The Great American Eclipse
In the woods with Sasquatch and the Red-Haired Dancer
Who is engineering the weather?
Sundown, you better take care, if I find you been creeping ’round my back-stairs
My friend Ashlea Stinnett invited me to a Bigfoot campout in Washington State. I brought the Red-Haired Dancer with me, fully aware of our interloper status. We were among a crew of true believers, mostly older women with a knack for kindness and the telling of a good yarn, who spent their days noticing twigs arranged into meaningful hieroglyphics, felled trees in impossible arrangements, a pack of Honeybuns gone missing and empty wrappers carefully returned to the base of a tree. Sasquatch left a knife near Ashlea’s tent the day after I mentioned she was the kind of woman to carry a knife on her belt. Sasquatch evaded me however, probably because I am a writer.
The truth is that I was the one evading Sasquatch because I can barely make sense of this world, let alone an interdimensional one. I came because I wanted to reconnect with Ashlea, who I met in a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, during my first …
Soylent Screens
The resource being maximized by digital technology is us
Now, AI overseers will squeeze every last dime from our bones unless we unite to stop them
A Producerist Manifesto
In the secular age, we have found our new God and it consists of ever-expanding binary code. We both worship and control this new deity, or so we imagine. Developments in AI will soon dispel that illusion. AI technology will create untold job losses, suffering, and upheaval for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of the world population. Not since the Manhattan Project have scientific inventors so thoroughly attempted to warn the public regarding the myriad disasters their own invention could bring about.
Back in 2022, OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever made news when he said large AI networks have already developed “partial consciousness.” He also warned that AI technology allows for the possibility of “infinitely stable” totalitarian …
The Sons of Liberty
Two days after Josiah Chase’s eighth birthday had been marked by a raisin cake and a game of roundelay with his seven siblings, his father’s elder half-brother Ezekiel had appeared from out of the west, occasioning a great stir. Ezekiel had traveled the Pennsylvania frontier as a chain-bearer with the surveyors, and then had fought in the Indian Wars, and seemed easily the tallest man anyone had ever seen. He wore long breeches and a hunting shirt the color of dried leaves and told tales of summer ambushes so vivid that Josiah could smell the pines and feel the hush hanging in the hot air. One account involved an English supply train in the wilderness for which Ezekiel had been employed as an escort, a column so encumbered with necessities that it extended six miles, and included folding chase chairs, cases of powdered mustard, and dozens of bottles of Madeira wine. After the rout the abandoned spoils …
