World 1-1

Welcome to OVERBURDEN! I’m really fluffed chuffed you’re here. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and it’s taken me a lot of work to get this going (not least of which is the work I had to do on myself), so it genuinely means a whole lot to me that you’re taking even just a little of your time to check it out.

Allow me to give a quick tour, so to speak. OVERBURDEN is a blog focused on expanding what you might call your philosophical perspective. Now, I don’t know you, dear reader, and I don’t know what your life is like. And, quite frankly, the particulars don’t really matter to me, because I’m just going to assume you are already doing the best you can with what you have and who you are. But I also assume you are at least somewhat unsatisfied with the general state of things and would love to make some pretty big and serious changes, but you’re having some trouble figuring out what exactly you should or even could be doing. And that’s the need OVERBURDEN is supposed to fill: helping you come to some kind of decision on a better direction for you to steer your life toward.

I’m definitely not claiming I have all the answers; not even close. I might genuinely have zero answers, at least for you and your whole situation. Really, the only thing I have going for me as some kind of metaphysical guidebook is a relentlessly unsatisfied curiosity and an inability to leave well enough alone. The result has been a life of almost constant philosophical wandering: like an extremely irritating child, I have never once stopped asking why? every time I’ve been confronted with something I don’t understand. Being like this has its ups and downs of course (on the one hand people tend to think I’m pretty smart, but on the other hand I can’t keep a job because management fucking hates me), but, now as I approach middle-age, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of where we—ie, the human community within Nature as it exists on Earth—are, what we’re doing, and the general direction we’re headed.

(If you want the tl;dr of OVERBURDEN: the closest thing to an 'answer' of what we need to do to arm ourselves and fight against the growing horrors we face, from social oppression and economic exploitation to mass upheaval and mass extinction, is this: we need to relearn how to be the kind of neighbours who are capable of building and maintaining their community without violence or coercion. This is because the root cause of all of our problems is the greed and selfishness intrinsic to the 'profit motive' which poisons all our relationships with each other and with Nature, alienating us in individual prisons of soul-crushing emptiness, and ultimately destroying the Earth's ability to support our current civilization and the vast majority of our population for hundreds if not thousands of years. The antidote to greed and selfishness is, of course, generous selflessness. And the good news is this is not some mystical trait miraculously bestowed upon a blessed few; it is more like a frame of mind that with some willpower can be turned pretty quickly into an unconscious habit. (I firmly believe it is a frame of mind that comes far more naturally to (most of) us than the miserably short-sighted avarice of capitalism.) And once acquired as a frame of mind, it will quickly focus your attention on what you need to do next.

This will involve learning how to provide for yourself and others, in the ways your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents used to, which means learning how to cook and clean, how to sew and knit, how to seed and weed and harvest, how to reckon and measure and plumb and cut and nail and build and fix. It will mean learning how to depend on your neighbours, and learning how to be dependable to them (which will involve relearning politics as the art of getting along with each other). It will mean learning how to fit into your local environment, rather than over it. It will very likely mean learning how to face down militias, cops, banks, corporations, governments and their militaries.

It will also almost certainly require you and your community to join things like mortgage, rent, credit card strikes; job actions (strikes, sit-ins, re-appropriating necessary machinery and/or supplies, etc); and narrowly targeted property destruction and vandalism (ie, empty banks, empty corporate facilities, empty server farms, private airports, etc), in addition to participating in mainstream politics, peaceful protests, and all available mutual aid networks.

The work will be inevitably difficult, dangerous, painful, bloody, and come at no small cost to life and limb. But it will also be carthartic, joyous, fascinating, and miraculous, because you will be assissting in the new birth of freedom, in the birth of a new human community; one that—if you've learned anything at all from your work—is based on each person's willing participation and not their forced exploitation; one that you will watch your children grow up in, and thrive in, and make even better.)

So, once a week (5:00pm UTC on Friday, aka quittin’ time!) I will post something that will hopefully help you make a little more sense of just what in the holy hell is going all Enron Pete Tong wrong around here. Some of these posts will be essays I’ve written, some of them will be excerpts and quotes from other people’s works, and—eventually¹—some will be my own fiction. Everything will be entirely free, now and forever. You can pay me back by improving yourself and your community. The subscription button is for those who want to get new posts emailed to them directly rather than schlepp all the way over here each and every week; subscribing is free, and subscribers will not receive anything different or extra (it’s no different to how newspapers and magazines used to be: you could buy one at a stand, or you could get it delivered, but you were getting the exact same paper/porno regardless). There will likely also be the occasional post like this one, about the site itself, and I’m going to tag all such posts Housekeeping because they’ll be posted as needed, like a “Wet Floor” sign. They may or may not be emailed to subscribers, depending on what and how serious the mess is.

I should also clearly explain that just because everything here is free doesn’t mean I intend to make you, sweet and succulent reader, the product. I absolutely don’t. I don’t want your data, I’m not collecting any metrics, and any cookies or other spyware that exists on this website do so only because I haven’t figured out how to get rid of them or turn them off yet. If I was capable of it, I would have coded the site myself in unvarnished HTML and CSS, Macromedia Dreamweaver style (if you know you know). In all honesty, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep OVERBURDEN going; I might genuinely run out of useful things to post and this site will be tossed in a dumpster laid to rest in the Internet Archive and that’ll be that. But if it goes the other way, and it becomes bigger than me, myself, and I can handle, you have my word—and my axe!—that I will do everything I possibly can to make sure it never enshittifies. I would rather fucking nuke it (metaphorically), if it comes to that. I could say some goofy shit about how a writer’s word is their bond, but in the end I’m just going to have to earn your trust on this, and I’m going to be a real try-hard about it.

I will also say this explicitly: OVERBURDEN is a wholly inclusive website. Everyone’s welcome (if that makes sense for a free blog). Like Red Green used to say: “We’re all in this together.” But I want to make it clear that I don’t expect everyone to all leave here with the same idea. This site is inclusive because I accept the fact we’re all unique individuals who deserve to be treated according to our common humanity (at least until proven otherwise). And the fact that we’re all unique individuals inevitably means we have different opinions, preferences, and goals, and I don’t know of any good reason why that should be ‘fixed.’ To that end, this is not a website that will ever promote any particular political position or philosophy. Which is not to say I’m some sort of ‘both-sides’ cowardly loser: one of the foundational principles of my life and thus OVERBURDEN is that no one has the right to interfere non-consensually in another’s life (except in matters of direct survival). I don’t promote political or philosophical positions because I think you should decide these things for yourself, not because I’m scared of saying certain philosophies or politics are totally loose butthole. Intolerant fuckfacery will be dealt with as it deserves, and I’ll admit straight up I do not suffer fools gladly or kindly (I’m working on it).

Finally, I’ve turned off the comments as well as all the social media sharing stuff not because I want to prevent communication, but because I’m hoping you’ll take what you read and argue over it with your family and friends IRL—remember: the goal is real change, which isn’t going to happen on the internet. Everything I publish I do so under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License, which means you’re totally free to do whatever you want with it, even print it all out and sell it as toilet paper if that tickles your fancy. If you want to talk to me (as I suspect at least one lawyer will, sooner than later), there’s a whole Contact page where you can do so directly. I will do my best to answer or at least address all (good faith) confusions and concerns, but I make absolutely no promises on timeliness (and this is purely to save you from any misplaced expectations, dear reader: as my mom could tell you, it often takes me what most might call an unacceptably long time to reply).

So! That’s the tour. Hopefully by the time you read this the place has filled up with a whole lot of good mental nooch (ie, nutrition). Feel free to have a wander and a ponder if it seems like it’d be useful; I really want OVERBURDEN to be the kind of mind-blowing rabbit hole that you fall into and that divides your life into before and after chapters. The goal is that it helps you write better chapters for yourself and those around you (consensually).

P.S. A quick word on vocabulary: I am extremely anti-censorship, and I do not believe there are morally bad words. Words are only inherently good or bad in terms of descriptive accuracy: they either adequately describe something or they don’t. Obviously, some words are ‘bad’ in the sense they’re insulting, derogatory, dehumanizing, et cetera, but not one single word has ever gotten up off a page and physically harmed anyone who tried to read it. Some words, of course, have such an ugly history that they must be used extremely carefully if they are not to perpetuate the same kind of immoral actions they’ve provoked in the past, but to believe by simply refraining from using such words we could in any way prevent immoral actions is fucking absurd: people will never be prevented from becoming violent bigots just because they can’t learn the right insults. We will not stop a single rapist or pedophile from harrassing and violating others by using the words ‘grape’ and ‘PDF file’ or by switching out a v*wel or tw* with an asterisk. At best it’s merely momentarily confusing, but at worst it’s the lowest-hanging fruit of infantile performative bullshit. It’s like the verbal equivalent of an extremely punchable face.

So, here’s how I use words: I choose them based on how accurately they convey what I wish to mean. As my dad was fond of declaring, I say what I mean and I mean what I say. And, yep, sometimes what I mean is to insult and humiliate, and I will use the words I think are most appropriate to that, because sometimes people deserve some verbal punching to the face. However: I will never use words to insulate and humiliate people based on who they are, but only what they do. So, for example, I would never denigrate a black person for having ‘wooly’ or ‘kinky’ hair, but I might (probably) make fun of them if they get a silly hair cut (and I expect nothing for myself but the same treatment; if I do something stupid, please feel free to tear me a hilarious new one, the more hilariouser the better. As P.O.S. said: “worse things have happened to better people.”).

Which brings me to my next point: I do not capitalize the adjectives we use to describe different groups of people (ie, black, white, brown, gay, straight, bi, and so on). This is because I don’t think such differences are much more than superficial, and one of my main goals for OVERBURDEN is to help us all overcome the minor differences between us and recognize our inherent common humanity. In all honesty, I really don’t care about your skin colour, genitals, fashion style, sexual preferences, or any other inherent trait you have: I only care that you live your life in a way that doesn’t fuck up the lives of those around you (and this includes the non-human lives). It’s not who we are, but what we do that really matters.

1 I’m working on several stories, but until they’re completely finished I’m going to hold off on sharing them because—with all due respect to a truly excellent writer—I don’t want to inadvertently G.R.R.M. anybody. Once (if) they’re done, I will publish them each serially (probably outside the regular Friday posts) and as an ePub file.