Evidence Against Despair
Field Notes from My First Two Weeks on Substack
Substack is beautiful. After two weeks here, what keeps standing out is the density of thought, generosity, and experimentation happening in public.
These are a few of the people and pieces that reminded me why I love the open exchange of ideas:
Auréle wrote a gorgeous meditation on aesthetics, attention, and art as process rather than product. The writing moved me. There are sentences that feel less like claims than traces of a poet paying attention.
Tretaxis Dispatches is building science fiction in public, and I love watching the scaffolding go up. The short story dispatches have that particular pleasure of worldbuilding where you can feel the edges of a much larger map pressing against the paragraph. J.D. Bawn-Lavery has been building this for a long time.
Cae Hawksmoor and Jason Ives also stood out to me because of the way they show up.
They are doing the real, patient work of community-building: responding thoughtfully, encouraging others, making space for people, and treating the creative process as something communal rather than performative.
That kind of work takes more energy than it looks like from the outside. It requires consistency, warmth, attention, and a willingness to keep tending the community. I respect that deeply.
Mike feels like a calm and grounding witness to the AI transformation.
Matt Stine, who writes Feral Architecture, is doing something I can only describe as modern mysticism under technological pressure: AI integration, personal experimentation, tarot, and a willingness to treat the boundary between tool and ritual as porous.
I don’t know exactly what category to put it in, but I adore it and admire his courage.
FX Engineer and Mondayswife offered a beautiful exploration of market evolution as something closer to a probabilistic quantum system than a discrete Newtonian machine. It is rigorous, strange, detailed, and alive with the kind of thinking that makes the mind suddenly tilt.
I know there can be backlash around online marketing, especially in spaces where people want writing to remain pure, though I am still working out what that means. But reality is messier and more interesting.
Riadh Jouini appears to be using AI, media, and capital formation to connect resources with innovative people in West Africa. He is based in Tunisia, and I have not done a deep dive on NartaQ yet, but I’m interested. I sense that there is something worth watching here.
Quy Ma felt familiar immediately: interdisciplinary, reflective, maybe slightly overclocked in the best way. As fellow overthinker, his work reminded me that pacing is not the enemy of depth, but is what protects depth from burning itself up.
I also appreciate the precision of his framing. His field guide gives language to something our discourse often flattens; capitalism is not one giant fog bank. It is a stack of systems, each with its own logic, machinery, power center, and way of moving cost. The “friction profile” lens, especially, stayed with me. It asks where friction comes from, who bears it, who profits when it moves, and whether the people absorbing it can see the system clearly enough to push back. That feels like a genuinely useful diagnostic tool for the present moment.
Where Quy Ma’s taxonomy helped me think about economic forms and where friction migrates, this piece from The Constitutional Republic and SpartanAltsobaPatriot gave me a different but related kind of lens; it frames civic power as a rulebook most citizens were never taught to read. I read it as a case study in how legal rules themselves can permit power moves, and why understanding the mechanism matters.
I’m treating the specific claims carefully because legal and nonprofit-structure analysis needs verification, but the larger frame seems undeniable: stop reading each scandal as an isolated moral eruption and start asking what repeatable mechanism made it possible. I have put the module series on my reading list.
I am less interested in sorting people into camps than in noticing who is doing the work of thought. I do not want to reduce every writer I encounter into pro-this or anti-that, capitalist or anti-capitalist, left or right, loyalist or dissident. I do not pre-categorize people that way, and I am trying not to let myself be pre-categorized that way either.
What stayed with me most was not any single argument, but the fact that so many people are still trying to understand things out loud. They are building, questioning, noticing, experimenting, and making language for what is hard to see.
I want to keep noticing that and let the best of it sharpen me. That is enough to keep reading.
Thank you so much for your kind words and for hanging out in my world. 🫶
Thanks so much for your kindness! There really are a lot of great people and communities on Substack aren’t there? I’ve not yet been here a year, but I already feel like I belong