Against My Better Judgment, A Newsletter

Hello, I’m the Neutral Ambassador. You may remember me from such posts as “Okay Plato I’m out of the cave now what” and “What if Omelas but they launched a guy into space and made him watch bad movies”. Welcome to my newsletter. What’s it about? God only knows. I’m here to post. I guess I’m just made this way. Time to embrace the inertia, acknowledge the hesitation, and bulldoze through anyway

I’m probably going to be posting with the same themes I already cover on Bluesky (and Twitter previously). The thing is, as much as using microblogging has helped me become a better writer (and in some ways a better thinker), I keep hitting on ideas that are too constrained by that format. Even with threading, 300 characters isn’t enough to get some of this out the way it needs to be said.

Right now, I’ve got one big theme to mine: a roadmap to avoiding ideological capture. It's sort of like a practical framework for individual ideological autonomy in the hyper-connected online age we live in. I’ll be the first to admit that it sounds like so much bullshit, but that's the kind of thing my mind comes up with. I’m hoping it’ll at least provide some utility to someone, somewhere. If nothing else, it’s at least a way to get out out of my head and free up space for other ideas.

Free Will-y

Writing is a choice. I use social media a lot: often just to think about my relationship to it, how platforms shape us, how the act of posting changes the way we think. So of course, I’m going to start this by writing about the choice itself.

I hemmed and hawed over platforms; turning the choice itself into procrastination. Do I use Ghost? If so, do I go through the pain of self-hosting, or pay for what’s basically a vanity project I might abandon tomorrow? Do I just hold my nose and use Substack? (You can see which one won. The barrier to entry was nonexistent, and somehow, I already had a subscriber to this previously dormant Substack, almost like a sign.)

Sometimes the last barrier to starting isn’t the actual work, but committing to the framework that makes the work real. This kind of meta self-awareness is kind of my brand. It’s just how I work. So why not?

The real challenge now? Getting comfortable with the idea that people might actually read this. That’s scarier than disappointment—because what if people engage?"

Microblogging helped sharpen both my writing and thinking, but I’m hitting its limits. Some ideas simply need more than 300 characters.

“Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?” (Garth Nix, Sabriel)

It’s sort of moot. I’m just wired this way. I may as well accept it. I don’t know where I’m going with this. It’s both exciting and terrifying.

Knowledge is a curse. Patterns are a haunting. Time to exorcise them.