Specifically, why do I spend what’s left of my time in this realm to write stuff? Not being terribly introspective (and not proud of it), it’s hard for me to say. It’s certainly not for the money, which doesn’t come close to covering costs (my two novels alone set me back over $10K, more if you count maintaining a web presence). It’s not for fame (I am sort of reclusive and couldn’t handle all the attention), though I wouldn’t mind a bit of notoriety. That said, I wouldn’t mind hearing that my writing is admired, even moving.
But before going on, let me ask for a little help. Not to support my writing habit, but for my intrepid daughter Deniz, an environmental scientist with a freshly-minted MSC from McGill. (Deniz means sea in Turkish, and she is indeed an ocean of good will.) While mostly financially independent she’s facing a situation for which she needs financial aid. She’s been selected to intern with the UN Development Programme’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative in Istanbul, where she’ll design strategies to fund biodiversity projects. She’ll have a stipend, but it’s definitely not enough to get from Montreal to Istanbul and subsist there this summer, so she set up a GoFundMe page for folks to pitch in. Click this link to see her story and if you feel you can help her out, donate securely there. To find out more, you can message Deniz using the Contact button on that page. And if you want to spread the word, click the image below to share her campaign on Facebook.
As I said, none of my books have turned a profit, but that wasn’t my motivation. The first one was my PhD dissertation, published by Springer in 1998, which at least has been widely cited. Then, when Deniz was 9, I helped her publish a little spy story she wrote and illustrated about the adventures of her pet gerbils, using blurb.com. In her teens, we collaborated on a photo book of family and friends at shutterfly.com as a gift for her mom. Neither vanity project was put up for sale.
Then came my two novels, in 2018 and 2024. The first, Turkey Shoot, was prompted by the refugee crisis begat by the Bush Administration’s ill-considered invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote the second one, Her Own Devices, to rectify the raw deal I had given my characters in the first one. And while neither fame nor fortune came to me, my storytelling improved.
At the turn of the century, I started posting online, with no thought of writing books, mostly about downsides of computer technology after a career steeped in it. I had just built a website dedicated to my work in geospatial computing as an academic and consultant. When clients didn’t materialize, I found work as a tech writer, and in my spare time started a blog using a Javascript toolkit called tiddlywiki that creates wiki-style web pages in a browser tab.
More about that later. My first gig was to write a newsletter for IDC, a company that sells research reports analyzing high tech market trends to corporate customers. My weekly editions of IT Forecaster garnered over 60,000 subscribers until it and I were summarily ejected from IDC when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. I had seen a crash coming, but it was hard to proclaim my concerns as a mouthpiece for IDC. So I discharged my doubts in a fugitive online diatribe (my first blog post, one could say) questioning high tech’s messianic aspirations that I called Vain Notion (an anagram of innovation). It’s still out there after 26 years, and in that time digital tech has metastasized to subjugate us all.
My growing skepticism of IT made my work as a tech writer increasingly fraught. Where is all this ceaseless innovation taking us, I worried, and to whose benefit and detriment? And so, in 2012, I started drafting a book on my TiddlyWiki blog called The Silica Papers that I never finished or publicized. It posits that technology is a force of nature, an updated version of Mother Nature I dubbed Silica, with a mind of her own. Here’s a short passage:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
We love our apps, home entertainment gizmos, and hybrid cars. On the whole, people are happy with intricate technologies that they can only begin to understand. Most of us put a lot of faith in Silica, despite our ignorance of how she brings us the things we use. Even the engineers who design our stuff may only understand a few of the components their plans include. So, while we gripe about shoddy and unusable products, we are happy not to know the details, having pretty much convinced ourselves that it’s all good. To feel otherwise would require more skepticism about technology than most of us are capable of.
But TiddlyWiki had limitations and my DIY web platform was unstructured and inelegant. So I built a WordPress site called progressivepilgrim.review where I mostly critiqued technology, media, and politics. Sample this series on the origins of Internet as a surveillance tool, this one about electric vehicles now and then, and this diatribe about Apple’s planned obsolescence, featuring Apple’s “1984” Superbowl ad for the new Macintosh. (I bought one as soon as I could, and seven Macs later I’m still enmeshed in that ecosystem for better or worse.)
Around then, I began contributing articles to an online magazine called The Technoskeptic, which, as its name implies, critiqued technological excess. Sadly, after a couple of years, insufficient funds caused the magazine to vanish from the ether. I’ve resurrected the article I’m proudest of here; it’s about E.M. Forster and his grim futuristic novella The Machine Stops, which in 1909 uncannily foresaw the thrall that technology would come to wield over us.
Since Her Own Devices (in which digital media plays a prominent part) came out I’ve mostly stuck to writing short stories and publishing newsletters at perfidy.press, the last website I ever intend to maintain. None of the short stories have been published except for one in a collection of stories narrated by inanimate objects called As Told by Things. My story, “Petit Mal,” is narrated by a sentient a PC suffering a malware attack. If you’re curious, you can download it as a PDF here.
I’ll surely have more to say about technology, politics, and other modern ailments, so stay tuned, and thanks for continuing to read and comment on what I have to say.
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