emsenn's letters to the Web on emsenn.net

This Christmas, give yourself bravery

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before beginning, I want to say that this piece is for, mostly, adult cishet white men. I understand that many folk need to lie through the Holidays for their own safety, and I don’t want them to read this and get any idea that the reasons I give here are a good enough reason to put your safety on the line. But if it’s not safety, and you just don’t like to make noise at Christmas Dinner? Then this is for you.

On white-supremacist COVID-eugenicist queers

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 06:21:00 +0000

¶Pushed Propaganda

A couple days ago, I was washing the dishes or cleaning the counters or something, when my phone sent me a push notification from Substack. This notification was from a white settler anarchist who’s partners with a different white settler anarchist whose Substack I subscribe to. Substack does that, whenever I start posting on it more: sends me updates about what’s happening past the edge of my network.

A storm is a storm is a storm

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 09:01:00 +0000

¶Introduction

On September 21, 2025, Stephen Miller stood in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, before tens of thousands gathered to honor Charlie Kirk.

His premise was mourning, but his content was aggressive and threatening:

“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal.”

“We are the storm,” he declared. His enemies, he told the crowd, “create nothing… you are nothing.”

Miller cast the gathered mourners as heirs to a civilizational lineage stretching from Athens to Rome, Philadelphia to Monticello. Their children’s children’s children would inherit the fruits of victory, because “the light will defeat the dark. We are on the side of God.”

Storytelling [Stop] Cop City

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:22:00 +0000

With the RICO charges against Stop Cop City activists being dismissed being reported as the state failing, and academic thought presenting Stop Cop City as an abolitionist success, it seems indicated that Cop City has been, well, Stopped. But… it hasn’t. So, what’s going on with reporting, research, and discourse, that the truth of a situation, when measured materially or ethically, and the truth of its narrative have such little relationship?

Reading through wet cement

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

¶Introduction

My recent essays, writing from mid-2025, are being described as difficult. Some describe them as impenetrable or alienating. Others say they are overcompressed, self-referential, or withholding. The most consistent descriptor is affective: it feels tiring—like a demand on the reader made without sufficient payoff. One reader described reading my recent writing as “running through wet cement, but I can’t stop.”

These assessments are accurate descriptions of what the essays are doing, rhetorically and structurally. What is wrong is the perception that it is anything but intentional. My recent essays are not designed to instruct, persuade, or resolve. They are not written for argument or clarity. They emerge from a specific configuration of constraints: energetic, economic, relational, cognitive, and systemic, primarily intersecting at two points:

Citing for containment

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is a gap between the story of Stop Cop City and the history of Weelaunee Forest. Not just a difference in emphasis, but a structural disconnect—between the shape of public sense-making and the uneven, often invisible labor of holding ground, building trust, and adapting under pressure. For those who were materially entwined with Weelaunee before Cop City, and before Stop Cop City, it doesn’t just feel like something got lost. It’s that something else got installed in its place.

Governing by confusion

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 05:08:00 +0000

This was a recursive response, not a policy error

On April 2nd, 2025, the U.S. government announced a sweeping tariff policy, applying across all imports with immediately effect. Over the following week, the policy evolved rapidly: it expanded to cover additional categories, triggered immediate procurement responses, and by April 9th, a substantial portion of it was suspended.

Other parts, particularly those targeting Chinese imports, remained in place or were even intensified. This wasn’t a full reversal. It was a targeted redirection under pressure.

The theory that survived the war

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am told that I must be legible. It is demanded from me by settlers, who—whether they mean to or not—imply that colonialism will continue unless I can explain why it shouldn’t. It is demanded from me by Indigenous people who fear that, if we do not make ourselves legible to settlers, our autonomy will become irrelevant. The logic is consistent: if we do not translate our position into terms that can be understood, we will be excluded from the conversation that decides our future.

Marked speech, borrowed grammar

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I. Introduction: The Withholding Grammar of the Present

Contemporary English, particularly in its American institutional and digital forms, is undergoing a profound shift in how it handles agency, relation, and responsibility. This shift is not superficial. It is not a matter of jargon, slang, or changing taste. It is structural. It reflects the adaptation of language to conditions in which speaking clearly, personally, or relationally is increasingly disincentivized, politically, economically, and algorithmically. Two dominant grammatical modes now shape this linguistic field. The first is what I might call dead institutional English: a procedural, passive, agentless grammar used by governments, corporations, universities, and platforms. This language appears in public apologies, press releases, moderation statements, and official reports. It is structured to perform responsiveness while deferring causality, to acknowledge harm without naming a subject, to describe action without ethical presence.

Signalgate caused signalgate

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I. Introduction: The Leak That Wasn’t a Hack In early 2025, headlines broke about a military operation leak involving a Signal group chat. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and other senior Trump administration officials had accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to an encrypted Signal thread that included sensitive operational discussions about a planned U.S. strike on Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg, upon realizing the magnitude of what he was reading, published the contents. What might have once sparked resignations and internal purges instead prompted shrugs and spin. President Trump affirmed his support for Waltz. No one was fired. The moment was absurd. But it wasn’t an accident. Not really.

When power buys itself

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, it was announced that xAI is acquiring X. That sentence is easy to skip past. It sounds like corporate rearranging, maybe a branding pivot, maybe Musk doing Musk things again. But the thing is—X is already owned by Elon Musk. And xAI is also owned by Elon Musk. So when a company owned by one person gets bought by another company owned by that same person, that just smells off.

Between care and control

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this moment of accelerated crisis — legal breakdown, visible state violence, the fast erosion of institutional legitimacy — there’s a growing wave of calls for action. Much of it comes from people who, until recently, insisted that electoralism or procedural reform was the only viable path. Now they’re calling for general strikes, mass occupations, coordinated disruptions. On the surface, this looks like a pivot: away from state trust, toward confrontation. But if you look closer, a particular logic is being carried over. These calls for mass action are often framed in terms of legitimacy through size. People argue that mass action is necessary because it is safer. Because it has weight. Because there is, implicitly, protection in numbers.

The network effect

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Seven years ago, I wrote this essay to piece together the connective tissue between Facebook, Russian financial networks, and the Trump campaign’s digital strategy. At the time, the conversation was focused on Cambridge Analytica, disinformation, and the fallout of the 2016 election. Since then, we’ve lived through another election cycle shaped by platform power, a billionaire takeover of Twitter, and a fresh wave of information warfare that makes 2016 look almost quaint by comparison. Back then, much of the discourse treated Facebook’s role as a technological accident—an invention that got out of hand, leading well-meaning users to accidentally destabilize democracy. There was also plenty of speculation about foreign influence, but much of it remained just that: speculation. The real connective tissue, the documented financial relationships and strategic decisions that tied these players together, was available in public records. It wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t hidden. It was just inconveniently clear.

The financialization of persuasion

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There was a time when shaping public opinion was a job for politicians, PR firms, and media moguls. The gatekeepers of discourse held the keys to influence, carefully curating what narratives gained traction. But today? That power is shifting to a decentralized, unaccountable force: the highest bidder. Welcome to FuzzAI, where debates are no longer won by truth but by profit.

FuzzAI is a market-driven rhetorical battlefield, where AI-powered debates unfold under the influence of anonymous bettors. Instead of passively wagering on an outcome, participants actively feed arguments to AI debaters, optimizing them for persuasion. The result? The most financially backed, memetically powerful narratives don’t just win—they shape reality.

Historical parallels on Trump's call for emergency Ukraine elections

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Trump administration has called for emergency elections in Ukraine, after a series of events distancing themselves from the nation currently partially occupied by Russia. The move has many historical parallels - to keep it simple and non-speculative, let’s look at the parallels within a government who this administration has explicitly credited as an inspiration: the Third Reich.

Parallels

Austria (1938ce): the forced election that never happened
- Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg planned a referendum on independence.
- Adolf Hitler forced him to cancel it under military threats.
Trump allies push for elections in Ukraine while supporting Russian aggression, similar to how Hitler demanded political changes while preparing to invade.
- Austria was annexed before the people could vote, and Germany held a rigged plebiscite after occupation.
The Sudetenland Crisis (1938)
- Germany supported ethnic German Nazis in the Sudetenland, encouraging them to demand autonomy.
- Trump’s team suggests Ukraine needs elections while occupied territories remain under Russian control, echoing Germany’s manipulation of border politics.
- The Munich Agreement forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland, undermining its sovereignty without an immediate war.
Slovak Independence (1939ce)
- After annexing the Sudetenland, Germany pressured Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia) into declaring independence.
- A forced “election” was held under Nazi influence, creating a puppet state rather than true sovereignty.
- Trump’s push for elections in Ukraine, while Russian-occupied areas remain under Kremlin control, mirrors how Germany used manipulated votes to justify breaking apart nations.
Vichy France (1940ce)
- After France fell in WWII, the Nazis backed a collaborationist government in Vichy, presenting it as legitimate.
- Russia has staged fake elections in occupied Ukraine, and Trump’s push for “emergency elections” could be a way to install a Kremlin-friendly leader.
- Vichy France lost credibility and became a Nazi puppet.

Strategy

“Democratic processes” were used to justify authoritarian control.
Nazis (and now Russia, with potential Trump backing) used elections to:
- Destabilize governments under siege.
- Create legitimacy for foreign influence.
- Pressure leaders into resignation or concessions.

This is a modern adaptation of an old playbook: first, withholding support, then demanding fradulent elections, and finally using the resulting chaos to justify further aggression.

Radical is as radical imagines

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Radicalism is not polite. It doesn’t come from a curated aesthetic, the perfect brand partnership. It isn’t found in the conversation of people eating a tax write-off for dinner. It cannot be embedded in a Twitter bio. If the only way I can tell you’re a radical is by checking your social media (which you might have on private, anyway), then how are you a radical?

I certainly don’t mean the folk keeping their praxis hush-hush: keep normie and carry on.

Solidarity erased

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the days following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, something remarkable happened. Across social media and beyond, people expressed a surprising solidarity with the act - not necessarily with the violence itself, but with the frustrations it laid bare. The sentiment wasn’t about glorifying a death; it was about recognizing a brutal truth: millions of lives are shaped, diminished, and ended by a healthcare system built to profit from suffering. For a fleeting moment, the collective response wasn’t shock or confusion - it was clarity: this system is intolerable, and something has to change.

Looking for homes old and new

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Back in February, I told you that my family and I were moving to Lakota territory to engage in food autonomy and build something rooted in sovereignty. We believed we’d find a space where we could work without the immediate interference of settler systems, where our time wouldn’t be consumed by reacting to settler expectations of our existence.

I was wrong.

Instead, we found ourselves confronting colonization’s worst scars, not just in the actions of settlers, but in how deeply those scars have been carved into my kin. The family we went to collaborate with had turned the language of sovereignty into a smokescreen for harm. Behind their rhetoric was an armed gang engaged in drug trade, sex trafficking, and child sexual assault. We tried to confront this, to protect the kids who were being harmed, and that’s what made us targets.

The nervous ally

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria isn’t just another international headline. For those living in societies that depend, directly or indirectly, on imperial or colonial arrangements, it’s a reminder that entrenched power is not invulnerable. When we see officials dragged from their offices and once-untouchable authorities fleeing, we recognize that if carefully maintained hierarchies can crumble there, they might crumble anywhere. This recognition often stirs a nervous unease among so-called allies - people who claim to support liberation but prefer it safely limited to symbolic or distant acts rather than meaningful transformations.

Now streaming

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a couple (or few) months since I’ve sent out any sort of update, so there’s a lot I want to share and I’ll probably forget a lot.

I’ve set up a YouTube channel. I’ve already uploaded a few videos you can stream there, and plan on uploading more as I get more comfortable having a camera in my face.
Me and my family have started stream restoration on a segment of Phahin Sinte Wakpala (Porcupine Tail Creek).

Support sustainable economics in Pine Ridge

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Me and my family have been living near the small community of Porcupine, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, for about a month now. We were invited because of our experience with regenerative horticulture and sustainable resource management oriented toward ending food apartheid, and so we’ve been taking time talking with folk to see how those skills should be applied here. And, we think we know what we should do:

Moving to Lakota territory

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Shortly before the start of 2024, my family decided to accept an invitation to move from where we are to Lakota Territory, to assist in food autonomy efforts there. Preparing for the move has kept us really busy, so this’ll be a pretty short-and-to-the-point letter.

First, this newsletter will soon be distributed by Buttondown, not Substack, in response to Substack’s preferential treatment of fascists. Apologies I haven’t done so already, but as I said, I’ve been busy.

Come to Turntide Islands!

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Embark on a Voyage to Turntide Islands: A Haven for Change-Makers and Visionaries

Set sail with us on an exhilarating journey to the Turntide Islands, a newly unveiled digital archipelago where forward-thinkers converge. This vibrant Discord community is your gateway to engaging discussions, innovative ideas, and collaborative projects that aim to reshape our world.

At Turntide Islands, we recognize that the currents of change are swift and unyielding. As stewards of this planet, it’s up to us to navigate these waters with intention and ingenuity. Our islands serve as fertile ground for cultivating sustainable practices that harmonize with our environment.

A broken election

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The recent Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief election was a spectacle of farce and dysfunction, revealing the deep rot that has consumed this supposed representative body of Indigenous peoples. The inability to reach quorum, despite multiple rounds of voting, speaks volumes about the level of disillusionment and disenfranchisement amongst member nations. They see the AFN for what it truly is: a cog in the colonial machine, designed to appease and pacify rather than empower and liberate.

Call to act! against Asteria

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Beneath the saccharine veneer of Disney’s “(topic:: Asteria)” project lies a reality starkly at odds with its advertised “campus of discovery.” This (topic:: proposed development), slated for the headwaters of the Haw River, ignores the centuries of Indigenous dispossession and Black enslavement that have ravaged this land, while simultaneously threatening the ecological health of the river and the future of the surrounding communities. From Disney’s press release on Asteria:

The community will come to life on 1,500 acres in the heart of North Carolina’s picturesque Chatham County. Ideally situated in the town of Pittsboro, residents will have access to metropolitan amenities with the charm of a small town. Plans call for more than 4,000 residential units including single-family and multi-family homes… …Asteria community homeowners will become part of a club with amenities planned to include a wellness and recreation center, restaurant, sport courts, swimming pools, community garden and plenty of outdoor space for lawn games, events and fire pits. The club will feature enrichment programming only Disney can deliver. Some of the experiences under consideration include storytelling dinners inspired by Disney tales, lessons with Disney artists and family fun days with Disney-themed activities… …The team at Walt Disney Imagineering has spent significant time researching, visiting and immersing themselves in the region to develop the Asteria community’s unique theme. Influenced by the nearby universities in the famed Research Triangle, the community is envisioned as a campus of discovery – a place for exploring and learning.

Alfredo Bonanno has passed

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Comrades, accomplices, friends.

I write this to reflect on and share how the passing of Alfredo Bonanno is affecting me this evening. Though his spirit has left his body, the spark he carried through his life continues to catch new kindling, burning away what he hoped we could live without, and illuminating the worlds that would be possible.

Born in 1937, Alfredo Bonanno was an Italian anarchist philosopher and writer. He is best known as a prominent theorist and proponent of contemporary insurrectionary anarchism. This branch of anarchism emphasizes the importance of direct action and violence in the struggle against authority and oppression.

Getting better

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am self-aware that a lot of my recent newsletters have been a lot of words that honestly don’t say much. They’d fully qualify as navel-gazing. It’s a time in my life for navel-gazing. The orientation is still toward bringing myself toward full participation in liberation, so I hope it’s still fascinating to read, if in a different way than my newsletters used to be. I’ve been getting more subscribers recently, so that’s reassuring. If you’ve been enjoying these letters, consider recommending them.

Unmasking the delusion of COVID risk

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The following letter is a rewrite of a conversation I had with a friend the other day, that I felt was worth sharing, if only to remind folk that some of us are still oriented against COVID, not toward whatever the state says.

After three years of propaganda that has misrepresented the coronavirus from the most fundamental facts of the virus, it is imperative to admit that the social reality is delusional, and there’s no possible risk assessment any individual can do from not simply a lack of information, but an abundance of falsehood.

Winter orientation

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this Letter to the Web in a different software than I normally use. Rather than using Emacs, an old-school text-editor on Linux, I’m using 4theWords, a browser-based word processor that has gamification features added on. For example, I currently have 24 hours, 26 minutes, and 20 seconds to write an additional 1608 words, in order to defeat something called a Mertino, as part of the game’s annual NaNoWriMo challenge.

Anarchism must not be criminalized

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(The following was sent along to me, and as instructed, I’m circulating it.)

[

![A photograph of a protest sign which reads, “Cops are the domestic terrorists”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca282a5c-2b7a-4bd6-827f-ffd3233c0fef_1024x659.jpeg “A photograph of a protest sign which reads, “Cops are the domestic terrorists””)

](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca282a5c-2b7a-4bd6-827f-ffd3233c0fef_1024x659.jpeg)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE & CIRCULATION; STATEMENT FROM 12 OF 61 RICO CODEFENDANTS:

“Anarchism must not be criminalized

statement from 12 of the 61 people indicted on RICO charges in Atlanta.

Fall arrives

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fall Arrives, 2023

I keep trying to write an update for y’all who subscribe to my Substack, explaining what it is I’m doing, but the issue is, I am busy doing the things!

So, this is going to be a poorly-written stream-of-consciousness update. It’s about 0500, and I’ll work on it until my partners get up, and then I’ll post what I have.

That is, perhaps, a good starting point: longer subscribers might have noticed that sometime this year, I went from saying “my partner,” to “my partners,” and someone pointed out recently that I never really explained what changed.

Birds go where winds blow

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few days, there’s been an honesty in my home that hasn’t been so prevalent since the spring, and it’s giving me good space to seriously consider where we are, what we can do, and where we want to go.

At some point over the past couple years, and then acutely this year, I got scared out of talking honestly about what I was seeing in the world with the Web, and while I’m not able to do that yet, I’m being supported in getting back to that sort of work. That’s my unfortunately inadequate way of saying, for now, that I see things as being very different than it is easy to see them as, and the divergence is only increasing.

Brief update

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve realized that while I quite like Ko-fi on the whole, I can’t stand its interface for adding new blog posts. And beside that, I’ve continued to get a trickle of new subscribers to my Substack - where I can also give out subscriptions, unlike Ko-Fi.

My current plan is to switch back to Substack for releasing my letters to the Web- using a mix of free and subscriber-only posting, while I’ll use Ko-fi for sharing garden images to folk who subscribe over there. (I’m also working on, like I’ve mentioned, re-starting my digital garden: access to that might be available as a subscription or one-time purchase, on Ko-fi, later, as well.)

Fundraising for onion, saffron bulbs

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fundraising for Onion & Saffron Bulbs, Fall 2023

Hey folks, I know it’s been a long while since I’ve posted anything anywhere - in fact, it’s coming up on about a year since I got kicked of Twitter, which is really probably the last time I was consistent about sharing updates with the Web.

The shortest way I can think of to explain what’s been going on in my life is that I’ve been spending a lot of time being dragged by material needs to recenter the feelings of white dudes over anything I actually care about. This has led to a lot of issues in the lives of me and my comrades, from needing to waste our spiritual energy on nonsense most days of the week, to living among vermin who are encouraged more by others’ apathy than we’re able to resist. There’s some decisions and changes happening in the community that support me that’ll work to prevent that happening again; one change is that I’m going to come back to representing myself, as myself, not focusing on building up a presence for any of the groups I coordinate with.

Nausea & NIMBYs

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Let me start by offering a thanks-at-large to the folk who read & shared my post soliciting funds for buying onion & saffron bulbs, and to those who could and did choose to help me exceed that goal! My goal was $155, and $218 ended up being donated. Looking at how much space is available for planting, I’m going to go ahead and increase the amount of onions in the order. I mentioned in a subscriber-only update, but I’m working to set up a robust digital ledger for my practices, and so hopefully, I can keep y’all updated about what comes from this purchase! Reading that sentence back, “robust digital ledger,” sounds like I’m being euphemastic about using a blockchain, and that’s not the case; the software being used is Emacs, Org-mode, and Beancount. Anyway, here’s what I wrote before checking my email and seeing that y’all brought me past my goal:

CLN winter drive update

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Zitkato from the Chunka Luta Network has shared some new information, after completing the first leg of the CLN’s Chunka Luta Winter Drive, 2023.

(For those who don’t know the CLN is a Lakota-organized group working help the Lakota people live as Lakota, recognizing that as part of a global effort for liberation from the current systems of oppression.)

Zitkato and others brought a 20’ box truck full of firewood, coat|coats, and other winter supplies out to Pine Ridge, coming in right after a winter storm. To get there, they drove through 4 hours of freezing fog, leaving the people tense and the truck covered in ice when they got there, late at night. Despite the conditions and it being past sundown, the crew got to unloading the truck immediately - and good thing: by the time the sun came up, half the firewood had already gone out to the people. (And, forecasts show another storm coming.)

COVID broke America

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Before I begin, let me start by saying thank you to everyone who maintained their paid subscription here or through my Ko-Fi. That money has been covering my groceries these past few months, which has been a tremendous burden off my back.

In my last letter, I announced that spring was coming, and encouraged everyone to reckon with their own relationships with our contemporary kyriarchy, colonial white dominionism. That letter was sent out February 26th. Back then, lots of folk who read it probably felt that with a new president, things were going to get back on track. The pandemic already seemed to be waning, and with control of the executive and legislative branches of our federal government, the Democrats seemed likely to move toward economic reforms that would reduce the growing gray-zones between middle class and working class, and working class and the underclass. (Petite bourgeousise, proletariat, and lumpenproletariat, precisely, if perhaps misspelled.)

Breaking illusions with math

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy folks! I have an important update to start with:

The “emspeculation” newsletter, which I started earlier in the month, is ending, really before it got off the ground. Stripe won’t verify my account, so there’s no way for me to do a paid and private newsletter. Luckily, it’s only the accounts associated with that newsletter that seem to have been affected - my primary Stripe account is still active!

A shift in praxis but not purpose

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been poor, now I’m less poor, but “investing” in developing mutualism on the Web, with my time and emotional labour, isn’t working to provide for me, and the West requires I give it money in exchange for its resources. As I’ve learned that the people closest to me in these efforts have secretly held substantial sums of capital through investments they do not expect to benefit from and actively cause harm, I’m additionally frustrated in the relationship that I have formed with these people. While I have been all-in on removing kyriarchism from the world, it turns out that the people around me are actually invested heavily on the continuation of projects like petroleum-sourced energy and real estate development.

Welcome to the new year

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy everyone! Welcome to 2021. I apologise for the delay of a few weeks in writing a good update, but I’ve been busy! As I wrote about a while back, I had a series of hardware failures that left me with, to look at this positively, a clean slate. No backlog of archived files that needed sorting, no half-finished code projects, just an empty computer.

With that clean slate, I spent some time tinkering around, trying to re-determine my relationship with computers. I have, though it’s hard to express, a better idea of that relationship than I did, and I even have some notions of how to build a tool that accommodates that relationship in a way I’d like. But, I also spent a lot of time working on things like setting up a Wordpress that aren’t going to be relevant going forward. Oh well.

False profits

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post has to do with computer technology, and the intersection of that technology with other contemporary technologies, like mechanisms of settler-colonialism.

In this post, I’m going to name names. These problems are social and cultural, but both of those things are made by people. Despite all the things I’m about to say about the people I’m about to talk about, I want to make it clear, I have a lot of respect for them. They are, all of them, willing to do hard and often thankless work, based on nothing more than a promise they made to themselves about their role in life. Brought up with a different set of knowledge and experience, these people might have grown up to become an inspiration for me. And as people, their knowledge and experience isn’t set in stone: any of these people might go on to become inspirational.

Thanksgiving

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been asked about Thanksgiving a lot these past few weeks. A lot. I lost count in the upper-30s, but I think I’m just shy of 50 now. Always white people, and their questions range in respectfulness, but all came with a lot of presumptions about what my answer should cover.

Even with that many prompts, I’ve found it really hard to give anyone an answer. And so I’m drafting this letter. I spent two days thinking about what I’d say here, but I haven’t really thought of much. I talked it over with my partner, and they had some good things to say. But me? I’m still not sure.

Of ducks and illusions

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Hail, hail, what’s the matter with your head? Yeah, hail, hail, what’s the matter with your mind? And your sign?” - Redbone, “Come and Get Your Love”

I slept well last night, though with many meaningful dreams to unweave this morning. But my spirits feel high, and I’m excited to be writing to y’all, though I’m not yet certain what I’ll say.

I live far from Hé Sápa, my chosen center of the universe. In fact, I’ve only seen them once, driving by in the backseat of my mom’s adoptive father’s Buick car, while his wife read Reader’s Digest in the passenger seat. I would’ve been 10, and my dad had gifted me a Palm m100 - a PDA; precursors to smart phone. I used it to meticulously write out dialog for a simple role-playing game whose source my dad had shown me how to edit and compile. All that to say, I’ve never really been there.

Decenter whiteness

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For some of us, it has been a frustrating week, and I am tremendously grateful to those who sought and developed community these past few days, cautiooning against celebration and rest. For many, Biden’s victory has relieved an anxiety present since Trump’s inauguration.

But - and I know I am repeating a refrain - those fears existed before Trump. What changed was that Trump marred the petina covering the kyirarchy in a brilliant neoliberal verdigris, and even those not directly harmed by its violence had to reckon with it in ways new to them.

Decentering computers whether I like

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks, sorry for the delay in sending out an email. First, my laptop’s harddrive died, then the operating system I installed on the replacement drive was very very hard to use (laggy, glitchy,) and it’s only yesterday I got that replaced (with Debian 10, for the curious, and Fedora 33 was laggy and glitchy. Running KDE Plasma and first Gnome then LXDE on Fedora.)

Since I had a few days without a computer around, I actually have written up the next couple letters I plan to send y’all by hand - expect them probably over the course of the day.

The things we live for

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was asked two questions, from different folk, that have ended up tying together:

“Would you please define ‘indigenous,’ as you use it?”
“Is it really fair for you to keep referring to colonial society as though it’s not your society?”

But first I’d like to thank everyone who has been reading this newsletter so far, and has offered feedback. I especially appreciate y’all bothering to read because, so far, I haven’t taken tremendous pains to edit what I’ve been posting, and that ability to write fairly spontaneously has really helped this feel like communication, not broadcasting.

Into our future step by step

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Land back. Water back. Medicine back. Ceremony back.

Land back. Return control of the material world to all those existing in it. No more rulers, no more prioritization of human needs. Mitakuye oyasin: we’re all relatives, all of us on this Earth, and it’s only by establishing that as our explicit relationship that we’ll be able to adapt.
Water back. Once we’ve taken control of our material world, we have the freedom to shape it in ways that benefit us all. The ecological projects of Indigenous peoples dwarf the engineering of colonial cultures in longevity and scale: let’s get back to actually developing our planet as a home.
Medicine back. With control of our material world and the ability to change it, we can finally start working to build up “medicine:” for our physical bodily health, but also all things we might need medicine for. In some implementations of Lakota belief, all things are medicine: they help or hurt our health, as a person and as people. This doesn’t clash with many colonial philosophies, which say that all that happens in a world, and all the actions a person takes, helps shape that person’s identity. But unless we’re in control of our world and actions, we can’t really start to shape our own identities. Without land and water back, we can’t really make good medicine.
***Ceremony back. ***Sometimes when talking to despondent colonists I’ll highlight that in some ways, it’s never been easier to be a human person: with the human-caused collapsed of our climate, the “meaning of life” is self-evident: mitigate that disaster. Even the most anti-human humans are motivated to act against it, enough to prevent the extinction of all life on Earth, and most of us are motivated to act against it because we think human life is worth continuing into the future, for various reasons. But this “meaning of life” is hopefully, temporary: it can be fulfilled by the return of indigenous ways of handling land, water, and medicine. With its fulfillment, we’ll again have a terrifying freedom to seek out our purposes, as individuals, community-members, and a species: to develop our own ceremonies that impart meaning into our lives, based on our lives, not (once again) the needs put on us by either an exploitive group or their emergencies.

Listen to your elders. Before I go further into the above, I want to pause and offer some words of caution, for those who are preparing to start performing some form of one of the four actions above. That is, if you’re, today, starting to change your relationship with the kyriarchy: listen up: listen to your elders.

Captains go down with the ship but

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

**“There’s no petition we can sign to end poverty, or to make ’no’ a word with teeth. I know there’s not enough windows to break us a free, but maybe one would be just enough for some dignity.” **- Pat the Bunny, “A Glorious Shipwreck”

There were once three people who, through their patronage of the same salon, became friends. Two worked within the city’s university, and one lived just outside it.

On decolonizing my web use

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this email I’m going to, superficially, talk about Barnabus, a piece of software I’m working on. But mostly it’s going to be, as a lot of writing is, about culture, philosophy, and how those intersect with our ways of living.

(Note: this email is also the first piece of writing I’m drafting while using HashUp, and hopefully will be the first rendered through Barnabus. There might be issues with how it renders, especially since I’ll end up having to copy-paste it into Substack to send it to y’all.)

2020-10-28, I touched a nerve

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 18:28:00 +0000

So yesterday’s newsletter about planning for the future upset a sizeable portion of my small readership, enough that I got multiple complaints. I was told that it, and my newsletter so far, have been “unnecessarily antagonistic” by multiple people.

To everyone who felt the same flurry of emotions but didn’t encourage me to talk about something else: thank you. But the response makes me think, maybe I should explain what this newsletter is. After all, some of you got subscribed automatically from Patreon, and others might not have read the about page.

Y'all've a week

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 22:20:00 +0000

This letter to the Web is for folk who, so far, have experienced most of the year through headline and social media discourse. Things are worse than it’s easy to believe. Unemployment is worse. Death tolls are higher. Anecdotally, there are four new homeless camps within a half mile of me, all bigger than the one that existed before COVID, and more than a dozen people have dying in these camps. (Reminder, I live in a very prosperous liberal university town.) I distribute now a couple hundred pounds of food a day, and it still isn’t enough to make a meaningful dent.

Regarding Settlerday

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I received a few replies to my “Settlerday” newsletter. To generalize, people wanted to express something in response, but felt uncomfortable saying “thank you.”

I replied to one person individually but now that I’ve gotten a few emails, I’ll just share the message widely:

I think gratitude is usually the right emotion for most situations.

It’s just important to be particular in *what *one is grateful about!

In this case, being grateful I put in the labor to compile it seems appropriate to me, to which I think I’d respond, “And I’m grateful to the people who shared these experiences first- or second-hand so I could do so easily.”

The RIAA isn't our biggest threat

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A couple days ago, people who follow certain events all woke up to headlines about a DMCA takedown that GitHub received for hosting copies of Youtube-DL, a command-line script that lets you download videos off Youtube. (The DMCA, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act, is a U.S. law that says folk can’t host material that infringes on copyright or is primarily for infringing copyright.)

The notice came from the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, because they feel that by hosting Youtube-DL, Github is hosting material that is primarily for infringing on copryight.

Settlerday October 24 2020

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Normally when I talk about what I broadly categorize as “settler nonsense,” I do it through short posts, usually right after I’ve digested whatever the nonsense was. As I said earlier this week in a newsletter, I’m planning to stop doing that, and instead put together a weekly look at what settler nonsense I saw through the week. This week I wasn’t on the computer too much, and still ended up with around twenty-five instances of nonsense.

HashUp semantic plaintext markup

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks! I hope everyone’s week has been going well. I’ve enjoyed the little conversations some of us have been having through the week.

Today I’d like to announce a small little project I’m working on: HashUp.

I’ve always been dissastisfied with the physical act of writing: with pen and paper it’s slow and requires a fair amount of concentration to write smoothly, and with computers… well, there’s What-you-see-is-what-you-get style editors like #Word, which I dislike: I’m not trying to typeset a document to be printed, I’m trying to write! Unfortunately, most non-WYSIWYG editors and formatting languages like #Markdown are similar in the same fundamental way: they exist to facilitate visual formatting, not help an author encode semantic meaning.

Picking apart the blood cult's litany

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

(Heads up: this piece is pretty US-centered, but everywhere has real estate so just replace the names with whoever your local kyriarchists are.)

So because I do building maintenance for a “commercial” building, I try and keep up with the wider trends in that market. Which brought me to read this Politico piece, forecasting commercial real estate as the next economic crisis. Great. But what I want to highlight is the hyper-focused zealotry presented through the article’s quotes:

Talkative Tuesdays

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy folks! I hope everyone’s been having a decent week so far. I’ve been getting really anxious after the sun goes down myself: where I live gets targeted by fascists because of the free market, and the election is getting closer.

Speaking of the election, how about Bolivia, right? Imagine having the ability to vote against US imperialism! Sure isn’t what folk’ll be doing in a few Tuesdays here State-side, huh?

Barnabus hawking trinkets to the

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the fantasy world of Teraum, there is a character named Barnabus Trent, who for a while ran a shop in the town of Bellybrush. That town sold items gathered from all over Teraum… but most were from such distant lands that any context or meaning they had beyond “pretty trinket,” was lost.

A drawing (by Stirling Little) of the alligator that hung from the ceiling of Barnabus’ shop. Rumor had it he let it loose at night to stop burglars but wrestled it back up to the ceiling each morning. More than one farmboy signed up to sail to Gnalens after seeing the alligator.

Kyriarchist violence escalates in

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a photo y’all may have seen in your history books, but maybe not. It comes up a lot in materials covering the relationship between Kyriarchists colonizing Turtle Island and the Lakota:

This is a photograph taken in 1892. It shows pile of buffalo skulls, demonstrating a “successful” buffalo hunt, by colonizer standards. You see, their goal wasn’t to provide food for their communities, but to remove my people’s food supply. It was a mechanism of colonial genocide, that just happened to use the extinction of another species.

Planning the next phase of my computing

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fortunate enough to get to correspond with Phil Hagelberg, a developer whose sensibilities match my own, but whose knowledge and experience far exceeds mine, and it’s been really helpful in helping me plan this next phase of computing I seem to be entering. (This next part of this newsletter took me quite a few drafts)

Viewed abstractly, a great deal of my computer use has been a struggle to record human-generated data (text “strings” and numbers) and re-present it to other humans, using computers. (Or, sometimes, a printer.)

Hello, world (of subscribers)

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy folk. Let me start this by expressing my gratitude that you’re reading it, and that you’ve subscribed to it, if you have. If you haven’t: (If you’re getting this and don’t remember signing up for it: you’re an active donor to my Liberapay or Patreon so I transferred you.)

Second, please forgive any issues these newsletters might have early on - I’ve never used Substack before, and I’m sure I’ll click the wrong button at least once!

I cannot trust post modern conservatives

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A preface, please: I know that “post-modern” is often used as a dogwhistle to refer to Jewish culture. I promise I don’t mean it in that sense. As you read the text, I hope you appreciate the irony that I’m asking you to, on this small matter, take me at my word.

A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t believe anything. This is, in contemporary society, if not inherently, significantly more of a problem among the post-modern conservative members of my society, so that’s where this critique will focus. However, it seems to apply to some extent to nearly everyone who is a post-modernist or unknowing adherrent to such an ideology, so if you don’t identify as a conservative or moderate, don’t necessarily assume this text isn’t going to criticize you as well.

Librem should have followed my escalation of communication

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

¶Background Information

There’s a technology company called Librem who is, I think, releasing a smart phone featuring an operating system they’ve designed for it, called PureOS. Again, I think - it’s tangential to my point, so I haven’t looked it up.

They made an announcement recently sharing some information about the applications the phone would run, and within the open-source software community, there was immediately criticism. From what I understand, many of the applications are existing free and open-source applications, which have had their appearance altered and are now being sold.

An escalation of communication

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 05:24:10 +0000

Dear Internet,

I’ve created this mailing list as a place for me to strike up conversations with “the Internet,” on whatever topic seems of interest. It’s an alternative to carrying discussions through my microblog. A current problem I’ve been perceiving with my microblog is that despite thFediverse]]’s platforms’ potential for a curated experience, the overall culture of the Fediverse around me seems to swing toward a more… average… online culture. Put another way, as the Fediverse grows its membership from those who come from legacy social media, I see them bringing their culture and it spreading to those parts of the Fediverse older than those “immigrants.”

Why emsenn is lowercase

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this very short essay, I explain why I choose to write my name in lowercase.

When I was 12 I joined a server where everyone’s name was their first initial and the first four letters of their last name. So my username was “msenn.”

After a while we migrated systems and the rule was relaxed, and many original members changed their names to be more phonetic—I added an e to the start of mine, to become “emsenn.”

Facebook did not accidentally fail

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In 2009, as the world was going through a economic recession, Russian social media mogul Yuri Milner invested $200m in Facebook, with a valuation of $10b, without requesting a seat on the board or voting rights.

The investment was financed by Alisher B. Usmanov, who provided funds from Gazprom, a Russian natural gas-and-more conglomerate. It’s likely the investment is what pushed out Facebook’s early CFO Gideon Yu.

The investments were facilitated by Ryan Williams, a friend and former classmate of Jared Kushner. At a similar time, Yuri Milner also invested in Cadre, a company founded by Williams, Kushner, and Kushner’s brother, Josh Kushner. However, Jared Kushner failed to disclose his ownership of the company.

Embrace, extend, extinguish; Slack removes IRC & XMPP support

Sat, 10 Mar 2018 14:58:00 +0000

¶Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Slack is the latest company to embrace the strategy, made famous by the Department of Justice in the antitrust suit against Microsoft It boils down to this:

Embrace: Develop software compatiable with competing products, or implement an open standard.
Extend: Add features not supported by the competition or included in the standard.
Extinguish: When the featureful iteration is the de facto standard due to market share, remove compatibility.

Slack has recently closed their XMPP and IRC gateways, walling in their garden substantially. As if to drive home the point, reading the announcement requires a Slack account, but the lede is:

Goodbye, Sam Jones

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the early spring of 2014, I moved into a ranch house outside of town. Bigger than I needed, the house gave me room to host friends’ band rehearsals, house shows, and perhaps most importantly, meetings.

The house was on Sam Jones Road, and so quickly became the Sam Jones House. I became known for always having an open door, with fresh biscuits & coffee available for those who stopped by. It was, I think, a good combination of what I’d learned about anarcho-syndicalism from my time at Occupy with true Southern hospitality.

Facebook learned nothing

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After facing criticism from users, politicians, bureaucrats, and shareholders, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his personal 2018 New Year’s Resolution, to “fix Facebook.” In previous years, Zuckerberg has publicly announced his resolutions, and his followthrough. He’s visited every U.S. state, built an artificial intelligence for his home, ran 365 miles, and learned Mandarin. So I had some hope that he’d be able to complete this one - after all, as CEO, “fixing Facebook” should be a core part of his job.

Doctor Allen Spreen is conducting fraud

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A doctor is misrepresenting himself and his research to popularize a theory that Hillary Clinton has conspired to hide cancer cures for decades. This is an explanation of his actions, which I believe to be a criminal scam.

Today, across the conservative web, there has been a video being shared as a banner ad, embed, or whatever. (I’ve since lost the video, unfortunately.) So, since I doubt any of you want to take the time to watch it, the video claims to be a Dr. Allan Spreen, explaining how “Crooked Hillary” is in bed with the hospital cartels to encourage cancer so she could have dead people vote for her in the election. Again, the theory is, Clinton has been working with medical companies for two decades, to encourage cancer, so there would be dead people she could have vote for her.

Landrace philosophy with InfoPonEmacs

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

THE DATE ON THIS IS WRONG, ITS FROM LIKE 2017

I mentioned briefly in my Ko-fi blog post that “I’m going to come back to representing myself, as myself, not focusing on building up a presence for any of the groups I coordinate with.”

That’s a pretty abstract sort of declaration, so I’d like to take some time to explain what exactly I mean by it. I’m hoping that this might be the first in a series of fairly casual posts onto my Ko-fi, that can serve as a kind of re-introduction into who I am and what that means I do, in a more holistic way than just seeing a photo from the garden or a snippet of political thought every three months.

Public posts implicitly endorse the framework they discuss

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to explain my claim “Public posts are implicit endorsement of the framework they discuss.”

If you make a post saying “I think we shouldn’t kick puppies,” that implies several things: – someone is saying we should – a discussion of whether we should is valid – so there are at least two valid opinions, one of which is “kick puppies” – thus, kicking puppies IS a valid thing to do, you just don’t agree.

Don't check in at Standing Rock

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up to a bunch of messages asking me if the checking in at Standing Rock on Facebook actually is helpful, so figured I’d answer everyone at once with a post:

No, not really. In fact, in the past, I have encouraged people to check in at an event SPECIFICALLY to make it easier to find out who’s there.

How it works:

Morton Co. claims to use FB check-ins to locate protesters.
Some scriptkiddy (or straightup a Morton County Sheriff employee) makes a viral post telling people from around the globe to check in.
This makes a subpoena of FB’s data more necessary, so Morton Co has less hurdles to jump through to get a judge to get them the data.
Now Morton County, instead of a list of people who voluntarily check in at the protest, has a list of EVERYONE who is there with a telecom device - which is, in fact, the thing step #2 was trying to prevent.

The first time this mass check-in was used was in 2009 when a bunch of people set their FB profile pics to green and checked in Tehran. The check-in was curated by Sedazad (that’s my free speech group) and ultimately backfired horribly, as many of the people who were checking in illegitimately had some tie to the protesters which the local state exploited - usually by threatening to hold remittances. There’s also a suspected instance where a young woman who was unaffiliated with the GR88 was killed by security forces, because she matched the name and description of one of the fake check-ins.

Bernie Sanders is a bad hire

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In your letter, you commended Sanders for working with the Democrat party, rather than running independently. I would like to highlight how that is perceived by Democrats: this is based on my personal conversations with people in the party, from aides in the House to local treasurers:

Imagine I came into your office and was like “Oh, wow, y’all are doing [software development] all wrong!” and then tried to convince you to do it my way. You don’t agree, so I start badmouthing your company to the press. That doesn’t work, so I start badmouthing YOU. That doesn’t work, so I start threatening you - run your private company the way I, an outsider, say, or I will go invest in your competitors, THAT’LL show you.

Bernie Sanders still can't win

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In your original letter, you stated:

I keep hearing that Bernie can still win, and that he’s the only one who can beat Trump in a general election. What’s your take on that?

Bernie’s “lead” in the general comes only from the #BernieorBust movement, which based on demographics aren’t incredibly likely to vote in the general anyway.

Your argument for why your candidate is more likely to win is because your candidate has supporters who would throw the election to Trump if he doesn’t get the nomination.

Honestly acknowledging the gray zone

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

ISIS has made it clear they intend to go after those Muslims they consider “false.” According to ISIS, these “gray zone” Muslims are more harmful to their goals than Westerners. The refugees approaching the United States from Syria are not fleeing Syria, they are fleeing ISIS, and ISIS has said they will follow those refugees.

Ignoring the stated goals of ISIS to claim there is no risk to accepting these refugees into our country is not honest.

Gun control stats are wrong

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

/(This was originally on my Facebook, responding to someone asking me to verify or disprove a meme claiming that women in America are 40x more likely to be killed by a gun. I took the opportunity to explain how the statistics both sides rely on are flawed, and can’t really be improved.)/

Okay first I don’t know where they got this number. According to http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/chart-the-u-s-has-far…, the US has 20x the average murder-by-gun rate (let’s say MbGR to save time). They link to the UN Office of Drug & Crime’s website, http://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html, but none of the research there has any information specifically pertaining to firearms.