Interlude: Catching Up!
A brief set of notes about where I've been, what I've been up to, and why this newsletter has been so sporadic lately :)
Hey everyone, thanks for reading!
You’ve likely noticed that I haven’t been publishing much here the last couple of months. The biggest reason for that is I’m quite wrapped up in a new set of projects that I’d like to tell you about now.
The core project is what I’ve decided to call the “Musk For A Minute” initiative. This $500,000 fundraising initiative sprung from finding out that Elon Musk (at the time) had made roughly half a million dollars per minute, 24/7, for the entire year of 2021. Immediately on reading this, my first thought was “boy, what could one person do with that kind of income for just one minute, starting from nothing?”
MFAM is not a one-time thing; the long term plan is to include spinning it off into its own separate project; once the $500K goal is met for the first project, then a new project will be selected and a new $500K fundraising campaign will be devoted to that through MFAM.
The intention is for the #muskforaminute idea, organization, and “brand” to become its own separate thing that becomes an ongoing funding source for our impoverished savants, the folks who for whatever reason have fallen through the cracks but have also demonstrated uniquely useful, evolutionary, and progressive ideas that lack only funding to be seen, heard, and popularized. This could take any medium - music, writing, a set of philosophies that need to be fleshed out, a revolutionary engineering concept that can be put to public benefit rather than corporate profit. As of this moment I’m the only person who would be making that decision; it is my hope, but not guaranteed, that by the time we’re ready to select a second project, we’ll be a properly organized non-profit (or public interest for-profit, depending on legal advice) and the selection of the next project will have my input but not be solely up to me to decide.
So obviously MFAM started out as basically a neat fundraising hook/frame and then I realized it’d be a really cool thing to base an ongoing philanthropy initiative around. In between these two points, I had to seriously answer that question above: what would I do if I had half a million dollars to work with, right now?
As I began developing the website, the Musk project itself and the work that the first “round” or “wave” or what have you is intended to support had become blurred and I realized I needed to separate them. I’ve gone ahead and opened the site in “beta,” (and am actively accepting contributions to help make it an operating reality; once I get to the point of taking the site out of beta I’m going to start “the clock” - part of this whole thing is to find out how long it’ll take the other 330 million of us to put together what took Elon one minute last year) and what’s publicly visible there at the time of this writing still reflects that entanglement, which I’m working “in the back” to disentangle. Part of the problem, honestly, is I haven’t come up with clever branding for the project yet.
What is the project? There are two main goals: the first is getting a proper small media production studio in place and making sure we can pay the bills for a minute. Contained within that are (of course) years worth of other projects and initiatives, but the first is the creation of a public education initiative, as ubiquitous as air, to elevate and empower people to the level of information literacy required to survive in the 21st century. I don’t want to tie up your inbox with duplicate information; at present you can find core information about the purpose and techniques of this public service program at this page, as well as this one.
The long and short of it is this: we - humanity, not just “the US” or “the West” or “developed countries” - are in a crisis of information illiteracy. Our capacity to manipulate through mass media has far exceeded the ability of the general population to quickly identify biases - especially their own! - and compliance-gaining tactics applied unethically to manipulating us against our best interests. I’ve taken to referring to the collective body of knowledge needed for this - critical thinking, bias awareness, understanding how to ask meaningful questions and ferret out subversive or manipulative subtext in journalism, politics, entertainment, and advertising - “information literacy,” with particular focus on media literacy and political literacy.
The purpose of “project one” will be to create a broad base of information and resources including teaching materials and non-academic education to radically improve the ability of the average person to see through the tactics of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and propaganda, thereby empowering us to act in our best interests even in the face of a relentless onslaught of confusing and contradictory messages.
We are ill-prepared to defend against bad information at present, and that is reflected in bright lights both in the political developments of recent years and the inexplicably intransigent ignorance that infests a substantial part of the population relative to the COVID pandemic. We are failing at every level of pedagogy to help students and others understand why this is important and how to deprogram ourselves from it collectively.
The goal of project one - and it’s indeed a lofty one - is to assemble the tools necessary to improve information literacy, but also to teach, refine, and improve those tools over time in a recursive improvement process just like any other field of science.
So that’s what I’ve been up to and why I haven’t been producing much anywhere on a steady basis lately. As I get the Musk website up and running and out of beta, you’ll see my output return to normal levels including going back to regular weekly publication here. I appreciate your patience and support during this growth period - and make no mistake, my bills aren’t paused just because my public output is! - and look forward to bringing all of this to you in a clean, comprehensive set of packages over the next few weeks!
Thanks again for reading and for your support, please don’t forget that engagement is the most important thing, so be sure to like, share, subscribe, comment, etc., and I’ll be putting out more “sharable” stuff very soon!