Welcome back to Other Worlds Catalog, and hello to my new readers. This newsletter is about speculative fiction, utopianism, and imagining how things could be different. Today I'm continuing a thread from my last piece on disconnecting from tech.

In my last essay, I laid out all of the ways I have tried to redefine my relationship with technology. In 2025, I made an attempt to escape the ecosystems controlled by the big tech firms — Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple. In many cases I succeeded, but my smartphone refused to be replaced.

Imagine you are standing in a field holding a rock, and you throw it as hard and as far as you can. Then you look down at your hand and there is the rock. That’s how I feel about my phone.

— How I disconnected from tech in 2025

I’ve gone to war with my phone. I’ve stripped out every unnecessary app and notification. I’ve deleted the accounts associated with those apps. I’ve installed a powerful, scheduled blocking service. You might say I’ve succeeded. My phone does not feel abusive to me anymore. But this raises the question: why did I need to do all of that just to have a healthy relationship with this device?

Phones are designed for consumption. We have been told by the big manufacturers that this is what people want, this is consumer choice. Consumers want bigger phones with brighter screens. They want to be able to do more, ever more with these devices. They want to watch movies, scroll TikTok, record videos, play video games. It isn’t the manufacturer’s fault that the product ends up so addictive. Hey, they even put in some features to help limit the time you spend on your phone! Not good ones, but still.

I don’t buy it. I bought the iPhone 13 Mini in 2022, right after it was announced that it would be discontinued. It’s big compared to many of the smartphones that came before it, but every single flagship smartphone from a major manufacturer since then has been significantly larger. Over the years, I’ve gotten many compliments on how “small” it is. I’ve noticed that there is a bit of a cult following for this device online. Specifically, it’s beloved by people who want to use technology intentionally, who curate how they use their attention and what stuff they allow into their lives.

It may not be an enormous market, and there may be many more people who want larger phones, but it’s a market nonetheless. Why then haven’t the major manufacturers made even the slightest gesture toward a smaller phone in the intervening years?

Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I believe that the manufacturers have incentives that go beyond the bare sales numbers for different phone models. Namely, Apple and Google get a cut of all paid transactions through the App Store and Play Store — paid apps, subscriptions, micro-transactions. If you have a phone with a bigger screen, you may be more likely to use it for more consumption activities, like renting movies and buying games. On top of that, wireless data providers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile make more money if you use more data, which may explain why they’re so keen to sell new phones to consumers at steep discounts or even give them away. If my theory is correct, it’s not that no one wants to buy a small phone, it’s that nobody wants to sell you one.

Regardless of the particular forces involved, the modern smartphone has coalesced around a singular, omnipresent form: the Big Glass Slab (or BGS). Phones have all settled on a nearly identical design and become almost indistinguishable. Slightly different colors, slightly different camera arrays, but basically the same. They are optimized for the consumption of content, any time, any where.

We have seen the effect it has on us as individuals and as a society: Depression, anxiety, isolation, distraction, radicalization. This isn’t incidental. These devices are engineered to capture attention, manipulate mood, and quietly reshape what you want. (I’m going to use “abusive” as shorthand for the negative effects of these devices throughout this piece.) It has given rise to the common refrain “Obviously it’s the phones.”

For years, there has been virtually no alternative. But now, there are some small companies that have started bringing some alternatives to market. They diverge from the BGS in different ways — size, shape, screen technology. They hope to offer a way out of the paradigm we’ve all been trapped in.

What I find interesting is that these devices all put forward different theories of the problem and therefore its potential solutions.

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1. The problem is that smartphones do too much

Let’s start with the obvious. The cell phone existed long before the BGS paradigm, and while there were social ills associated with them, they didn’t seem to be driving us insane. So why don’t we just go back to using those?

I had a flip phone in high school, a silver and cherry red Samsung SCH-a950. It made calls, sent texts, took blurry pictures, and could theoretically play music if I’d bought the special earbuds from Verizon. I loved that phone. I still have it somewhere.

Those old phones mostly don’t work anymore since 2g and 3g networks have been retired, but you can get their modern equivalents, like the Sunbeam F1 Horizon (in a small concession to modernity, it can run Waze for navigation). Or if you’re feeling a bit more minimal luxe, you can get the Punkt MP02.

I can see the appeal. I have searched for “best dumbphones” almost every year since 2012 and ogled many an old Nokia. But I never pulled the trigger, and now I don’t think I ever will. This theory boils down to: If the phone is janky and unpleasant, I won’t use it. Texting is bad, taking a picture is bad, navigating any interface at all is bad. Maybe I could do that if I were still in my early 20s — maybe I would want that if I were still in my early 20s. But I don’t think it can be a real solution for a mainstream audience.

2. The problem is that dumbphones do too little

Even when we go wrong, the answer is very rarely “go back”. The dumbphones of yesteryear don’t make sense in 2026. Maybe the dumbphone of yesteryear was better for us, but if we want to meet some of the reasonable demands of modern users, we need new devices that take advantage of progress in technology and design.

I would include the Light Phone III and Mudita Kompakt in this category. They are shaped a bit more like smartphones and have touch capacitive screens, though they’re smaller. This allows them to run some slightly more sophisticated software while being more user-friendly.

But they restrict the basic functionality to a small set of bespoke apps or “tools”. For the Light Phone, that means: calls and texts, alarm, calculator, calendar, directions, directory, hotspot, music player, notes/voice memo, podcast, timer, and camera. The Mudita Kompakt has those, and a few more: e-reader, weather, chess, and a meditation timer (though it lacks a hotspot). The Kompakt can also sideload apps, but it doesn’t have Google Play services, compatibility may be mixed, and none of it is optimized for the e-ink screen.

I personally own and have tested the Light Phone III, and I really like it. Some evenings or weekends, I turn on call forwarding and leave my iPhone at home. At times, I’ve caught myself unconsciously reaching for my pocket purely for the dopamine in my smartphone only to find the Light Phone there instead, and I’ve felt like laughing. Damn! Foiled by myself! I don’t miss the abusive and addictive parts of my smartphone at all; I’m glad to be rid of them.

But I’ve never been able to make the full switch. As someone who works remotely, I have worked really hard to banish and minimize work functionality on my phone, but man, sometimes I just gotta check that calendar. And even if I gave that up or found a workaround, the smartphone has been so woven into our lives — boarding passes, QR code menus, apps for kids’ soccer leagues and restaurant shift scheduling — there are still a few innocuous functions that are hard to part with.

The Light Phone is a great detox device, but I think to fully commit to it, I’d need to carry a second smart device and that feels like trying to get a fishhook out of your finger with another fishhook. Besides, Verizon doesn’t currently offer NumberShare for this device, call forwarding is a partial solution, and SIM swapping is annoying.

Maybe I should just suck it up and make the switch, but I’m not sure I should have to. My banking app isn’t the problem, nor is my fitness app. Some of my apps are fine!

3. The problem is that phone screens are hypnotic

So much of what’s harmful in our smartphones has to do with their displays. They are large, glossy, vivid, dynamic. The human brain is wired to seek that kind of novelty and these OLED displays give it immense power. So if we just changed the display technology to something less stimulating, maybe we could cut it off at the knees while still enjoying the powerful capacities of the smartphone.

Devices like the Boox Palma, Bigme Hibreak, and Minimal Phone are basically just Android phones with e-ink screens. They have a little custom firmware to bridge the default Android experience with the e-ink experience, but otherwise you can download basically any app you want, visit any website, do anything you’d do on an ordinary phone. The catch is that you’d be doing it on a black-and-white screen with a poor refresh rate. Suddenly, YouTube and TikTok don’t seem so appealing.

I own a Boox Palma (which is technically a “tablet” because it lacks a SIM to connect to cell networks) and I can confirm that e-ink truly changes what you want to do on a device like this. It is excellent for reading (there’s a good reason why its primary use case has been e-readers) so I tend to use it more to read articles or look something up quickly. It’s like a nicotine patch for my phone in that way. It mostly lives on my nightstand while my phone charges in another room, but I have taken it around town a bit too and can imagine the ways in which it might substitute for a full-fledged smartphone.

Still, they’re not addiction proof. A lot of addictive and abusive phone interactions are purely text-based. While I haven’t had an account on a micro-blogging platform in years, I do have a Substack account (obviously), and after my last piece went viral, I found myself increasingly addicted to the notifications and Substack Notes, which I mostly consumed on my Boox Palma. Turns out you don’t need a beautiful color screen to make a Skinner Box!1 They are still capable of infinite scrolling — a super-charged version of channel surfing — which creates an intermittent reward schedule, and thus addiction.

Also, the poor refresh rates of e-ink don’t just make it hard to watch videos, it means that even some basic functionality is fairly janky. Typing is unresponsive and navigating apps that aren’t specifically designed to work without color can be rough.

I love e-ink as a technology. My Kobo is now my preferred way of reading books. But I think as an answer to the smartphone, it draws the line in the wrong place. TikTok and YouTube become almost impossible while reading becomes a delight, but it’s perfectly possible to scroll feeds, and maps and the camera remain genuinely janky.

It’s enough of a problem that these companies are working hard to overcome these limitations by… increasing refresh rates and developing color e-ink. Isn’t that just a regular smartphone again?

4. The problem is that phones can download abusive software

The three previous theories have something in common: They all try to solve the smartphone problem by downgrading the device. They try to use form factors, hardware limitations, and bespoke software to make the phone less powerful, and in doing so they either make it less useful, fail to remove all of the abusive elements, or both.

But what if there’s actually nothing wrong with the design of the modern smartphone? Perhaps we can have our big screens and powerful cameras and access to all of the bounties of the app store, minus anything addictive or abusive. If the problem can be located to specific uses of the phone, we could build operating systems that simply don’t allow for those behaviors.

That’s what the Sleke Phone, Wise Phone, and Balance Phone are trying to do. I personally own the Sleke Phone, so I will speak to that one primarily.

In terms of hardware, the Sleke Phone is just a Google Pixel 7, which is a totally respectable phone in our current age of plateauing smartphone design. But it runs a forked version of Android that draws a hard line between what you can and cannot do. The key feature is that you can only download whitelisted apps. This could be almost anything, no matter how obscure, so long as it isn’t for consumption. The Sleke Phone even goes so far as to eschew a browser. You can use an LLM chatbot to find and show you individual pages you may need, but you can’t navigate around the internet freely.

I had been thinking about the phone problem for a long time when I first heard about the Sleke through a video on YouTube and I ordered one almost immediately. Conceptually, the idea of blocking abusive consumption at the level of firmware with scalpel-like precision was fascinating to me. In practice though, I had two serious issues.

First, because these devices use modern smartphones as their base, they have average-sized screens, which is to say, enormous screens. As we’ve established, the very purpose of those huge screens is to display consumable content, but they’re mostly useless when you run an OS like this. It feels totally incongruous, like driving a Ferrari with the engine of a Honda Civic. This problem isn’t inherent to the concept though; the OS could run on a smaller phone in the future.

My second issue is more fundamental. Who decides what counts as “consumption” and what counts as “utility”? Sleke’s founders, of course.

When I first got the phone, I requested that a few apps be whitelisted. The founders accepted a few of my requests, but they rejected my requests for Strava and Instapaper because they considered them to be consumption. Personally, I use Strava purely as a fitness tool to upload workouts. There is theoretically a feed of your friends’ workouts, but I’ve never had more than five people in my contacts that I could follow, nor have I wanted to spend more than 60 seconds looking at little orange lines indicating where they recently went for runs. And Instapaper is for reading saved articles, which to my mind is perhaps the healthiest thing I ever use my phone for. But I guess an article is visual (bad), whereas a podcast is audible (good)?

My issue is not that these two calls were the wrong ones or with the Sleke founders’ particular perspective (they seem like really nice guys), but that the call will always rest with the person developing the software. It risks becoming paternalistic, and that’s no fault of the developer. As a user of such a device, I’m asking someone else to decide what’s right and wrong for me and hold that line. Yet almost immediately, the humanist in me rebels against what then feels like arbitrary restrictions.

5. The problem is that phones are designed for consumption

Implicit in all of these arguments is a division between consumption (bad) and utility (good), and though they come at it in different ways, each theory shares a core approach: they focus on making consumption worse / harder / impossible. But what if the answer lies on the other side of the equation? What if the answer is to design for utility instead?

This is the theory embedded in the recently announced Clicks Communicator. It’s an Android phone with a small, squarish screen and a physical keyboard; basically, a modern BlackBerry. And yet when I first saw it, I thought it might be part of the answer. (I pre-ordered immediately. The device is slated to ship later this year.)

Though the word “dumbphone” has been thrown around to describe everything from flip phones to the Sleke, I don’t think you could call the Communicator a dumbphone, it simply does too much. Yet it’s also not quite a smartphone as we know it. The name itself suggests this: before the iPhone was announced and the word “smartphone” entered popular usage, this sort of device was often called a “communicator”.

I never had a BlackBerry, so I have to take people’s word when they say that the typing experience is better. But what the keyboard actually does is allow for the screen to be small while still maintaining functionality. Every element of the phone — the locked orientation, the shape of the back, the keyboard — is designed for it to be something that does quick and important tasks. Bang out an email, reply to a text, check some piece of information. But you wouldn’t want to browse or scroll for very long on it (I don’t think).

There is a real barrier for any phone that markets itself as an alternative to the abusive devices that most of us currently use: It’s hard to sell something that does “less”. Yes, I’m interested in all of these devices and willing to tinker until I find my optimal experience, but I’m a weirdo! We can’t afford for healthy technology to be a niche phenomenon, and it turns out, most people are turned off by products that are marketed for their wholesomeness and benevolence.

I remember being in a burrito shop years ago, and there was an old poster advertising Moxie Cola and Diet Moxie. The can of original Moxie said “Great taste”, and in the same place on the can of Diet Moxie, it said “Fewer calories”. Which really makes you wonder, does Diet Moxie not have “great taste”? That’s how a lot of the positioning for these good-for-you phones comes off to me: “This phone is better for you because it’s a bad phone.”

The Communicator solves this problem by being for something rather than against it. Clicks designed a phone that was genuinely excellent at the things people actually really do need phones for: communication, quick reference, getting things done. The small screen and physical keyboard follow from that design brief. And as a byproduct — not a feature, a byproduct — the phone is pretty bad for consumption. You could load Instagram or TikTok but I don’t think you’d want to.

Of the options I’ve explored here, I think this design theory best locates the sweet spot between functionality and benevolence. It doesn’t ask us to try to go backwards, to close ourselves off, to introduce meaningless and arbitrary friction and roadblocks, or to hand our judgement to someone else. It just makes a phone that’s good at being a phone and bad at being a slot machine.

The real solution is…

Personally, I don’t think the classic dumbphone, the restrictive operating system, or the e-ink phone get to the root of our problems. They add friction that helps in some measures and hurts in others, which is why none of them have broken through.

But in the other options, I see a few paths forward. I genuinely like the Light Phone III, and they’re planning to release an SDK that may help the device develop and mature. Only then will I know if it can make the leap from part-time phone to full-time phone. And I’m really excited to get my hands on the Clicks Communicator to see if it can thread the needle from the start. Until then though, I’m holding onto my 3.5-year-old iPhone Mini 13. I’ve basically beaten it into submission through app blocking and deleting accounts, as detailed in my previous essay, so I’m not in urgent need of a replacement (though it will only hold out for so many more years).

One thing all these options have in common? Small screens. Not e-ink, not sophisticated gatekeepers, not a T9 keyboard — just a small screen. Perhaps that’s the real secret, and the one thing the big phone manufacturers don’t want to give us. (There are rumors that Apple is finally going to make another phone with a smaller front screen. The catch is that it’s a foldable phone with an internal screen the size of an iPad Mini.)

Ultimately, the phones are just one part of the puzzle. They may be the doom portals that shape our experience of the internet, the thing that shaped the internet into the abusive, all-encompassing network it is today, but simply changing our devices will not fix what it has made. It leaks out of every WiFi connected device in your home and in the world you move around in. It has other ways to get at you, in particular through other people. But attacking the phone is a strong start to addressing the problem.

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In January of 2025, I decided to do something about it.

Though I tried many different things to connect with reality again, nothing had a bigger impact than my efforts to change my relationship to technology. In the course of one year, I systematically attacked every device, service, and app that in any way distorted my experience of reality. I came out of the experience changed.

So it isn’t surprising to me at all that many people have chosen “disconnect from tech” as one of their New Year’s resolutions. In the hopes that it may help people on that journey, I’m going to share what I did, what I learned, and offer some tools for escaping the technosphere (including a special spreadsheet that I think will help a lot.)

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Principles for disconnecting

In the beginning, my project was really just a long list of stuff I wanted to get rid of or replace. But by the end, patterns had emerged and I saw the problems so much more clearly. Here’s what I wish I’d known when I started.

You have to understand your own motivation. Understanding the problem you actually want to solve is the key to identifying what changes are most important or meaningful to you and keeping up the motivation to make the change. There are many good reasons to change your relationship to technology — to escape the grasp of big corporations, to reclaim your time and attention, to be in control of your own choices. Personally, I felt that I wasn’t in direct contact with reality, that everything was a mediated, virtual experience owned by tech corporations. Take some time to reflect on what you really want and why.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We’ve all spent many years racking up accounts, devices, and services, all of which are easier to acquire than to get rid of. I spent all of 2025 on this project and while I made a huge amount of progress, I’m still not done. Like diet and exercise, this is a choice you’re making for your long-term health and well-being, and the battle will be won in months and years, not days and weeks.

Learn to love (or at least accept) inconvenience. If you ask people what their values are, virtually no one will say “convenience”, yet that’s how we make so many of our decisions. Streaming services are convenient, two-day shipping is convenient, optimized platforms are convenient. If you want to get clear of this stuff, you have to accept that some of the stuff you’ll have to do will be clunky, janky, fussy, slow, or difficult. It’s really not so bad.

If you don’t want to be the product, you have to pay. We’ve all gotten used to free services. “You won’t own anything and you’ll be happy” turned out not to be true, and more importantly, obscures who actually does the owning. I now pay for things I used to get for free, and I’m glad to do it because it gives me back control.

Tech is insidious. You need to be persistent. The big tech companies have lured us in with convenience and novelty, but the real trap is often dependence. I found that many of the apps, services, and devices in my life had multiple purposes, some of which were harder to give up than others. It requires diligence to slowly remove all of these dependencies.

Don’t just delete. Replace. Everything you try to get rid of served some kind of function or purpose in your life. On a practical level, if you want to quit streaming music or stop relying on corporate cloud storage, you will need to find alternatives. Don’t worry, options exist and they’re actually pretty good. And on a personal level, if scrolling is what you do when you’re bored, you’ll need to find some activities to take its place.

Stay flexible about the outcome. I defined what I thought successful outcomes would be at the beginning of this project. But I was surprised to find that sometimes, once I had reclaimed some control over a technology, it didn’t feel so pressing to be completely rid of it. The problem, for instance, wasn’t that I have a Google account, but that I used it for so many things. Once I had reduced what that account did, it didn’t feel so awful to have it around. We all define success for ourselves, and sometimes that definition changes.

On the other hand, sometimes the only real solution is total disconnection. I found that there were some technologies that I simply couldn’t have a positive relationship with. There is no healthy dose of TikTok, and no matter how I maneuvered around Instagram, I would always end up back there somehow. Some things you just have to delete entirely.

Taking action

Auditing my tech

I’m going to offer you an exceptionally powerful tool for changing your relationship to technology: an Excel spreadsheet.

You see, my goal wasn’t just to use social media less” or get out more. It was to fundamentally alter my relationship with technology. That’s an amorphous, complex thing that permeates so many dimensions of my life. I had to be systematic.

So near the beginning of the year, I created a spreadsheet and audited all of the devices, services, and apps I used. For each one, I filled out the following information:

• What I used them for

• What ecosystem they belonged to (Apple, Amazon, Google)

• A rating of how “evil” I thought they were (malicious, neutral, benign)

• A rating of how hard I thought they would be to get rid of (easy, medium, difficult, punishing)

This was necessary for me to wrap my head around the problem and build a plan of attack. For example, I may dislike how I spend a lot of my time on my MacBook, but I don’t actually think my MacBook is the problem, whereas I felt that my Apple Watch and Google Photos were screwing up how I perceived the world and myself. This is all very personal. If you try this, you will have a different list of technologies, but you will also feel differently about each of them than I may have.

Once I had completed my audit, I made a second spreadsheet. The purpose of this one was to track my progress. I carried over all of the technologies from the first sheet that I wanted to disconnect, then I sorted them by difficulty. I then broke that list into roughly three tiers: quick wins that I could knock out in a sitting, medium difficulty projects that might require some sustained attention over weeks or months, and the truly punishing technologies that were completely ingrained in my life.

Get the spreadsheet template here

Then I started plotting. I wrote a line or two for each one about how I thought I would tackle them, as well as defining what success looked like. Each week I checked the spreadsheet and chipped away at the next item on the list. When I made progress (or had to change tack), I updated the spreadsheet with my next step.

Some weeks I made no progress. Sometimes I was working on a few different projects at the same time. There was rarely any sort of urgency and if I didn’t feel like working on it, I didn’t. But I often found it so interesting and satisfying that I would willingly dedicate my free time to it.

A quick note, there’s some stuff I don’t address in here because it wasn’t part of my tech stack, but it might be a part of yours:

• TikTok / short-form video — I went through a three month binge of TikTok a few years ago, deleted it, and never went back because it was perhaps the most nakedly manipulative thing I’ve ever come in contact with.

• Micro-blogging platforms — These are close in their amount of evil, and I have been off Twitter et al for a long time now. You are what you consume, and there’s no way to be a good consumer of hyper-reactive micro-sentiments.

• TV streaming — I don’t stream a lot of TV or movies so it wasn’t something I was worried about getting rid of, and I only have maybe one account to begin with.

• Smart devices — I have never had anything that responds to “Hey Alexa/Siri/Google” turned on for general use in my life, but I would have turned those off if I had.

Also, AI is notably absent on this list. I haven’t become hooked into or exposed to AI in any ways that need to be painstakingly disconnected. Yet.

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Tier 1: Easy

I started out with quick wins, changes that I could make in a single day.

Shopping on Amazon

For many years, I consoled myself that I didn’t buy a lot of stuff on Amazon. My family had a Prime account and they weren’t going to cancel it just because I stopped using it. So what was the difference if I ordered something now and again?

That, as they say, is how they get’cha. Amazon is based on one principle above all else: convenience. You were going to buy this thing anyway, so would you rather buy it from a store or have it delivered? What if there was no shipping cost? What if it would get here tomorrow? Suddenly, there’s no compelling reason to ever visit a store again, and no other retailer can match them.

My first step was to turn up the friction. I removed my credit card and home address from the Amazon account, deleted the password from my password manager, and deleted the app from my phone.

Then, I needed to replace all of that online shopping with something else. To make things harder, the next natural alternative — Target — became more morally complicated around the same time I started this project.

Once I forced myself to get creative though, I found that there are now some really great alternatives to Amazon for online shopping now:

• Etsy: Shopping vintage and handmade from small businesses whenever possible was my first line of defense. As a bonus, you can find a lot of stuff with more personality. I’ve used Etsy to get weird and interesting doodads for a long time, but this was maybe the first year that I thought of it as a place for practical shopping.

• Shopify: Many small businesses now use Shopify, which eliminates the primary pain-point of buying from independent websites: filling out all your payment and shipping information. You can even search across shops from their app, which allows you to find stuff from tons of small, specialty storefronts.

• eBay: I’m here to tell you that eBay is actually great. Turns out that many manufacturers now sell their open box and refurbished products on eBay. I got a power drill, a space heater, a cordless vacuum. It costs less, reduces waste, and avoids Amazon while being basically an identical product. And if you get into vintage electronics the way I did this year, it’s the place to go.

Getting off of Amazon entirely wasn’t too hard. The secret, as I’ve said, is accepting inconvenience. It requires a little extra searching, paying more shipping fees, and waiting a little bit longer.

Oh, and pro tip: Maybe just buy less stuff.

Google Drive

As with many of the technologies on my list, Google Drive got into my life by being useful and seemingly harmless. They honestly didn’t have to work very hard to make a better product than Microsoft Office, and I didn’t think twice about the difference between cloud and local storage at the time.

But just like real life storage facilities, once you’ve given them all your stuff, they basically own you. If I ever wanted to be free of Google, I had to find somewhere else for my stuff to go.

Google Drive is one of the easiest Google services to get out of. First, I bought an SSD (SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, 1 tb) and copied all of my files to it. I also had a few services and devices that used Google Drive for their remote storage, so I created a Dropbox account and moved my backups there. Easy.

I still use Google Drive from time to time, and it’s a big part of my work life, but the important thing is that I have demoted it back to what it once was: a simple utility.

Google search

It has been the dominant search engine since it was invented. It is even the word for doing such a search:

Google (v) — to search for something on the internet

On one level, I don’t really care that Google uses its data to target ads at me. Isn’t it better to see a relevant ad than an irrelevant ad? And what does it matter if Google knows what deodorant I use or that I’m trying to find a site to watch The Nice Guys? Besides, I use uBlock origin.

What I actually care about is the fact that in macro, targeted content distorts reality. I have no idea which websites and companies are working to silently shape my perceptions of reality based on what Google tells them.

Also, Google’s dominance allowed it to enshittify in a big way and it’s not even a good search engine anymore, so good riddance.

When I looked around, I discovered that there are a new spate of competitors. It’s not just Bing and DuckDuckGo anymore! Here’s a quick summary of what I found:

• Kagi: A paid search engine. Their argument is that paying for search avoids making you the product, and this has been a pattern in my efforts. Kagi brings fun and life back to search engines.

• Brave: Another paid search engine. I’ll be honest, I don’t like the lion logo. It’s a dumb reason, but I don’t care! They have their own indexing.

• Startpage: Free, with minimal ads. It provides Google-quality search results but without the privacy violations. Probably the smoothest transition.

I added all of these to the search options in my browser settings and now I readily flip back and forth between them. I don’t think this is a case where you have to settle on a single best option. Heck, I still use Google for certain specific use-cases now and again. The point, really, is to reduce dependence.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome was cool, once upon a time. Now it’s just another browser, and one that sort of chugs at that. The only reason I’ve stayed with it is inertia.

In replacing it, I wanted something mature, stable, and independent. So I went back to FireFox. It’s a browser, and it isn’t made by Google, Microsoft, or Apple. Mission accomplished. The browsing experience is almost identical, but now my data isn’t feeding Google’s profile of me.

Instagram, Facebook

Social media is maybe the most difficult tech disconnection to make because something in your brain says that you’re abandoning your friends. Yeah, you may absolutely loathe the amount of time you waste on Instagram and feel that it’s rotting your brain and making you into a bad person, but are you really going to cut yourself off from your social network??

However, I found this mostly to be an illusion. When I really looked at my Instagram with a critical eye, I found that I wouldn’t be losing much. Most of what I did on the app was idle content consumption. Sometimes that content was made by my friends, but that content wasn’t what I actually liked about my friendships. I enjoy actually talking to these people and spending time with them, not the false intimacy of seeing their vacation photos. Besides, I had most of the important people’s phone numbers. When I really tried to account for what I would lose without Instagram, the answer was: very little.

I’ve tried to limit my Instagram usage for years. I’ve set usage limits, blocked the domain, deleted the app. But it didn’t really matter what I did. I would either find a way around the block or simply remove it. This time, I decided to just delete it.

I used the download tools in account settings to get all of my pictures and videos saved on my SSD. You have to navigate a labyrinth of menus to do this because they really don’t want you to do this. With that done, I just deleted it.

I planned to delete Facebook after that, which was going to be even easier because I had already deleted it once many years ago. But when I logged in to delete it, I found that Meta had gone ahead and deleted my account due to suspicious activity. I don’t know what that was about, but — and this is the only time I’ll ever say this earnestly — thanks, Zuck!

I no longer have any relationship to Meta. Hooray!

Apple Watch

I got my first Apple Watch without really knowing what it would do for me. It was a neat gadget, the next evolution of the Apple ecosystem. Like many people, I found it convenient to see notifications on my wrist and track various health and fitness metrics. But that metrification meant that this device was in control of how I understood myself and my health, and the constant tether meant I wasn’t never really away from my phone.

I felt anxious about losing those instantly visible notifications. Truly, the biggest thing tying me to the Apple Watch was the idea that I needed to see Slack messages during impulsive midday showers. The solution was that I simply decided to be okay with not seeing everything immediately. This is how things used to be, and they could be that way again.

I also used my watch for my morning alarm, so I got myself a good alarm clock. I settled on a Loftie, which is itself a somewhat fancy piece of technology, but in practice it’s actually pretty set-it-and-forget-it.

I could have continued to use the Apple Watch just for workouts, but part of the dangers of these technologies is that regardless of why we acquire them, if they can do something, we often end up using that functionality.

Instead, I got Coros Pace 3 — a simple but effective running watch. As with many of my replacement technologies, the Coros is a better running watch than the Apple Watch was. Its battery lasts longer, it has a memory-in-pixel screen that is always visible and looks great in direct sunlight but only lights up when you need it to. I use it for running and pretty much nothing else.

And once I was free of the Apple Watch for a few months, I decided that maybe I wanted a watch that was just good at being a watch. The Casio Royale is what passed as a smart watch in the 90s and 00s — it has a timer, stopwatch, alarm, and world time clock, and it has a delightful retro-futuristic aesthetic. It turns out there’s a whole subculture around Casio watches and now whenever I see one out and about I feel like I’m in on something.

Tier 2: Hard

Once I had gotten the low-hanging fruit, I started on projects that would take me a little bit longer to pull off.

Google Photos

I remember running out of local photo storage on my phone for the first time in the early 2010s. At the time, I resented the idea that Apple wanted me to pay them a monthly fee for expanded iCloud (ha!), so I opted for Google Photos, which was free for the amount I was using at the time. By the time I decided to get out, I was paying monthly for the 100 gb version of Google cloud storage, most of it taken up by photos and videos.

It is, admittedly, super convenient to be able to access all of your photos anywhere you go and to be able to search your photos using keywords. From another perspective though, it was pretty annoying that there was a company that had control of all of my photos.

Google Photos has a way to download your repository all at once. Then I simply loaded it onto my SSD, then delete everything from Google Photos. Since I hadn’t been manually managing my photo library up to this point, this was a sort of unusable mess. So I used a piece of software called PhotoSweeper to reduce duplicates, similar images, and poor quality shots.

Kindle and Audible

Though Amazon has become the Everything Store, it all started with books, and they’ve never let go. And as with everything it does, it has dominated its competition through pure efficiency and convenience. No one held a candle to the Kindle or Audible for years, and so that’s what I used.

When I started this project, I knew I never wanted to buy another ebook or audiobook from Amazon again, but I wasn’t planning on doing much more than that. Then Amazon announced that it was removing the option to download your ebook files, and I took that personally.

While there was still time, I painstakingly downloaded each file individually, removed the DRM, converted the formats, and organized my library in Calibre — free, third party ebook library management software. I did something similar with Audible through OpenAudible.

At that point, I could have continued to use my Kindle, but I wanted out of the ecosystem entirely. Instead, I got a Kobo Clara BW and I now buy my ebooks from the Kobo store. And I get my audiobooks through Libro FM, which is an almost perfectly lateral move from Audible in terms of functionality.

Spotify

Spotify promised that I would never have to buy an individual song from iTunes ever again. I could listen to whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Sure, artist compensation was terrible, but it’s not like they were making bank on 99 cent downloads either.

But in recent years, I had long come to feel that Spotify had ruined my experience of music. As Erik Hoel would put it, my algorithm had become “over-fitted”, serving me a very narrow, boring idea of what it thought I liked. The human curation was gone, the discovery felt drab, and I felt like I was fighting the interface just to see what music I had saved.

For that reason, my first step wasn’t simply to replace Spotify with a different streaming service. I wanted to rediscover music unmediated by an app subscription model.

I went down the rabbit hole of rebuilding my music library, almost from scratch. I made a catalogue of the music from Spotify that I wanted to own, fought with iTunes to reclaim my long lost library, bought a lot of tracks and albums from Bandcamp and the awfully named Qobuz, and sailed the Seven Seas just a bit. I ended up with a catalogue of 1700 songs that I fully and completely own.

I spent weeks monkeying with near-dead iPods from eBay and the new crop of Android-based “digital audio players” (which are mostly uninteresting to me). I settled on an iPod Mini with a fresh battery and expanded flash memory. The clickwheel is unbeatable and non-algorithmic “shuffle all songs” is a killer feature. I also found that listening to music through wired in-ear monitors sounded meaningfully different than my AirPods.

I didn’t actually feel pressed to get off of Spotify though, just to replace it a bit, and I succeeded on that count. Listening to music felt fun again.

But later in the year, more news came out that moved Spotify from the “ambiguous” moral category to the “evil” moral category. So I tried out Apple Music and Tidal and settled on Tidal because it was almost exactly the same as Spotify. Migrating is nearly painless. The interface is a bit more bland and there isn’t much in the way of generated playlists, but if you’re considering a change, there’s very little reason not to.

Tier 3: Punishing

Finally, I came to the big, sticky problems — the technologies that are almost impossible to escape.

Gmail

I knew that I would have to chip away at Google. Offloading my files, reorganizing my photos, switching my browser and default search engine. All of these are piddly things in comparison to Gmail. It’s the username I log in to hundreds of websites and services, which means that Google gets every receipt, confirmation, reservation, and newsletter. Google really doesn’t need anything else from me as long as they have me locked into Gmail, and it’s immensely hard to undo. And unfortunately, that’s what makes it more important than all of the rest.

Patience.

The first step was to find a replacement. I looked into email providers that were smaller, private, had no conflict of interest, demonstrated long-term stability, and didn’t have a goofy name. Several met my criteria, but I settled on Fastmail, mostly because my desired handle was available. It’s another service that’s $5 a month and I’m happy to pay it. Presumably, that’s how much Gmail would cost if they weren’t selling my information. I set up inbox forwarding and now I don’t log into Gmail at all.

Now I’m engaged in the diligent process of moving all of my accounts over to the new email address. I started by going to “Third-party connections” in my Google account settings and unhooking Google authenticated login from almost everything. Most services will then allow you to use your email address and a password or one-time code to log in. Now, every time I log in to some website or service, I try to take a minute to change my login to the new email. It will take time, but someday in the near future, I will no longer use Gmail for anything important.

iPhone

Imagine you are standing in a field holding a rock, and you throw it as hard and as far as you can. Then you look down at your hand and there is the rock. That’s how I feel about my phone.

The phone is so hard to get rid of because it’s the nexus of everything. It’s how you listen to music, watch videos, take photos, text your friends, make calls, take notes, track your appointments, check your email, wake up in the morning, it’s a flashlight, it’s an entertainment system, it’s a calculator, it’s your navigation system, it’s your plane ticket and your payment method. This makes it nearly invulnerable to escape. You’re not just addicted, you’re entangled.

So the strategy isn’t just “replace the phone”, it’s to weaken it by a thousand cuts. This is also why it comes last. Everything up to this point has removed arrows from the phone’s quiver. We have deleted accounts and apps and services, and the hold of the phone has been weakened.

In truth, I have been attacking the phone for years now. Here are some of the tactics I’ve employed:

• Delete as many apps as you can. Even boring ones that you’ve forgotten about. If you don’t need it, get rid of it. Every additional app is another potential distraction and contributes the general feeling of infinite novelty.

• Keep a minimal home screen. Leave everything else in the app drawer. The goal is for your phone to be a little boring. When you pick up your phone for no particular reason and look at your home screen, you should think “huh, I don’t need to do any of that right now.”

• Reduce notifications to bare essentials. Every notification is an invitation to open your phone, or clutter that makes it harder to think clearly about what you’re doing. A notification should be something actually important and timely; everything else can wait until you open the app again.

• Use a simple, brutally effective blocker. I’ve investigated the options over the years, and nothing works as well as Freedom. It’s paid service that blocks sites and apps at the domain level, across devices. It has various levels of locking intensity, all the way up to needing to contact customer support.

Most of this stuff I tried or implemented before 2025, and yet 2025 was a big year for reducing the influence of my phone, and it seems to be due to the fact that I made so much progress on so many other fronts. I detached from so many device integrations and services that my phone’s hold shrank almost without me thinking about it.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a handy little pocket computer. The phone isn’t the problem, it merely contains problems. And yet, I think the smartphone paradigm is fundamentally broken at the moment. If you take the steps necessary to make your phone a healthy device, I think you will find that you aren’t using a lot of what it was made for. If you aren’t consuming videos, scrolling, or playing games, then why do you have this enormous glass slab?

We, as consumers, have been denied real choices about phones for years now. Basically, you can get a dumbphone and be constantly blocked out of interaction with the modern world, or you can get a consumption phablet that barely fits in your pocket. Still, I’m hopeful that this will change soon.

What changed for me

To my surprise, my plan actually work worked. Some part of me figured that this was a lost cause and my plan was a series of meaningless gestures in the face of an unbeatable opponent. I was going to scream and rage into the hurricane, but my ship would still go down.

But that’s not what happened. Basically every single change I made brought at least some small, lasting sense of relief. I would replace a device or delete an account and think “Wow! I did it! This feels great!”

In fact, I find myself forgetting how it used to feel just a year ago. I hear people talk about their relationship to technology and think “oh yeah, it used to be like that.” I really don’t mean to sound high and mighty. What I actually mean is that the result is fairly humble. I don’t feel like a genius or a guru. I don’t feel like life is easy all of sudden. But I do feel a bit closer to how I felt years ago, before the tech ecosystem engulfed us. It’s possible, is what I mean to say.

I also found some new hobbies along the way. See, I’m actually not an anti-tech guy. I love gadgets and widgets and doodads, I love to tinker. Looking for replacements to virtual services and devices led me into so many more interesting technical forays. I mucked around with modded iPods, film cameras, old Game Boys. I actually learned things about various kinds of hardware and software rather than letting big companies selling me out of the box solutions. (I always thought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was unbearably pretentious, but that doesn’t mean having personal mastery over the technology your rely on was a bad idea.)

What’s next in 2026

As I said before, there was too much to accomplish in a single year, and there are still a few projects I’d like to pursue in 2026, including:

• Setting up a NAS for remote file storage. Based on some cursory research, it seems like this may be easier and more feasible than I would have assumed. The main downside of getting off Google was that I don’t have access to their cloud services. I don’t need instant, remote access to all of my digital stuff, but it would be nice to have.

• Changing all of my accounts over from Gmail to Fastmail. I rarely log into Gmail anymore, but it’s still the username for so many of my accounts. As long as that’s the case, Google owns a part of me. Slowly but surely, I’m changing all of my account logins.

• Making physical photo albums. I want to go through all of the photos on my SSD and curate a collection of pictures from each year that I actually like, print them, and put them in photo albums that I can just pull off a shelf.

• Continuing the quest for a good phone. For the first time in years, a small crop of companies is working to make phones that aren’t just enormous glass consumption slabs. I’m hoping that in the near future, we will once again have options regarding what kind of phones we carry and I’m looking forward to trying them out.

I first wondered this while reading the Leech. I hadn’t heard of it before I pulled it off a shelf in a bookstore, and this paragraph on the jacket is what hooked me:

For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed.

A hivemind doctor protagonist in the post-apocalypse? Hell yeah! I was sold.

Unfortunately, after a short spell of cool hivemind stuff at the beginning, one of the doctor’s hosts becomes isolated, and… becomes individual again, which the author deems a good thing. It doesn’t matter that the Doctor was the most intelligent, benevolent, optimistic, hard-working character in the whole story — hivemind bad, individual good.

There are two primary kinds of hiveminds. The first is the assimilating collective. The best, most classic vision of this kind is The Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The drones and the collective do not experience joy or beauty or love. They have no meaningful ambition. Everything is optimal, nothing is wonderful. It’s a managerial dystopia.

The second most common variety is the space bug hivemind. Starship Troopers sets the template for this variety. Somewhere in space is a race of giant bugs. They reproduce quickly, they’re expendable, and they’re all on the same page. This is a thinly veiled metaphor for Communism (if you want to talk about Nazis in space, you create an Empire; if you want to talk about Communists, you create a hivemind).

In short, hiveminds are evil because they will either forcibly assimilate you, replacing your individuality with the miserable, grey consciousness of the collective, or they will steamroll your society full of individuals with the superior numbers and coordination that come with being a collective of expendable drones.

What I find so interesting is that our cultural assumptions about hiveminds are so deep. We basically know they’re evil from jump, and the logic seems to work upstream. Leech, for instance, assumed that I would be so ready to understand the hivemind as evil that it didn’t really have to make its case.

This is in part because the trope plays so well when combined with Horror. In Horror, it does all the things you need a monster to do: it’s implacable, it takes away your loved ones, it threatens to consume you without your consent, you can never run fast enough to get away. Or, when deployed in an Action story, it gives you unlimited cannon fodder that you don’t have to sympathize with.

I find this all very boring. Whereas Horror is about fear and powerlessness, and Action is about excitement and empowerment, Science Fiction is all about curiosity. I’m interested in hiveminds almost solely because I’m interested in the other forms that intelligence and consciousness can take. We are only one possible configuration for intelligent life, and it would require a wild amount of human chauvinism to assume that we are the best. Although they involve aliens and laboratory experiments, these are merely pretexts in stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Stranger Things.

And Science Fiction has indeed explored hiveminds in neutral or positive ways, except that as soon as they’re deemed “good”, they tend not to be called hiveminds anymore:

• The Tines in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep are pack-minds — individual dog-like creatures that only achieve consciousness in groups of 4-6.

• The Sensates in Sense8 are psychically linked humans who share experiences while maintaining fierce individuality.

• Theodore Sturgeon’s gestalt in More Than Human connects outcasts into something greater while preserving what makes them themselves.

• Ender’s Game has a space bug hivemind — the Formics — and to its credit, portrays the violent conflict between them and humanity as being due to a shortfall on humanity’s part.

Notice though: they’re all non-assimilationist. We can tolerate collective consciousness as long as it doesn’t threaten to include us. The moment a hivemind wants to expand, to invite others in, we code it as evil.

There’s no reason there couldn’t be a good assimilationist hivemind though. What if it just made its case, asked nicely, and kept showing up? That, basically, is what the Federation does in Star Trek.

The Federation promises not to interfere in the internal affairs of other societies. It doesn’t conquer by force, it does not coerce. They show up on your doorstep with a pie. They want to know about your culture, they want to try your food and your music, they want to extend a hand in friendship, offer you a glass of root beer. They hope that someday this will be enough to convince you to join them.

So what would it look like if a hivemind operated this way? What if it used the Federation’s patient persuasion rather than the Borg’s violent assimilation?

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In the first fifteen minutes of Pluribus, scientists discover a signal from space. Somewhere out there, an antenna the size of Africa has been beaming out this repeated message for millions of years. It contains a RNA sequence, and once it gets into the human bloodstream, it begins converting every individual on Earth into a hivemind. A few days after the first infection, only 13 individual humans remain due to their innate immunity.

All the elements of a classic, “hivemind bad” story are present, but their meanings have been changed. The hero is not the great and noble individual who will save us. She’s a miserable, selfish, incurious person that you wouldn’t want to share a beer with. She is never happy, she swears and drinks and falls asleep on the couch watching the Golden Girls. She can’t dig a hole or feed herself without the apparatus of American commerce. If I could say only one thing about Carol, I’d tell you that she’s a grasshole: despite living in Albuquerque, one of the driest cities in the country, Carol chooses to keep a well-watered lawn.

By contrast the hivemind seems… fine? They say they’re happy. It’s clearly established that they can’t lie, so we can be confident that’s true. They’re ending climate change and exploitation. City lights are shut off at night, wildlife is returning, people spend the night in shared sleeping arrangements. Every bad thing about them seems designed to invert a trope. They eat people! Only once they’ve died naturally, a contribution to feeding the world that they value. They don’t have personal relationships with pets! But buffalo and coyotes and other wildlife are returning to the places they once roamed. They can’t make art! Arguably we only make art because we’re so isolated that we can’t sufficiently express ourselves or understand each other. Everyone is fed, everyone is sheltered, and everyone receives medical care.

There is one other individual human that wants to stand against the hivemind though: Manousos. Whereas Carol represents selfish, misanthropic individualism, Manousos represents rugged, brutal individualism. He is stubborn, hostile, uncompromising. He will survive on dog food before accepting a meal from the hivemind, light his own car on fire before leaving it behind, try (and fail) to cross the Darien Gap rather than accept their help. Our species has made it this far thanks to men like Manousos. But he reminds me of the classic novel I Am Legend; once humanity has been replaced by “monsters” who form their own society, the last human being that stalks them in the night becomes the monster.

Pluribus does intentionally what Leech does accidentally. The hivemind is careful, competent, compassionate; the individuals are panicky, stupid, and selfish.

And there’s one important detail here that I haven’t shared yet: Carol is an alcoholic, an addict.

Why is this so important to understanding the story? Because addicts want something that’s bad for them, and Carol wants individualism like she wants booze. Individualism is killing us and the planet. It’s the source of so much pain and suffering, and we really, really want it. We don’t want to stop being individuals, no matter the cost. We kick and scream: Give us Lean Cuisine and grass lawns in the desert.

We want consent to be more clear cut than it is. Yes means yes and no means no. Except that we recognize some conditions don’t allow for clean consent. Children can’t consent to refuse their parents’ care. An addict in crisis isn’t in a position to refuse the intervention that might save their life. Or, as the hivemind in Pluribus puts it, you don’t ask a drowning person if they want to be saved. We accept that sometimes transformation is necessary even when the person being transformed would say no. We are kittens, hissing and huddling in the back of our cages, afraid of the doctor who wants to give us medicine.

The name given to the hivemind in Pluribus is “the Others”. They see the message from space as a gift. It was here before humanity evolved, before we made the first stone tool. But only once we were able to make radio telescopes and edit genes were we able to find it and do anything with it. Because that’s the exact moment we need help.

Around episode three, I predicted a detail that didn’t come until later: the Others plan to build another telescope to pass on the gift. It’s only natural: The last step of The 12 Steps is to take this message to others.

This all makes perfect sense when you consider Fermi’s Paradox. It is roughly this: based on what we know about biology and the cosmos, we should be able to look up to the night sky and find signs of alien civilizations pretty easily, so why can’t we? There are a number of solutions. Maybe we’re early. Maybe we’re wrong in some of our assumptions. Maybe they’re hiding (the Dark Forest Theory). Or maybe, intelligent species all die out for some reason. Maybe there’s some challenge that they all encounter that keeps them from going on. This idea is known as the Great Filter.

It’s possible that we’re up against the Great Filter right now. We’ve invented vaccines and grocery stores but also nuclear weapons and climate change. Do we have the wisdom to continue past this point, or will we destroy ourselves?

In this light, the message really does seem to be a gift. We, as a tribal species, sort of suck at collective action problems. We’ve been trying to solve them through social technologies and coordination mechanisms for all of history, but they never stay beaten. What if the only way to overcome that enormous problem is to give up our precious individuality? It got us this far, but perhaps it can take us no further. Our attachment to individualism might be nostalgia for a failure mode — a configuration of consciousness that was adaptive in our evolutionary past but catastrophic at civilization scale. Perhaps we should welcome the joining, perhaps we should see it as a gift.

It is a given that a human hivemind would leave behind some traits of tribal humanity. There would be no need or purpose for so much of our art and our lifestyles. But it would be foolish to port our ethics to such an organism. If it’s happy, if it can experience beauty, if it lives in harmony with all living things… would that trade be worth it?

We are basically trying to accomplish the very thing that the hivemind is so good at. What is liberal society if not an attempt to create structures that connect us in spite of our differences? The Federation is persistent. It shares its culture with you, it engages in trade. They are perfectly friendly and pleasant and diplomatic, and they hope that eventually their efforts will change you.

There’s a moment in Deep Space 9 where Quark offers Garak a ‘human drink’ — root beer:

Garak: It’s vile.

Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.

Garak: Just like the Federation.

Quark: But you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.

Garak: It’s insidious.

Quark: Just like the Federation.

The Federation ideal — a society that ends scarcity and cruelty without changing what humans fundamentally are — is what I want. My politics are Utopian. I believe we should use diplomacy, science, education, and art to create a world where no one suffers or goes hungry, where we explore space in curiosity. Star Trek suggests we might achieve this without changing what humanity is. It says that we don’t need genetic augmentation or to hand judgement to machines in order to end scarcity and cruelty and coercion.

But do I think it’s possible? As a Utopian, I’m dedicated to saying it’s possible, to compelling myself to believe even when the world causes my belief to waver. But I truly don’t know. I don’t think anyone can know, and our estimations have more to do with the strength of our hope and courage than any rational calculus.

I personally would not want to join a hivemind. I see too much of myself in Carol: I can be a bit of a misanthrope and an introvert (though hopefully I’m a bit more curious, capable, and forgiving than she is), and I don’t really want to be directly connected to the rest of the species. But maybe that’s just my addiction speaking.

I’ve got no love for the end-of-year round-up lists put out by big publications. Often, they represent a certain amount of critical acclaim and book sales — taste that is either smoothed over or rarefied to appear authoritative.

But I absolutely adore the lists made by my intelligent friends (and intelligent people I aspire to befriend someday). These lists have much more quiddity to them; they speak to where our taste and curiosity took us in a year, and in the background you can often glimpse a rich and textured life. (See: my partner’s round-up of the best things she ate this year.)

As a book person, I am honor-bound to share the best books I read during this orbit around the sun. Last year’s list was extensive. It had been an intellectually intense period and the themes that emerged were so strong, the books so deeply connected. My list is shorter this year, the themes a bit more tenuous — and yet there they are!

Literary fiction: Flourishing through connection

My personal theme for 2025 was “the Year of Connection”, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that I read several novels that deal with this directly, but none were chosen for that purpose. Maybe something subtler than conscious thought moved me to these selections.

Middlemarch may hold the record for “book that sat on my shelf the longest before I actually read it” despite the fact that it is so highly and regularly recommended. I blame my high school English classes for overdosing me with 19th Century marriage plots — Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, The Awakening. From these books I learned two things:

1. The 1800s were a terrible time to be alive.

2. Books are better if they have a ghost in them (and better still if you turn them into a Kate Bush song).

So I was very pleasantly surprised by Middlemarch! What can I say that you haven’t heard? Nothing, probably. It’s full of humor, compassion, humility, and ambition. It admires the sort of people who want to make great things of their lives and the world, and it appreciates how fraught that pursuit can be. And ultimately, flourishing is found through freedom; not the kind that allows us to be solitary and independent, but the kind that allows us to form nourishing connections with others.

Lonesome Dove is the story of some past-their-prime Texas Rangers who decide to go on one last adventure by driving a herd of cattle to Montana. In the telling, we meet all sorts of people that populated the West shortly after the Civil War — cowboys, saloon keepers, whores, gunslingers, and outlaws. So far, so Western.

But to my untrained palette, McMurtry strikes the exact right balance and tone for such a story. It isn’t fawning and nostalgic for a time when men were men; clearly, there is too much meaningless cruelty and hardship for that. But it also isn’t cynical and anhedonic (which seems to be the other, more respectable mode for a Western); these are real people with hopes and dreams, with humor and passion and stubbornness and ignorance. These people are looking for some comfort or happiness where there is so little to be found, and that is a noble, often doomed pursuit. Is this starting to sound familiar? About halfway through the book, I thought to myself “Why, this is like a Middlemarch of the West”. Sure enough, a character name dropped George Eliot a few chapters later.

A book this capacious can’t be reduced to a single line or sentiment, but let’s try anyway. At one point, the highly intelligent but uneducated Gus McCrae makes a sign for their small, middle-of-nowhere ranch, and thinking to give it an air of esteem, he adds a Latin motto:

Uva uvam vivendo, varia fit.

“A grape changes color by living (with other grapes).” Roughly, you are the company you keep. The West was full of hard characters because the living was hard, and the individuals in it are shaped, deformed, influenced, and enhanced by the people around them.

More Than Human slipped in under the wire; I literally finished it this week. It has also been on my list a long time, but it jumped up the queue as background reading for an upcoming piece I’m writing on hiveminds. In More Than Human, a few broken, outcast individuals with unusual abilities find themselves drifting together to form a gestalt, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. So uh, not quite the same kind of “connection” as the other two books.

It’s surprisingly fresh and lively for an SF book published in 1953. There are books from the 2000s that were acclaimed in their time and haven’t aged half so well. I’ll have more to say, so keep an eye out for that piece about hiveminds!

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Science Fiction: Do they still make Hard SF?

I really love SF that’s philosophical, literary, or sociological, but now and again, I just want a big idea book. Gimme some really weird aliens! Gimme a technology that turns the world upside-down! I think I’d gone so long without that kind of thing that I really went looking for it this year.

For as big an SF fan as I am, you may wonder how I put off reading The Three Body Problem until now. Well, I’m a contrarian. It was on Barack Obama’s reading list, okay? I had older, weirder stuff to be reading.

What I like about TBP is that it’s an SF book, a real honest-to-goodness SF book. It’s not using aliens at a ✨metaphor ✨ to teach us about ourselves; they are aliens and what’s interesting about them is that they’re aliens. Thank god! TBP sets forth a premise and then spends the rest of the book caring very deeply about how that premise plays out. It lays out a formula, selects values for some of the variables, and then plays the whole thing out. It’s able to think about biology, history, technology, the nature of the Universe, game theory, and a dozen other things simply by taking its premise seriously. It’s as good as people think it is. And yes, the Cultural Revolution bit at the beginning is a bit of a slog, but I promise it’s important.

(I read the sequels as well. The Dark Forest is passable, but less interesting. Death’s End was a complete DNF.)

Children of Ruin is another SF book that takes its premise seriously. It’s the sequel to Children of Time the book with the sapient spiders, and in this one the premise is: sapient octopodes. (“Octopi” is wrong, “octopuses” sounds dumb — moving on.)

I can now say it’s the best SF book I’ve read about sapient octopodes (sorry, The Mountain in the Sea). Tchaikovsky portrays them as passionate, expressive, self-contradictory beings. Octopode society is characterized by contention and struggle, between their own arms as much as between each other. I imagine that humans must feel about octopodes the way that Americans sometimes feel about Australians: in some ways, we are more similar than our more civilized cousins, the British/spiders.

Tchaikovsky is doing some of the most thoughtful work on consciousness I’ve seen in SF in a long time. Clearly, he’s engaging with the scientific literature and the big questions. Is it possible to know what its like to be a different creature? Can we ever know if another being is conscious from the outside?

Without any spoilers, Ruin is also part of why I’m thinking about hiveminds, though this book doesn’t technically contain one…

Exhalation is a collection of Ted Chiang’s best work, much of which I’ve already read once, if not twice. I feel confident in saying that Chiang is the best SF short story writer of the decade, and of the century so far. The stories in this collection include:

• The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate: Like a story from the 1001 Nights, but with plausible time travel.

• Exhalation: A mechanical scientist does an auto-dissection.

• The Lifecycle of Software Objects: Dedicated fans try to keep their maybe-conscious Super-Tamagotchi running across platform migrations.

• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling: A new technology called “writing” really screws things up.

• The Great Silence: Parrots wish we would talk to them.

• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom: People get FOMO about parallel universe versions of themselves.

If that doesn’t make you want to read this collection, I don’t know what will.

Non-fiction: The problems of modernity

This was a lesser year for non-fiction for me. Why? Maybe it’s a corrective for how much I read in 2024. Also, most of the stuff I read this year just wasn’t as good. But when it comes to the stand-outs, I think the themes are contiguous with what I was reading about last year: legibility, control, progress, technology.

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott makes a simple argument: increased legibility and measurement become tools for top-down control by the state, which when over-applied can have catastrophic consequences. He recounts the failures of scientific forestry and centralized control to make his point, and from his critique, he moves on to advocate for what he calls “métis” — practical knowledge gained through experience, the kind of wisdom a farmer has about their land or a craftsman has about their materials.

Scott makes an intelligent and extensive argument, and he does it with measure. He’s always careful not to overextend his position, and (mercifully) he never falls into Graeberian sneering or contempt. However, because I tacitly accepted many of his premises before we began, I came away from the book with more counter-arguments than epiphany. Scott’s subject doesn’t really end up being the state, or even law and order, but what he calls “authoritarian high modernism”. As a rhetorical move, it positions a lot of the valid counterarguments outside the frame of the book. And while I think métis is an excellent concept, his argument fails to acknowledge its limitations or the ways in which even highly optimized organizations can employ it.

For all that, Seeing is a classic for a reason. If this is the sort of thing you like to read and think about, this book is a non-negotiable addition to your list.

I read The Spell of the Sensuous in the Spring and it gave me so very many thoughts that I’ve been trying to write an essay about it ever since (and I hope I’ll get it out in early 2026). Spell is about our connection to nature (or what the author calls “the more-than-human world”) through a phenomenological lens. Basically, our connection to that world is through the senses, which in turn are how we speak and perceive speech, forming a conduit with all living things (which, because this is animist, includes rocks and the wind and the Sun and such). This connection, the author argues, has been severed by a dangerous, insidious technology: alphabetic written language. He really didn’t know what was coming…

Spell is poetic while still being intellectual, and it doesn’t dissolve into pure sentiment, which can be the danger of books that try to convince us into environmentalism through nostalgia or beauty. I think it has so very, very much to say to our current moment, which is precisely why this entry is so short: I want to give it better treatment elsewhere.

What’s in my TBR for 2026

As I shuffle and peruse my TBR list, there are a few titles I’m excited about:

• I’ve just started The Brothers Karamasov and I already feel like it will be on next year’s recap.

• I’m a fan of the idea of Finite and Infinite Games, and it’s about time I get the thing direct from the source.

• I need to read Black Mass by John Gray because he’s my mortal enemy and I need to know why he’s wrong.

• I think Hannah Arendt tackles a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking about in The Human Condition.

Notably: I am really scraping the barrel for good SF. Give me your recommendations, please, I beg you.

Thanks for reading in 2025. I hope to put out one more essay this month, but if I don’t, see you next year!

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I had been auditing the existing content, reading about how the site was designed and used. Basically, it was a repository — a filing cabinet. A few key stakeholders would input useful information, then send links to individual pages to people via email when it was relevant. Nobody really “browsed” the site. But I was beginning to think that my team should change that. I thought that it could be something more, something better, even though that wasn’t what we’d been asked for.

I told a colleague this hunch, and they asked (smartly): “And how do you figure that out?”

I said something generic about how I run content audits, which even I found unsatisfying in the moment. But I kept thinking about that question in the following months as I worked on the project, because the question my colleague actually asked was much, much more interesting: How did I know that we should do something other than what we were asked for? More than that, how do we figure out what we should do — ever?

The problem with how we make decisions

In work and in life, we are offered an infinite set of choices about what to do at any juncture. It’s only natural that we resort to a handful of heuristics to make the thousands of decisions we’re faced with every day. Unfortunately, each of these decision-making approaches suffers from some weakness that we’re rarely completely conscious of.

“I’ll keep doing the same thing I’ve done before. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Tradition contains a lot of wisdom (see: Chesterton’s Fence — do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place), and you can’t upend your life or your business or your culture every day. However, if you are overly wed to tradition, you risk being caught holding stone tools when the tribe who has just discovered bronze comes running over the hill. Our assumptions must be regularly questioned.

“I’ll do whatever the relevant authority tells me to do.” Sometimes this is the only option. You have to do your job or you’ll get fired, you have to obey the law or you’ll be arrested, and you can succeed in many systems just by following the explicitly stated objectives. But humans are fallible. Your boss is human, rules are written by humans, and institutions are composed of humans, and thus they are often wrong in a technical or moral sense. Authority cannot always be relied on to provide the right answer.

“I’ll look at what other people are doing and copy them.” This is a more common approach than we often imagine. So many of our choices are based on what other people are doing. We shift imperceptibly in response to our peers, offloading some of our judgement to others. But even if we add the caveat that we’ll only copy smart, successful people, there’s no guarantee that you can recreate the insight that led them to their actions, which risks misapplication. Even when something works for most people, it can’t be relied on to work for us.

“I’ll do whatever is optimal. I’ll look for every advantage and take it.” Sure, that’s a good idea in the very broadest sense. It’s how we get better at things. Create a metric, pay attention to what affects the metric, tailor your tactics to ensure that it goes up as much as possible. You’ll get promoted, make more money, win more contracts, dominate the world. But oops, you’re evil again! The thing you really care about — happiness, independence, community — has been eroded by your single-minded pursuit of some metric or another (see: Goodhart’s Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). You’ve got a lot of money, a big house, and you are an empty shell of a person who’s paving paradise.

“By process of elimination, I believe I’ve found the right answer: I will only make decisions based on my values. Truly, this is the best way of doing things.” Wonderful, you’ve figured it out — values! It’s settled. Except… what are our values? How do we apply them? How do they relate to each other? How do we put them into action?

Values-based decision making would be the default for every person on Earth if it made any intuitive sense whatsoever. We’ve spent millennia trying to encode any kind of meaning into words like “justice” and “integrity”, but they’re incredibly slippery and abstract. We may think that we are acting in line with our values when we’re actually resorting to one of the other heuristics outlined above. You want racial justice, you get black squares on Instagram.

That, really, is the challenge I want to answer: how do we turn our values — which are necessarily abstract — into concrete action?

The answer, I think, is that we should start with “why”.

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A framework for values-driven strategy

I first heard this idea in a TED Talk about 15 years ago. Or rather, I thought I did.

I recently went back and watched Simon Sinek’s Start with why – how great leaders inspire action. He argues that some of the most exceptionally effective companies don’t just sell great products, they sell their own motivations for building those products. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

To illustrate his point, he draws what he would later call “the Golden Circle”. It’s three concentric circles — WHY, within HOW, within WHAT.

If you want to persuade people to buy into your products and ideas, he says, start with why, then how, then what. “We believe in innovation” > “That’s why we’ve designed this computer this way.” > “Here’s the computer. Want to buy one?”

What’s interesting to me now is the way this idea mutated in my head in the years since I last saw it. I have never really been someone who sells things. The only exception might be getting internal buy-in for my ideas, but “Frame your ideas in the interest of the other person” is Dale Carnegie stuff — nothing especially radical. Instead, the Golden Circle became a way of thinking about strategy.

When I’m in a situation where I have to figure out what to do, I find that the heuristics I mentioned previously offer answers almost immediately — do what you’ve been asked, do the optimal thing, do the thing other people are doing. I hope that I have chosen to follow my values more often than not, but it’s exceptionally difficult to tell what’s a genuine and reasonable impulse and what’s motivated reasoning.

I have found the Golden Circle a helpful framework time and again for confronting these sorts of issues, if only because it reminds you that “why” is a question worth asking. This might seem obvious, but I’ve been in many meetings where I said, “Yeah, but why are we doing this?” and my colleagues found it to be a genuinely valuable contribution.

When you ask why, you will naturally generate a laundry list of reasons, justifications, and motives — and there is no substitute for determining your values and what’s worth caring about — but the Golden Circle offers a constructive framework for sifting through these answers. Make a bunch of post-it notes with every possible answer, then ask yourself: what here is a motivation, what’s a method or approach, and what’s a tactic?

Tactics are contingent, they can change by the hour to meet the needs of the moment. Methods and approaches are firmer, they constitute your beliefs about the right way to do the work, and they evolve over time. But your motives are deep-seated. Despite being incredibly abstract, they are also foundational to who you are and what you do.

Maybe what you really care about is making money, in which case, “optimize everything, become evil” is a legitimate choice, and you’ll become a drop-shipper or a crypto miner or whatever it is that makes a buck.

Or maybe you’re trying to decide on a career. Years ago, a friend of mine was studying to become a dentist. He didn’t really want to be a dentist, but his parents wanted him to be a dentist. If you’re the type of person whose core value is “do whatever makes you happy”, you might have advised my friend to quit dental school. But my friend really cared about filial piety, and while it’s not the choice I would have made for myself, staying in dental school was the choice that aligned with his values.

Three examples

Lest you think this is just more think-boy epiphany-chasing, I want to show you that this framework actually works. It’s practical, lightweight, and easily applied.

Years ago, I was sitting in a diner with a friend of mine. They worked at a nature center and they explained to me that the organization that ran it was in the middle of a fight about their strategic plan. They showed me the organization’s mission statement on their phone and I saw the problem immediately:

Our mission is to inspire an appreciation for the beauty and value of native plants and a commitment to support the habitats that sustain them.

That looks like a pretty good mission on the surface, but it was leading to a real headache: Some of the staff argued that making nature accessible to the public was the most important thing, and others argued that preserving the nature center’s rare and beautiful ecology was the most important thing. These two objectives were sometimes in tension, but they both appeared to be supported by the mission statement.

I asked my friend some follow-up questions about the origins of the organization. I tried to locate the different parts of their work — their motives, their approaches, and their tactics — and put them into order. Then I grabbed a napkin and sketched out a revision. It was something like this:

Our mission is to inspire an appreciation of native plants and a commitment to protecting their habitats by making [the nature center] accessible to the public.

The difference between the two versions is that mine makes clear what motivates their work and how that motivation leads to their approach. It starts with why, moves on to how, and leaves what to daily operations.

I used this framework more intensively when I was a policy analyst at the Pennsylvania Department of Aging.

I facilitated the development of the next version of their State Plan on Aging — a plan they remade every four years. For the year prior to writing the new plan, I had sat in on monthly, hour-long meetings where department heads gave updates about how they were meeting the last plan’s objectives. We would go around the room and each person would start by reading the relevant objective out loud — not because it’s what they had been asked to do, but because they needed the room to hear the abstract mess that they were trying to comply with. They followed their recitation by looking baffled and exasperated, then attempted to work backward from the work they actually did to the objective they were trying to meet.

When I went about rewriting the plan, I talked to the department heads about what they thought we needed to accomplish in the coming years, and by contrast, they were calm, colorful, and incisive. They knew what was important and they had some sense of how we should do it. I didn’t ask them to write objectives themselves, I just noted what they said and later sorted it into motivations, methods and approaches, and tactics. This allowed us to connect our motivations and ideals with the actual work we were doing day to day, and allowed departments to be more flexible with how they met those goals.

The third example is my own work. There were a number of ways we could have looked at our work:

• We could make an incremental update to the existing site, smoothing some rough edges.

• We could read our given task very thoroughly and literally and then do precisely what we’d been asked.

• We could have come up with some metrical approximations for some version of success — like site traffic — and optimized for that.

• Or if we were optimizing for compensation, we wouldn’t be paid more for radically changing the site, so why bother?

Instead, I asked “What’s the actual mission of this thing?”

Reading through documentation, there were a number of different stated goals and objectives, but the common thread was improving outcomes for the people this resource was designed to serve. So how do we do that? The theory behind the original site was that practitioners in this field were often reinventing the wheel, so collecting and sharing proven strategies would help them work more effectively. That’s what the site did — it assembled information for professionals to reference.

With those answers in hand, I could address what we should do. If the goal was improving outcomes by sharing information with professionals, shouldn’t this be a resource they returned to regularly? We redesigned the site to fit practitioners’ mental models and gave it a more flexible structure so it could grow and change. By becoming more connected to its users rather than functioning as a static repository, it could better serve its mission.

So Sinek was right. People don’t buy what we do, they buy why we do it. But why do they buy why we do it? I think it has something to do with trust.

As with high school math tests, it’s not just about getting the right answer, it’s about how you arrive at it. You and I may agree on something important today, but if I don’t understand how you made that decision, I don’t know whether I can trust the decision you’ll make tomorrow. This is why we sometimes find that we respect our opponents but do not trust our allies — for the purposes of building trust, making decisions with integrity matters as much or more than making the right decisions.

Right now there are people out there spilling a lot of ink on a problem that they call human-AI alignment. Fundamentally, they’re trying to figure out how we ensure that AI has some integrity, that there’s some relationship between its values and our values. Because up until this point, we’ve only been able to influence what it does, not why it does it. That’s what makes it so hard to trust. And the funny thing is, we haven’t even figured out human-human alignment yet; we regularly act out of step with the values we profess. This framework helps to address that, making it clear where decisions flow from.

There’s no way to guarantee that you will always make good decisions, but with this framework, you can ensure that you always make decisions with integrity.

Wolfe wrote sumptuous prose, created characters with immense psychological depth, told powerful stories, and created intricate worlds. One could argue that he’s more like Nabokov or Proust than Asimov or Heinlein. And yet, he isn’t widely known. Why?

The genre label certainly puts off some more literary readers, but even SF super-fans often bounce off him. Though he has a huge catalog of brilliant work, much of it is a bad place to start. (I have personally turned more than one person off of Wolfe by handing them the wrong book.) And while there’s lots of good advice about how to read Wolfe on a line-by-line or chapter-by-chapter level, what to read is more opaque.

So, in the interest of making this great writer a little more legible, a little more knowable, I present a reader’s guide to the corpus of Gene Wolfe. (A visual version is included at the bottom of this post.)

1. Where to begin

I have determined that there is a correct place to begin with Wolfe: The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Fifth Head is a collection of three novellas:

• The Fifth Head of Cerberus (which gives the book its name), the memoir of the son of a mad scientist/brothel owner on a backwater colony planet

• A Story by John V. Marsch, an anthropological recreation of the aboriginal life on the planet, ostensibly written by a character from the first novella

• VRT, a lazy, low-level policeman rifles through a box of evidence in the criminal case of the second story’s author in no particular order

I have come to this answer after much trial and error. Fifth Head so clearly lays out what Wolfe does and how. The first novella is evocative and mysterious — full of misdirection, personal voice, and textured and economical world-building. It’s creepy and fascinating, and importantly, most reader’s will feel that they “got it” by the end. The second and third novellas are stranger and more opaque but the reader is more prepared for them, more aware of what kinds of games are being played. Both completely redefine what you think you know about the first. And crucially, the entire thing fits in one slim volume.

2. Certified classics

“Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.”

Now, if that’s all the Wolfe you wanted to read, that’s fine. But if that whetted your appetite and you’re interested in more, here’s where you get to choose you own adventure:

• If you want to read his magnum opus, a challenging and intricate puzzle box full of mysteries, a dark Science Fantasy series with a mystical bent, jump to: The Book of the New Sun

• If you want a Greek Historical Fantasy — borderline Herodotus fan fiction — or if you just really loved Memento, jump to: Latro in the Mist

• If you want something spooky, or you’re looking for something a bit more “grounded”, or if you simply feel like a standalone novel is more your speed, jump to: Peace

• If you want to explore the entirety of Wolfe’s exceptionally broad palette, or if you would prefer to experience him in smaller doses, jump to: The Best of Gene Wolfe

The Book of the New Sun

The Book of the New Sun (BotNS) is set in the evening of humanity. Urth is a shadow of its former self. The sun is dying. The world is littered with artifacts of greater times. When Severian, an apprentice of the torturer’s guild, goes against his training and shows mercy to a prisoner, he is exiled. And thus begins his wayward path to the throne. BotNS falls into a category I’d called Mystical Science Fiction, into which I’d also put Dune, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Hyperion. Dark, gothic, moody, evocative, mysterious.

The Book of the New Sun is one of the great accomplishments of English literature. Wolfe’s prose is intricate and gorgeous without becoming purple or baroque. Though it can be hard to decipher, there is a coherent story here, encased in a world that feels always like you could turn down a random street and discover ever more detail. It also manages to be philosophical and theological without becoming didactic or self-important. With or without the label “Science Fiction”, I’d put it toe to toe with any English language masterwork.

Then why not start with it? It’s a difficult book for a number of reasons that also make it excellent. Like reading Shakespeare, it can be confusing because our far future narrator doesn’t provide necessary context for readers from the 21st century. He refers to concepts that don’t yet exist, which Wolfe renders in repurposed archaic terms that you may struggle to find in a dictionary. The narrative is a puzzle-box that makes half-sense on the first read, basic sense on a second, and continues to reward successive revisiting.

But fear not, there is a secret to enjoying BotNS on your first read: Don’t try to understand it. Don’t read it with pencil in hand. Don’t look up every word you don’t know. Don’t reread the chapter twice to figure out what you missed. Let yourself be confused. Experience it impressionistically. The basic action will generally be clear. This isn’t Faulkner where you have to re-read a page three times just to figure out that Uncle Jimmy went to the general store. Keep moving forward and things will click into place. And if you plan to read it a second time (probably months or years later) I recommend picking up a copy of Lexicon Urthus, a valuable reading companion.

A note on publication: The “Book” of the New Sun was written as four books, which are now often collected in two volumes: Shadow & Claw, and Sword & Citadel. You can continue with Urth of the New Sun, an unplanned fifth volume that Wolfe wrote at the request of his publishers to spell out the events that follow BotNS, which were merely implied. I don’t enjoy it as much, but many Wolfe fans would argue it’s necessary.

Peace

Peace is the memoir of a somewhat broken old man living alone in his very large home in the Midwest. He seems to have had a stroke and is no longer able to fully inhabit the house, so he wanders from room to room reminiscing about his life. The fantastic is woven all throughout this story, and yet you will struggle to definitively nail down any moment as supernatural. One has the sense that this is a ghost story, even if it’s hard to point to the ghost. If pressed, I’d label the genre not as “Horror” or “Fantasy”, but “Spooky”.

Peace is short, beautiful, and relatively accessible. It’s probably the second best place to start with Wolfe, but I think it is so quiet, so understated, that it’s easy to miss what kind of writer Wolfe is. Still, if it sounds more appealing than Fifth Head, go for it.

Latro in the Mist

In Latro in the Mist the titular soldier, Latro, gets a head injury in a battle and from then on has retrograde and anterograde amnesia, giving him a rolling 24-hour window of memory. He writes to keep track of who he is and what he’s doing, which forms the text of the book. (Yes, it’s basically Memento, except this came first.)

Latro isn’t trying to lie to you, but like Severian, he doesn’t tell his story in a way that a modern reader would understand. He forgets to write things down, forgets to read what he writes, fails to recognize people he has met before or identify them clearly in the text. He is pushed this way and that, barely understanding what he’s doing or why. A lot of the fun is figuring out what Latro himself doesn’t know.

His injury also gives him a gift: the ability to see the Gods. Throughout his adventures, he is the pawn of deities and encounters mythic beasts. If you were a mythology kid in middle school and now have elevated taste in fantasy, I can’t think of a better recommendation.

Latro in the Mist is a volume of two books — Soldier in the Mist and Soldier of Arete. There’s also Soldier of Sidon, but I don’t like it as much and since there isn’t any strong resolution to the narrative, you could just as easily stop with Latro/Arete.

The Best of Gene Wolfe

Wolfe somehow managed to have a prolific short story career in tandem with his prolific novel career. (It’s just not fair.) If you don’t want commit to a full-blown puzzle-box series, maybe you’d prefer to micro-dose.

In The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe picked his own best work from his entire career and provided just a bit of commentary on them afterward (which often fundamentally changed how I understood the story). The subject matter includes neighborly aliens, kindly archvillains, gods who might not be gods, robots, ghosts, faerie, pirates, faerie pirates… I have several of his other collections, but the title of this one is accurate.

Some of my favorite stories include:

• The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, about a boy escaping his life into a dime store paperback

• The Death of Dr. Island (yes, really), about a sentient psycho-therapist island in space

• La Befana, about Christmas in space

• Forlesen, about how much he hated work

• The God and His Man, about what it says on the tin

• Death of the Island Doctor (yes, really), about a kindly old professor who loves islands

• Parkroads — A review, about a highly abstract film that doesn’t exist but should

• A Cabin on the Coast, about the aforementioned faerie pirates

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3. Going deeper

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”

— Gene Wolfe

Now is a good time to tell you about one of the best things about reading Gene Wolfe: re-reading him. Most of his books feel completely different the second time around. You know this experience from re-watching movies with a twist, like Fight Club, except that Wolfe layers his mysteries so that even a third or fourth reading will have you wondering at new questions.

At this point in your journey, re-reading any Wolfe work can be as valuable as picking up a new one. However, if you want to keep exploring, here’s where you can go next:

• If you loved The Book of the New Sun and want more in that Universe, jump to: The Book of the Long Sun / The Book of the Short Sun

• If you want Arthurian fantasy, a world with knightly chivalry but without its religious underpinnings, jump to: The Wizard Knight

• If you want a inter-dimensional portal fantasy, jump to: There Are Doors

Book of the Long Sun / The Book of the Short Sun

If you loved The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe wrote two sequel series that I think you’ll enjoy as well.

The Book of the Long Sun tells the story of Patera Silk, a priest who is granted enlightenment by a god in the very first sentence of the book. Silk lives in the Whorl, a world on the inside of a massive egg-shaped asteroid with a beam of light stretching across the center. Yes, there are cities in the sky. (The denizens of the Whorl do not know that it is an asteroid, of course.) Silk is sent by this god, the Outsider, to save his parish, but that single moment of divine intervention creates an avalanche of action that pushes through the entire Whorl and only gets faster and bigger as the story progresses. (Keep that in mind when 80% of the first book is Silk trying to break into a house.) The narrative voice of Long Sun is the more familiar omniscient third, but that should make you suspicious because Wolfe doesn’t really do objective narration.

The Book of the Short Sun directly follows Long Sun, and there are some who argue that it’s his finest work. Horn, a character from Long Sun who now lives on a planet called Blue, sets out to find Patera Silk many years later. That sounds fairly straightforward, but the narrator begins recounting the tale when he is halfway home, so that telling of the first half of the journey overlaps with the action of the second.

Short Sun is written in an exceptionally intimate voice. The narrator is trying to grapple with his own guilt, his own identity, with his confused understanding of the events he’s partaking in, and we get this in the form of his journal entries, his piecemeal attempts at making sense of his own life to himself. He doesn’t have a head injury or a brain aneurysm, but Wolfe shows that even those of us without cognitive strangeness struggle to form tidy narratives. Some Gene Wolfe fans argue that Short Sun is his true masterwork.

The Wizard Knight

If Arthurian fantasy is your thing, The Wizard Knight is for you. A ten-year-old boy is transported to a fantasy realm and given the body of a full-grown, exceptionally strong man. He battles demons, dragons, trolls, and the like, but the description of that action is often something like “And then I hit them with my sword really hard.” Because again: he’s a ten-year-old boy.

Personally, I don’t think The Wizard Knight is Wolfe’s finest work (which still puts it head and shoulders above most fantasy), but I also know that there are many people who disagree with me. I was really taken aback when I encountered my first fellow Gene Wolfe fan in the wild and he said he hadn’t read The Book of the New Sun but worshiped The Wizard Knight.

Aside from being poetic, mystical, and brilliant, Wolfe had a wicked sense of humor. Wizard Knight contains my favorite joke of his: the main character occasionally tries to say to someone, “Hey, I’m just a kid in a man’s body,” to which other characters reply, “Man, I feel that”.

There Are Doors

There Are Doors is the first book on this list that I haven’t read, but as far as I can tell, it belongs at least this high on the list if not higher. In it, a completely unremarkable man, Mr. Green, follows his mysterious girlfriend Lara through doorways between parallel worlds and finds himself in a place where men die after sex and women rule through a goddess-worshipping culture. Obviously, it’s an oversight on my part that I haven’t read this and I plan to correct it immediately.

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4. For completionists

From about 1970 to 2015, Gene Wolfe put out a new book roughly every 18 months. That’s just insane. The majority are fantastic, but no author could hope to write that many books and still avoid putting out some duds. I’ll categorize this last tier into two parts: lesser works and bilge.

Lesser works

If you have read everything in tiers 1-3, you can give these a try. If you haven’t, I’m not sure I see the point.

• Free Live Free - Four down-and-out people in Chicago get involved in a mystery involving time travel and a perpetually flying airship.

• Castleview - Arthurian legends bleed into a small Illinois town.

• A Borrowed Man / Interlibrary Loan - A “recloned” author of mystery fiction solves real mysteries in a dystopian future.

• The Devil in a Forest - A medieval peasant’s coming-of-age tale, Christianity vs paganism.

• Pandora, by Holly Hollander - A teen detective story that’s actually about family secrets and small-town dynamics.

Bilge

These are simply not worth it, not because they’re bad necessarily, but because there are too many good Wolfe books to bother with them.

• Pirate Freedom — Pirates

• An Evil Guest — Lovecraft noir

• The Sorcerer’s House — Epistolary

• Home Fires — Warfare time dilation romance

• The Land Across — Kafka-esque

• Operation: Ares — Bad

Conclusion

Thus ends this overview of Wolfe’s work. If you have a quibble, go tell it to r/genewolfe and leave me out of it!

A visual guide to reading Gene Wolfe

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Last autumn, my girlfriend and I did something a bit nutty. We moved to Michigan without any pressing reason — no job offer, no graduate program, no family to be close to. Prior to that, we had spent about 72 hours in Michigan, and probably less than two weeks in the Midwest over the course of our lives.

There were things I hoped to get from moving. I had lived in Philadelphia for the last 15 years and I wanted more quiet, more fresh air, easier access to nature, and to generally get away from the radiating effects of the northeast metropolitan corridor. I also hoped to find community.

There’s an irony in moving away from my longtime home to find community, because of course it meant leaving behind my entire social network. But the truth was that despite having many lovely friends there — people I care deeply about and want to keep in my life no matter where I go — I also felt rather isolated.

In March of 2020, I left the office with my laptop and never went back. The pandemic killed off a lot of my connections and many of my hard-won social skills atrophied. And as an autistic person, I felt increasingly boxed in by the chaos outside my home. It felt harder and harder to have the windows open on a nice day or to step out my front door.

Moving away from Philly was a bit like ending a serious relationship: even if there are good things about what you have, there are too many problems to keep going. You have to sacrifice what comfort and security you have for the possibility of finding something better.

On top of my own personal struggles and recent context shift, we’re living in a disconnected world. We’re all constantly busy and moving, out of sync in time and space. It’s all highways and social media and zoom calls.

So for any number of reasons, I’ve decided to make this a Year of Connection. I will be reading, thinking, and writing about this a lot in the months to come, but today I want to tell you how I came to this idea in particular and what I am planning to do with it.

Why "connection"

There are a bunch of ways I could have come at this problem, but I’m rather fond of years themes. I got the idea from CGP Grey and it has worked pretty well for me over the past several years.

Year themes have an advantage over New Year’s resolutions in that they take a broad focus. Rather than pursue a rigid target, which is easy to fail and will likely only change one dimension of your life even if its successful, a year theme helps you notice opportunities to choose differently at life's many branching paths. They also can’t fail since even small shifts toward your theme count as success.

Most importantly, themes create resonance. “Words are tuning forks for the brain,” says CGP Grey. Our minds are full of metaphors that steer the choices we make in every day life, and finding resonant ideas to guide us can be a powerful way to make change.

I was in Literati Books the other day and there was a themed display in their non-fiction section. The titles contained words like "community", "belonging", "friendship", "networks", and "togetherness". Many smart people are working on this problem and they've created and invested in dozens of metaphors, but as a writer, I feel that choosing the right one is crucial.

“Community” is probably the most obvious one, but for me it feels like more of an outcome than a process or an action. “Belonging” is simply what community makes you feel, another outcome. I miss my friends, but “friendship” is only one part of what I’m after, and “networks” are really just the broader category that the social network of community belongs to.

My partner was the first person to use the word “connection” in a way that stuck with me. She had lived in Philly for a much shorter time than I had, and her best friends were scattered around the world — Bhutan, Italy, NYC, rural Maine — and she felt that she was losing touch with them. I encouraged her to find ways to make visits happen or talk on the phone more often, and she resolved that she wanted to make re-connecting with these people a personal objective.

In July 2024, I read Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell. Before that, I had vaguely understood myself to be a humanist, at least in the sense of "atheist but not an asshole", or a secular do-gooder, or someone who likes old books, but revisiting the great humanists of the past and studying their commonalities made the idea robust and alive for me: humanity is the yardstick by which we can measure what is good.

After that, I spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas of humanity and reality.

When we look at the common causes of our social isolation, we find that they are all things that de-center human experience and distance human beings from each other. We work from home, we attend events virtually, we get meals and packages delivered.

And many real things are replaced with imitations and illusions — things that seem like humans or seem like they are putting us in contact with humans, but are not. The instructive voice of the self-checkout machine, the customer service chatbot, the algorithm of content that we shape and shapes us, the lives and experiences of our real, actual friends as mediated through our phones. Reality is the shared space in which other humans operate, it is the substrate of our connection. (I was amazed to learn that "common sense" is the phenomenon that emerges from people sensing the same common reality.)

Bakewell sets up freethinking, inquiry, and hope as the three pillars of humanism, but she also gives special treatment to the idea of connection. It it through our connections to other human beings that we find meaning, self-definition, and the foundations for our morality. To emphasize her point, she quotes Howard's End by E.M. Forester: "Only connect!"

This, ultimately, was the idea that stuck with me. Connection is the building block of community, the atomic level of the social network. It’s the mechanism underlying all of the other ideas — community, friendship, belonging, humanity, reality. "Connect" is the relevant verb, the correct action. Only connect.

Connection in practice

Though neither became my theme proper, humanity and reality are the twin strands of my yearlong project. I’m developing strategies and tactics to connect to people in my life — staying in touch with old friends, making new friends, being an active part of my community, spending quality time with my partner — but I also recognize that I can’t hope to be successful without addressing the role that illusory and manipulative systems play in my life.

Connecting to people

Connecting to people is mostly simple-but-hard. Some of my initial tactics include:

• Making a list of friends to text and call on a regular basis. I love my friends and want to know what they're up to, but I really struggle to send messages without a specific motive.

• Focusing on the quality of the time I spend with my partner. My partner and I already spend a lot of time together, but there is something special about when we have each other’s undivided attention.

• Joining hobby groups. Do other people find this instinctive? I have some deep anti-joining impulse that I know I have to override.

• Sitting on my front lawn with a coffee. One of the things I miss most about West Philly is the abundance of spontaneous porch gatherings.

• Returning to the same public spaces at the same times consistently. I know from my time as a barista that you can become a “regular” faster than you think.

• Smiling, making eye contact, saying hello. I know this works but it feels like an attack on me as an autistic person that it does.

Though our approaches differ, my fellow hope-peddler Garrett Bucks frames his own "Year of Connection" around a simple daily practice: "I'm going to start the day asking 'how am I going to either deepen an existing connection or build a new one?' I'll then end the day by asking myself how I did."

Even this blog is part of it. I have always struggled to find people who want to participate in the kinds of conversations I want to have and in the way I want to have them. It's part of why I'm a writer: putting down thoughts in documents and notebooks feels like a conversation I can have on my terms and on-demand. But now I am putting things out into the world and hoping that what was once a private form of self-conversation can become a way of reaching out to others. As Henrik Karlsson put it, “a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”. I hope to find that's true.

Connecting to reality

Connecting with reality also seems deceptively straightforward: go outside, touch grass.

And I fully intend to do that! For instance, I’ve made a list of outdoor spaces to visit, and instead of listening to podcasts and music when I’m out walking or running, I’m making an effort to pay attention to the plants, animals, and houses in my neighborhood. I know you could call it mindfulness, but I think it’s even simpler than that; I’m just experiencing the world without technological mediation. And I gotta say, it’s strangely revelatory to do something so simple and so human.

But the other part of the problem is that there are so many systems at work to ensure that I continue to engage with things that are fake, illusory, and manipulative. We think we’re interacting with the world and with other people, but we’re interacting with a simulacra. In order to connect with the real world and real people, I actually need to dis-connect from un-reality.

To that end, I’ve started auditing all of the tech dependencies in my life — devices, apps, subscriptions, ecosystems — and developing and implementing strategies to remove them from my life.

Where I’m going from here

It's only the beginning of April, but I think even my small initial efforts are having an impact. My mind already has a slightly different texture from lessened engagement with media. I'm enjoying more small moments of direct connection with my partner. I've extricated myself completely from some digital platforms and greatly reduced my reliance on certain ecosystems — swapping my Apple Watch for a running watch, switching my browser to FireFox and my search to Kagi, (legally) removing the DRM from my ebooks. It truly, actually, feels liberating.

In the coming months, I hope to find that my life is much more full of people than it has been in previous years. I’ve got many more experiments planned, books on my reading list, and ideas to write about. But for now I'll just say: "Only connect!"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thanks for reading! Speculative Cartography is still in its early days, and my primary goal is to share ideas and connect with like-minded people. If you enjoyed this essay, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with someone.

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Moral compromise, moral surrender

The Star Trek: Section 31 movie came out recently. This is not a review and I’m not going to talk about its content. In fact, I haven’t watched it and don’t plan to, because despite the inclusion of Michelle Yeoh, the quality appears to be on par with Morbius.

I wouldn’t even have anything to say about the movie if I hadn’t come across some quotes from actors promoting the movie. One in particular jumped out at me:

"When you expand the [Star Trek] universe into something more realistic, the simple truth of the matter is, the Federation can only exist if a Section 31 exists. We can take it from being a nefarious organization to humanizing it and actually showing the need for it."

To understand what bothers me about this sentiment, we have to go back to the introduction of Section 31 on Deep Space 9, all the way back in 1998.

Star Trek’s Federation is a paradise — a diverse, space-exploring, diplomacy-first, post-scarcity civilization. In DS9, they come under threat from the Dominion, a authoritarian civilization that has genetically engineered hierarchies into their society. Up to this point, though the Federation had contended with strong enemies and fought great battles in The Original Series and The Next Generation, it was mainly tested in terms of its technology, strategy, and mettle. With the introduction of the Dominion, DS9 began to ask: How far should you go to preserve paradise?

It was in this context that Section 31 was introduced as a black wing that operates with Starfleet, but secretly, without oversight, and acting counter to many of Starfleet’s stated principles, such as… *checks notes* …no genocide. Their plan to win the war is to engineer a biological weapon that will kill off the entirety of the Dominion’s ruling species.

DS9 does ultimately suggest that not every moral principle can be maintained in war and that we can’t be precious about our conscience when the complete domination of civilization is at stake. Throughout the show, the protagonists all grapple with exactly where the line is. Lying? Sabotage? Murder?

Section 31 represented the line, not simply because their actions went too far, but because of their moral framework. Whereas characters like Captain Sisko agonize over crossing ethical boundaries to save lives, Section 31 sees those boundaries as naive fantasies to be erased. In their self-importance, they believe they are a necessary evil and that they are what makes the Federation possible. They represent not just moral compromise, but moral surrender.

Within the context of DS9, Section 31 was a clever vehicle to explore the central narrative tension. The protagonists contended not just with the external antagonist of the Dominion, but also with an internal antagonist Section 31, which pushed the conflict to the absolute limit. Unfortunately, even though Section 31 had served its purpose by the end of DS9 and the single character that embodied it was killed off, the writers didn’t fully destroy any possibility of the organization’s return.

Since then, it has been brought back in Enterprise, Into Darkness, and Discovery by writers who don’t seem to get that these are the bad guys. Instead, they think these are the cool, capable, black-leather-jacket-wearing badasses that Starfleet really needed. In successive appearances, writers have progressively normalized and institutionalized what DS9 had established as beyond the pale.

After 27 years of lazy storytelling, Section 31 is simply part of the world. The Federation has always had an evil faction inside of it and that’s fine and good and we will never — can never — be better than we are now.

The invention of suffering

A few days after I read the quote about “humanizing” Section 31, I was talking to my partner about Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. She hadn’t read it, so I fished a copy off my shelf. (It’s a quick read.) **Spoilers for a classic short story from 1973.**

Omelas is a paradise for all of its denizens. All, that is, except for a single child that suffers alone in a closet. The suffering child is the price this society pays for the happiness of all others, and those that won’t accept this bargain leave.

LeGuin said that she took the premise for Omelas from The Brothers Karamasov. During an argument, Alyosha poses a philosophical question to Ivan: would you accept a world with divine justice if it required the torture of one innocent child? Ivan refuses, saying he "returns his ticket" to such a world. He chooses deontological ethics over utilitarian ethics; one should never choose to cause a child to suffer, no matter the good that may come from it.

Previously, I had read Omelas as making almost the same point: the ones who walks away are simply acting out of extreme moral principle. They refuse to be complicit in the bargain of their city. And I’m far from the only person who has interpreted it that way. Over the years, there have been many stories written in response to Omelas, some of which are founded upon this same understanding.

But when I shared the story with my partner, she pointed out something I had glossed over on my first reading, and it changed my understanding of the story entirely.

For the first part of the story, the narrator describes Omelas as a vague, joyful place where everyone is happy, but they don’t go into many specific details. The narrator is allowing you to fill in the blanks yourself in order to make as many concessions to your imagination as possible, then, finally, they ask: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." Only then is the suffering child introduced.

Before that moment, the suffering child was not a part of the world of Omelas. The narrator only invents them because the reader was unable to accept a happy world — even a vague, modest one — unless there was a price to pay. The suffering child isn’t necessary for Omelas to function; it's necessary for the reader to believe that Omelas could exist. LeGuin is holding up a mirror, revealing our collective inability to imagine utopia without building in tragedy. We summoned the suffering child into existence because our cynicism demanded it.

In this light, it becomes clear that the ones who walk away are not people who value the cleanliness of their conscience so highly that they choose non-participation, they are the ones with the most courage.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

They believe a world better than Omelas may be possible, and they’re going to try to find it, even if it doesn’t exist.

The cynical reader can’t say “Well I would have stayed and fought until there was a just society,” because the reader didn’t believe that such a world could exist. And if someone were to free the suffering child, everyone else in Omelas would now suffer. (Isabel J. Kim explores this morass in one of the very best responses to Omelas, ”Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole”. She also introduces the excellent phrase “load-bearing suffering child”.) Because the reader created the suffering child, they cannot judge themselves morally superior to the ones who walk away.

The trap of cynicism

After I reread the story, it occurred to me that it was an indictment of the exact mentality that led to a Section 31 movie. Some people have watched Star Trek and thought “Hm, this post-scarcity, non-coercive utopia is cool and all, but there has to be some cruelty or violence that makes it go…” And thus, just as the cynical reader demands a suffering child to make utopia "believable,", the cynical writer creates a genocidal black wing to make the Federation "realistic."

Section 31 continues to exist because contemporary audiences and creators couldn't accept Gene Roddenberry's optimistic vision without inserting their own load-bearing suffering child. But the original vision of Star Trek wasn't naive, it was aspirational. It acknowledged humanity's flaws but suggested we could evolve beyond them. By insisting that the Federation can only exist if a Section 31 exists, the writers aren’t making Star Trek more realistic; they're revealing their own inability to imagine a better world without cruel compromise. They're refusing to walk away from Omelas.

This isn’t merely an aesthetic complaint either. LeGuin believed (as I believe) that stories shape our world:

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

I’ve written about what I call prefigurative belief. It’s an aspect of hope.

I argue that we don’t know what the future holds, but our beliefs about the future can shape what’s possible. We imagine possible futures, we believe in them, and we act to make them real. Believing there are solutions makes it more likely that we will find those solutions, believing that battles can be won makes them more winnable. But the reverse is necessarily true as well.

Cynicism constrains the possible. If you believe that your enemies are invincible, that institutions will fail, that there are no silver linings, then those things much more easily turn from possibility to reality. If you believe that you are a victim, that it is “correct” to be depressed and anxious, that the world is doomed, that we cannot make anything better than we have, you will personally play a role in making that true. If you cannot believe in the city of happiness, you will invent the suffering child.

Cynicism often masquerades as realism. Any expression of idealism risks being called “unrealistic”, while cynicism virtually always gets a pass. This is why you sometimes see people who superficially resemble utopians — for example, people who want to go to Mars or make electric cars — become sort of… evil. They have been “realistic” about the wrong things. They believe in the beautiful possibilities of technology but try to balance it with with cynicism about human society. They come to believe that the evil is necessary and therefore good, thus making the same moral surrender as Section 31.

We do not live in Omelas or the Federation, not yet. But I refuse to believe that they aren’t possible, or that their price is a suffering child or a genocidal black wing. To quote a much better Star Trek movie (the best):

“You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.”

“Just words.”

“But good words. That’s where ideas begin.”

— Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

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I must admit, I’m a total sucker for a Latin motto. And one about going to the stars? Irresistible. Ad astra, per aspera! What’s more utopian than that?

But if I’m being honest, it can feel a bit cheap, like a purely aesthetic statement — the NASA worm logo sticker on your laptop, a pair of leggings with a hyper-saturated space print. Yay space! Yay science!

And everyone always focuses on the “Ad astra” part. That’s the part you name a movie after, the part you get on a t-shirt. For some reason (probably because it feels like a bit of a bummer), everyone is quick to drop the other half: Per aspera. Through hardship.

But that, I think, is the part that makes it utopian. Without it, the phrase is meaningless. Going to the stars isn’t some weekend diversion, it’s not a music festival. The more we learn about space, the more we learn how unforgiving it is, how forbidding the path. That difficulty — the per aspera — is what gives the saying its power and poignancy.

More importantly, “going to the stars” isn’t purely literal. It doesn’t just mean going to the stars. It means so much more. The stars point the way. They are a direction, an orientation. We — all of us, humanity — are going up, to health, freedom, prosperity, and flourishing. We are going to build a better world. And it’s going to be hard. So. Incredibly. Hard.

I.

Admittedly, I had the idea for this essay months ago, and the world looked a bit different then. Now, there’s a part of me that feels foolish writing anything vaguely hopeful. ‘How can you talk about building a better world in a time like this,’ I imagine you saying. ‘We’ll settle for keeping this one from dying.’ Despair is the mood of the day and optimism of any sort sounds a bit flippant.

My entire generation was born into a difficult position, psychologically. When we were kids, Francis Fukuyama was talking about “the end of history” and the ultimate victory of the American way of life. And almost immediately thereafter, things started to fall apart. It was like waking up from a full night’s sleep at the top of a rollercoaster.

We were told that we would grow up in prosperity and stability, then get good-paying jobs that also saved the world. Instead, my generation has studied to tend libraries that don’t exist. We have worked at non-profits that raise money to fund their fundraising. We have paid rent by begrudgingly writing micro-copy for e-commerce platforms. And the last 23 years seem best understood as series of interlocking catastrophes.

It should come as no surprise then that so many of us feel like each dark development is a sign that things will continue to get worse from now on and forever.

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I was going to write a “best books I read in 2024” list, but my partner convinced me that I should write about the patterns in my reading instead. What resulted was much more interesting than a simple top-five list (though I love those too).

As I wrote this, it became clear how deeply interrelated my reading has been during the last year. Here, I’ve grouped the books by rough theme. These aren’t just reviews or summaries (though they’re partly that), but an attempt to find synthesis. I encourage you to jump around, follow threads, and see what captures your interest.

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The scientist and society

As part of the novel I’m writing, I’ve become interested in the archetype of the mid-century scientist-intellectual. This person is a nexus of questions about science, technology, progress, and ideology.

Disturbing the Universe — Freeman Dyson (1979)

Freeman Dyson is perhaps the quintessential example of the mid-century scientist-intellectual. He worked in British bomber command in World War II (which he says “might have been invented by some mad sociologist as an example to exhibit as clearly as possible the evil aspects of science and technology”) and later with such names as Feynman, Oppenheimer, and von Neumann. He was involved in many great events of the nuclear era, including attempts to create the first commercial nuclear reactor (successful) and a nuclear-powered spaceship (unsuccessful). He worked on nuclear disarmament from within government and advocated against the nuclear test ban treaty (which he would later feel more ambivalent about).

In his memoir, Dyson grapples with the impact of science and technology. He had a front-row seat for the successes and failures of his field in this era — their instrumental (mis)use in the war, their complicity in creating weapons, their mixed attempts to create new tools and understanding. He talks explicitly about the Faustian impulse and comes down clearly that the way forward must always be about humanity, sympathy, and community. He echoes Terence:"I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.”

“In everything we undertake, either on earth or in the sky, we have a choice of two styles, which I call the gray and the green... Factories are gray, gardens are green. Physics is gray, biology is green… Bureaucracy is gray, pioneer communities are green. Self-reproducing machines are gray, trees and children are green…"

J.D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics — Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian (2018)

Years ago, I learned about dazzle camouflage, a type of design used on some British ships during WWII as an attempt to confuse enemies. That’s when I first learned about J.D. Bernal, a scientist who led a team called the Department of Wild Talents to innovate strategies and tactics for Britain.

What really caught my attention was a quote I came across years later. "It is always the same way: I may be right, I may even know that I am right, but I am never sufficiently ruthless and effective to force other people to believe that I am right and to act accordingly." Bernal had worked on planning the landing at Normandy and he was lamenting that not all of his advice had been taken, perhaps because his scientific insight was perceived as abstract rather than practical. The despair in that line grabbed me.

Bernal, it turns out, was a complicated man. He was an Irish patriot that served Britain in the war. He was a scientist that was most at home with “poets, theologians, mystics, and rationalists.” He was a socialist that came to resent his fellow socialists and described their work as “plot”, “conspiracy”, and “cabal”.

And whereas Dyson seems to have an ambivalent but ultimately optimistic view of science and progress, Bernal feels much stronger conflict. He forecasted radical futures including space globes and disembodied brains. He predicted that humanity might split, with transhumanist scientists becoming star-exploring beings and “the meek shall inherit the Earth”, but he admitted that even felt a little revulsion about this possibility. He believed in an aristocracy of scientists and the impossibility of it ever coming to pass. He maintained optimism about science’s potential for human liberation even while suffering immense disappointment. He embodied both the promise and limitations of applying scientific rationalism to human affairs.

Dyson was exceptionally intelligent and influential, but he was also temperate and his success seems due to good-natured diligence. Bernal was a bit different; he was passionate, curious, clever, rational, and encyclopedic. As Voltaire might have put it, he had a bit of the devil in him.

The Romantic Machine — John Tresch (2012)

It is commonly held that scientists are strict rationalists and mechanizers, which makes Dyson and Bernal seem a bit odd for having some rather romantic views. Perhaps the stereotype is untrue, or maybe Dyson and Bernal make interesting subjects specifically because they embody this conflict.

However, it was not always thought that the two impulses were contradictory; scientists during the French Restoration thought of the two as not only compatible, but inextricably linked. For a time, they saw their work through a romantic lens; machines and industry were expressions of natural and divine order, the dichotomy between dreamers and realists was a false one. The period saw the development of steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, mass-scale printing, fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and finally, the Revolution of 1848.

I can see why figures like Saint-Simon and Comte felt the need to merge these twin strands. As monarchical and religious authority fell and more secular, democratic forms tried to take their place, the pressure to maintain the strengths of the old systems must have been immense.

Central planning and mechanization

The mid-century Man of Science was sometimes/often engaged in the process of changing the state of things, either in their own thoughts or in practice. They knew from experience that material could be arranged differently to great effect, so why not society? The results were… mixed.

Player Piano — Kurt Vonnegut (1952)

I read Sirens of Titan in high school and found it sort of aggressively *fine*. I always considered Vonnegut to be a literary writer that used SF elements but didn’t really care about the genre. Jon Stewart mentioned Vonnegut at the end of his recent interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast, which lead me to revisit his bibliography. I was struck by the premise, which sounded a bit more properly Science Fictional than his other work (and thus, to me, more interesting).

The story follows Paul Proteus, the manager of an almost-fully-automated industrial plant in up-state New York. Proteus is an engineer, a believer in the faith of mechanization, but there is something gnawing at him. His life is materially rich but spiritually empty, and his unease with the non-engineer populous tells him that something here must be wrong. Those who don’t have one of the few technical professions, or one that can’t yet be mechanized, work in the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps — useless time-killing jobs, like 40 guys filling a single pothole — or the military. Industry and bureaucracy have interlocked to make a society where people are given basic food, and housing, and appliances, but nothing much more can be had.

Red Plenty — Francis Spufford (2010)

I read this in 2022, but couldn't exclude it from this synthesis. Whatever else you might say about them, in the mid-century, the United States and capitalism made cheap hamburgers and good cars and all sorts of solutions to modern living. The U.S.S.R. knew that for communism to survive and thrive, they needed to beat the U.S. at their own game. This meant not just feeding everyone, but also making yesterday’s luxuries common and affordable. They needed to make a Soviet champagne. They needed a red plenty.

Their answer was to cyberneticize their economy. They bet that scientific planning and optimization could outperform the chaos of capitalist markets. Mathematicians tried to model and optimize the operation of their society through linear programming and early computer technology, economists tried to implement the models, and ordinary people lived with the results.

I find that the story of the U.S.S.R. is usually told as basically “Stalin tried to do communism by killing a bunch of his own people and the whole scheme was barbaric and stupid from top to bottom”. That, obviously, is a bad story. This tells a better one.

Pulp, adventure, and gee-whiz

Storytelling is an immense part of how we imagine our past, our future, ourselves, what’s good and bad, right and wrong, and SF has been one of the great shaping myths of the past century. In order to understand the behaviors and forces of the mid-century, I felt I needed to read what they had been reading a short time before and explore SF’s not-quite-SF roots.

Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze — Lester Dent (1933)

Before there was the Man of Steel, there was the Man of Bronze. First published in 1933, the character introduced a ground-breaking concept: what if there was a guy that was good at everything? A scientist, a fighter, an adventurer, a scholar, and it’s insinuated, a lover (though he comes across vaguely ace). Doc Savage is the prototype for the modern version of the “competent man” (an idea as old as myth; see: Odysseus).

Did I learn anything? The formula of the specialized team that encounters a mystery, uses scientific investigation, and comes to a rational explanation is, again, basically Star Trek. Savage was more renaissance man than I anticipated, and I saw more James Bond and Indiana Jones than meathead action hero. I think the cover illustrations led me to expect something more like Jack Reacher. Of course, Savage really isn’t big on emotional or moral complexity; this is clear-cut good and evil stuff.

Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle — Victor Appleton (1910)

Since I was a kid, I knew Tom Swift purely as a type of joke: “‘Hand me that knife,’ said Tom, sharply.” It turns out this comes from the cheesy, cheaply written stories about a very competent, adventurous boy. Like many of the stories I read from this era, it’s about being earnest, good-hearted, hard-working, industrious, and clever.

What I find so funny is the humble beginnings. The first story, published in 1910, is about Tom repairing a “motor-cycle” and using it to go on a countryside adventure, but later titles involve Tom Swift and his air glider, his war tank, his sky train, his ocean airport, his giant robot, his atomic Earth blaster, his sub-ocean geotron…

Galactic Patrol — E.E. Smith (1937)

A mentally and physically powerful organization of crime-fighting explorers that travels the Galaxy at FTL speeds. Published in 1937, it actually struck me as more modern than its publication date in terms of its ideas, but that is likely because there it is a mostly-forgotten progenitor of properties that have long outlived it, including both Star Trek and Green Lantern.

I’m curious what it means that so much of the Star Trek formulation is here, so many years before it first aired. I’m not sure I have any answers. Nothing is wholly original, but what is it about this structure that it has survived nearly a century? What even earlier predecessors am I missing?

Foundation — Isaac Asimov (1951)

This is a sociological story about the predicted fall of a galactic empire, and how one man named Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian, orchestrated events centuries in advance to speed the re-ascent of civilization. This is conveyed through a number of crises, decades apart, where only one path can be taken.

I’ve read a ton of Science Fiction, including most of the big names and titles and some other pretty obscure stuff, but somehow I’ve never gotten around to Foundation. Maybe it just felt so fundamental that I wasn’t even curious about it, and as something published in 1951, it is about as old an SF novel as I can find enjoyable.

Having read it, I wasn’t surprised by anything, I wasn’t wowed by any of the plot, characters, or prose, I didn’t even really enjoy the journey. But I’m glad I read it because it is a key part of the history of the genre. For example, it suddenly becomes clear that Dune’s Paul Atreides was a response; Herbert thinks predicting the future would be way weirder than punching in some figures on a calculator. Predicting and controlling the flow of future events is a long obsession for SF, and this is somewhere close to the core of that concern.

Space Cadet, Citizen of the Galaxy — Robert Heinlein (1948, 1957)

I’ve read the works of Heinlein’s that remain best-known: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, which are both modern enough to be intelligible and sufficiently fresh to our minds. But these are Heinlein “juveniles” (what is now called YA), written in the 40s and 50s.

In Citizen, a boy on a faraway planet is sold at auction to a beggar, and so begins one of many tutelages in which he serves different masters and learns different skills. Ultimately, it is about the difficulty — or impossibility — of becoming free. Cadet is more straight-forward: published in 1948, 18 years before the first episode of Star Trek, this is very nearly the story of a class of Starfleet Academy graduates.

These books are mostly for and about boys coming into their own, and encourage certain virtues — curiosity, independence, cooperation, leadership, courage, competence, critical thinking. Call me old-fashioned, but aside from the obvious representational issues, I think these would still make good reads for young people, and it surprises me that I have never seen them on store shelves.

Hidden gems and “recent” stand-outs in SF

When it comes to fiction, I read some fantasy and some literature, but my heart so decidedly belongs to SF. Having read most of the undeniable classic works and authors of SF, most of what I read in any given year tends to fall into two categories: obscure older works and the well-regarded books that people are still talking about a few years after publication. That I read two books from 2022 is very unusual for me.

Stations of the Tide — Michael Swanwick (1991)

I’m a huge Gene Wolfe fan and I’d heard this was inspired by his book, The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I loved it, but I can see why it isn’t better known. It’s about a nameless bureaucrat mucking across a swamp planet, a representative of an unimaginably technological future society trudging around an incredibly low-tech backwater. It contains obviously fake magic and less-obviously real magic. But does anything supernatural actually happen, or is it all just sleight of hand? Stations doesn’t offer an easy marketing line, it refuses to come out and say what it’s really about, though it’s very clearly about something.

To Reign in Hell — Steven Brust (1984)

A retelling of the rebellion in Heaven. I’m a total sucker for that sort of thing. I knew within seconds of pulling it off the shelf that I was buying it (despite never having heard of it before) and I finished it within 72 hours of getting it home. I’ve always suspected that Satan’s case was understated, that surely there *was* something tyrannical about Yaweh (in this telling, only the first among angels), and this book spells it out in a way that makes perfect sense. The plot is wonderfully organic, almost entirely told in brief conversations between dozens of angels, giving it an evolution that feels completely inevitable.

Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie (2013)

This book was pitched to me all wrong. “It’s a book about a ship-mind in a human body, and it does cool stuff with pronouns.” I’ve read a few books with that description. Cool, I guess.

No! It’s a story about a hive-mind! Justice of Toren is a battleship, a personnel carrier, and its own army, all in one. This allows Leckie to tell the story with the intimacy of first person and the broad perspective of third. The book has some complicated things to say about humanity, individuality, and consciousness, and it never sounds moralizing. And yes, the pronoun stuff truly is neat, not so much radical as it is innovative.

All that said, I’m not sure I’ll continue with the series. Breq the Individual is less interesting to me than Justice of Toren, and I don’t think we’ll ever see the latter again. After my frustrating experience with Leech (which abandons the most exciting parts of its premise after the first 1/3), I am very glad to have found a book about a hivemind that doesn’t find one of the hivemind’s drones to be inherently more interesting than the hivemind itself.

A Half-Built Garden (2022)

The people of Earth have had a difficult journey toward a healthier planet. Through network protocols, they have crafted systems of consensus that allow them to do the work of repairing their environment. Then aliens show up — glad to find humanity alive (their other attempts at first contact found only dead civilizations) and insistent that humanity come live in their post-planetary habitats. The primary protagonists represent the watershed networks and push back on leaving, but soon they are joined by representatives from nation-states and corporations, both of which lost most of their power over preceding decades and are looking to get it back.

I found this to be a really interesting take on a partially-constructed solarpunk future. The most potent idea in the book is the network protocols, which suggest a future in which power is mediated through human values. Through its constant, near-universal participation, it accomplishes a democracy more complete than anything before it. This alone was worth an entire novel.

I have some quibbles with the execution. I’m not sure an intelligent species would treat so narrowly with a single family of humans, I think some of the politics weren’t relevant to the core ideas and will age quite rapidly, and the most interesting / realistic / sympathetic human character — the harried representative from NASA who just got pulled off maternity leave — was relegated to the background.

This book most reminded me of the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler. Joining into community with aliens species might necessarily mean mutating into something current humanity might not recognize.

The Mountain in the Sea — Ray Nayler (2022)

A leading marine biologist goes to an island in Vietnam to study a newly discovered species of intelligent octopus. She works with the only "conscious" android ever made, and the island is protected by a drone operator. Elsewhere, a hacker is hired to crack into an AI more complex than any other he has encountered. And thirdly, a kidnapped man is enslaved on a fully-automated fishing ship.

I was initially frustrated by what I perceived as insufficient focus on the octopus element. However, it soon becomes clear that the other plot lines are thematically related to the octopus element in that they are all exploring consciousness and exploitation. In the back half of the book, there are more attempts to understand and contact the octopus. Rather than opening with an octopus-hello, it ends with it.

I finished the book feeling that this was one of the better works of actual, proper SF that I'd read from the past decade. It really engages with ideas and a world in a way that I most value about SF.

Revolutionary ideology

It all goes back to the French Revolution, all of it.

Les Miserables — Victor Hugo (1862)

Having never read it or watched an adaptation before, I always thought of Les Miserables as a historical drama, an emotional period piece about poverty and cruelty and the scent of black powder. And it sort of is, but it’s also a grand moral narrative about progress, revolution, humanity, and society, filled with wit, verve, humor, and style.

There is so much I could say about this book, and also nothing at all that I can say that it doesn’t say better for itself. It isn’t merely a “classic” — meaning an old book that someone professed authority is Important for some reason or another — but a real work of staggering genius. It asks a lot of you and gives twice as much back. It’s a moral tale, a gripping adventure, a suspenseful drama, a collection of essays on human nature, and a history lesson.

“But let those who don’t want anything to do with the future think carefully. By saying no to progress, it is not the future they condemn, it is themselves. They give themselves a fatal disease when they inoculate themselves with the past. There is only one way to reject Tomorrow and that is to die.”

Russian Thinkers — Isaiah Berlin (1978)

A lot of my reading patterns can only be explained by the format: “If you give a mouse a cookie…” In this instance, “If you start reading about the age of technological optimism in the mid-1900s, you’ll need to read about the Soviet Union. If you read about the Soviet Union, you’ll need to read about the Russian Revolution. If you read about the Russian Revolution, you’ll need to read about the generation of intelligentsia that inspired it.”

Isaiah Berlin made a close study of this cohort. They were born into a society divided into just two categories: nobility and serfdom. The intelligentsia were a small set of people who were able to travel to get a Western education and came back radicalized, full of ideas that had limited reach and appeal in their society except to their immediate peers. Furthermore, they lacked Western Europe’s history of day-by-day ideological evolution and social struggle. As a result, they overdosed on novel philosophy, and their society’s reactive evolution and struggle was expressed as a (relatively) sudden, massive, messy burst.

Historically, these figures are treated with a kind of pity, but Berlin finds many things to admire. They were passionate about ideas — they embraced them, argued about them, contradicted themselves, and radically changed their minds. As such, they made an excellent laboratory for experimenting with political ideas, revealing their moral and intellectual appeal as well as their dangers and shortcomings.

And this leads into the real question that Berlin is grappling with, the one at the dark heart of the liberal project: "Are all absolute values ultimately compatible with one another, or is there no single final solution to the problem of how to live, no one objective and universal human ideal?"

Red Star — Alexander Bogdanov (1908)

What a weird old book. Published in 1908, it imagines a Russian revolutionary that visits a communist Mars. For its time, it is a creative achievement for its imagination of space travel and the workings of a completed communist society.

Bogdanov was himself a revolutionary and so likely intended to write something inspirational, but the story ultimately ends with the protagonist having to return to Earth after finding that even he, the most radical of humans, was not psychologically or constitutionally prepared to experience a communist society. It’s unclear to me, and to scholars generally, whether this was a conscious or unconscious expression of Bogdanov’s own misgivings. The result is an ambiguous utopia like The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. This book would later inspired the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, itself a story about a quasi-communist Mars.

Utopian theory

Core to the premise of this newsletter is that Utopia is an idea that means much more than a grand scheme for society or a paradise fantasy; it is an attitude toward the future that changes our behavior in the present. This was long an implicit attitude of mine, an instinctual position, but in the last few years it has become an explicit understanding. (I must credit Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota for this.)

Since then, I’ve tried to read texts that speak to this idea. Many are academic, and they range mostly from having great ideas and obscure prose to having bad ideas and obscure prose.

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction — Lyman Tower Sargent (2010)

Of the theorists I’ve encountered, I like Lyman Tower Sargent best. In this introduction, he actually attempts to get at the fundamentals of utopian thought and provides structure and clarity. He outlines different utopian modes — literary utopias, utopian practice, and utopian social theory — and presents a useful description of what we’re actually doing: social dreaming. I’ve read his work in other contexts and find him cogent and sensible.

"All utopias ask questions. They ask whether or not the way we live could be improved and answer that it could."

Utopia for Realists — Rutger Bregman (2014)

This is mostly a book of socially progressive policy arguments from 2014, which have perhaps lost a step in the intervening years, but the conceptual shell around all of those proposals is the argument for a return to utopian thinking that still rings true today.

Bregman’s argument is this: In the last 200 years, “Billions of us are suddenly rich, well nourished, clean, safe, smart, healthy, and occasionally even beautiful.” This is amazing, previously unheard of, it is yesterday’s utopia come to pass. But now that we have abundance, the dream of Utopia has run out. The only place to go from here seems to be stagnation or descent. Bregman clarifies that he’s not talking about a totalitarian blueprint utopia, but the vague outline utopia. If we are to go forward, we need a new lodestar, a new dream.

“Without all those wide-eyed dreamers down through the ages, we would all still be poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. Without utopia, we are lost."

A Primer on Utopian Philosophy — Jonathan Greenaway (2024)

It’s unfortunate that this has such a similar title to the last one, especially because I feel that it’s inaccurate.

It’s basically a marketing pamphlet for reading Ernst Bloch, a Jewish-German Marxist philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, best known for his work The Principle of Hope. It’s an enormous, arcane work in three volumes that I someday hope to read (but it is also expensive and difficult to find).

Bloch says that hope is a fundamental aspect of human consciousness that allows us to see latent possibilities in the present (the “not-yet”). This isn’t mere abstraction or naive optimism; it’s rooted in our current reality. We live in “the darkness of the lived moment”, unable to access all of the possible paths forward until we engage practically with hope. Hope is not simple, easy, or naive. It is engaged, willful, agential.

I feel more positively about Bloch’s work than this pamphlet about it, which occasionally has a tone of contempt that I don’t think he shares and that I find a bit unbearable. Bloch sounds cool, his most passionate boosters sound tiresome.

Humanism and the human spirit

This might seem like the topic that is unlike the others, but it’s actually the one that binds them all together.

Humanly Possible — Sarah Bakewell (2023)

Humanism rejects tacit authority. Nothing is sacred, everything is up for debate, there are no great texts or prophets — secular or otherwise. So how, then, does one define Humanism?

Bakewell’s answer is to express Humanism through a biographical history of its practitioners, a tour of artists, writers, activists, scientists, and more. The truth of Humanism emerges from the commonalities of her subjects — freethinking (rejection of absolute authority), inquiry (commitment to questioning and learning), and hope (belief in human potential for betterment). But Humanism is as much defined by their commonalities as their differences — their attitudes toward religion, science, government, education, morality, and the right way to live. In other words, this isn’t just a history of Humanism, but a Humanist history of Humanism.

In part, it is also a history of anti-humanist traditions, both religious and secular, which emphasize human misery and failings and argue that human nature must be fundamentally altered or constrained by higher authority.

This might be the most important book I read this year because it can speak so thoroughly to everything else in this list, to this moment, and perhaps to every moment.

"Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.” — Robert Ingeroll

Watership Down — Richard Adams (1972)

I love this book. I just finished listening to it again in the car with my partner and it’s just as good the second time around. Though ostensibly about rabbits, it's one of the most deeply humanist works I've ever encountered. It celebrates courage, leadership, intuition, strength, trust, cooperation, and the general will to live. It is good for the soul.

Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

I first read this years ago, but picked it up again this year. While most post-apocalyptic fiction focuses on the brutality of survival and suggests that humans are savageness hiding behind a veneer of civilization, Station Eleven celebrates art, music, Shakespeare, human connection. Much as humanists of the past traveled between abbeys, looking for ancient texts to restore the beauty of a bygone age, this book insists that the candle shall not go out, that we will go on. This time around, I appreciated the Star Trek references much more. “Survival is insufficient” — the heart of the book — is a line from Voyager.

Also, if you haven’t watched the HBO Max adaptation, you must. It is the rare adaptation that successfully expands on its source material.

In conclusion

I wish I could say that my reading was this thematic every year. Obviously, I was grappling with a very specific set of questions and interests, which led me down separate but connected paths, looping back around at times. Science, technology, progress, revolution, hope, optimism, rationality, romanticism, liberalism, humanism, utopianism. The lines between science fiction and non-fiction often blurred.

Many of the books could have been put into multiple categories. Red Plenty, Red Star, and Russian Thinkers make a Russian series, The Romantic Machine and Les Miserables make a French one. To Reign in Hell is about a revolution!

Unsurprising to me at least is that it all comes back to a fascination with human attempts to direct our own progress — the tension between planning and organic development, between scientific rationality and human values, between revolution and evolution.

Thanks for joining me in 2024. Subscribe to catch what's coming in 2025 — this publication will be back with a new name and a more ambitious schedule.

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I was old enough to vote in my first presidential election by 12 days. I spent the weeks before registering every eligible student in my high school to vote. I wasn’t affiliated with anyone and no one told me to do it. I just got some blank registration forms, sat outside the cafeteria at lunch, and returned the completed forms to the county clerk.

Why? Because I thought everyone should be engaged in the project of building a better society. I’m not sure I could have told you that at the time, and I had no clue that this is what’s meant by “the spirit of democracy”. I just knew that it was important.

But not all of my classmates agreed with me: “It’s pointless. It’s boring. It’s frustrating. The two-party system is broken. All politicians are the same. Our votes don’t matter.”

I argued with my classmates about it then. I argued about it with people at parties while I was studying political science. I argued about it while I worked on campaigns. And I have continued to argue about it while holding various roles in municipal, state, and federal government.

So you can imagine my frustration when I now hear some people say “I should use my vote… as a form of protest!”

I’m here (indefatigably) to tell you: There’s no such thing as a protest vote.

When protest works (and when it doesn’t)

I don’t mean that protest votes are a bad idea. I mean that protest voting doesn’t exist. It isn’t possible.

“Protest voting” cannot work because there are only two outcomes:

1. The candidate you’re trying to influence loses, leaving you without representation.

2. The candidate you’re trying to influence wins without you, proving that your issue wasn’t a necessary part of a winning platform.

Protest and direct action are powerful and necessary tools in any democracy. I have personally bird-dogged senators and rallied groups for spur-of-the-moment protests. I’ve worked with brilliant organizers who have gotten their constituencies huge wins through tactical action.

Any good organizer would tell you that all effective protests have certain elements: clear demands, identifiable targets, direct pressure mechanisms, and ways to demonstrate power.

Voting, by its very nature as a binary choice, can’t do this. The act of voting can only ever be affirmative – it can only express support for something, never against it.

Some might argue that if protest voting / abstaining happened in large enough numbers, it could work. But we already know what that looks like: it’s called low voter turnout. Every election cycle, about somewhere from 35% to 65% of eligible voters stay home, and no one points to that as evidence that the election is less legitimate.

The eligible voters who already stay home aren't creating pressure for change; they're simply ceding their power to those who do vote. A protest vote is no different – it's just a more complicated way of not voting.

The political science research bears all this out. Politicians interpret any win as validation, regardless of margin or turnout.12 Third-party votes and write-ins rarely influence policy34, and strategic non-voting has no measurable impact.56

Instead, elected officials consistently respond to one group above all others: the people who actually voted for them.

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Too-clever-by-half

So why, then, is there so much talk of protest voting?

I think it’s propaganda. If I wanted to trick good people with strong convictions into harming their own interests, it’s exactly the kind of thing I would concoct.

I would target the too-clever, too-cynical types. I would tell them that there was a bigger, better thing they could do with their vote; nothing so banal as voting for the candidate with the greatest opportunity to support the things they care about. I’d slip it into their social media feed, and soon enough people they trust would repeat it in Instagram stories and niche podcasts. They would all think it was their idea, that all of their people were doing it. They would even feel anxious to admit they weren’t doing it.

Fortunately, I think the amount of actual protest voting is marginal. I hear from people who like the idea in abstract, or support other hypothetical people doing it, or have some Rube-Goldbergian scheme to engineer a form of harm-free protest voting (one simple trick the Founders DON’T want you to know). But most of these people seem to understand that the message it sends is minuscule while the negative consequences are immense.

Unfortunately, elections are won and lost on the margins.

Do both, just separately

Please, protest. I want you to protest. Protesting is good and it works.

But I also want you to vote. Voting is also good and it also works.

In fact, the two are complementary. But they are never the same thing.

For the five minutes you’re in that booth, there is no protest to be had. Staying home isn’t protest, voting third-party to “send a message” isn’t protest, writing something in isn’t protest.

If there’s something you care about, use the entire power of your ballot. Vote for the result that’s closest to what you believe in, even if it seems disappointingly short of your ideal. Then walk out the door and join a protest.

The only thing you can actually do in the voting booth is vote for something.

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Many people are pessimistic about the future right now. Whether it’s in regard to inequality, climate change, or fascism, there's a prevailing sense that things are bad and can only get worse.

Some would even say that they know doom is inevitable. We're screwed, there's no way out, and the only rational response is despair. These are just the facts.

I am not immune to sudden bouts of anxiety about the forces banging at the gate. Some of our problems are massive and growing, and we don't really know what to do about them. That’s enough to make anyone anxious.

But any Utopian worth their salt is at least a bit skeptical of Certain Doom, and not because of some naive optimism that insists everything will be alright in the end. Utopians simply have a different theory of historical change.

The rational argument against Certain Doom

If I were trying to persuade someone to let go of their doomerism, I might be tempted to resort to reason.

I could cite statistics and point to graphs that suggest that many important factors have actually been trending in the right direction for a while now: global poverty, child mortality, and illiteracy have decreased, while economic growth in low-income countries, clean energy investments, and social spending have increased. The COVID-19 pandemic response saved millions of lives, and while climate change remains a serious threat, the worst-case scenarios are becoming less likely by the day. (Noah Smith does a pretty good job of making this argument.)

Of course, there's always another statistic or problem to cite in rebuttal: biodiversity loss, wealth inequality, the mental health crisis, plastic pollution, and the still very real terrors of climate change even in a best-case scenario.

In my estimation, neither side can fully prove their case. Many things are better, and many things are worse, but a litany of improvements or failures doesn't add up to a theory of the future. If you were an optimist or a doomer before such an argument, you're likely to be one after.

The problem is that these sorts of beliefs aren't born of rationality. As the saying goes, "if you didn't reason yourself into something, you can't reason your way out of it". Certain Doom isn't a fact, it's a feeling.

So the question becomes: Why do we feel like we're Doomed?

Perhaps it's something innate to our species. After all, humans have been predicting Certain Doom since the beginning of human history. Before rogue AI and climate change, it was solar flares, the Yellowstone supervolcano, ultra-fatal pandemics, the Mayan calendar, Y2K, nuclear winter, Malthusian collapse, peak oil, Ragnarok, Judgement Day...

suggests that this may result from a cognitive bias favoring simplistic scenarios. Basically, envisioning the future is very complex, but predicting doom is very simple: everything from here on out goes wrong and it's all broken forever, the end. To this I'd add negativity bias (over-weighting negative information), availability heuristic (relying on information we can easily recall, like catastrophes), and confirmation bias (seeking information to confirm our intuitions).

While these are all failings our ancestors had as well, we may be uniquely inclined toward doomerism due to our media environment:

• Incentives for traditional and new media companies to produce negative content are stronger than ever as they race to monetize every second of your attention.

• By creating a distorted reality that contributes to anxiety, depression, and loneliness, social media is causing the aforementioned mental health crisis.

• Progressives have valorized outrage and depression, thereby giving the crisis a partisan dimension.

We're living through an epistemological crisis that makes it impossible to tell exactly how bad things are, and it’s hijacking the traits our ancestors evolved to stay alive in a world more dangerous than our own. We ask ourselves "what's going to happen in the future?" and our poisoned minds can't muster a drop of hope. We become depressed and demoralized.

But prediction is always a fool’s game; even the experts can’t do it. In his work on forecasting, Philip Tetlock found that while experts may know a lot about their field, when it comes to predicting the future they are as accurate as chimps throwing darts. And the further out they try to predict, the worse they get. Past five years their odds are as good as chance.

However, Tetlock also found that 2% of experts were superforecasters who were able to see the future more clearly. What makes them different? Their philosophical outlook: nothing is certain, reality is infinitely complex, and what happens is not necessarily meant to be.

Prefiguring Utopia

I’d love to make the argument that everything is going to be just fine, but unfortunately, I don’t have sufficient evidence to support that. I can only point out that our compass is broken and we must find another way to navigate. Despair is obviously not a healthy or productive response to the world, but it also isn’t a rational one, so we need an alternative.

Perhaps you will object that we shouldn't believe anything we don't have evidence for. William James, the father of American psychology and the philosophy of pragmatism, argued against evidentialism in his 1896 essay, The Will to Believe.

James said that in life we sometimes face "genuine options" — choices that are:

• "Living" (personally meaningful and relevant)

• "Forced" (we cannot abstain from choosing)

• "Momentous" (the decision has significant consequences)

If you are faced with a genuine option and insufficient empirical evidence, he argues, it is permissible and even beneficial to choose some beliefs using our "passional nature" — our emotions, desires, and will.

Clearly, whether or not we should believe in the possibility of a better future is a genuine option. It is meaningful to everyone, we act on our assumptions regardless of whether we make a conscious choice, and it has massive consequences. Thus it is sensible that we should choose the right belief on other grounds: the impact it has on us and the world

The question then is how we should go about acquiring a healthier, more sensible relationship to the future. Some, including , have suggested society-wide cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to reframe our harmful beliefs. has argued that we need to return to a more holistic, animistic perspective that reclaims ritual, connection, and the poetic.

I don't dislike either of these answers, but Utopians have our own approach. I call it: prefigurative belief.

To prefigure means to represent, suggest, or anticipate something before it comes to pass, thereby shaping or influencing how it manifests. That makes it sound pretty grand, but you actually prefigure things every day. You lay out the clothes you want to wear tomorrow, you make to-do lists, you practice for an interview in the mirror, you talk about where you'd like to live and trips you'd like to take. These small acts of anticipation shape how things actually play out.

Prefigurative belief is the same idea but directed at things that are more distant, more ambiguous, more important — the unknowns of our individual and collective futures. With prefigurative belief, we vividly imagine a better world, believe in its possibility (not inevitability), speak of it, and act as if it will occur.

It was prefigurative belief when — in a time when interracial relationships were still taboo — Star Trek imagined a future where a kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura was not just acceptable, but unremarkable.

This is not a new idea, simply a new formulation. It has been called hope, dreaming, imagination, optimism. All of these names represent some part of the idea, but none of them capture the way the utopian uses it and the power that it holds.

Prefiguration is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. According to Robert K. Merton, father of modern sociology, self-fulfilling prophecies occur when our expectations or beliefs about a situation or person lead to behaviors that cause those expectations to come true. A teacher believes in the promise of a student, invests in them, and they succeed. An athlete believes they can win a race, they commit themselves to the effort, and they win. Obviously, mere belief in a better future isn't sufficient to bring it about, but it may be necessary.

I think it's important to point out that this makes prefigurative belief a grounded approach to the future. It is not naive optimism; our problems will not simply solve themselves and we cannot afford to be complacent. Nor is it manifestation; we are not merely attracting something we want through magical thinking.

Self-fulfilling prophecies work because the belief leads to action. We envision the future, which changes how we think, which changes how we speak and act, which changes how others think and speak and act. Together, we form positive, collective visions of the future and coordinate the work necessary reach it. Prefigurative belief is a star that lights the way.

"There is nothing like a dream to create the future."

— Victor Hugo

Mundane forms of prefiguration aren't super spiritually taxing — maybe our dinner plans for tomorrow will change and we'll just have to deal with it — but prefigurative belief demands true courage, the courage to not be overly "realistic". If we look at the past, we see a long chain of unpredictable and dramatic changes. To cling so tightly to what you think is possible that you unnecessarily narrow the possibility of the future is unrealistic in its own way.

The philosopher Ernst Bloch said, “The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.” His great work was called The Principle of Hope, and indeed, that is basically what prefigurative belief is: hope that is chosen because it works.

Prefigurative belief changes us

However, I still think I’m underselling the power of prefigurative belief. It is more than just a practical strategy for the future, it's a spiritual position that enables self-transformation.

We have never been completely in control of ourselves. The age-old question of nature-versus-nurture doesn't even entertain the possibility of autonomous change or self-formation. We take for granted that our biology and environment have always conspired to make us.

But now there are other forces trying to slowly and invisibly turn us into their creation: the market and the algorithm. Millions of actors exert their will through these channels every day, trying to nudge us in the direction they want us to go for their own petty, selfish reasons. Corporations want us to be more passionate consumers, enemy nation-states want us to be conspiracy theorists, and media platforms want us to be ever more viral versions of ourselves. One need only look at one’s phone to see the mutation in real time.

While these are immensely powerful behavior modification structures, they aren't the only ones. The ancient philosophies and great religions of the world show us that we all have the power to believe in something beautiful and allow it to change us.

The philosopher Pierre Hadot said that the philosophy of antiquity wasn’t merely a way to know and categorize things: ”Philosophy was a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom, and in its goal, wisdom itself. For real wisdom does not merely cause us to know: it makes us 'be' in a different way.”

I believe that prefigurative belief — and by extension Utopianism — has this power. Prefigurative belief casts off the yoke of optimization and combats the coercive forces of the world by creating a new, parallel incentive structure. It aligns our personal convictions, expectations, and behaviors toward an envisioned destination. It changes us in a way that we choose.

Previously, I've said "If Utopia is a dream, Utopians are the ones who dream it." We imagine, we anticipate, we prefigure, and in doing so we are transformed.

Thank you so much for reading this essay. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe and join me for more adventures in Utopian thought.

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The Steadfast Utopian is a publication about society and technology, philosophy and politics, Science Fiction and Fantasy. We'll delve into the past, decipher the present, and dream of the future.

Some questions we'll explore:

• How is technology interacting with our biology and our culture?

• What does it mean to be human in an era of machine ascendancy?

• Are we being guided by our dreams or our nightmares?

• How has our literature shaped our reality, and what role might it continue to play?

• What is the purpose of consciousness in the Universe?

• How might Utopian ideas provide a path forward for humanity?

• Is there cause for hope?

But before we get to any of that, why “The Steadfast Utopian”?

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What is Utopia?

The word "Utopia" — as you probably know — is a bit of a pun. Coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, it is derived from Greek and can be interpreted to mean both "good place" (eutopia) and "no place" (outopia). More's original rendition is a fictional island nation characterized by social harmony.

Here enters a critic. “It means no-place because it can never exist. It's a farce, a satire. The happy island isn't real." (For now, this critic will go unnamed.)

That's one possible interpretation. Another interpretation is that Utopia is a no-place because it's not here or now. It's somewhere on the horizon, off the edge of the map, in Terra Ignota. Utopia is located someplace we’ve never been, or in the future.

This is a necessary bit of framing as it allows us to think about a better world without conceding to the messy details of the present. It frees our imagination to construct a society piece by piece, holding each fragment up to the light to see how it might succeed or fail.

Our critic is not impressed. “We all know that perfection is impossible, and thus Utopia is impossible.”

But this is another straw-man. Utopia does not mean “perfect place”, only “good place”, and goodness is not unattainable. We can make a society where everyone is clothed and fed, where wrongs are corrected and wounds are healed. We can live in balance with the natural world. We can cooperate without coercion. We can make a world where society and the individual flourish — culturally, spiritually, technologically.

In this conception of Utopia, people will still cry sometimes. Utopia does not demand perfection, only goodness.

Our critic scoffs. "You say it is attainable, but the society you describe is better than any that has ever existed. You tell us what is good about it, but not how it works."

A fair point. Even my more humble definition exceeds the zeniths of human history, but that is exactly what makes it Utopia. There are countless other heavenly afterlives, earthly paradises, and perfect states in the intellectual history of humanity — the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields, the Peach Blossom Spring, Avalon, Hyperborea, Atlantis, the Republic, the City of the Sun — but Utopia is short-hand for all of them because it captures the universal aspect: Utopia is the good-no-place.

Utopia is a dream. It isn’t here, it isn’t now, but it may exist tomorrow or just over the next hill. It is a place and time that is good, and we can see it when we close our eyes.

What is a Utopian?

The word “Utopian” suggests something radical: an inhabitant of Utopia. If Utopia is a dream, Utopians are the ones who dream it.

Utopians, as a rule, are fantasists. We imagine different worlds vividly. Even after we close the book, turn off the screen, put down the pen, or refocus our eyes on the room around us, the worlds we imagine persist as a sort of after-image. Herein lies the potency of the Utopian.

When you inhabit other worlds in this way, you see new possibilities for the one you were born into. You don't take it for granted that things must be as they are.

Some of the ideas that Utopians imagine are impractical, some impossible, some even undesirable, but that is precisely the point. We can't prejudge what is practical, possible, or desirable. The work of the idea must precede the work of the change. and it is the Utopians who do that work, it is an almost sacred duty.

Furthermore, Utopians are natural malcontents. I don't necessarily mean that we are troublemakers, but we are easily frustrated by complacency and normalcy. If the world can be better, why isn't it? The Utopian's dreaming is thus not an escape from reality, but the motivator for its improvement.

Utopians inhabit the dream of the good-no-place, and when we open our eyes, the world looks different. New things are possible. The dream of Utopia, like all dreams, changes our waking life.

The Non-Utopians

Our still unnamed critic is growing impatient. "What is this nonsense? What do you actually believe? Where do you stand? What are your economics? Your foreign policy?"

As I have defined it, a Utopian is not an ideologue. I can imagine that there are many ideologies that may have Utopians as adherents, but also non-Utopians. Utopians share an approach, an outlook, and a general destination, but as soon as the dream is made rigid and dogmatic, it ceases to be a dream.

"Then we're all Utopians. Or none of us are. Meaningless."

In order to clarify what a Utopian is, I want to tell you about a few Non-Utopians.

The first is the Realist. The Realist is gnostic about reality: they are certain that they know what is true and what is possible. The Realist may be benevolent and thus an ally to the Utopian, but they cannot see Utopia for themselves. They are not dreamers.

"Ah, that's me," says our critic. "I'm a Realist. I see things as they are"

I disagree. I think our critic is something else: the Pessimist. They often call themselves Realists, but they have mistaken cynicism for clear-sightedness. They are certain that the past, present, and future are all bad, and any progress is illusory or temporary. The Pessimist does not believe in progress.

"Oh, please. You're just trying to discredit me."

Not so. That would be more in the playbook of the third non-Utopian, the Sophist. They are the worst of all. The Sophist is also a kind of Realist in that they are certain of how the world works, and they believe that the laws of reality — psychology, biology, geography, physics — make the ideas of right and wrong, true and false irrelevant. There is only strong and weak, winning and losing. The Sophist doesn’t even believe in goodness.

The Utopian believes that new, good things are possible, and that we do not have to abandon our principles to achieve them.

The Untrustworthy Utopian

Perhaps I could just call this publication “The Utopian”, but I feel that I must answer the charge most often directed at us: that we are naïve.

“That's true," the Pessmist says, “Utopians are unrealistic, impractical, and idealistic. They have grand designs that ignore the constraints of reality and human nature. They are reckless, careless, delusional. They are unreliable and not to be trusted.”

In short, we are dangerous fools.

To that I say: that may be true. Utopians hope to turn the world into a good-place, and that requires more than some tinkering around the edges. The scope of that change may make us impatient, unwise, and insufficiently cautious. And the greater the change, the greater the unknown risks it poses. Utopian schemes have often failed, and often failed disastrously. This is inarguable.

But you know who else suffers from incurable foolishness? Every human being who has ever lived.

We are short-sighted, self-deceptive, and ignorant. We often chase our own annihilation and neglect the basic labor that would set us up for success and happiness.

Every generation has been born into a world it did not choose, that no one chose. Every turn of history has replaced old dogmas with new dogmas, old failings with new failings. Every day has been a battle to overcome our ignorance, our wounds, our petty impulses, our bestial nature.

The only hope we have of any human ever being more than a benighted, dangerous fool is to create a better world. What we did last was wrong and what we do next will probably be wrong too, but perhaps it will be just a little better.

It's true that a better world can't be built with good intentions alone, but without good intentions, it cannot be built at all. We should not abandon the quest for Utopia, but pursue it with increased wisdom.

I accept this criticism of Utopians, but the alternatives are unacceptable.

The Steadfast Utopian

In order to integrate this criticism, we must learn from the Non-Utopians. We must be grounded like the Realist to ensure that we are not engaging in mere escapism. We must entertain (but not embrace) the negativity of the Pessimist to avoid tragic missteps. And we must accept the Sophist's truth that being good is insufficient, and to win our better world we must be strong.

Whereas "Utopian" is a 16th century neologism built in Greek, "steadfast" comes from much older Proto-Germanic: "stede" meaning a place and "fast" meaning firm or established.

The Steadfast Utopian has their head in the clouds and two feet on the ground.

The Steadfast Utopian knows that their forebears have sometimes been reckless, naive, impatient, “unrealistic”, but they are resolved not to be.

The Steadfast Utopian is modest, self-aware, conscious of their own failings and fallibility.

The Steadfast Utopian is patient and determined. Resolute, unwavering, unyielding.

The Steadfast Utopian does not give into despair, nor do they lose themselves in the dream.

The Steadfast Utopian knows it is a long journey. The path leads through hardship, to the stars.

Welcome to the Steadfast Utopian.

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Acknowledgement

I owe the premise and inspiration for this entire publication to Ada Palmer. My thinking on this subject and many others has been greatly shaped by her work. Additionally, I’d like to thank:

• Plato

• Thomas More

• Voltaire

• Mary Shelley

• Harriet Taylor

• John Stuart Mill

• Victor Hugo

• Frederick Douglass

• HG Wells

• Aldous Huxley

• Ursula K Le Guin

• Octavia Butler

• Kim Stanley Robinson