Blogging Platforms

Why I chose Substack.

I’ve been playing with creative writing for a while.

I have a few dozen journals filled with notes and diagrams that appear to be the ravings of a mad scientist.

I wrote on Medium for a while.

I wrote a book.

My Google Docs are cluttered with half-written and private whitepapers, essays, and random thoughts.

One of my influences is Jordan (Green)Hall, a polymath thinker, futurist, and a friend.

His 2016 (right after the elections) talk, Politics Decentralized: a New Paradigm for Governance, was a foundational paradigm shift for me in the way I perceived the world.

“For the very first time, we are all enmeshed in a comprehensive global civilization fabric. 7.5 billion of us, many of whom are just still learning how to make it work, all of whom are getting better and better at killing each other, and pushing the absolute limits of all of the infrastructure that we have. So, we’re at a precipice, and if we drop the ball, it could be something we never recover from.

At the same time, the prophets of abundance are not wrong. These exact same exponential technologies, the exact same 7.5 billion people, are exactly positioned to deliver on a level of flourishing and well-being that is dreamt of only in science fiction and poetry.

We are right now, at a historical moment, a moment of choice, a pivot point between one future and another future."

This talk inspired the title of my book, The Abundance Prophecy. I am working on a 2.0 update, which I will probably just publish here instead of Amazon.

Jordan had an article on Medium, Making Sense of QAnon, back in 2018, when Q was still mostly lurking in the chans. I just spent about twenty minutes looking for an archive of this article with no luck. It has been erased from reality.

QAnon may be controversial, but banning a rational discussion of the phenomenon as a decentralized collective intelligence by someone who I know has good intentions and high intelligence makes me question Medium as a platform.

Then, Jordan Hall was banned from Facebook. The great purge has begun.

I joined Facebook in 2008 (ironically, while I was in Shanghai) and have been at times a heavy user, sharing and consuming content. In the past couple of years, I’ve had two experiences being censored on Facebook:

1. I wrote an article called Kanye and the Paradox of Inclusion, and shared it on Facebook. A liberal friend got offended and started commenting and expressing his disappointment and another friend started insulting him. I thought to myself, “My mom and family are on Facebook” and self-censored the article.

2. I posted a photo in the ‘Crap wildlife photography’ Facebook group which started accumulating likes and comments. Apparently, the moderators of the group find photos of literal crap wildlife photography offensive and banned my photo.

There’s definitely a metaphor here for the Facebook platform that I don’t need to elaborate on. So, as I was looking for a new channel/platform to express thoughts and saw that Glenn Greenwald left the Intercept, the publication he started, I followed him here.