times than I can count that my unique background in intelligence, military leadership, and product leadership afford me a set of opportunities that are not available to everyone. I understand the privilege. I guess what I'm saying is that right now, the more I attune to my own personal resonant frequency, the more I feel that what I ought to do is separate from what I could do.
Two years ago I was accepted to and was excelling in a Counseling Psychology master's program, aiming my energies at psychodynamic psychotherapy. It was in this program that I read some amazing works by Nancy McWilliams and others, which led me to a kind of truth about people that was really a truth about myself. And really that's what this all boils down to: the more I journal and engage in the act of self-reflection, the more I find opportunities to provide other people a map of the crevices and footholds available on this cliff face of a reality. But not everyone wants that. That is my lesson from 2024. Not everyone is interested in self-reflection, in sitting in the discomfort of one's identity collapsing under the weight of comprehending that much of what we've become has been the product of illusory forces seeking to define who we are for us.
Women are especially aware of this. Men are perhaps only recently becoming aware of this. An economy that monetizes insecurities about one's core identity is an economy that thrives in a heteronormative patriarchy. The marriage of artificial interpersonal hierarchy with an insatiable drive for belonging has given us a very interesting (in the most derogatory sense of the word) world in which we find ourselves together. Unfortunately our education system continues to fail each new generation, our governments struggle to find purpose outside of the authoritarian polycule of media, fascists, and technology. Fortunately, the same tools that are exploiting the most vulnerable of Americans—young white men, who struggle to belong to a world forged by the sins of their ancestors, and the overwhelming majority of Americans who are economically disenfranchised, lacking the time, ability, means, and energy to peel back the layers of illusions themselves.
I have been working in technology my whole life, and I have never felt less optimistic than I do now about what is going on. The sharp pang of nostalgia echoes deep in my heart; growing up, I thought technology would bring us closer together, more deeply humanize the robot and at times deeply inhuman nature in which much technology has been developed. Now with this recent iteration of an AI Hype Cycle, combined with a tripartite government fully enmeshed with fascists, I'm finding my military training is leading me to conclusions that are not appropriate for the world in which I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to live in.
I am not so stupid that I don't understand the speech that Jack Nicholson's character made to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men (1992). I was a Marine Corps combat instructor, after all, one of the only ones that I'm aware of who earned two medals for outstanding leadership and teaching. My young adulthood was spent teaching young men to kill other young men—sometimes with guns, sometimes with big guns, and at all the times with their bare hands. It's hard to feel separated from that version of myself that I've tucked away so long ago with what is going on around me. I'll always have that Marine Brain, crayons and all.
But that is not me anymore, not in the sense that I am a nascent actor in the world I wish to create and can choose, at any time, to make choices that are in line with the kind of world I want for my children. I don't want to talk about what fascists are doing; I want to create new energy as part of the world we want to build. I want to make things. I want to experiment and build and explore how we think about abstractions and how we create abstractions from abstractions. I want to do what brings me joy, and what brings me joy is writing fine computer instructions.
I have only about a year's worth of savings left before I have to start picking up contract work again. Frankly I'm not sure that the future software engineering economy is going to be recognizable to old people like me. (When you're > 38 years old, you're generally considered an old geezer in tech). In 2028, I turn 40 years old and where I want to be by 40 is going to require a different kind of focus than I'm able to provide here as a nonfiction writer covering the zeitgeist through the lens of social technology. That doesn't mean I will completely stop blogging about social technology, it just means that the pressure of writing on a schedule creates a specific kind of overwhelm that activates the performative aspects of my Capitalism Survival Skills. Instead I want to write to complement my engineering work; I want to share what I have been working on rather than what other people, with whom I do not share a vision of the future with, are rapidly trying to push out the door to make numbers go up while the world burns.
I don't feel like I'm being cynical, but I understand if it comes off that way. What I do feel is that there's a dire need for technology companies that are more like Costco and less like Starbucks. I am not anti-capitalism, I am anti-capitalist—in the same way that I am not anti-Christianity, but I am anti-Christians. Just like how I was growing physically sick arguing with evangelical Christians about the literal words their brown king said and what he meant, I am growing existentially weary arguing about the American experiment with functionally illiterate and hoodwinked white people. While I am good at doing this kind of work, this kind of work is not good for me.
It's interesting to think about how our collective imaginations have felt like they've become compressed versions of potential, fuzzy approximations of potential and wonder like compression artifacts of a JPEG or LLM-summarized text. Too many of us have fallen into the trap of limiting our own imaginations to the shallow and inhuman impulses of what rich white men who can't think beyond the next revenue cycle can muster through their hangover. Creativity is the first victim of artificial reasoning, and I see no signs that those with the most means and opportunities to advance good new software will choose to do so. The alternative is just too enticing—and rightfully so, since those who live their lives according to the Almighty Number and the Almighty Number alone slowly lose connection with the natural frequencies of our species.
What I intend to focus on—where I think my contributions to humanity will help me feel like I am not doomed to continue reincarnating into this man-made hell of a reality—is the ever-increasing gap between what we know technology can help with and what technology is available. I'm not looking to exploit market opportunities because I don't want to think about the world like that. Instead, I am looking to build software that solves problems, in the way that the nostalgia of what feels like a long-lost relationship with the potential of personal computing can return—one system, one service, one relationship at a time.
Toward that end I do not think of myself as a pioneer; that label is reserved for those with a scientific lens over their computer science work. I do, however, consider myself an adventurer and explorer, and coincidentally, it is through the act of adventuring and exploring that we find our own comfort with the process of experimentation.
One of the most important concepts that humans can integrate into their lives is experimentation.
It is experimenting with what if and what could be that we discover not only new parts of ourselves and each other, but also the disavowed aspects of ourselves. Experimentation is different for everyone, because everyone is different. Maybe for you it means experimenting with how you think about your job, or with how you think about your body and gender. (Don't forget: gender is a social construct). For me, experimentation looks like my music, my writing, my books, my acting, my posting, my goofing around... it's about how I bundle up my creative energy and share it with the world. I want to be clear, though: I like to write! I like to publish essays! I like to think about social technology and what we are doing with it and how it will be used and how we can foster inclusive digital communities in an age where humans have technologically mediated reality construction computers in their pockets!
It's just that this blog, this energy that you may have discovered through TikTok or elsewhere, it cannot be my primary focus going forward because it is not the kind of energy I naturally create. It is not who I am; who I am is someone who experiments with computer instructions and has adventures down rabbit holes of programming languages and the kinds of abstractions we create with them to solve novel and boring problems alike. It's someone who writes science fiction and music in an ever-evolving exploration of inter-and intrapersonal experimentation. For me, communication is what I am interested in—communicating what kind of world I want to be in right now, by building the kinds of tools I want to use and I want other people to find utility and joy in using, as well as different possible future worlds through the direction I point my momentum along with the kind of science fiction I write. This includes social communication technologies—the tools, the protocols, the philosophies—as well as private communication tools, like workplace chat software and information publishing systems. But it also includes how I communicate my creativity itself—my music, my acting, my fiction, my games...
In other words, I've experimented with Lawsonry.com being a revival of my old progressive blogging days, and I've reached the apoapsis of my creative energies. I'm spread too thin across too many surfaces, and as we stare down the barrel of very real existential threats to who we are as a people, I am finding that deep in my heart I want to be myself as fully as I can. We don't need another white man drifting listlessly between the pillaged remains of functional fascism. I can direct my natural energies elsewhere, and in doing so, be a multiplicative force in areas I feel personally fulfilled and charged in rather than across information battlefields that I know in my heart are designed to exhaust and extinguish people like me.
I would be remiss as someone who habitually dissects everything I feel and think about if I didn't mention how this all feels like I'm having to explain myself to you. And in a way, I am: many of you have been giving me money in exchange for proximity to my work, and many others of you have been giving me with zero expectations of output or anything (I know this because many of you have told me this). I am immeasurably grateful for your financial support, without which I could not be where I am today. Not because the amount of money from supporters like you has had a tangible effect on my bills (I can barely cover my internet and phone bill with your subscriptions), but because that you decided to share your income with me because of the energy I am putting into the world led me down a path of rediscovering my own internal sense of confidence with the kind of world I want to build.
I'm not concerned with how we got here; there are plenty of far more intelligent and articulate people from whom you can gain much more rigorous insights and reflections on history. I am also not concerned with the kind of world that fascists want us all to accept. What I am concerned with is building now the kind of things that I wish were available now. So that's what I am going to do; that's what I am going to focus on.
Does that mean I am no longer going to be posting essays here? Not really, but it does mean that I am going to make this site much more personal. It bears my name, after all. And frankly, I'm tired of trying to piecemeal myself into different buckets to make myself more palpable for the many different disconnected audiences for which I have become one of many different sources of content. The truth is that I do many different things, and trying to keep everything that I am and do neatly separated is taking too much energy that I feel in my heart ought to be spent building the world I want to live in. Trying to only focus my energies into one kind of output is leaving other parts of me feeling anxious and unattended to.
Going forward, I'd like to be explicit about what you are supporting when you are financially supporting me, whether through BuyMeACoffee, Patreon, or here as a subscriber:
I'm hunkering down and working on open source software for the AT Protocol called OpenPDS, and building the workplace information sharing & human connection tool I've always wanted called Teamlanes.
- My hopes for Teamlanes is that it becomes a viable source of revenue to fund my open source work and the open source work of others.
- Teamlanes is and will remain and private company. As such, one thing your financial support will fund is my ability to work on this business idea full-time. The business thesis centers around there being a market for good software that focuses on solving problems instead of more and more features to extract more and more revenue. I don't mind sharing this seemingly obvious (and exploitable) circumstance because I honestly just don't think a lot of people are interested in moving slow and making things much anymore. (But I certainly am.)
It's okay to stop supporting me financially. It's also okay to support the kind of people who are building the kind of world you want to exist in. Totally up to you. We are all on our own journeys of sense-making about who we are, what parts of ourselves we share with the world, and how our society has socialized us to commoditize social artifacts in ways that can both enable and corrupt social connection.
- I am grateful for your financial support and I'm also grateful for your non-financial support.
- I do not, however, want to feel pressured to perform or deliver outside of the roadmaps that I am currently focused on. On top of that, I need space to express full agency over what I am focusing and working on.
- If you like this vibe, great. If not, no worries at all. Again, I appreciate you for just being yourself—and for understanding that I, too, will provide the most "utility" or "value" or whatever measurement you want to use when I am also being myself.
I do not feel like I will be posting about disinformation anymore. Not right now. Not when we are inundated with it day in and day out. Any more energy into Dinner Pancakes is going to be back to my skits. Absurdity, goofing around, playfulness... These are things in which I can lead by example—and still intend to do. But no more disinformation education or calling out what the fascists are doing and why what they are doing is fascist. We all understand deeply that people are continuing to avoid media literacy—and that big tech will partner with fascist regimes to, as much as they can, make this a permanent reality.
- We NEED people on the front lines of journalism—but please hold space for what I am saying when I say that we also need people on the front lines of expression and exploration.
I've had many frontlines that I've studied, served in, and led others across. I have served my country as a U.S. Marine and did all the things I felt compelled to do last year as I noticed a fascist uprising taking place. But an information battlefield during a fascist marriage between criminal power brokers and big tech is not where I belong. No, I belong at the edges; I belong where rivers cut through rock not with their power but with their persistence.
So here is my Roadmap for 2025:
1️⃣ Build Teamlanes, and get a demo out to early adopters by my 39th birthday (March 30). I'm building Teamlanes to be the tool I've always wanted to manage and communicate context around the projects I build myself as well as the projects I build with other people.
2️⃣ Lead development efforts of OpenPDS, to ensure that people sharing information via the AT Protocol have tools designed that not only enable but that also actively cultivate curiosity and experimentation.
3️⃣ Continue to share my nonfiction, fiction, and music with the world.
If you're still reading, you must be someone for whom I've had a profound impact. I'm aware that this has happened, but it still strikes me as incomprehensible due to the way my foundational neural connections in childhood were created. Nevertheless, your attention—your most precious commodity to these vultures of spirit we keep finding throughout history—will always be respected and valued by me. Thank you, friend.
Joy and rest, in a world like this, are acts of resistance. I look forward to the future that we will find ourselves in—I really do—because I know the power of relentlessly pursuing ones dreams, despite a world that seems deadset on crushing them. It is not the future that matters. It is the work we do now that is toward the future we want that does.
♥ Jesse
P.S. I will still be posting and ranting and rabbit holing on BlueSky. That wont change. I've always been a microblogger at heart. But if you're interested in sating some part of your curiosity that may feel unsated after this post, here are some other humans I recommend also sharing your attention with:
JESSICA VALENTI
"Abortion, Every Day" Newsletter
BlueSky account
JAMELLE BOUIE
NY Times column
BlueSky account
Unclear and Present Danger podcast
NILAY PATEL
The Verge
Decoder podcast
BlueSky account
MEREDITH WHITTAKER
BlueSky account
JIM RAY
BlueSky account
STEVE FARRUGIA
Faster And Worse blog
Faster and Worse channel